"Deal," he said. The waiter set the beer before him. He drank half the glass and sighed and said that that was so good. "You wouldn't believe how long it took me to learn to eat, to sit and stand upright, and to walk, to see. I had to learn how to see all over again. My brain didn't come equipped with any knowledge. We don't know how the Bravennans equipped minds with knowledge. My brain is just a made-up thing, made from cells taken from Kapetria's hands. She figured it out, if she never severed the hand, but took the biopsies from it while it was still connected to her, then no new life would be created that would have to be killed. And she built my brain from the cells in her hands, and some from the cells in Derek's hands, too." He shrugged. "I could explain it to you, but it would take years. Anyway, I had to learn how to see, to walk, to talk!"
"It's only been four months," I said. But I was shocked by the implications of what he was telling me, shocked by the genius of Kapetria and the living proof of that genius in him.
"Seems like forever." He sat back in the little woven tub chair and gazed up at the awning. His wavy red hair fell down in his eyes but he didn't seem to care. Dark eyebrows, precise eyebrows, and lashes. She had constructed all of this.
Horrible possibilities occurred to me as they had before--of beings grown or manufactured and gaining ascendency on an unsuspecting planet if Kapetria and her tribe could do this. And what of the dead, the earthbound dead who might come back through such marvelous bodies? What could they do for Magnus, and for Memnoch?
"What are you going to do?" I asked. "Have you any great plan?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. He picked up another small jelly pastry and swallowed it, and then broke off a bit of the lemon tart. "I have no idea," he said. "There's so much I have to learn. I thought I knew everything, that inside you, I'd grasped the entire tenor of the age!" He laughed at himself and shook his head. "So stupid, so blind. Every day now I'm shocked by some new discovery. I read of the things human beings have done to one another in war. I read of carnage on the planet now. I'm paralyzed by much of what I read, what I see in television news, in films. Yet I must continue to study, that before anything, study and travel. And I want to figure where Atalantaya was, where she sank. I need to know that, I need to know where my city died. I need to know where everything I'd created and envisioned and planned for this mighty world died!"
"I don't blame you. You must know infinitely more than the legends."
"No, I don't," he said. "In those long-ago days, I was too preoccupied with the projects right before me to pay that much attention to the whole scheme of the planet. I thought I knew its geography, but what I knew was distorted, limited, primitive. Anyway, now I must go everywhere. I must roam jungles, deserts, mountain ranges. I must see the ice melting rapidly at the poles, see that for myself, the ice melting and breaking off and falling into the rising seas. And I have this dream that maybe one of my little satellite cities sank somewhere with the dome intact." He paused, looking around him, and then back at me. "And then there is the work in our laboratories."
"Can you fully duplicate the luracastria of the old days?" I asked.
"Oh, of course, Kapetria had to complete that before she could put me into a working body," he said. "But luracastria begets other materials. That has always been the power of luracastria, it's like a virus, mutating other chemicals in wholly unforeseen ways. I'm working on it constantly in here." He tapped his right temple. "This ghost brain is organizing this biological brain and I'm recovering old knowledge and acquiring new knowledge all the time! But tell me, what is Fareed doing? What has he discovered? What is Seth up to? I want to know them. I must know them. And Louis, I must come to know Louis. Louis is over there watching us. Louis is making you happy? Before we were separated, I knew Louis through you and--."
He broke off.
He wanted to say something, but he couldn't. "I lost all of you," he whispered, "and I grieve for that loss." The tears rose again.
"Yes," I said. "I know that. And I lost you." I fought my own tears. "You brought me together with Louis, you did that, and you gave Louis back to me. I have Louis now because of you."
Ah, this was agony, and yet I treasured every second of it.
He reached inside his seersucker jacket and took out a white card and a pen. The pen was a very-fine-point gel-ink pen, and in a scrawling spidery hand he wrote numbers for me. This was for his phone. He gave the card to me and I put it in my pocket.
"Now give me your phone," I said, "and I'll tap in my numbers for you after I tap in yours."
"Oh, right, of course," he said. He blushed. He should have known it was that simple, and he was suddenly ashamed. But I fully understand such gaps, such random and sudden inabilities to grasp the simple or the sublime in the midst of the flow of so much powerful knowledge. He watched me manage these small tasks. "You're as beautiful to me now as you were in the mirror," he said. "You're as beautiful to me as you were the first night at Trinity Gate when I saw you in the mirror through your eyes."
He was startled. He looked around anxiously. I hadn't heard anything or seen anything. "Just watching for them," he said. "They're going to be coming for me because I won't call for them to come. Ah. I knew it. I always experience this frisson...that's one of your words...this frisson when I'm being watched. There they are now. I love you. I'll see you again. Vow to me, we'll meet again here as soon as we can."
I held his hand. I wouldn't let him go.
I had no idea of the names of the four women who came towards us, except that they were clones of Kapetria, or of Kapetria's clones. They were magnificent with the same d
eep shade of bronze to their skin and the same large black eyes with flecks of gold in them, and lots of gold in their long hair. They wore rouge on their lips and they had on sundresses of light cotton with only straps over their beautifully molded shoulders, and bright gold bracelets on their naked arms.
"Good evening, Prince."
"Good evening, ladies." I pushed the chair back and rose to my feet. "Can't you give us just a few minutes longer?"
"Amel gets overexcited, Prince," said the one who had spoken, while the other ones nodded. "Tell you what...we're double-parked. We'll go around a couple of blocks and come back. With this traffic, it will take us a little while. But only if you promise you'll both be right here when we return."
"Promise, cross my heart, hope to die!" said Amel. His face was wet with tears. "If you take me right now, I'll never forgive you."
Off they went, piling back into their large black Land Rover and steering the car into the sluggish stream that was moving on the boulevard.
He shuddered, and tried to swallow his tears. "I love them," he said. "They are my people now, and I am of them. But I--. I can't endure their relentless control."
"There's so much I want to ask you," I said. "So much I want to know. They won't prevent us from knowing and loving one another."
He appeared doubtful, sad. A dark fear gripped me.
"Know this," he said taking my hands in his hands. "I will love you forever! Were it not for you, I would never have survived."