Castles in the Sky
by Gabriel S. de Anda
Jose Luis Espejo-Alatriste, a diplomat from Earth, travels to the world of Alebrije on a mission of coercive diplomacy. He also wishes to claim the body of his deceased son, Amado Alatriste, who has died in a work-related accident. However, wires get crossed, and Amado thinks that it’s his visiting father — and not himself — who has met an untimely end.
To complicate matters, father and son each wants to keep the stored consciousness of the other from realizing that it is, in fact, dead. Between the two of them stands Eta Alatriste-Greschoff, Amado’s wife and Jose Luis’s daughter-in-law. Who can resolve this misunderstanding and its consequent split in reality?
Meanwhile, Jose Luis has interstellar relations to worry about, as well. Alebrije is on the cusp of being invaded by Earth, and there is the specter of imminent war.
Chapter III: Amado Alatriste
In my father’s dream, I am like vapor. I rise into the air when I walk, my long hair floating about me as if I were in freefall, my weight minimized, my steps soundless across the smoothly grained, polished wooden floors of home. I am like a ghost.
There are parts of the dream which neither I nor Biotech Compugenix can control, not if we’re to accomplish what I want to accomplish. This is our home in Los Angeles, but the gravity is wrong, recalling our brief stay in orbit on Arco Iris.
Awaiting a return that was never to be.
From outside I hear the gentle sonic wails of the ozone replenishers, sky-whales reprocessing the damaged skies. The syllables of words are like music, says the Sage, which soothe or break the heart. Yang and yin, white and black, down and up, no and yes, here and now, now and then.
Broken, unbroken.
I don’t remember my mother reading to me as a child, ever. But I have a vast catalogue of the songs she sang: in the kitchen preparing breakfast; healing tonalities as she applied mercurochrome to my seriously scored knee; or the moody heartbreakers she whisper-sang while setting me down to sleep.
Or when she was sad, as she was so often in the last year of her life. I still remember the lyrically mournful minor notes of the canticles she sang softly after my father went away the first time.
My father, on the other hand, used to tell me bedtime stories all the time. One of my favorites was of an airborne city of castles, turrets and spires rising defiantly into the clouds, a kingdom of the winds named Aethereal, wreathed in gorgeous cloudwork. My first taste of world-building. We created a reality around the seed of a fairytale wherein I could escape, a palace of reverie.
I feel a stirring in the air, invisible wings, a whir of ancient rotors and spinning blades. It makes me feel dreamy, seven again, lying in bed, watching the mouth-sized moon migrate across the sky.
I am alone, and I relish it, but I know he will be home soon, and we will fight, as we always do. He’ll smell of the perfumed bodies and augmented pleasures of the bordellos he has taken to frequenting since mother’s accident. I miss her something terrible.
I sit out on the verandah to absorb the cool darkness of the predawn, splayed like a lotus in the meditative posture taught at the 9MS temple on Fairfax, an oasis of silence and solitude in the middle of the busy and manic heart of this city of fallen vardøger — pale predecessor angels mired in reverse déjà vu — citizens living rich, eventful lives that may or may not, one day, belong to them. That is my father now, that spirit essence that precedes birth, the part that technology has retrieved from the wreckage of his death.
He’ll walk in through the front door’s permeable caul keyed to the Espejo-Alatriste genome, through a drift of sandalwood incense and fresh Valencia orange peel. I can hear him stop and hesitate as he senses my presence, a little surprised and, perhaps, confused that I am still here. In one of the rooms, Abra, the house AI, is playing Satie’s third gymnopédie.
He’ll stand at the phantasmagoric portal behind me, and I’ll sense him. Aramis, sex and urine, alcohol and the smoke of hallucinogens. I can smell the unbearable gravity of the sadness — subtle, raw, addictive — that we share.
I turn and he is standing there, a look of drunken, heartbroken concern. “She’s never coming back.”
“Not now,” I say. “Or ever again. Thanks to you.” I don’t want to argue, but I’d been instructed to use the misdirection of conflict to keep his mind engaged. If I were amenable, he would not believe it was me, his only son. And — really — I didn’t have to be told. I am talking to a dead man’s ghost, and I still can’t help myself.
“There is no such thing as immortality.”
“You’re wrong,” I say. “Again.”
“Memories are the heart’s tyranny,” he says and stops, as if hearing a far-off noise. The music of the spheres. “We need to engineer our dreams, son.” He looks down at the opened palms of his hands and frowns. Does he suspect? A string of baby ducklings is marching through the living room in a straight formation.
“Freeze.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask, the world around me pulsing but curiously unmoving, like an antique three-dimensional painting in an art museum.
A duo of Biotech Compugenix techies have stepped onto the stage, Act One of my father’s reboot crashed after barely having begun.
“There’s residual bleed-over. Your father is no fool. He senses that something is amiss.”
I laugh at this, sardonically amused. “Amiss? Something amiss?” I laugh, then sigh and shake my head. “Can we make this work?”
“Yes. We can. We will. Patience, Sen Alatriste. We’re here to smooth out the wrinkles in your father’s memories.”
Put that way, it sounds like a Sisyphean task.
“Fine,” I say and take a deep breath. “It’s important that he not realize that he’s dead.”
At least not yet.
Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel S. de Anda
