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 V: Eta Greschoff-Alatriste
The morning war was declared — the same day Eta was scheduled to leave — it started to snow. It was a light flurry, little tags of snowflake that made her think of a childhood’s snowglobe which, when shaken, raised a swirl of tiny squares of the palest gold and platinum, vaguely opalescent.
The mountain valley surrounding the vast empty plains far below was quietly austere with the bluish and silvery pastels laying down a mantle of peace such as only nature could conjure. Central Atmospherics had reported three minor earthquakes, but nothing strong enough to cause either Avignon Lux or its smaller, surrounding cities to find safe haven in the air. Traffic surrounding the spaceport seemed to mimic the peaceful swirl of the early snow, but the terminals themselves were growing crowded, the domes hot, panicky, the belligerence no longer so polite. The exodus had already taken thousands, but the flurry and desperation would only grow worse as the enemy’s orbital dragnet tightened. Indecisive Alebrijeyans who had waffled by virtue of ignorance, limited resources or lack of connections were scrambling to find exit strategies, mostly illegitimate. All the remaining official charters were already booked.
A state of emergency had been imposed and curfews posted. Worldwide stock markets and monetary rates had begun plummeting when Axis battleships had entered the system. Upon their arrival into high space orbits, they’d released swarms of pulse-emitting drones configured to disrupt net and craniocosmic connectivity as well as other forms of planetary intercommunication, deftly securing popular frequencies for their barrage of Solarian propaganda. Alebrijeyan countermeasures had been initially effective, but they were inevitably showing signs of weakening. The military forces of the thirteen most powerful planetary governments had coordinated defensive mobilization and deployment. One World Militia had instituted a draft months earlier.
Out of the corner of her vision, Eta saw a rain of gruesome corpses dropping from the sky far to the valley below. Her breath caught in her throat as she turned her back on what she knew to be disturbing hallucinations, but was shaken nonetheless.
She met her uncle on one of the various roofless platforms skirting the ring of fullerene domes attached to the spaceport terminal. He was, like her, wearing a greatcoat that seemed to sweep the floor without actually touching it, his maroon, hers black. When they hugged, his sable hat tickled the right cheekbones of her face, dry, cool and fluffy.
“Where are your husband and father-in-law?” he asked.
“Already aboard the shuttle. Their cartridges are safely stored in a Faraday sleeve that Biotech Compugenix provided.” Her smile was one of exhaustion. “Death has brought the two of them closer than they ever were in life. Which isn’t,” she added, “that close. But” — she looked up at the falling snow flakes and held out a gloved hand — “I just came out to see the City of Light one more time.” Her nose and cheeks were flushed pink with the cold, highlighting the blue of her eyes. “And to meet you, of course. You’re really staying?”
He took off his hat and placed it on her bare head. His hair was, like hers, that kind of blond with bright golden threads, thick and wavy and tangly. His grin, though moderated by the tragedies to come, had a depth of wry amusement that never failed to warm her. He was like the papá of her childhood and the uncle — out of six — that she’d always preferred, her mother’s favorite brother. In her mind and heart, he was her real father.
He nodded, then vigorously stamped his feet as if to warm them. Like Eta, he’d been born on another world, a warmer world. But the better part of his life had been spent here. Attracted by the dream, held in thrall to the magic of a world like no other, Alebrije had always been an enchantment, a siren song, a captivating bittersweet love spell. Especially now, on the eve of her probable destruction.
“Go with me,” she quietly pleaded. “Nothing good can come of staying behind.” Something fizzed in the corner of her vision, making her turn. “What is that?”
A skyborne migration of animals of every stripe, marching in pairs, were gamboling towards the fading horizon where something — a whale? A zeppelin? No: an ark — seemed to await their arrival.
“Solarian propaganda designed to amuse while implanting subliminal, explosive emotional cortical mines.” He handed her a pair of goggles from a large pocket in his greatcoat, which she slipped on. She looked around and the scene had changed. In the sky above, a fat cartoon man made out of rings of white rubber with huge button eyes floated by, wearing a sailor’s cap and a mannequin smile. He trailed a massive banner which read: Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin.
“There is good and bad in everything. I stay for the same reasons you’re leaving.”
“And I’m leaving pretty much for the reasons that you’re staying.”
He fingered her chin and lifted her face and, nodding, said, “You need to be clearer than that. Sometimes the cost of misplacing things is no different than losing them.”
Her head tilted to the left. She bit her lip, considering her words. “When Amado died, I wasn’t sure how to move on. And then Gael found me. It was a breath of life, a mending of the hole in my heart left by Amado’s death.” Eta tried to explain that, in love again, she felt renewed, as if she couldn’t imagine ever again being paralyzed.
Eta had purposefully never accessed Amado’s mimicant, believing that it would hobble her. “And then Amado’s father arrived, and I decided that I was going to let Jose Luis have Amado’s cartridge.” But then he, too, was killed, and then she had two dead men in her pocket.
“And then you found yourself forced to interact with Amado’s BC construct,” deduced Jose Luis.
She surprised him by saying, “No. I mean, well, yes. But more importantly, I made each of them interact with each other. Again.” She turned and looked her uncle in the eye, said, “It’s not about what I thought I’d misplaced but had actually lost. It was more about what Amado and his father had thought they’d lost, but had merely misplaced.”
“Do you think they’ll find each other again?”
Eta’s sigh was like an unstitching cloud, concealing imaginary shapes. She shrugged, squinting at the far off horizon, said, “Really find each other? Who knows, tío. Maybe. I hope so. Maybe they’ll find some measure of peace. I know I could use some.” She was specifically thinking of her husband, of Amado. There’d been too much unresolved between him and Eta prior to his accident as well. “Why isn’t being in love enough?”
“Is this the kind of syrup you spoon-feed Gael?” he said with a gentle smile. “I can see why she’s smitten.”
Eta’s silence betrayed how close his words had cleaved, and she looked away from him. Just then, she noticed a giant yellow rubber duck with a bright orange bill floating in toward them, a leviathan balloon caught in whorls of snow and shadow.
“They don’t really exist, do they?” she said about the giant rubber duck and the other ephemera.
Erroneously thinking that she was referring to the mimicants of her husband and father-in-law, he shrugged, turning to gaze into a distance of mercurial silk. “I suppose I don’t really exist, either.”
“And yet here you are,” she said, snapping out of her momentary reverie and running her hands over his shoulders.
“Everything that exists is somewhere, Mutzenmandeln,” he said, using the clunky name he’d christened her with as a child, on a different world and in a different life. My carnival donut. He’d just then realized that she had been referring to some floating virtual chimera, but when he spoke he referred to Eta’s deceased husband and his murdered father. “If you asked them, where would they say they are?”
“That they’re as sure of their own reality as I am of mine,” she answered, back in sync with her uncle. “Maybe more so. They would call me the mad one. Amado’s father, by the way, is wary of you, but he likes you quite a bit.”
“He’d probably be much more wary if he knew he was dead and that I was keeping it from him.”
“That you were manipulating him?”
“Just helping him out.”
“Just being Mr. Nice Guy?” Eta lowered her chin as if staring over non-existent glasses. “That’s your expertise.”
“Then it must be in your blood, too.”
“You know, even the dead love you,” said Eta.
“Everyone loves me. By the way, Gael’s running late.” And just then it dawned on him. “She’s not coming, is she.” There was no questioning inflection.
“No, I don’t think so. We’re about as star-crossed as my mother and I.”
“Which reminds me. I have a message from her.” He pulled out a small catseye marble in a cube of transparent metal and placed it in Eta’s hands. She would be able to access it with the same interface she used for both Amado and Jose Luis.
Eta was frowning. “Why does she do that? Why won’t she communicate directly with me?”
Her uncle smiled sympathetically, arms akimbo, staring into her eyes. “I think it’s something the living do.”
“Push each other away? The dead seem pretty good at it, too.”
“I hope you’re not referring to me.”
“No. I’m not referring to you. You’ve never pushed me away.” She turned to look at the distant city. “At least not until now,” she added, smiling ruefully.
Someone from the terminal walked through the iridescent sheen of a bubble-door, a man in spaceport uniform who looked about at a few other stragglers, his gaze settling on Eta and her uncle.
“Sen Felipe Garcia-Rifenstahl?”
“Yes,” said Eta’s uncle. “That’s me.”
The man handed Garcia a long brown cloned leather wallet in exchange for the electronic impressions of all the fingertips of his left hand. The attendant nodded, bowed slightly, turned and left.
“Here. Here you go. Your boarding passes.” One for Eta, the other intended for Gael. “You can always exchange the other one, cash it in.”
Eta thought of how, so long ago now, his connection to the Department of National Security had facilitated her immigration to Alebrije. He had pulled strings as well when she’d applied to the Ferry Corps.
And now he was using his influence to help her escape.
Eta started to say something, but Garcia held up a hand and silenced her. “No. It’s better that I don’t know where you’re going.”
“Will I see you again?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“Can’t say, Mutzenmandeln,” he lied. There were many things he wanted to say, but he felt a peace in silence, a geometric rightness and elegance in meeting reality on its own terms. Words were intermediary and, ultimately, misleading, whereas his regard and love for his niece were like smooth, round stones of a comforting heft and weight, easily held.
Just then, from somewhere down the mountain, a police skimmer rose on petals of distortion, wavering near the edge of the platform. A ribbon-door unfurled like an opening hand containing a rippling of steps.
“Be gone, little one. You must go, and so do I.”
She started to remove the goggles but he stopped her. “Keep them. They’re entertaining, and they’ll keep you safe.”
A cartoon dialogue balloon had flowered above her uncle’s head. She squinted and read it.
The troubles of the world are just a pretext.
* * *
A violent earthquake rippled through the valley, but Eta’s shuttle caravansary was already a string of lightning bugs slowly crawling away and upward into orbit. She was looking through a large cataract of diamond leaf metaglass, which the ship irised for clarity. She could see the buildings of Avignon Lux below, no longer visible to the naked eye but now magnified, rising into the fragment of sky which lay beneath their ascent and to the east. Already the glittery iridescent nimbus attendant to the workings of the sloth tech illumined the floating castles in the sky, infusing the snowy glooming with the watercoloring fusion reversing the polarity of gravity.
An old thought reoccurred to her with the clarity of a goodbye. It was that Avignon Lux had decided to build itself in a place of peril, a land of unstable geography and earthquakes, all to make a point. Her uncle had likewise elected to stay behind with similar motivations.
“Why are you doing this?” Gael had asked her at their last meeting. “For magnetic patterns encased in ceramics? Bits of on-and-off impulses, zeros and ones?”
“Are we ever more than that, Gael? Patterns huddling in a vortex of disorder?”
“You’re living your life for the random patterns of rogue electrons.”
Eta had liked the sound of that, and smiled. “Probably.” She had stood up, but Gael had remained seated, face upturned, expression torn and pleading. Eta had run her hands through her lover’s short hair. “Memory is a dish best served cold.”
“Then I wish I were dead,” said Gael, tears in her eyes. “Maybe then I’d mean more to you.”
And just like that, Gael, too, became a memory, a bit of history that, in time, would metastasize into a longing, another fragment in the puzzled mosaic of Eta’s life. Eta tried to find a glimmer of reciprocity in Gael’s eyes, but her lover had been in a mourning of her own, the never-quite-hardened amber of remembrance capturing Eta like a hologram that would be referred to, again and again. Time would draw the fever-inducing venom of life’s serpent-bite, leaving a pleasant mist of history, a lover’s legend, a creation myth.
She can’t see me anymore, thought Eta. She can only see herself.
It would not dawn on her until much later that this is what Eta saw when she looked at Amado: herself.
She closed her eyes and floated away into the wide, unsheltering sky.
Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel S. de Anda
