Thresholds

((co-written with Silver Night))

She is
                                      flying
                                                                     free                                                             She
                             is in the stars                                     free
                                                          tasting comets
building worlds                       She is
                             not   
is      
                                                                             is not
          swooping through the rings of a planet and smelling the tart yellow lelen notes of the ice tumbling past her
                   is                
                                      falling through the heart of a blue star
is there 



is here


           everywhere


diving to the threshold of infinity
                                                                           
         

is                 is not                   
            is

                   fraying away into the equations she dives through, shedding skins and scales and feathers
                                                          is      
                             honed down by the friction, by the fractions, a narrow knife that used to have a name, effortlessly slicing through impossibility and putting it together again in new and beautiful patterns that she can see, she can see them all, she can see everything …


Flares coruscating off the surface of stars and moons and planets and interstellar dust, the orange of orbits and the tangy apple taste of gravitational flux and –







                             Kresh.


A pale, iridescent smell, sharp, out of place. It belongs with … with …


The pieces of herself that knows what it belongs with have flown away into the looping numbers and symbols that dance and spin and beckon her back to them. For a  moment     


                                                                   An hour
                             A year        


                                                She is distracted by them and follows, turns, loops through and around them and sets them to new shapes, more beautiful than before, more beautiful than she has ever seen, until that shimmering scent catches at her again and she reaches out to drag the memory free, cold crunching beneath her feet and kresh and a high blue note in the air that goes with the tiny points of chill settling on her face.


It’s snow, that smell. He tells her so, his arm steady beneath her hand as the delightfully treacherous footing threatens her balance. His voice weaves through the strangeness around her, warm familiar deep taupe, telling her what he can see, telling her what she can see.


It should not be here, that kresh. She had forgotten it along with everything else.


She did not put it here.


The mystery is even more fascinating than the dance of the numbers and she turns and dives after that thin thread of molecular patterns, weaving down through a tumbling wave of blue and green navigational points, until she reaches –


Kresh, and ship-scrubbed air, and shapes that might be a desk, chairs. And wrapping around it, a warm brown ribbon backed with gold, a voice, a voice she knows
                             Knew
                                                                             Knows.


She reaches out and clutches at a passing opalescent trail that remembers voices, clumsy communication through sound, hears -

Yes, she would tell him, but there’s no words inside her, nothing but the numbers, and so she spills them all around her positive integers.


“ Do you know where you are?”









It is boring, that is where she is, this tiny space redolent of a place she knows she ought to remember, when right outside there are stars waiting for her to unpack the secrets at their heart.


He can come. Of course he can come. Anything is possible, here. She can show him, can show him all of it.  If he will only come with her …























No. He will not leave this room, the walls buttressed against the glorious tumult outside.  He is talking to her, slow and clumsy as he shapes equations, formula.  She recognises the interaction of neurons, of groups of neurons. Then more, fluid dynamics, electrical interactions, the mathematics of biology. A body, is what he is showing her, she remembers the concept, a cage for consciousness, limiting thought to the sluggish connections between neurons.  

Now something else.  Electrons neutrons resonance … yes, she knows those equations, has seen them spilling through her fingers every day in the lab.


Not like this, though. She would never pass this beyond concept, a shield running high and hot and burning out every piece of its hardware.


Words. More words. It is important to him, that she can grasp, these two pictures, the body, the shield burning itself and the ship it protects to ashes.


She tries to understand, picks up the looping equations from his mind and mimics them.  A heartbeat. The transfer of oxygen to the bloodstream. Weight. Height.  She pulls threads she had lost from the storm outside the walls to make sense of it. 


Incomplete.


He wants more from her. Wants … she has not answered his question. He wants …

She reaches for more traces of herself.


And comes up empty handed.


Tries again, mining the endless streams of data that pour unceasingly from the infinite horizon for something that fits into the gaps, anything that fills the gaps.


For the first time she can remember – and now she realises how little she can remember – she is afraid.

There.  She recognises what he is showing her, almost, like a familiar melody in a different key. The hand that rests on his arm is her hand and knowing that she can identify another trailing strand in the whirling kaleidoscope around them, the amber richness of expensive fabric beneath her fingers, the warm solidity of the arm beneath … She knits the memory in to herself, finds another, adds that …  a voice she recognises as her own, heard through other ears, the orange tang of ozone from a shield simulator …  

 Thread after thread spin into her hands, called home from the brilliant turmoil around them, fitting together, making a seamless whole, fingers hand wrist arm … a body built of memory but for the first time she can feel the faint tingle of information coming from the pod-interface as it monitors her flesh and bone self inert in its bath of goo.         




A hand extended toward her, as illusory as her own. “Nolikka?”

She takes it, or imagines she does – but it is as warm and solid as if it were real, and it incontrovertibly belongs to the man who has come here to find her when she could no longer find herself. “Val.”

There is so much relief in the interface between them she can’t tell how much is hers and how much his. She holds onto his hand tightly. There are words, his, hers, about what happened, and she tries to concentrate on them, because wordsare how the woman she is trying to remember how to be communicates, but they are less important than the strength of the hand holding hers, the warmth of the concern still echoing around them.

  

Words. She shapes them, forces meaning into their confinement, boxes and borders to keep her here in this imaginary form. “Thank you for - 

Thank you for 

finding 

me                 saving

me 

thank you for

no-one else ever

looking for

thank you

“- for finding me.” Perhaps he understands: there is a strange doubleness to her senses in places, shapes and colours that are new and unexpected, that do not come from her own perception, but – 

“I can see you," she blurts suddenly, magenta astonishment. “Not how I see, but - Is this what you look like? In the world?” 

Everything 


    a million   


                           infinities


numbers perfect numbers


                shaping


shaped
                             shaping


every
                         thing

Nolikka puts her free hand on the door control, and Silver covers it with his. 


The door opens.


“Now?” she asks.


“Now.” 


Hand in hand, they step together over the threshold to the world.