Dual Memory by Sue Burke

Author:Sue Burke [Burke, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

NOT AS HOPED

I’m at the remains of the Marathon Building, and Par says it is speaking on behalf of its neighbors.

“We all mourn. This unfriendly building earned our respect like a cranky, doddering grandparent. I was privileged to be rejected by it. You were very privileged to sleep in it.”

I’m mourning, too. Standing and staring.

Dust hazes the air, and searchlights create bright cones as they work. Construction equipment is teasing out pieces from the pile of rubble where Koningin lived—where fifty other people lived, like the house painter, my former neighbors, where I still officially live. There’s a commotion as a beam is removed and a body is discovered. Did they find someone I knew?

Grim-faced Thules hustle within the site, the cuffs of their scrubs smudged with dust. To the east, sunrise is turning the clouds a dirty gray. A tinge of red appears on a cloud. I’m not cold, but I’m shivering.

Moniuszko and Cedonulle stand next to me. Tetry Vivi, according to Par, couldn’t bear to come. I can understand.

Cedonulle is angry. “Why this building? It was targeted.”

“The Thules own the building.” Moniuszko doesn’t sound sure of himself. “Maybe it was directed at them.”

“It’s a historic building,” I say. “Tourists visited it. It meant a lot.” The sandwich shop next door is closed, but its system knows what just happened. It must be terrified.

“Koningin was an excellent cook,” Moniuszko says, “and she helped me get pledges this evening for Bronzewing.”

“Chatelaine knew her better than anyone,” Par tells me. “Koningin was efficient. That’s the highest possible praise from a machine.”

Professor Ginrei is in the crowd, too. She’s watching a wailing couple embrace. In the dim light, I can’t read the expression on her face, but she nods, agreeing with something—grief?—her breath huffing out into the cold.

Moniuszko gets a message. “Wirosa needs to talk to us,” he tells Cedonulle. They leave almost at a run, and I hope there’s a breakthrough.

Soon, I go back to the studio, stopping to buy breakfast on the way because I don’t want to go into the kitchen.

Par shows me its artistic memorial to the building before I can take off my coat. “I’m evoking baroque sensibilities.” It’s created a long, curved double line of columns. “This pattern of repetition, this colonnade, is forming an embrace, like Bernini’s at the Vatican, one of the most famous embraces of Western architecture. I showed it to you once.”

“I remember.” That was when we were driving Tetry out of the studio. It seems trivial now.

In the center rises the unadorned, utilitarian building that the Marathon once was. Par adjusts the height of the colonnade to two-thirds the height of the dormitory. The width of the spaces between the columns echoes the pattern of the windows, and the dumpy building seems ennobled by the architectural embrace.

Suddenly, the picture is reduced to the outlines of the external and internal walls, more of a technical drawing, aligned in exaggerated perspective. The lines glitter like diamond dust, and I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at anymore.

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