The Memory of Water Page 2

  I understood the analogy, even though the physics of black holes were completely beyond me. “And I share everything with you. You know as much as I do about them—”

  “Except for what we will become!” Ffraid cried softly, her voice husky with impending tears.

  Dismayed, I struggled to find something to say. “But you didn’t get the virus,” I said slowly.

  “The children did!” Ffraid closed her hand into a knuckle-bleaching fist. “And I could have caught it and been asymptomatic. So might you! How can we know? It goes dormant and hidden, until it shifts to active and then…” She stared at our three children playing in the wavelets, her eyes glittering.

  “Not everyone goes through the active phase.” It was a pathetic attempt to calm her. I felt stupid even saying it, but I always felt helpless when she cried. I could count on one hand the times Ffraid had cried, and they had all left me feeling this abysmal sense of uselessness. If my incredibly smart, Nobel laureate wife could not find answers, how on earth was I supposed to?

  Yet when she cried, I wanted to fix things for her. So I gave her the equivalent of a there-there pat on the head.

  Ffraid rightfully tossed it straight back at me. “You don’t know that! No one knows anything, you said. You know a thimbleful more than most, but you don’t know. You can’t tell me we won’t end up like them!” She shot her hand out to point at the dozen Errata sitting on bare sand, their backs to all the humans.

  It was only then I thought to wonder how long she had been building up to this. And a secondary thought made me glance to the right, to the humans quietly enjoying their day while pretending the Errata were not there at all. How many other mothers, parents, brothers, sisters, children, lived with this quiet dread? This waiting?

  I made myself look at Ffraid. “There are no guarantees,” I made myself say. “None. There are no patterns we’ve discerned. Not yet.” I gave her a scientific principal she would understand. “There isn’t a large enough data set to even begin to guess.”

  She nodded, and her tears spilled. “But you do know that the virus doesn’t shift along DNA patterns. If I shift…if I phase, then I might become a…a water leaper. And Gwen might become…” She choked and put her face in her hands. “An orc!” Her voice was muffled and filled with dread.

  I was smart enough to not correct her terminology, this time. Orc was the epithet everyone used for the goblyns. I also didn’t tell her I thought there was a goblyn among the Errata sitting behind her, staying low and out of sight. She was upset enough already.

  I picked up her hand. “Ffraid, listen. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I don’t care if you…if you phase. I don’t care if we all phase, and I don’t care what we become. It doesn’t matter. Do you understand?”

  Ffraid shook her head, trying to hide her blotchy face with one hand. Denial.

  I tugged her hand. “Look behind you,” I said, lowering my voice, even though we were still using Welsh. “Really look at them. There are three water leapers. There is at least one dwarf and I even think there is an angel. And if they’re this close to the water, the avanc who owns this section of the sea likely has his mate here, too. But do you see, Ffraid? There are all kinds among them and they’re together.”

  Ffraid gave a great sniff, then lifted a corner of the cheesecloth shirt and wiped her face. When it was quite dry but still red, she looked at me. “Don’t you wonder what will happen to you? Aren’t you afraid?”

  I drew in a breath. Let it out. “When I let myself think of it, yes, I’m afraid,” I said truthfully. “But there is nothing we can do, except deal with whatever happens, when it happens.”

  “And look for answers in the meantime,” she whispered.

  I frowned.

  Ffraid gave me a stiff smile. “They found Gordy in his bed, yesterday. Sleeping pills.”

  My jaw slackened. I stared at her, my heart thudding, as it all shifted and came together. While I pulled my wits back together, Ffraid turned toward the water, lifted her chin and her voice. “Gwen! Heulwen! Owen! Come back here!” She used English, as the children were not comfortable with Welsh.

  Gordon Howard was—had been—the dean of physics and Ffraid’s doctoral advisor. He’d walked her up the aisle, for Ffraid was without family just as I nearly was. He was a scotch drinker and spent all his spare time in a pocket handkerchief-sized garden at the back of his cottage in Godstow, coaxing peonies and lillies along.

  And he was the third professor in her department who had chosen to end matters now, who could not face waiting and wondering…

  The children took not a bit of notice of Ffraid’s call, so she added, “Right this moment!” Her tone was more convincing than the words. We all knew that tone.

  The three stepped reluctantly out of the water and trudged up the beach, dripping and breathing hard, their eyes shining. Even Owen was dancing about with joy.

  Ffraid took Owen’s arm, tugged him closer to her. She pulled out the very large bottle of sunscreen lotion and uncapped it.

  I beckoned Gwen toward me. “Turn around, let me reach your back.”

  The squealing screams were distant and soft. I’d heard them so many times before that at first, I didn’t register the significance of them. I was too busy plucking Gwen’s wet, black locks from her back.

  “Michael…!” Ffraid said softly. Her urgent tone did snag my attention. I looked up.

  Ffraid looked at the Errata, then back at me.

  The Errata were clustered in a tight group. I saw a pale foot kick out from among their legs, the flesh white from too much time spent inside. An arm flailed. The low grunting sounded again and this time I consciously registered it.

  I got to my feet. “You three, stay with your mother,” I told Gwen, Heulwen and Owen.

  “Is that…is one of them phasing?” Ffraid asked in Welsh.

  “Yes, I think so. I should help.”

  She nodded. “Yes, you must.”

  I was already sorting through what supplies and instruments I had in my kit in the car, as I walked over to the thick glob of Errata. “Let me through, please. I’m a doctor. I can help.”

  The man on the sand was writhing, his contortions kicking up clouds of fine white sand. He looked human, but he wouldn’t for much longer.

  Everyone around him hovered with their hands out, as if they were reaching to help. Only, they had no idea what to do to help him.

  I yanked on the nearest shoulder to make way for myself. A white wing snapped out in surprise and I ducked away from the thick upper edge. The angel looked over her shoulder.

  “I’m a doctor,” I told her. “I can help.”

  She looked troubled. “You know ‘ow to fix…us?” Her eyes were crystalline and beautiful, as all angels were. The expression in them was troubled.

  I ducked the direct answer, which wouldn’t reassure her. “I’ve had a great deal of experience. Let me through.”

  She brought her wings back in and folded them against her back. “‘e just started to…to scream ‘n to squirm.” Her accent was east London and thick. She tapped the arm of the water leaper next to her and they both shuffled out of the way.

  “He is moving into active phase,” I told them. “Although I’ve never seen it come on so fast. There is usually a few days of fever…”

  “‘e was sick last week,” one of the other leapers said. “Moanin’ and groanin’. Then ‘e got better.”

  “Hmm…” I said diplomatically. No one “got better” when they moved into active phase. They sickened, changed, or died. I knelt in the sand next to the writhing man. “The shift was delayed,” I murmured, studying his facial features. I absorbed the details, cataloguing them. I looked up at the leaper standing over me. “My car is in the carpark at the top of the cliff. The white Mercedes. There is a Gladstone bag in the back of the boot. You can open the boot from the dashboard. We left the windows down because of the heat.”

  The leaper nodded. Then she threw herself up into the
air. Her gossamer wings spread with a soft snap and worked hard with the characteristic fluttering sound water leapers made when they flew. She lifted up in the air.

  Farther along the beach, I heard gasps and cries of alarm as the humans saw her take flight.

  I ignored them and instead studied my patient. He was kicking, thrusting and making harsh tearing sounds at the back of the throat. His eyes were screwed shut.

  I frowned. If he had passed through the fever stage and avoided developing meningitis as so many of them did, then he should not be in such severe pain now.

  I examined the way he was holding his eyes so tightly closed and the truth occurred to me—only it was too late.

  He screamed, a very human sound, and the last he would make as a human, then threw his head back and howled. It was a guttural, deep sound, for his vocal chords were shifting.

  Along the beach, I heard echoing gasps and horror-filled murmurs.

  The Errata around me shifted on their feet, alarmed.

  “Please, please, ‘elp him,” the angel murmured. Agony twisted her voice.

  She would not personally remember the pain of her own phase-shift. None of them did.

  “It will pass,” I assured her. “But we must get him out of the sun—”

  The soon-to-be goblyn howled again, cutting me off. He straightened, rigid with pain.

  The ground beneath us vibrated and began to shake, almost exactly like an earthquake.

  Even the Errata moved away, their eyes widening. I looked between them for the black face and black tusks of the goblyn I knew was lurking behind them. I saw his red-rimmed eyes. “Control his power!” I told the goblyn sharply. “He cannot—not yet!”

  The goblyn crouched down on the other side of my patient. He put his hand, with the thickly ridged, black epidermis on the back, on the shoulder of his new brother. “‘ugh…’ugh!” He shook.

  “He can’t hear you,” I told the goblyn.

  “I can’t stop ‘im,” the goblyn replied. “Not in the sun, not out ‘ere.”

  “If we get him inside, then?”

  “Maybe…” the goblyn said. “If it’s dark, like.”

  I put my hand out as the ground beneath me seemed to shrug and try to toss me aside.

  A bone-deep cracking sounded.

  Then the world paused, for one last shining moment. Even Hugh grew still.

  We looked at each other.

  “What was that?” one of them breathed, as if they were too afraid to speak any louder.

  A man screamed, behind us.

  “The cliff!! The cliff!”

  I leapt to my feet and whirled at the same time, my heart racing. I saw something that my brain refused to process properly, not until many long black days later.

  A massive portion of the cliff had cracked and was falling away from the land behind it. It was as if a giant had cleaved an axe into the land above, and now the severed section was falling away.

  It fell with horrible slowness. It fell far too fast for me, with my pitiful human reactions, to respond.

  “Ffraid!” My shout tore at my throat. I threw out my hand, as if that would shove my wife and my children far away from the shade at the foot of the cliff. Ffraid had Owen on her hip as she slogged through the sand, with Heulwen’s hand in hers, while screaming at Gwen to run.

  The goblyn leapt into a hard, driving sprint across the sand, as if it was a smooth running track beneath his thick feet. As he could control the earth, it possibly was hard track beneath each heavy foot. He raced toward them, a powerful, squat figure in jeans and teeshirt, moving with inhuman speed.

  Even he was not fast enough. The cliff dropped like a broad shiv, driving into the soft beach beneath. The top half of cliff-face crumbled at the jarring impact with the land and spewed across the narrow beach and into the wavelets where my children had been playing only a few moments ago.

  Then everything grew still once more. Very still.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LaMancha Reconstruction Syndrome Refugree Camp, Toledo, Spain. Two Weeks Ago.

  The dream woke me somewhere between two and three. I couldn’t make the green numbers come together in sharp focus when I blinked at the clock. From long experience, I knew I wouldn’t sleep again tonight, so I dressed in yesterday’s clothes, which saved me from having to put on a light. I walked through the camp, which was mercifully quiet once more because all the protesters were sleeping—or doing what passed for sleep, for them. The goblyns and their kind, of course, would be awake and silently watching.

  I ducked under the flap of the clinic tent and walked into chaos.

  The waiting room at the front was a narrow area marked off by blankets pegged to rope, which hid the interior of the clinic from non-medical gazes. The noise, though, was distinctive and familiar. When I pushed aside the blanket and moved through to the general ward area, the view matched what I had heard.

  At the far end of the tent was a plastic-walled room, brightly lit, with a “temporary” wooden floor which had been in service for the entire two years I had been here. The rest of the tent had started with mowed wild grass for carpet. Now it was all bare dirt.

  Forming a circle around the edge of the surgery room were banks of monitors, equipment, trays of instruments, chests of drugs and three laptop computers, one of them a heavy-duty monster which NASA claimed could be run over by a two ton truck and keep ticking—but then urged us to not try it at home.

  In the center of that scratched, dented and mangled collection of secondhand and scrounged equipment and the supplies they held was a fully adjustable hospital bed, the only one in the clinic. Everyone else got to sleep on narrow camp beds I had come to believe were World War II surplus.

  The man lying on the bed was the source of the groaning and incoherent shouting. He would have been thrashing, too, except he was strapped down upon the mattress with sheepskin-lined straps. Even with the straps, he was still managing to squirm and kick. They were to stop him hurting himself, or throwing himself off the bed, or wrenching the IV from his arm, or any of the other three tubes which were supporting his bodily functions because he could not.

  Around the bed, three medical aides, all of them Errata, stood back with their eyes very large, watching the agony-driven patient. They were new to this. Aides were always new to this. We went through medical aides the way I had consumed energy drinks as a student. Most of them resigned after witnessing a patient move through their active phase change. From the look on these three’s faces, we’d lose them all after tonight, too. It was hard to blame them. A phase change scraped against the soul like a grater.

  Suzuki was bent over the patient, trying to pry one of his eye lids back so she could check the sclera, calm despite the noise, the unhelpful help, and the rolling head under her long fingers.

  I stepped into the room. “Prognosis, doctor?”

  Suzuki straightened and tilted her head at me. “You’ve been gone barely two hours, Michael.” Her large green eyes tilted up at the corners. I always found it amusing that even her epicanthic folds had tilted upward, too. They were reduced to almost nothing, but they were still recognizably there.

  “Don’t get tetchy,” I told her.

  “The dream again?” She didn’t wait for my answer, as the patient gave a great shout and his body grew taut against the straps. I could see every tendon drawn tight like violin strings, all over his body.

  I rolled up my sleeves. “I’ll help you with the lumbar puncture.”

  Suzuki glanced behind her at the cowering aides, as if she had just remembered they were there. “Go and get some sleep.” She clearly agreed with me that they would be unnerved by the tapping of spinal fluid, too.

  The aides didn’t ask anything stupid such as, “Are you sure?” They left, herding each other out of the room, as eager to escape as I was to see them go. They were nothing more than a tripping hazard now.

  We got to work. It normally took four people to manage the patient while the spine was
tapped, but Suzuki was strong enough for three. As we finished the procedure and cleaned up the patient, I looked at her. I didn’t have to drop my chin to do that as I once had. “There was a time when you couldn’t reach over the bed. There’s that, at least.”

  Suzuki’s nose wrinkled. She had a finely-drawn nose, now, with not a hint of upturn at the end. It offset the very long ears, with their pointed ends. “Even then, I could still dump you upon the floor and not raise my pulse while I did it.”

  I laughed, because that was exactly what she had done to me the first time we met. I had stood eighteen inches higher than her and outweighed her by three stone, even then.

  Now she was within a hair’s breadth of being taller than me. All the fae were tall, willowy and elegant.

  Suzuki picked up with the dish with the syringe holding the sample and turned it toward the light. “Milky as hell,” she said. “We could save ourselves the expense of running the test.”

  The patient was quiet for the moment, breathing hard, his eyes closed. For the life of me, I could not remember his name at that moment, but it had been a very long night. “Save the money,” I told her. “Look at the angle of his neck. It’s curving.”

  She turned on her heel. “Well, bugger me,” she breathed. “I missed that.” Then she sighed. “Poor sod. He has a rough few days ahead.”

  “More than rough,” I assured her. “This will be a bad one, Kája.”

  She tilted her head in that graceful curve once more. “Are you doing that observation thing again?”

  “Gut feeling,” I assured her. “Also, long practice.” We both smiled grimly at that.

  Suzuki watched the patient, as if she was reluctant to leave. Schroeder. His name came back to me, finally. I could feel energy returning as I shrugged off sleep. “Go and rest,” I repeated to her. “I have this.”

  Suzuki nodded and left, which told me exactly how—well, not tired, for she never got tired—but how depleted she had grown from dealing with this one. The active phase was draining on everyone.