Katy looked. Behind her was a man, and his face was painted. Wrapped around his neck was a long fur, and two more around his wrists, and he wore wolfskin boots and a long robe painted blue, red, and brown. What she initially took for a bow on his back was a single, tall, splayed black bird wing. Around his neck, she thought the necklace he wore was stone, but now it looked more like an ossified fish skull.
She swallowed. “Hello?”
“Hello.” There was something about him. She had never seen him before, never seen anyone dressed in birds' wings or red furs the way he was. She tilted her head to the engine.
“What do you know about this?”
He smiled, toothily, and bent on legs that seemed too long to squat beside her. “Suppose I were to tell you that ten thousand years ago, the man in the moon had a debt to repay to the death god, so he built her a box that would make the same noises he heard listening to the stars singing, so that she would never be alone?”
“I suppose you know more than I would.”
“I would say I was lying.” He got up. “Anyways. I came here to tell you that. And to do this.” With a fluid movement, he unstrapped the bird wing from his back- it had a fossilized, stiffened look to it- and tapped it against the thrumming casing of the engine.
The Engine vanished.
Katy leapt, sending the box of blank paper went flying. The man started to leave.
“Hold up!” She yelled. The man turned around to give her one last look.
“I imagine,” he said, in slow, unaccented words, “that if you wanted to find me, you could look in the Garden of the Lost.” Then he turned back, and walked steadily out.
Katy merely stood by the gateway of the room where the engine had sat just before, now silent, completely flummoxed.
There was, in fact, no man in the moon, and no death god. Ten thousand years ago, there was only a bird, who drifted on smoky wings over a sandy wasteland of blasted plants and billions of animals, lying on their sides, in pain, not moving.
Where the bird landed first, a glimmer of rock began to show through the sand.
Katy tread thoughtfully through the gates of the sixth garden. This, as best she could tell, was the Garden of the Lost the man had told her to come to. She had not brought Simon- had not told him yet, even- but it seemed important to know who she had offended and how, and what she had gotten into.
She headed towards the bench, noticing more animal life in the park now- tiny triangular insects that crept into compost as she neared, something furry moving into a bush, a long-armed bird with a thin bill which circled overhead, looking at her.
“It is an eskimo curlew,” said a voice, and she turned to see the same man, the same boots and gray eyes and black hair and red furs.
“Katy Knight,” Katy told the man, sticking out her arm, before feeling impulsive and adding, “PHD.”
“Inok Passerine,” he said to her, and they shook hands. “Also called Inok Crow, Knock-Wood, the Prayer-Sayer, he who built the waterfall, he who delayed the building of the Great Train. Now, if I were you, I would want me to sit down and tell you a story that was true.”
So they sat on the bench, and he did. “My people are not from any one place. We are the continent-walkers, the lost Clan of Mists who gave the name amassona to the River Sea, boat-breakers, the gray-eyed tribe of the coast, the last uncontacted clan of Siberia, the gate-keepers. There is no reason we should be bound by the fall of land-bridges nor the rise of seas. We live on islands, on tundras, on sand-bar straits and densest forest. And we guard the gates of death.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we looked through the gates, saw what was right and wrong, and then, when we could, fixed it. And before we came there, we were here, and we built the Houses, and caged the Primal Beasts who roamed here, in bars of soul-iron and thought.”
“Did you create the river?”
“No, the river is from long before us.”
“What about the engine?”
“Too many questions.” Inok Passerine waved a hand. “Anyways, we lived on the earth for thousands of years. What should you be asking that you aren't?”
Katy couldn't fathom it.
“The question is, why are we here now?
“And the answer is that we are dead. We were as mortal as you are, just a little bit less, and then we were killed- the eight of us who were left. Now our bodies are ash in a stagnant pond, and we are trapped here, like you. Not as permanently, perhaps, but being in Death we have to do the same things we always have, from the other side.”
Katy wasn't sure what to think about that. “So… looking into Life. The living world. And fixing things.”
“It is as you say.” He leaned towards her. “Now, can you imagine why we are interested in this Engine?”
Dr. Knight nodded, carefully. “The engine- What is it?”
Inok Passerine sighed. “Here is the thing. We did not build it. We did not authorize the building of it. Memories are meant to be transient: human beings are meant to learn that things pass away, and what must be left behind, and that no bond will hold forever.”
Katy found herself abruptly thinking of the house by the sea, her house by the sea, where in her memory the floors still smelled like the first time they had been washed. She wondered why.
“But the machines provide a link. They are a link between the gates. Do you understand? This is exactly what we have worked to prevent. They are not supposed to be.” He had taken the rigid bird's wing from his back again and knocked it against the ground. “Not. Supposed. To be.”
Katy blinked- her far-off suspicions confirmed, the gears in her mind spinning. “How long has it existed for? I mean, we thought it's centuries old, at least… Jesus, if it's been active all that long…”
He shook his head. “You remember where it was found?”
She thought about it. She had never been there, but she remembered the strange house and the vault under the earth, its rock walls gilded with layers upon layers of meaningless writing.
“That's right,” he smiled, exposing marble teeth, “Even before it was found, people would come to it here to think or talk. In the lack of direct input, the machine processes everything in its surroundings. Ink and paper, naturally, are retained from world to world, merely the information moves. The rock etchings are the product of… oh… Forty or sixty years of this transfer. It appeared in its current form after we became an extinct species, so as of yet we have not been able to destroy it.”
“So everything I've been putting into the machine…”
“Has also been in some way put through.”
She felt a sudden thrill of fear, thinking of the bland and abstract phrases she had been getting as results. The Foundation would never use anything other then randomized and meaningless inputs, would they? What had she sent through? She couldn't quite remember.
Inok, in all his air of quiet wisdom, noticed her look. “I would not worry if I were you. They may possess the means to cross the gate again, but I cannot imagine why they would. Do not fear: you have given away nothing essential, and you did not know. Just- do not do it, again.”
“Where's the machine now?”
“It will be there if you return, it was only hidden.
“And that is all I am here to say.” Inok Passerine stood up abruptly, sending something scaly that had been resting near his leg scampering away. Katy allowed her gaze to wander, into the horizons, where tall animals with long necks and thick bodies scraped treetrunks, and long-winged batlike lizards beat the sky.
“One other thing,” said Inok, and she turned to look- he was staring out at the same scene she was, the bird-wing in his arms again. “Things are not going very right in this world. Or the other. We believe it is because of the fact that we are gone from that world, and too many things have been passed back there through the gate. As per our duty, we will maintain order. But that will take time. As long as you are here, you would do well to stay out of trouble.”
Katy nodded, blinking. Inok Passerine dropped the end of the bird wing against the ground, then turned around and strode out the garden's gates, signalling nothing more or less the end of their conversation.
Dr. Fleming and Dr. Johanna Garrison swept into the containment cell for a final check. Along the bleached white walls were stacks of machinery, silver and crystal screens all placidly silent. A stainless steel autopsy table stood below hanging bags of warmed saline, and all manner of medical tools and resuscitative tools littered the tables around, including an imposing defibrillator.
Otis lifted up a cold hand of the body on the table- it was only a body, wasn't it?- and let it fall. “This still feels half frozen.”
“It's not as bad as it looks,” Johanna was quick to reassure. “And 28 hours was the longest we could let it sit without significant tissue damage.”
He nodded. “It's ready, then?”
“Yes.” Dr. Garrison's eyes flickered around the room, and said lightly to quell the rising doubt, “Hey, if this works out, can I have a promotion?”
“We'll see. …Come on.” A light had gone on above the door, and the two stepped aside into a glass viewing chamber, and shut the door.
Two staff cloaked entirely in protective suits entered the containment room by another door, dragging a third man between them. The third wore an orange jumpsuit, and had not shaved in several days.
“D-504889,” Otis said into the microphone, “please approach and touch the cadaver.”
Quaking, the young man was released by the suited guards, and he stumbled forward and pressed a shaking finger to the arm of the body. Nothing.
Otis shot a look at Johanna. “Please repeat the action.'
Slowly, the man drew out his arm again- covered in grayscale sores- and touched it to the cold skin again. This time, a spark leapt, the connection was made, and everyone nearby felt it, as though the lights had flickered. The guards led the man out very quickly.
Katy and Simon climbed a hill of silvery-green grass under a glassy sky, carrying a few found tidbits- a tiny spyglass and a hat- between them. At the top, there would be a basket containing whatever delicious food the landscape had produced for them, and the pale red sun would rise slowly through the fog. The gray world at peace, as ever.
Nearly up the hill, something in Katy's gut suddenly felt as though it had been struck. She doubled over, jaw squeezing shut. Simon turned around. “Katy? What is it?”
It came again, and she fell onto her knees, nauseous, knowing that this needed to stop now or she was going to die, like this, in the same pain that had borne her here. It came again, deep, profound, and a shaking, high-pitched noise escaped from her. She was suddenly aware that she couldn't feel Simon's hands on her any longer.
Then, as if guided by a phantom hand, she turned to look behind her: a ghastly pseudopod was climbing the hill- cloudy water, tentacular- and she knew with increasingly tear-blurred sight that it was meant for her. The arm of water was a hand of the Gray River, forced into doing what water never should. It scaled the hill and enveloped Katy, and pulled her into the rushing not-water at breakneck speeds. Simon sucked in a gasp, and sprinted to the top of the hill to see what was happening.
Katy had only a dim sensation in the clear, lucidly cold water, that was still somehow all-too-real, like an encasing glass sheet.. Yet, she was overcome with a terrifying instinctive sense of wrong when she realized that she was moving up the river.
“Impossible,” she swore she could hear a familiar voice mutter from far away, and she knew something had gone cataclysmically wrong.
Struggle was useless, and her flails and motions were as futile as stopping time. Slowly, the river bore her through greater and greater currents, until at last all she was aware of was a vestal white wall of vapor and spray, and a great moral heaving. With a sickening silence, she passed through the veil of water.
And woke up on the other side, screaming.
