Randal Shayne: To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

[Randal Shayne]

She tells me to write after my nightmares. 

The paper on my bedside crinkles with “it’ll wake you up!”s and “don’t want to disturb you”s of conversations long ago. I’m delicate, so careful, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. I’m clumsy around parchment. It doesn’t feel right. But she sleeps right on, covered and husking a steady, reedy breath. 

I dip the quill in the ink, and hold it there out of learned habit. It’s clenched in my hand like a knife in a fight, or a flux coupler under a relay-

The horizon looms, shaking and sundering the shuttle. A woman is shouting- no! Not shouting. Loudly speaking. Like she’s been trained for just this moment, and it is barreling at her anyway. 

“Adjust thrust vector 2-1 degrees!” She doesn’t look around, only ahead, and a hand- it doesn’t matter whose- dances on the illuminated bank of smooth, blinking machinery. It’s broken, liquid fire burbling from severed, slashed innards. She isn’t screaming, this woman with a red collar, but something is- the shuttle? Rising in pitch, urgency, volume, and the earth rises to meet them, and they have to slow down but who will be there to-?

I’m out of bed in a flash, the covers behind me. The floor creaks as I march to the window. They don’t wear clothes to bed here. The moonlight flaunts me as its own. 

The suns are still hours away. Twin suns are not uncommon, and yet they never feel like home. 

The city is asleep. A mayit grunts, a deep voice sings low and slow, serenading the sleeping buildings haphazardly splayed out across a battered, loping landscape. At the center is a stone fortress, where the king brays. Beyond the farthest house is a wooden wall, manned by sleepy, wilting guards. So long as I’ve been a part of it, Ayelya has never been attacked, and yet the tautness in the air ripens the trees and the animals and the people. Everything has the stink of new tidings, of one final straw being brought in on a purple pillow to break the back that has endured so much for so long. Or is that just me? 

I wish it was just me. 

If it was, perhaps I wouldn’t be here-

Space starkly stares into the bright room, and the people gathered about the wooden table are looking attentively forward. 

“This is a pre-warp civilization”, someone says. “Currently feudal, class F3 on the Richter Scale of Cultures. Evidence of growing destabilization compels a careful survey by a small away team, possibly…”

He’s speaking, but it’s harder to hear, harder to make out words and then meanings and then even the memory itself god please just let me remember-

“You were dreaming again”.

Her voice is pleasant and sweet, and it pains me to shut my eyes. My mate… not wife, mate… is beautiful, by any measure, but how much pain would I cause in showing her yet more tears? She caresses my scars and permanent welts, tenderness taking the place of the care she’d rendered to me when she’d first found me, alien and battered and broken on the side of a distant hill. WIthout her, I could not have survived. Without her, I wouldn’t have had to. 

“It’s nothing”, I stave. “Needed to pee”. 

“Fifteen years, and I still do not understand the etymology of that phrase”, she says, and I can hear her smile. What a wonderful caretaker she is. What a terrible partner I am. 

“I have to see it again”. 

My words slice the mood, and the night is suddenly an audience to another impromptu discussion. 

“Teyebek, you’re doing so well! How long has it been since your last visit? How long might it yet be?” 

I turn to her, the tears no longer hidden. They shine, make it impossible to ignore the starlight bouncing from them. “Long. A long time. And it may be a long time afterwards. But I need to see it”. 

She swivels away, and she’s wrestling a demon as only the graceful can; quietly, without a hint to the unaware of the battle inside. “I see the contest may never end”. 

I move to her, determined. I must do no harm. “You mean the world to me”. 

“I mean this world to you”, she says, spinning my way, certainty and clarity infinitely more terrifying than her brash, loud screeds. “But there is another world, according to you. A world you belong to more than mine, than ours, and you would return to that world with a snap of your digits if it were possible. I love you, Teyebek, and I would share any world with you, but this is the one we are on”. 

She doesn’t understand. I can’t blame her. I can leave in a huff, visit the hill on my own, strangle her to death with enough time. But I can’t blame her. I don’t want to. I walk in her shoes, and leave with blisters every time. 

“Come with me”. 

Some had affairs. Others indulged in Woodwine, or Xcursion, or any number of substances. Our little household? I made my pilgrimages to the hill outside town, and she stayed behind and tried to ignore my absence. The routine was long established. 

I see her fight, look down, take stock. 

“Alright. But we do so as soon as first light is up. You know how things will be tomorrow.” 

I smile at her, and hold her hand, and guide her back to bed. She’s stiff, but pliable to my affections. I kiss her, and cover us both. 

The city is already thrumming by the time we make it out of the apartment. Merchants hock their wares, children rattle about in the cobbled streets, but the signs plastered to every scarecrow and electric pole scream a different kind of message. 

 

TAKE BACK OUR LANDS! PROTEST, THIRD DAY OF EGLEDOR!

 

I wonder why they haven’t been packed away by guards or agents of the king; the small size of our enclave has not stopped him from taking such steps before. The venders greet my wife, and poignantly eye me. 

“Morning, Thela”. 

“Beautiful day, Marson”. 

Marson cleans a glass at his stand, and pokes me with an accusing gaze. 

“We shall see”. 

I quicken my pace. 

The border post to the outside is not hard to convince, and opens the gate for us. He knows as well as anyone what’s about to occur, and the fewer people inside the gates at the appointed hour, the better. 

The safer. 

The winding path is dusty and stony, and the trek is hot and humid. Two suns broil our backs as we proceed, the small container with provisions over my shoulder our only comforts. I’ve made this trip often, but less in recent years. It’s a friend, where it had started as an enemy to my survival. 

Or so I remember. 

“How much further?” Thela asks, her voice ragged, and my heart breaks for her energetic spirit. But I can’t help but smile as I point across a small ravine. “There”. 

She stares, baffled- nothing but an endless stretch of lumped hills attracts her gaze- but I know my way forward. I sprint down the ravine, desperately afraid of twisting an ankle but even that won’t stop me. Eventually I push my way up the other side, slipping on moist grass. The crest is in sight. I summon a final push of speed, and reach the summit of Ozymandius. 

The plush vegetation has made it that much more difficult to extract, but the sharp, scuffed red that flashes out of the corner of my eye won’t be denied. I grin manically, shouting a yip and begin to dig. Mud slides under my nails and sweat bolts down my face, but I don’t stop. It’s real. It’s real. It’s always real. Finally, it is revealed, and I kneel back and let my heart explode. 

Before me sits a twisted piece of metal, about a meter wide. Its side has been fused and mangled by a rock, turning it into a single superstructure, ancient and advanced. On the metal, a stripe of burgundy I’ve yet to find a means of replicating anywhere on this world underlines a grouping of symbols. 

.S Theseus

CC- 55939

Thela has almost arrived. I wish I hadn’t asked her to come. She stands beside me. 

“What are we lo-?”

She stops, gasps quietly, kneels. Every instant of silence is vindication. There are many, many instants. 

At last, she says, “What could have made that on Syrydon?” 

I look at her, wonder filling my vision. “What indeed?” 

And then I begin to weep. 

She takes me onto her shoulder, and holds me, and caresses a beard I don’t belong with, and wipes tears I needn’t have ever shed, and cradles a body wracked with pain I can’t ignore or find cause for. She whispers in ears that have heard power unimaginable thrum me to sleep, and squeezes a breast that swelled with each moment I wore the uniform-

In front of a mirror, the uniform looks imposing. It itches, the gray wool twill a constant companion, and the shimmering golden circle on his collar a far heavier, far realer demand, but the harder it pressed from above the better it felt to stand up to it, to meet it, to see a universe worth saving, worth loving- 

“Have to get back!” 

I shout and stumble back, and put my raw, red hands to work on digging all the harder. Mud becomes stone, stone becomes clay, but still I dig, and still I dig. 

“Teyebek, please! There’s nothing-” 

“My name is not Teyebek!” I shout, pleading. “Call me anything but that, please!” 

I’m a foot into the ground now, I can’t stop. 

“There’s nothing there! You’ve looked, sweetheart, don’t you remember?” 

“Planets are consistently subject to tectonic stresses and landmass sublimation- it’s entirely possible that something buried before has made its way to the surface!” I pause, squinting. What was that about? And yet it seemed reasonable, and I couldn’t stop, and there had to be-

“They left you here!” 

I stop, exhaustion gnawing at my rippled sides. 

“They left you here and let you suffer alone! Away from this home of yours. Left you with savages, these… these gods of yours! Left you to stick it out with us mere mortals! And if they hadn’t”, Thela’s eyes clench shut. “If they haven’t I never would have met you!” 

I stand, and grip her shoulders. In the distance, the first fires in the city have started to burn. 

“Yes! They did. And they had good reason. I don’t know what it was, but it was for a good reason. And I must honor them”. 

“What must I do to get my mate back?” said Thela almost silently. 

I round on her, the truth blooming from my soul like a forbidden rose in a mortuary. “The first of our laws, Thela! The first laws of these… people. I don’t know their names or faces or why I was among them, but I know their directive, their guiding light. I mustn't interfere with a planet that is not my own. I mustn’t use my knowledge to bring about change.” 

I stand. More fires have been ignited, all in the center of town. 

“Look what I could have done for you! Helped you find water, or treat the sick, or anything. I do what I can, what I must! But I mustn't interfere, and to be the husba- dammit, the mate you want, I have to interfere!” 

“Then do it!” Thela’s scream was visceral. “Do it and help us as only you can!” 

“But you are not my people”, I respond, whispering with grief. 

And to this, Thela does something I hope I’ll never forget. She takes my hand, red not just with effort, but with blood, and places it on the chest of her low slung climbing shirt. Beneath my palm I feel stinging pain and blood slick from one surface to another. One skin to another. 

And then she drags my palm down, down, further, all along her body. It might have been arousing if not for the sincerity. Down, down, past her sternum, and settling, finally, upon a toned, slightly iridescent stomach. 

“You are now”, she never has to say. 

I was hers. Theirs. Whatever they were, whatever they did, or deserved, or became, I was theirs. How best to love two people? 

A bearded face looked down, the question opening another memory. The man’s eyes were kind and black and vacant save for the gentle curiosity they showed. 

“By doing them both justice”, said the man, and I look over, and he’s standing there, on another hill, waving gently, proudly, four metal circles blazing in the afternoon suns. 

I’m theirs. 

I look at the city. The fires have spread. The protest chants ring loudly, even from afar. By darkness, chaos will erupt. I can see it. Smell it. It will be a nightmare. 

But it is a nightmare, I decide, that I must do something about. 

Thela grabs my hand, and I hers. 

We both start to run back towards the city. The smoke of revolution spirals into the dusk. 

If I am worth anything, if I am a man I would wish to be, my child will read my writings, and will live in a world where they are consigned only to parchment, written late at night at the side of the bed, in a world safer than the way I found it. My lungs itch and burn, but I understand now. Truth or delusion no longer matters. What matters is what I make of it. 

I look up at the stars, and see one arc across the sky, begging for a wish. I don’t offer it one. My fate cannot be left in the stars, or to the stars. 

It is time to honor both. 

It is time to awaken.