Aimee Ogden - [BCS271 S01] - Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark (html) Read online

  Anell could not draw diagrams of such a thing and submit them to the Great Journals for her peers to dissect its meaning and fate, but then neither could she bear to destroy it and start again. It was alive, and it was hers, and she still hoped that it might grow into the faculties of a sentient being. So she fed it, and dressed it in doll’s clothes, and watched it grow. While she worked or ate or dressed, she did not need to fear for its well-being, for it only slept or stared vacantly at the wall beside its cot. If she left a bottle of nutrient broth beside it, so that its lips just brushed against the nipple, the bottle would be half-empty by the time she came home. And the child-thing grew, in size if not intelligence, so it must be drawing the nutrition it needed. If Anell’s calculations in creating the ex vivo womb were correct, it would live forever, given water and air and food, without ever grasping what forever meant.

  She feared now, as she never had before, that when Arantha spent the night in her bed, when he sprawled beside her table as she served riceleaves and tea, he might seek to learn what lay behind her office doors. A son of Liel would not, she thought, take kindly to the kinds of experiments that occupied her time; especially not the kind soul who had helped bear her the Rite of Annihilation. To lose him might be a mortal blow, but to surrender her research at such a tender and potential stage surely would be.

  She would force the duality of the situation into a tenable middle ground. She only needed more time.

  Later that month, after holding vigil during Arantha’s Surrender, she begged off on account of overworked exhaustion and retired to her home without him. If Arantha was disappointed, his gentle kiss did not show it, and he went off with his friends from the temple to celebrate the continuation of life while she went home. But she did not fall early into her unmade bed; only paused to consider it. The petals of roses, remnants of a never-finished arrangement, curled black at the edges where they lay strewn about the sheets. Anell turned her back and retreated into her office for another night’s work. Her weariness had been an excuse but not a fabrication; each time Arantha was absent from her bed she spent a sleepless night behind her lightscope.

  Twice more she had tried to incubate an ovum, and twice more she had failed to produce a sentient being. These secondary creations she destroyed, which was more of a kindness to them than the half-life she had granted their eldest sibling, who still lay lifelessly beside her as she worked. There must be some fundamental principle she had missed or mistaken in building the womb or in understanding the needs of the animalcule. She sat back down before her lightscope and rubbed her thumbs in her burning eyes.

  Once again, the ovum she placed on the slide contained a perfect human being in miniature. If Anell had still cared to draw her observations, she could have limned tiny nostrils, fingers, even the dark frail bones of the spine and ribcage where the light pierced through the delicate flesh. And yet even in the bright glare of the lightscope, the spark of vitality still lay hidden somewhere Anell could not find it.

  She sat back to clear her eyes with a blink, and dull colored shapes danced in the darkness behind her lids. Amid their mad dance, inspiration glittered: perhaps she had missed something in the magichemical trigger with which she’d initiated the implantation. She had issued commands to grow, to engorge with angiogenetic tendrils, to increase and multiply along nature’s intended design.

  If she were to observe the original process fully, perhaps she would be able to glean some information about what was lacking.

  That, however, would require an additional sample.

  At this hour the outside of the Liel estate was dark but for the low braziers of incense burning in the courtyard. Anell ducked her head as she stepped under the great arches. Two servants looked up from their act of love in the shelter of the blacklace tree; they watched Anell pass by, but no questions nor offers of assistance left their swollen lips. Anell knew where Arantha’s room was, had visited it often enough. She entered the foyer, where golden candlelight spilled down the stairs in fits and starts to show her the way.

  Anell found the Countess before she found her son. Liel’s head of House reclined in a shared salon through which Anell was obliged to pass to reach the sleeping quarters. When Anell tried to stroll through, robes pulled taut across her shoulders, the Countess called out to her to wait. “I meant to send for you to meet with me tomorrow, but as you are here now, let us talk.”

  Trembling legs brought Anell closer to the Countess as the old woman set aside her reading. No need to kneel before her patron after the many years of their association, but she sat on a stool opposite her so that they would be eye-to-eye. “Nath Anell,” said the Countess. Not once had she ever called Anell by the Camrainian custom. “I saw you briefly after my son’s Resurrection this afternoon. Have you been at work all the while since?”

  “I have,” said Anell, sidestepping the matter of what exactly she was working on. “Your Grace, I hope you will not begrudge me the time I took to be present for his return to us. I underwent the Rite to show you that I will serve you above all else, but I won’t turn my back on all other ties.” Of course she had already forsworn her vow to put House Liel’s interests first but did not say so. “I am a scientist, not an automaton, and if I do not live I can’t create.”

  The Countess raised one hand to still Anell’s tongue. “I did not mean to rebuke you. Or if I did, it is for the opposite of what you presume.” Liver-spotted hands drifted over the cover of her book: a religious text Anell did not recognize. “You should feel welcome to celebrate the joys of this House. You have served me aptly enough these past years. And I hope you will serve my son Temat the same way.”

  A question bubbled inside Anell, then burst under the weight of its callousness. Carefully she stumbled through a less invasive alternate. “Your Grace, do you mean to abdicate soon on Temat’s behalf?”

  “I met with the Lord Physician today.” Time had not dulled the piercing luster of the Countess’s eyes. “He has given me my sentence. A few months, perhaps three to six, he thinks.”

  “Your tumor—”

  “Does not trouble me. My heart, however...” The Countess shrugged. “I never expected to see true Victory. You will of course devote yourself in the interim to researching cardiac disease, and reaching out to friendly colleagues who have spent more time working on the same. But I know the time frame is not a kind one. When I worsen, I will go down to the Temple and ease myself into the After, as all those who have fought a long and valiant fight ought to do.” A small smile touched her lips. “My son wanted to upmarry you into the family. To make you a gentleperson and ease your life of work and worry.”

  “I never wanted that.”

  “I know.” The Countess leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I’m glad that you have found what you want, and found it here with House Liel. Go, take your leave. I must rest a spell before I finish my reading for the night.”

  Anell fled. Arantha had not yet returned, so she knelt on his soft mattress to wait. When he stumbled in some hours later he cried out in wordless surprise at the sight of her. His breath was humid with wine as he undressed her and covered her mouth with his. She rose to his touch but had no patience for his gentleness tonight. When his body was ready, hers was not, but she thrust herself astride him and drove relentlessly against the cradle of his hips.

  Her pleasure did not come to her, but his did to him, and she waited scarcely till his thrusting had stilled before pulling away and making the same old weatherworn excuses. Arantha clung to her hand a moment longer, and then she was off and away into the hall with her name dying on his tongue. She paused only a moment in the stiff shadow of a garden pillar to deposit the formless mass collecting on her undergarments into the orb of Permanence. Then she let the night carry her homeward.

  Her creation watched, expressionless and still as ever, as she worked. Trembling hands assembled a fresh slide: a single ovum and its soft sleeping animalcule, a swiftly-painted sample of Arantha’s semen. The li
ghtscope bruised the bony sockets of her eyes as she observed, and in the twisting of her fingers she broke her pen. Rather than miss a moment of what unwound before her, she let the hungry folds of her robes blot up the black ink.

  The spermatozoa seemed to be aware of the ovum’s presence, and they oriented toward it as if the animalcules they contained could direct them by those tiny tight-shuttered eyes. She reconsidered her earlier hypothesis, that the spermatocyte’s animalcule was an evolutionary dead end. It must serve some purpose in navigating toward the ovum, even if not truly by sight, though what goal that might yet serve evaded her imagination. Whatever the cause, in their hordes the spermatozoa battered at the ovum’s cold hard moon of a surface. Anell marveled that the ovum’s animalcule could sleep through such a barrage.

  Then, at last, one spermatozoon pierced through into the ovum’s cytoplasm. Eternal After! Perhaps it was this moment that fully quickened the ovum’s animalcule, the brief rupture of the cell membrane. The change in equilibrium. Perhaps—Anell caught her breath.

  The ovum’s animalcule had opened its eyes.

  And now, yes, now it moved, too, short jerking strokes of arms and legs. Reaching, pulling; a sort of primitive swimming stroke. Anell muffled her cry of triumph with her clenched fists. At last the mysteries of Life unraveled before her eyes. Now she could mend those fraying strands, loop them around themselves to create a new kind of pattern: one that need never know the pain of an ending.

  A flicker of movement at the corner of the slide asserted itself into her attention. An odd development: the male animalcule, too, was on the move. The head of the spermatozoon had dissolved around it, so that it could swim freely in the cytoplasm. It oriented itself toward its counterpart and lurched toward it under the power of spasmodic kicks.

  What would happen when they reached one another? Perhaps they would merge into a single animalcule—lightning crawled up and down the length of Anell’s spine. But of course; if the animalcules integrated into one another, that might explain the mixing of parental traits observed in offspring and would neatly parallel the adsorption of the spermatozoon into the egg.

  Anell’s hands were shaking again. She pressed them into her ink-stained knees as the animalcules reached one another, and the ovum’s animalcule opened its mouth to tear a hunk of flesh away from the spermatozoon animalcule’s shoulder.

  Anell wasn’t squeamish, but she would have screamed if she’d had breath left in her body. The sight drove all the air out of the room, rewrote elegant biological hypotheses with cold cruel data. The spermatozoon animalcule clawed for its counterpart now, and rent a long tear in the ovum animalcule’s torso. But too late; now its gaping maw slashed through only cytoplasm. The ovum animalcule had maneuvered behind it. When the ovum animalcule bit down, it tore into translucent skull. The spermatozoon animalcule spasmed, then stilled, as the ovum animalcule consumed it: cranium first, then moving slowly downward through the soft flexible spinal cord, the diaphanous viscera. Anell gagged. She had desired this, she had initiated it. She would witness it through to its end.

  “Anell?”

  She shoved back from the lightscope. Arantha stood in her office doorway, one bare foot just breaching the sanctity of this space. “You shouldn’t be in here,” she said, but her gaze wavered: from him to the lightscope’s eyepiece.

  “Is this what’s been occupying you day in and day out? Anell, whatever my mother may demand of you, losing your life to only work is a sort of death in itself. Eternal After! Don’t make me argue theology, it makes me sound like my brother and no one wants that.” He edged forward, as one might walk toward a wild animal in a trap.

  Anell realized she was still holding the broken pieces of her pen and let them fall to the floor. Now Arantha moved in close, draped her shoulders with one solicitous arm. His body was warm against hers, wicking away the cold burn in her muscles. “Come away from here. Lie down and take your rest, and—what is that?”

  She looked. In its pillow-stuffed box on her desk, her creation lay silent and still as the faraway moon. Arantha drew away from it and pulled Anell with him. Her feet tangled and she nearly brought the two of them down together but for Arantha’s swift recovery.

  “Anell,” he said, his voice small now, “it looks just like you.”

  “I made it,” she said, and could offer no other explanation, nothing that could possibly satisfy the man who loved her not in spite of her choice to violate the Rite but because he had been spared an awareness of it. Nor could she satisfy herself, not with the afterbirth of her own understanding still pulsating fresh and too hot. Her creation would be immortal and lifeless without the violence of its conception to thrust it forward into sentience. Too late for this half-being to battle for its life against its counterpart. And if her laboratory were lost to the anger of House Liel, she might never see the creation of another. She wanted Arantha to love it, this awful lifeless thing, when she could not even stir her own heart to such an affection. “I made it.”

  Against her, Arantha went still. Then the hard lines of muscle softened into swift-flowing purpose. He urged her out the door and down the stairs to the little galley kitchen; he settled her in a chair and put the kettle on. On the kitchen table were the viridescent entrails of an unfinished bouquet. She picked up a pair of hand shears and a fistful of lavender.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Arantha said. He knelt before her, and put his hands on her knees. “Anell. Are you listening?”

  Anell looked down at him. She tried to imagine a reason he might ignore such a breach, a way their life might continue uninterrupted. No. More than that. A path around life’s cruel and inflexible rules. “You’re going to try to destroy it.”

  “I’m sure that Temat would entrust me to do so. I may never be head of House, but at least—” His fingers knotted into her wrinkled skirts. “I can take care of this, Anell.”

  All things ended in destruction, given enough time. If she could have, Anell would have chosen to keep them all: her work, her passion, her love, her House. But she could not have them all. Perhaps could not have any, but then, yes, perhaps this one thing. She made her choice and bent to press a parting kiss to his temple.

  “Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.” With that, he broke away.

  She turned the shears to trim the lavender to size as his footsteps fell too heavy on the stairs over her head. On its own lavender meant healing; in combination with olibanum it meant regret. She would have to get some olibanum before she could be finished.

  The kettle sings out, shocking in the sudden noise—the upstairs has fallen silent. Anell sets aside a last sprig of lavender and rises to remove the kettle from the flame. For a moment her hand lingers over the gas valve; then she closes it, and the blue flame smothers in its cradle.

  Her feet find the stairs. She lurches upward, knowing what she will see and dreading it all the same. The choice is made, the sacrifice paid. It is not her eyes that will drink down that cost but her heart.

  Her creation sits cross-legged on the office floor. Blood, drying dark and scarlet-fresh, paints her mouth and cheeks and she chews, chews, chews. Her once-sunken belly now strains against the gore-streaked doll’s chemise that covers it. By her side lies the pillow of her cradle, torn and shredded, and on the floor sleeps Arantha in endless Surrender. Not an easy Surrender, nor a gentle one. Not what he deserved at the end of his days, sung sweetly into that final rest by the ministrations and medicines of beautiful young temple attendants. His good eye is gone and his glass eye shattered; deep gouges mar the bare skull where it shines through ruined flesh. The skin of his left arm hangs in ribbons from the bare, marrow-sucked bone. A sob rises in Anell’s throat, but she strangles it when her creation shivers and turns toward her. One eye hazel-green, the other milky and dull. Arantha’s eyes.

  “It’s all right,” Anell says. She holds out her hand, and the creature studies it. When this overture provokes no further reaction, she draws nearer and kneels beside the crea
ture. She combs her fingers through the soft fine hair. The creature leans into the contact, presses hard against Anell’s palm. It would be very easy to grasp that head with both hands, to twist sharply. To unmake her work.

  Anell’s hand cups the creature’s cheek. No, no, this is not right. She will have to stop calling her “creature” or “creation” and give her a proper name. “It’s all right,” she says again, and she is already composing abstracts, penning imaginary proposals, to build from scratch a world where it will be.

  © Copyright 2019 Aimee Ogden