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 VI: Amado Alatriste
conclusion
My father’s existence is very much like that of my adopted world: dangerous and rife with black magic. I’ve often tried to tease an understanding from this odd equation, never quite at ease with the various answers I’ve glimpsed.
I lie on my back, curled and drowsy, eyes closed and head hanging over the edge of the bed, foot rubbing against foot like a villain rubs his hands. A habit I acquired from a lengthy stint as a space jock. My wife sits cross-legged at the opposite end, toweling her hair dry.
Having made love after a particularly trying run, we are unraveling in a sad, weary languor in the Union Station dorm after a long day of shuffling and rearranging skyscrapers as if in a game of dominoes. The ground had been very unstable today. Two crew members nearly lost, seriously injured, in a collision that could have been much worse — Fando and Lis were cradled in cryogel in Intensive — but for the unthinking swiftness of our AI net. The earthquakes eventually subsided, unlike my heart, and the structures tugged and cajoled back into place.
“What time is your father?”
“An hour from now.”
“Do you mind if I don’t go?”
“I’m afraid of what I’ll say if you’re not there.”
“I’m afraid of what you won’t if I am.”
“I feel that it’s a little like praying, you know. He’s just—”
“Don’t say it. Just.” She shakes her head, looking away at something on the wall, eyes blinking. “Talk to him. And. This isn’t about him, you know. It’s about you.”
For a while I say nothing, merely watching as she moves about the room, doing the small things that always create a centering peace in me: adjusting her earrings; folding her body through a sun salutation; or staring out through the large magnifying disc windows overlooking the vast lonely valley cradling the distant faerie’s gold of Avignon Lux. Is she dreaming of home?
“I think he suspects.”
She stops and stares at me as if seeing me for the first time. And then she smiles, shaking her head. “No. There are doubts we carry with us; forever, I think. But doubting our own existence? No. Only in dramatic virchies or old existential Russian novels. Why we are here, yes. But that we are here? No. You might doubt everything around you, but never yourself. You can doubt God, love, even death. But that you are here? You are the center of the universe. You might come to the edge of the world and fall off, but there you go — you — falling off.”
After that small burst, she comes to me and kisses my upside-down face with a lover’s lingering and nibbling gentleness.
“But if anyone could make him doubt himself, it’s you. No, really,” she says, laughing along with me. “Around you, sometimes I doubt that I exist.” She kisses me again but dances away when I grasp at her. “I become a phosphene that you see when you press a corner of your closed eyeball, a lighthouse beaming through the void.”
“If you think I’m good at it, you should see him.”
“Maybe that’s the reason I don’t want to be there.”
“Maybe we don’t exist, Eta. Maybe this is all a dream.”
“I rest my case.”
Later, at the city’s outskirts, seated at a restaurant in a nearly deserted mall annexed to the lightship starport, I watch him approach through the rosy glights which create a fey, otherworldly glow. Instinctively I stand, and we embrace for a long moment, then sit, separated by gorgeous magenta hothouse orchids drooping from a long-necked mirersatz vase.
We stare at each other and, for a moment, after so long a time without having seen him — and never having thought to lay eyes on him again, really — I feel caught, as if in one of those spins between quake-loosened buildings, my tugboat gnat pirouetting between the grappling lasers of gravbeams, excited and frightened and hyperventilating, close to passing out. The moment passes, leaving in its wake a sad joy at seeing him.
“I’m glad to see you’re okay,” I say as the wine arrives. “I heard. About the attack. On your ship.” The thought of the danger we think behind us can often make us relax, allowing us to feel more alive. I want him thinking that he is.
“Oh, yes, that. Pretty frightening,” he says with the deep dulcimer tones that I remember, along with the musk, the cologne, the smells of him. “I’ve been in firefights before. But what made it worse was my fear of dying and not seeing you again.”
There is a sudden vibration in the air, static electricity like a comb drawn through the scalp on a very windy day, body tingling, a rumbling in the ground and in the building around us. For a moment I think earthquake, expecting the phone inside my head to call me to duty.
“It’s starting.”
The Communard Militia’s starships overhead, rolling through the night skies towards a rendezvous with uncertainty. They are on their way out, the acoustics tapering off toward an uncomfortable silence.
“I want you and Eta to leave. With me. Tomorrow.”
“Alebrije is my home.”
“Then you will be turned into a pillar of salt.”
My lower lip curls outward as my mouth flattens, and I shrug. “When that happens, you can have my sophizesthai mimicant.”
He stares at me when I say that. He looks like he wants to say something but can’t find the words.
“You know how I feel about that,” he finally says.
“I’m not likely to forget it, even when I’m dead.”
“When you’re dead, you will be no more.” There is a body of thought that goes with that sentence, but he seems as weary of repeating old arguments as I am of either listening to or countering them. “I want you, Amado. You’re all I have.”
“Tell me, Father. Why did you have me? I mean, did you actually even want children? Or was I an accident?”
On the table he lays his hands together like an open prayer book and seems to study the lines of his palms.
“You weren’t planned, if that’s your question. But we wanted you, very much. You were a controlled accident, an artful child born of an artless marriage between two people who had no business being together but fell headlong into the accident of love.
“The universe is filled with unplanned miracles, Amado. There are those who theorize that consciousness itself is an accident, a fortuitous spark that turned into a conflagration, an unplanned bit of ultimately unexplainable magic.”
“Let me have Mother’s mimicant, and I will come with you.”
He looks down and smiles ruefully. “I wish I could, but I destroyed it, long, long ago.”
“How could you?”
“It was a principled act that took a lot of courage, and even greater stupidity. There hasn’t been a day since you left me that I haven’t regretted it.” He runs his hands through his hair. “I’ve learned since then, many times over, that there’s no virtue in doing things the hard way.”
“Wrong again, Father. What is hard and what is easy is just the measure of how weak or how strong your imagination is. You lost Mother because you couldn’t see that who she was was not what you knew about her but what she knew about you. No one knew us the way she knew us. And that’s why you lost me as well.”
“Have I really lost you?”
Seeing him again has jarred my angry convictions. Living in our own skulls, we all think we know ourselves best, but hearing him express his doubts has unnerved me a little. He is not the man I remember. It has occurred to me that maybe there are things about me that he knows better than I do.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Later, when I’m gone — assuming I leave this mortal coil before you, Father — ask my mimicant the same question. And if it answers you that yes, you have lost me, then ask yourself another question: What is it exactly that you’ve lost?”
When our visit is over, we hug again, longer this time. I leave him there, drinking wine and pondering the möbius of our fates. My father on the heels of what he’s been running away from for so long, me on the cusp of regaining what I believed well beyond recovery. Or is it the other way around?
At the building’s exit, I gaze up at the uncertain night sky and at the distant lights of battle. One hundred light-years between my former and present homes, it’s the gulf of a lifetime of absences. How do you bridge that? I smile, a little wistful over my father’s visit, by the errant and delightfully melancholic fluke of our existing, he and I, in the circular ruins of our dreams. And to end up here, of all places, in a deserted restaurant on an alien world in a corner of the universe that is having a little trouble shaking off the shackles of its dreams and waking up.
I feel like chuckling and, somewhere inside, I do, but not out loud.
I rush off, hoping that Eta is still awake and waiting for me.
Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel S. de Anda
