41. Khiann
KHIANN
Khiann awoke to a cold room and an empty chair, and for a moment he panicked.
Where was she?
Then he remembered. She was having a morning meal with her family in her son's house. The daughter who had traveled across the world to see her was there.
He was proud he had told her to go, and glad she had listened. He needed her, but his need should not swallow her whole. She had a family who needed her, and she needed them. He had seen the love and devotion in her children's eyes.
It was beautiful.
Besides, he was no longer alone without her. He was not isolated. All he had to do to understand what the medical staff was saying was to touch the translating device in his ear, but he did not.
He needed to think, because something was bothering him, a realization that had been niggling at him since Kian's visit, but his mind was still not clear enough to grasp it. He let it wander.
The images were there, waiting just under the surface, so he did not have to reach far. He only had to be still and wait.
They rose.
The wedding came first, because it was the best of them. A square full of light. A bride so bright that looking at her hurt, her hair like a banked fire, her face turned up. And the groom beside her, tall in fine clothes, luckier than any man had a right to be.
This wedding had happened.
Somewhere behind the fog lay a life, and this was a piece of it surfacing. One day there would be enough pieces to make it whole.
His mind drifted to what Annani's son had told him about towers, mines, and ships.
He thought about Kian sitting in the chair next to his mother, as he was now, a male over two thousand years old, and then the picture shifted to Kian as a boy.
Then it shifted again to a woman with golden hair and a soft, knowing smile.
A little girl with her father's fierce eyes, or perhaps it was her grandmother's, because Annani had been a fierce little thing, quick to laugh and stubborn, always getting her way.
He welcomed the memories. It felt like healing, but something about the pieces was not right. They did not match.
He could not have remembered Kian as a young boy because Kian had been born thousands of years after the earth had swallowed him and he entered the long sleep. He also could not remember Kian's wife or daughter because he had never met them.
Where had those pictures come from? They were not memories. They could not be.
So, where had the picture of the young Kian come from?
He retreated into the wedding, his happy place. But for the first time, he did not look at the bride or the lucky groom, but at himself, at where he was standing.
He was in the crowd.
He was at the edge of the square, among the guests, looking at the two figures in the light. He saw the groom's back and the turn of the bride's face, the whole bright picture only as someone across the square could see it.
But he was the groom.
He was the tall man in fine clothes.
That had been his wedding.
But then why had he been watching his own wedding from among the guests?
Then the answer hit him. He was watching the wedding from the sidelines because it was not a memory. It could not be. His sleeping mind had constructed the scene not from memory but from a story. He was seeing it as it had been described to him, not as something he had lived through.
Once the discrepancy became obvious in this scene, he saw it in all of them.
The lands with the strange trees. The long roads. The children, one after another, their births, their small faces. A woman living through epochs and waiting.
He remembered some of it in detail, and some in fuzzy, incomplete pictures, but he had not lived through any of it.
The children had been born while he was in the long sleep. The epochs had passed while he was in stasis. Every treasured memory he had hoarded against the day he would be whole again was something that had happened while he was asleep.
The one thing he had believed was his own, the inner landscape of his mind, the only ground he thought he owned, was borrowed. Those were Annani's memories he had been dreaming, the stories she had told him while he slept.
Something in him wilted.
He had thought he had made peace with how little of himself was left, had told himself he could rebuild from the pieces, and that those pieces were his.
Now he understood there were no pieces. It was all Annani, who had been pouring her life into him while he slept, so he would not be empty when he woke, and he had mistaken her gift for his own returning past.
He was worse than empty. He was a room she had furnished.
But the room was not cold. It was full of warmth, full of her, and the truth was that he could live in that room she had created for him and be happy.
She was the room, the warmth, and the world was in its right order because she was in it. He had felt it from the very first awakening. It was the feeling that he was part of her and she was part of him, and all the rest was much less important than that.
Had she given him this too? Had she told him to feel it?
No.
A story could set a picture in a mind, but no story, no matter how often it was told into the dark, could put this feeling in his chest. It had come from nowhere she could reach.
It had grown in him on its own, or rather, it had always been there, a dormant seed waiting in the dark for her light to shine on it so it could start growing.
He had to tell her.
That was suddenly urgent and far more important than the grief over losing something he had thought was his. He did not want to lose this realization to sleep the way he had lost so many things before, and he could already feel it fading at the edges. He did not have long.
He began to gather the words, but there were so few, and when the double doors opened and she came in and crossed to his bed, he still did not have what he needed to tell her what he had found.
"Good morning, my love." She leaned over him and kissed his forehead, as she did every day. "I am sorry I was gone so long."
She lowered herself into the chair and took his hand.
"Everyone is sending their love and asking when they can see you.
They are jealous of Kian, and they all want to talk to you now that you have the earpieces and can understand them.
I told Allegra she would be visiting her grandpa later today.
I hope you do not mind that I made you her grandpa, but it was the easiest way to explain who you are to a little girl who is not even two years old. "
He looked at her, and the whole enormous thing rose in him, pressing against the small door of his throat.
"Annani," he said when she finished one part of her story and before she could begin the next.
Her name came out whole. It was the one word he could always find.
"Yes?" she said, smiling. "What is it?"
"He-am," he said.
Yes. Yes, and then everything after it, the wedding and the crowd and the stories and the warmth that was not a story, all of it crowded behind the word, and none of it would come out.
He strained. He worked his mouth around sounds that fell apart before they were anything. He lifted his other hand to reach for her, but then let it fall back down.
Her smile faltered.
"What is it?" She leaned closer, and her hand tightened on his. "What is wrong?"
He tried again. A sound tore out of him, urgent and incoherent, and he heard how it must sound to her, this straining, this distress.
"Oh, my love." Her voice dropped. "You are safe. You are here with me, and you are safe. Whatever it is you are trying to tell me can wait."
That was not it. That was not it at all. He pushed harder, and the effort went through him, taking what little strength he had left.
"Rest now," she murmured. "I have you."
His eyelids went down. He dragged them up. They came down again, heavier, and this time he could not find the strength to lift them.
He felt the realization he had reasoned out dissolving, the argument loosening thread by thread before he could reach its bottom. In a moment or two, he would not remember why it had mattered so much.
He did not fight for it.
Because the truth was that it did not matter. The reasoning was only the road he had taken to reach the light, and the light was her.