Chapter 15 #3
“That sounds very shortsighted of them,” says Smita, semi-cautiously. But she does move a step closer, and it’s hard not to see that as a good sign.
“Oh, it is. Some of the most talented alchemists the world has ever known have been women, and shutting them out just keeps America behind the curve.”
“You make it sound like there’s some sort of weird alchemical arms race going on,” says Smita, laughing lightly to show how absurd she finds the very notion.
Lilianne nods. “That’s exactly what’s happening, actually. There are Alchemical Congresses all over the world, and they’re all trying to be the first ones to unlock certain essential functions of the universe. There was an outpost here in Berkeley until very recently.”
“Really? In Berkeley?”
“Yes. They built a permanent lab and everything.” Lilianne looks at her pendulum.
“They sealed it off due to staffing issues, and I’m trying to find it, in case they left anything useful behind.
The Congress has access to all sorts of things that a self-taught alchemist isn’t going to be able to acquire. I’d like to see what I can learn.”
And then Smita’s hand is on her arm, Smita is touching her, fingers resting lightly on the curve of her elbow. Her skin is warm, and Lilianne never wants her to take her hand away, not now, not ever. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to know?”
It’s a simple question. It’s an impossible answer.
Smita just learned that alchemy exists, may not even believe in it—not when it’s just a swaying rock and a strange midnight story.
Explaining incarnations and the transformative potential of a place like Berkeley may be several steps too far, taking her fragile acceptance out of the realm of fact and sending her spiraling down into disbelief.
“I’ve always been interested in what it takes to transform one thing into another,” says Lilianne carefully.
“I like to understand what the universe is made of, because you can’t really change what you can’t comprehend.
People should be able to control their destinies.
We should get to choose what we’re going to be, even if other people don’t agree with us.
It’s your body and your life; why shouldn’t you be the one making all the decisions? ”
“How does that explain the quest for knowledge?”
“Like I said, I like to understand,” says Lilianne. “If I don’t know what all the options are, how am I supposed to decide which one I want? Haven’t you ever wished that something about your life could be different?”
Smita chuckles, bleakly. “You have no idea.”
There’s a story in that answer, heavy and strange and simultaneously unconnected and perfectly in harmony with the rest of their conversation.
Lilianne looks at it and decides that she doesn’t have the time to pull that reply apart and study what it’s made of: she needs to move along before the hour gets too late and it’s no longer safe for her to follow the unceasing pull of her pendulum.
“Anyway, you asked what I was trying to find. I’m looking for the lab.”
“Why would you want to find that?”
“Why would I want to find the permanent lab the alchemists built here in Berkeley before they abandoned it? Because it’s still out there somewhere, sealed off and waiting for an enterprising young alchemist to find it and claim it as her own.
Who knows what they left behind when they fled?
I could find all sorts of things that will help me with my research, and some of them probably shouldn’t just be left lying around for people to stumble over. ”
“So they’d be safer with you. These terrible secrets.”
“Well, yes. I know I’m trustworthy.” Lilianne pauses, realizing how that sounds. “… and I guess that’s exactly what someone who shouldn’t be trusted with impossible secrets would say, huh?”
“Probably,” says Smita. She smiles, lips closed so that the expression pushes her cheeks upward, forming a dimple that Lilianne can’t help but think of kissing.
It’s right there, so close and so perfect.
“I guess that just means I’ll need to go with you and see this ‘lab,’ in case there’s something dangerous in there. It’s not safe for you to go alone.”
“If you want,” says Lilianne, forcing her voice to stay light. She starts walking again, and wonder of wonders, Smita walks alongside her! Smita is actually coming as she looks for the lab! Her skin feels too tight and her heart is beating too fast, and she doesn’t know what to do with any of this.
“So…” she says, rather than focusing on her own feelings of radiant distress. “You’re from Seattle, right? Doesn’t it rain there all the time?”
“That’s just what we tell the tourists, so they don’t get funny ideas about moving there,” says Smita.
“I always expected I’d graduate and go back, get a job at one of the big biotech firms. I miss the mountains so much it aches some mornings.
They have mountains here in California, but it’s not the same.
Just like both places have evergreens, but we have fir and hemlock and pine, not redwoods. It’s hard to be transplanted.”
“So why stay?”
“A lot of reasons, really. You met Erin earlier—she’s my roommate.
We’ve been living together since just after college, and she hates rain.
I can’t leave her, and she has absolutely no desire to live in Seattle, no matter how much I reassure her that we exaggerate the amount of rain for comedic effect.
My work is here. I really thought I’d be able to bounce from firm to firm and keep studying the same cell lines and genetic markers, but private scientific research turns out to be a twisty little maze of NDAs, all of them almost exactly alike.
I’d have to start over from the beginning.
” She sighs heavily. “Maybe someday. A girl can dream, right?”
“Right,” agrees Lilianne, as she feels the foundations of the sandcastle future she’s been dreaming of with Smita start to crumble and fall away.
She knew it wasn’t going to happen from the start—beautiful, polished, presumably straight scientists don’t date unfashionable, unkempt trans historians from Alabama—but after running into the other woman twice in one day, it had been starting to feel a little bit like fate.
She’s a big believer in fate. Hard not to be, when your mother is literally the incarnate fall and your father is the incarnate spring and they keep building a big semi-Euclidian labyrinth behind the house to test the new monarchs of the Summer and Winter.
Fate might as well be a regular dinner guest from the way she understands the world.
“And what does Erin do?” she asks, and is proud of herself for how light her voice manages to sound.
“She’s a chaplain at one of the big hospitals in San Francisco.
I know that sounds ridiculous when you’ve just met her, but she has a theology degree, and a lot of experience dealing with stressed-out people who have big personalities and no real interest in eating, sleeping, or taking their vitamins.
She does a lot of good. Not as much as she maybe feels like she should, but a lot all the same. ”
“Theology and biotech are pretty separate disciplines. Did you meet through school, or just while you were both enrolled?”
“Actually, yes,” says Smita, with a little laugh that feels like an electrical jolt running the length of Lilianne’s spine.
“One of my other roommates, Dodger, was living with her off-campus. Her, and a woman named Candace who died in the earthquake. Dodger and I were much closer to being peers than Erin and I ever could have been, and we became friends, inasmuch as Dodger ever really did friends back then. Erin sort of came along as a package deal. Then, after everything, Dodger needed someone to come and help her with the rent, and Erin just showed up one day, put her stuff down, and said she lived with us now.”
The story feels rehearsed and incomplete at the same time, like Smita’s leaving out pieces she doesn’t think need to be shared.
Lilianne gives her a sidelong look. The names of Reed’s successful embodiment have never been published outside the Congress, but she knows they were in Berkeley, and she knows that the female member of the pair had some ridiculous literary reference of a name to allow her to rhyme with her counterpart …
but that would be too much of a coincidence.
She can’t have met the most beautiful woman in Berkeley, only for that woman to be living with Reed’s cuckoos. That would be impossible.
“How many people do you live with?” she asks.
“There’s six of us in the house, all told, but we have plenty of space for everyone to have their own room, which is honestly the only way I could live with those weirdos,” says Smita.
“If I had to share a room with one of them, I’d be on the first commuter flight back to Seattle, and just leave my stuff behind. Stuff isn’t worth that.”
No way she’s living with the Doctrine. No matter how big the house is, Reed’s greatest creation would never be lowered to sharing with that many people.
Lilianne glances down at her pendulum. It’s still swinging and pulling, but less vigorously now; they’re almost on top of whatever it is they’re looking for. She looks up again, scanning the nearby streets, and doesn’t see anything.
“We should be almost there…” she says, giving the area around them another look.
“Over here,” says Smita. Lilianne turns, and the other woman is standing next to a storm drain, the grate rich with rust and trapped leaf litter, slowly becoming mulch as the autumn weather wears it down.
Even in California, there is rain, and it falls on Berkeley as often as it does anywhere else. The sewer below is probably disgusting.
“What about the drain?” Lilianne trots over to join Smita, looking down into the darkness through the slats of the grate. Her pendulum stops swaying and points, straight as an arrow, down into the dark.