Free States

18. MON BON VIEUX MARI

‘WE WERE CALLED the daughters of the Garden, the daughters of the Just,’ she told him. ‘We reproduced ourselves by the occasional effort of will. We understood the principles of self-similarity. I suppose you would call it an instinct. There is no particular miracle in being, as we were, part flora, part mammal. Such syntheses are common to the worlds I usually inhabit. Paul Minct made me cross so many scales and forget so many lives to reach him. The stories are always a little different. But this time, I think, we shall achieve some kind of resolution.’

‘Surely, we are something more than mere echoes... ?’ Yet even as he said this Sam Oakenhurst felt oppression lifting from him and a rare peace replacing it. In combination with what the machinoix had given him, he found still more strength. He had reached a kind of equilibrium. At that moment nothing was puzzling. But was this merely an illusion of control? What she had told him should have dismayed him. Had her madness completely absorbed him?

‘Our science was the science of equity,’ she continued. ‘We were the natural enemies of all tyrannies, no matter how well disguised. Our world occupied a universe of flowers; blossoms and leaves were woven between blooms the size of planets. Paul Minct allied himself with a devolved race whom we knew as Babbyboys and these he ultimately unleashed upon our world. Just before he committed that crime he was lover and I taught him all our secrets.’

‘And your sisters?’

‘Our whole universe was raped. I am the last of it.’

Until then Sam Oakenhurst had been unable to imagine a burden greater than his own.