Chapter 21 Hazel
Hazel
STATION C, DATE UNKNOWN
Hazel blinks and the cradle’s reflections of her blink back. For a moment, she can’t tell whether she’s looking at herself or Echo. Her ears hint that she was making a noise right before waking but now she’s quiet, gasping.
Just one more day. You must stay where you are as long as possible. Was she really so cruel? Echo’s reply, plaintive enough to break her awake: Do you think we’ll go back to our time simultaneously? I wouldn’t want to be here without you.
Accidentally falling asleep in the Aperture hasn’t done her confusion any favours. She needs air. She kicks the hatch open and tumbles from the Aperture onto the grass where she lies, twisted in her blanket, drawing a boundary between sleep and waking.
Hazel’s had dreams that feel real while she’s in them before.
She’s lived days or even lives in dreams, and been surprised on waking that the experiences were only phantasms. Yet, nightmare or wish, they were not unreal either.
Their presence followed her into the corporeal world, casting a disquieting veil over the mundane: the click of a kettle became the tap of death’s scythe; a bird settling on the balcony became the flayed hands of fate; a broken plate foretold a more terrible shattering.
The dreamscape isn’t the same. It’s been haunting, with its quantum state of real-but-not-real, now-and-then-and-after, never-and-definite-and-maybe …
But Echo’s sickness is different. It doesn’t just veil the waking world with silken anxieties; it shrouds it with leaden fears.
Beyond the greenhouse roof, dawn paints the clouds and Hazel pulls her blanket tighter for comfort.
Robin pokes its lenses out of its own cradle, making the diver’s ‘OK’ symbol.
Hazel returns it. ‘Yeah, it’s alright. I’m alright.’
‘The Tiny you call Robin is reporting an elevated heart rate and a spike in adrenaline.’ Sitting in one of the Keepers’ deckchairs, CHARL1E closes the novel he’s been reading and raises an eyebrow.
He shuts the book twice, likely in order to re-experience the coarseness of paper under his fingers, which he’s confided he finds pleasing.
‘This indicates that you are, in fact, not alright.’
Hazel sits up, hugging her knees. ‘Echo’s sick.’
‘She has been in upsetting states before. I recall the tyrant of Athens once cut her face.’
‘This is different. She’s got an infection. In our time it wouldn’t matter so much, she’d be getting pumped full of antibiotics, but in Athens they’ve got none of that.’
‘You are concerned she will die?’ Hazel’s still weirded out by CHARL1E having a body, not least because it feels wrong for such a soft figure to come out with such blunt facts.
‘If we don’t help her get home, I’m almost certain she will.’
‘I would suggest that—’
‘I know. It’s not safe to send her home yet. We don’t know whether the Deed succeeded.’ Hazel accepts Robin’s help getting up, and sets her face. ‘We’ve got to get you reattached to the chronodes, then we can help Echo.’
CHARL1E stands too, unfolding to almost seven feet in height.
He’s adopted an old set of ill-fitting dungarees but refuses to wear a shirt underneath, and his speckled, froglike skin gleams in the Aperture’s glow.
‘So far we have been trying for thirteen hours and twenty-three minutes, with little success.’
‘Yes, but I was asleep for at least seven of those hours, and before that talking to the Backward Traveller As Was for another two. I managed to make her write down the instructions for building the catopthura this time, but she still thinks she’s going bonkers, so I doubt she’ll do anything with them.
’ Hazel draws a breath, aware she’s got verbal diarrhoea from panic.
‘But for now that’ll have to take a back seat.
Keeping Echo safe needs to take priority, and if I only focus on your body and the chronodes, we’ll get more done. ’
CHARL1E puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Even so, reconnecting the chronodes may take months.’
Hazel shakes her head. ‘It could but it won’t. Between the glitch that might wipe my past out any second and Echo’s life being in danger, we have to find a way now. Trying is imperative, right?’
‘Indeed.’ CHARL1E smiles, showing a full row of gold teeth.
They’re there for show—CHARL1E’s body doesn’t eat, just recharges in the Experimentation Dome—but the flash of metal always makes Hazel slightly uneasy.
Lilith could have chosen a more visually appropriate material, but she was limited by what was around Station C for upcycling.
Downstairs in the Keepers’ bathroom, amongst dozens of dusty used toothbrushes, Hazel reties her hair and cleans her teeth.
She splashes her face with cold water, but that’s as far as her ablutions go.
Personal hygiene’s gone by the wayside lately, given that CHARL1E and the Tinys don’t care what she looks like.
She rubs a rough towel over her face and inspects her reflection, but it doesn’t really tell her what she looks like.
Without anyone else to say, ‘you look nice/rough/thin/tired,’ she’s lost all sense of her outward manifestation; her body’s just a tool with which to make things happen.
The only truly important bit is remembering to put her headphones on, and she wraps her arms around herself as Uhrhaus drops the day’s first beat.
When Hazel emerges from the bathroom, CHARL1E’s sitting on Lilith’s old bed, pawing through her belongings. He squints at the one of the family photographs. ‘Lilith was different in life to in this photograph. I thought I might feel closer to her when I downloaded into the body she built me.’
‘And do you?’
He hums thoughtfully and puts the photograph back. ‘In some ways. I feel her love, in my joints when I move, and my voice when I speak, but these are only her gifts to me, they are not her. She herself feels further away.’
‘I can really empathise with that.’ Hazel pats him on the shoulder. ‘For now, let’s focus on what’s in front of us, shall we?’
‘Of course, you are right.’ CHARL1E stands, dusting off his dungarees. ‘Please do not misconstrue me, I am grateful to have a body, however it has not fixed as many things as I had hoped.’
They make strange figures walking from the Hab Dome to the Experimentation Dome, Hazel in her biosuit, CHARL1E with his engineered-to-endure skin and too-short dungarees, Robin, Teaspoon, and Shiny whooshing around them like tin-can puppies.
Inside the Experimentation Dome, CHARL1E lies on the gurney and readies to power down.
He had to do it twice yesterday afternoon as well, but it seems to distress him more each time.
‘You promise to wake me up?’ he asks, clinging to Hazel’s hand.
‘Of course, I will. Why wouldn’t I? I’d miss you.’
He looks at her with those empty, glistening eyes. Neither of them ask what happens if she accidently commits anamnesis while he’s switched off.
‘Are you ready?’
He gulps and nods, closing his eyes. Hazel presses them firmly, before he has time to change his mind. His mouth opens and once again Lilith’s voice demands a clearance code.
‘SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS,’ Hazel recites from memory.
‘Clearance code accepted. Power down in process.’
CHARL1E’s breathing slows, slows, slows, then stops.
Hazel waits longer than she needs, making certain the torso’s still before she pulls the wire from CHARL1E’s fingernail and connects it to the coding terminal.
As the code loads, Robin slides a cup of cold tea onto Hazel’s desk. ‘Very needed, thank you.’
Robin nods but avoids looking at the screen.
The Tinys don’t do code; Hazel suspects because it’s Tree’s language, reserved for deities.
It might also explain why they refuse to write.
‘Hubristic or not,’ Hazel says, ‘you should learn to code. You’ve got to be able to fix yourselves—and fix CHARL1E’s body. Take your lives in your own hands.’
Robin turns away from the screen, shaking its head so hard its wipers threaten to fly off. It holds two fists together and explodes them outward, fingers stretching until the rivets squeak.
‘No, it wouldn’t be dangerous.’ Then she thinks about the results of playing God and she can’t hold up the argument. ‘Alright, it’s dangerous, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You have to deal with what’s in front of you.’
Putting its hands over its eyes, Robin whizzes in circles.
‘Fine, fine.’ Hazel sighs and turns back to the code, the beat from her headphones urging her on.
She drinks tea after tea, eats whatever the Tinys deliver her for lunch, unravels some code, tangles up other areas …
She considers waking CHARL1E, but he finds it almost as distressing as powering down, choking like he’s drowning and becoming gratefully tearful at being awake again.
Deciding it’s better to wake him as few times as possible, Hazel goes for a breaktime walk alone, circling the glinting Keepers’ graveyard in the dusk.
Robin ropes her into helping to hunt for bottle caps.
She finds nothing, but Robin unearths a pink milk bottle top with ‘You’re a winner’ and a gold star stamped inside.
‘That’s cool, isn’t it?’
Robin nods and spins in delight.
‘Wonder what they won.’
She watches the waves. She’s got another hour or two of coding in her. She might be able to fix CHARL1E’s body in that time.
At 3 AM, she admits defeat, and powers CHARL1E back up. He splutters, leaning over the edge of the gurney and gulping for Station C’s wireless signals. She strokes his back.
‘I dreamed that you did not wake me, and I was trapped in the dark alone forever. I could not hear Tree singing, or the waves outside, or the Tinys running around.’
‘But you were dreaming,’ Hazel says, ‘so even if it was dark, you were still there.’
He grabs her shoulders, grip vicious. ‘Being is meaningless if you are alone.’