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“The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed,” Carmilla concluded. Laura listened in silence with her eyes half-closed. After Carmilla’s final words had sunk in, her eyelids fluttered and she looked up.
“Is that the end?”
“That’s the end, creampuff.” She leaned across in their bed to press a kiss against Laura’s forehead, tossing the book onto her bedside table behind her.
“Hmm. I might have to think about that ending for a while.” She glanced left towards the clock on the bedside table. “Eleven. LaF and Perry will be here in a couple of hours. Do we need to do much about lunch?”
Carmilla ticked off the morning’s tasks on her fingers. “The steaks are defrosting according to the arcane principles imparted by the curly one. I’ve done up the spare room. JP says he won’t be back in the country for dinner tonight because Vienna airport is somehow unprepared to cope with rain, but he’ll make it tomorrow.”
She’d done all of the chores earlier in the morning - with her operation still not a month past, Laura was sleeping late in the morning to recover.
“Thank you.” Laura bumped her grey-haired head gently against the side of Carmilla's shoulder. “Oh, and I've decided I’m going to accept the university’s offer. Do the guest lecture series.”
“Hey, great! They’ll be glad to see you back. Distinguished visiting lecturer Laura Hollis! Have you chosen a topic?”
“I think might be good to do something about the early days of internet journalism. Going back to my roots, you know? And it was long enough ago now for some good hindsight. It’s always funny to see the undergraduates’ faces when they’re shown vintage computers. Oh my god it’s got a fan stuck in it, why would you do that?” she mimicked, and Carmilla chuckled.
“You know, I remember when a ‘computer’ was a smart young woman in the accounting department,” she commented.
Laura rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but that is actually weird. Like, objectively.”
“Anything you say, cutie. Come on, sort yourself out. Got to have you spruced up for the Bobsey Twins or Perry will take me to task for not looking after you properly.”
So Laura hauled her way out of bed and loped into the shower. She was still limping a little, Carmilla noticed, but her co-ordination was a lot better than it had been only two weeks before. Reading normal sized print for more than a few minutes was a struggle, but overall her condition was improving every day.
Carmilla in turn dragged herself back out of bed and wandered through the house out to the balcony. They lived overlooking a park, and it was pleasant – even this early in spring with the air still chilly – to watch the comings and goings of people on the winding tracks between the trees.
She breathed in the air and caught a slight hint of new-sprung greenery in its scent, probably undetectable to anyone who wasn't a vampire. The first buds on the trees somewhere down there at street level.
There was a crashing from the bedroom. “Laura?” called Carmilla, but when there was no reply she flitted at top speed into the bedroom. There was a mess of things from the nightstand strewn over the carpet and Laura was lying on the floor in the middle of them.
“Laura!” Carmilla pulled her up and tried to get a response, but although she was still breathing she’d lost most of her muscle tone and could not manage to move. He eyes were open but they wouldn't focus.
“Hey. Hey, stay with me Laura.”
It took ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive – it would have been faster for Carmilla to run to the hospital, but she knew from experience such an arrival inevitably caused more delays in confusion than it saved in transit – and twenty for Laura to start returning to responsiveness.
“Carm?” she whispered, both her eyes managing to find the same object at once for the first time. “Where?”
“You’re in an ambulance, cupcake,” Carmilla replied, and ignored the paramedic’s frown of surprise at her way of addressing her ‘guardian’. “You had another attack.”
“Crapsticks,” she muttered, and the absurd word triggered a mass of giggling from them both.
The paramedic shushed them both after a moment. “Laughing’s a good sign,” he said, “but let’s focus on breathing steadily and keeping your heartbeat regular for now, yes?” The ambulance swung round as it pulled into the emergency bay, and then Carmilla was shunted to the side by running people clad in green.
The rest of the day was a parade of waiting. First the two of them together waited for the doctors to decide what to do. Then Carmilla waited outside while they did it. Then LaFontaine and Perry diverted themselves mid-transit and came to wait with her.
Eventually somebody came to tell them that Laura would be all right. She would be shaky and easily tired for a good few weeks, more so than before, but she was quite herself otherwise. Then, enragingly, balling her fists by her sides, Carmilla had to trot out the stupid story about 'Aunt Laura' being her guardian before she could go and sit by her lover's bed. No, there was no other next of kin, no blood relatives. Yes, she was to be considered a relative for the purposes of visitation.
It had been a standing problem for some years now - ever since the infamous ‘Journalism professor alleged to have had affair with student’ headlines, which had only been partially quashed when it was ascertained by exhaustive press questioning that nobody in the university actually knew the name of the dark-haired young woman seen both in Professor Hollis’ lectures and in her arms at a bar. This didn’t satisfy everyone, but fortunately the local paper was bought by the Belmonde Group a little while afterwards and a new editorial line was fed down from higher up.
Carmilla had reluctantly modified her fashion sense and make-up style after this scrape, and for many years Laura was known for nothing more scandalous than dating people ten or twenty years younger - to much general hilarity from the journalism community. A few people commented that she definitely had a 'type' when it came to dark-haired girls, and were not invited back.
When even this began to strain credulity, JP had performed a virtuoso feat of forgery and hacking and Laura became the legal guardian of the orphaned daughter of her dear, tragically lost friends Hans and Marta. The date on the birth certificate advanced by one year every year, but by this point Laura had retired from regular employment to take up writing, and so she was put to less frequent scrutiny.
After a few anxious days sitting by the hospital bedside - when the tide of bureaucracy had finally been dealt with and LaFontaine had pointed out that they were themselves a highly qualified medical advisor capable of making useful recommendations - Laura was allowed to return home. She was pale and walked to the car haltingly, supported by Carmilla on one arm and Perry on the other. She said nothing on the journey home, and neither did anyone else.
Carmilla sat in the back while Perry drove, Laura leaning against her and the city going by outside the window. She watched the raindrops being blown across the glass and leaving tracks in their wake. They always reached the edge of the window in the end, no matter how long they managed to wind the journey out for.
And now Laura's own threads were winding very thin indeed and Carmilla felt the available paths narrowing down to the single track leading to a cliff edge with no other options.
Except – suppose one night...
The bar was quiet on Thursday night, so Carmilla and JP had their favourite corner table to spread out across. Carmilla slumped against the wall with a glass of whiskey, frowning and distracted; JP propped himself neatly against the brick pillar and nursed an ale, concerned and solicitous.
“How's Laura?” he asked.
“She's badly weakened,” confessed Carmilla and sighed. “Last week she was getting so much better. The operation was behind her, her eyes were less tired, she was able to be up and active most of the day. But now – she's not well at all.”
“Is there anything-”
“No. No, I don't think so. She's had three attacks now and even though she recovers each time, it's always to a lower level. I don't think there's really anything anyone can do.”
JP reached out and gave her arm a squeeze. Carmilla hunched over and fidgeted, her standard reaction to not wanting to talk about something. They sat in silence for a few minutes, trying to find a way to change the conversation.
“How's the library?”
“Oh, it's okay. Been a bit skittish of late, but I think that's just the students' stress rubbing off. It's never quite itself this time of year. We found a Lesser Key of Solomon with what I think were Mother's own corrections the other week.”
“Burnt it and threw the ashes down a well?” Carmilla checked, and JP nodded vigorously. They had learned this from experience. “How did we miss this one the first time, anyway?”
He looked embarrassed at his mistake. “It was in a dust jacket from the complete works of Plato.”
Carmilla made a face. “Yuck, no wonder nobody touched it.” She glanced up and laughed at his stricken expression. JP liked Plato and Carmilla liked arguing against him. “Oh come on! Nobody not suffering from insomnia reads that crap. Time is a moving image of eternity.” She produced a noise only possible for someone with experience in hairballs.
“The eternal world is a reliable comfort,” he said primly, “amid the changing matter of the world.” He waited for Carmilla's predictable response to his bait, looking more cheerful now that a topic of conversation had been found.
“Eternity is a bullshit concept that just gives people an excuse to not live their own lives.” This was Carmilla's normal opening move on such occasions.
“By no means!” JP protested. “Time being a dimension like length and width demands the conclusion that there be abstract time as well as passing time. Movement requires a still point.”
Carmilla raised an accusatory finger. “An idea made up by grumpy old men who wanted to pretend the world should stop in the way they preferred it.”
“Hardly. The uniting and holding of all happenings in a place beyond the contingencies of the world is not the domain of one demographic,” JP waved away the accusation and recited his normal lecture. “Whereas your embrace of contingency as the sole reality makes meaningless the passage of time and hence of understanding itself. The past is gone. The future is always absent. So all you end up with is the present – but how do you know anything in the present without the past to remember? The continuity is necessary, and hence the great continuity in eternity is inevitable.”
“You place too much faith in abstraction.” Carmilla drew down a long slow sip of whiskey.
“I was an abstraction, for over a hundred years,” he reminded her. “The reality of immaterial concepts looks a lot more certain when you're one of them.”
“And you end up subordinating reality to abstraction. Like your Plato, convinced the best way to understand the world was to turn away from it because it was imperfect-”
“-that is a gross oversimplification and you know it-” he started.
“-whereas if we accept that the process of meaning begins with the individual,” she pressed on without stopping, “then abstractions are always rooted in personal experience and so always carry their meaning with them! No waiting for the correct application to arise.”
He let that one slide for a few moments and worked on the glass of beer before him until it was half-empty. Finally he dragged up a question.
“But there's always the residue of desire for eternity, isn't there? Like your Nietzsche. Didn't he talk about eternal recurrence?”
Carmilla shrugged dismissively. “Only as a thought experiment. Would you be willing to live the same life over and over again forever? Because if not, on what basis are you living it at all? It was a challenge, not a metaphysical doctrine.”
“So for him, the highest thing would be that which you would never change: still eternity of a sort. But a second-rate eternity, trapped by your own person – because nothing beyond yourself to aim at! And what about everything in life beyond your control? Who'd choose the life of Sisyphus, endlessly rolling a boulder up a mountain only to have to start again when it rolls down?”
“You must imagine Sisyphus happy, JP,” Carmilla smirked back, kicking her bag with its ever-present volume of Camus. “Allowing himself to be happy through accepting the unsolvable.”
“I don't see how that can work.”
“Well neither do I! But people do it every day.” She waved around at the bar with its minimal occupants, the regular comers. JP nodded to that and seemed to give up on the argument.
“Have you,” he began slowly and tentatively after a while, “ever spoken to her about turning? About becoming a vampire?” He didn't have to use Laura's name.
“We've talked about it,” Carmilla admitted. “She says she doesn't think she'd mind. But I can't. I mean I won't do it and I don't think I could even if I were willing. I can't condemn her to whatever might happen in ten thousand years time! Do you ever think how long that is? None of us have the slightest idea what that'll do to a person's mind.” She shrugged hopelessly. “Anyway, it's not like it's a standard operation, is it? Even Mattie doesn't think she knows how to do it.”
“That one died with Mother, then.”
“Well, there might be others out there who could make new vampires, but I've never met any.” She drained the last of her bourbon and then spoke. “Now listen up, little brother. I've got a job for you.”
“Do you remember?”
That was all they wanted to speak about, now that the time for the making of new memories was short. Do you remember the canals in Venice? Do you remember Kirsch trying to dance at Danny's wedding? Do you remember the first time we met?
Carmilla remembered it all. She had hoarded the memories, gone over them a thousand times or more. Some of them hurt. Some of them were so electric that they seemed more alive than any memory. But all of them pointed inexorably forward, to their own bed in their own house, where Laura lay flat on her back and breathed laboriously as she clutched her hand and would not leave for fear of missing one last moment.
The doctor had been and gone, and had a long, serious, professional conversation with LaFontaine. Then LaFontaine had sat with Laura for an hour and explained, and finally broken the news to Carmilla.
She had questioned them back, fiercely. How could this have developed, how could that have occurred?
“She's running out of life,” is all they could offer. “When this time comes, it's never one particular thing. Just... all winding down at once. The attacks were the first signs, but-”
They couldn't finish. Carmilla hugged them and took up her vigil by Laura's bed. She was sleeping at the moment, with heavy slow breaths. Carmilla stared at her, and then at the records of their relationship plastered on the walls. All around the room were collages of photographs from decades and decades of togetherness.
At Silas University, sitting in the sun on the south lawn with LaFontaine and Perry. Over their shoulders the legs of Danny and Kirsch could be seen along with the lower half of a descending Frisbee. Laura’s checked sleeves were rolled up and her arms displayed the beginnings of sunburn.
In Vienna, one winter in Laura’s twenties. She was wrapped up to such a degree that it was a wonder she could even raise her arm to wrap it round Carmilla’s shoulders. Carmilla wore a gold pendant, the only spark of colour amongst the black of her clothes and the white dusting of snow.
Somewhere in the Mediterranean – Istria, she recognized after a while. The pale crevassed limestone with tufts of greenery. Carmilla had found a pose, lolling absurdly against a contorted chaos of stone with her limbs propped on tiny holds. Laura made a deliberately exasperated face at the camera. Fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes enhanced the mime.
A lecture hall in faded wood. This was a clear memory, Laura delivering a series of lectures on the politics of journalism. The photo was taken from the far corner of the hall, by an attendee slumping in the back row.
Here in Canada, just after moving into their house. Laura wore the same smart pantsuit she’d had on during the lectures, but with the jacket discarded and sleeves rolled up to make unpacking easier. With her shoes off and the towering figure of Danny next to her she still bore a child-like appearance despite her greying hair and slowly lining face.
When she turned her attention back to the bed, she found that Laura was watching her with an expression of such tenderness that she could feel her heart break open.
“There I am, always changing. And you always look the same.” She said it with sadness, but Carmilla shook her head.
“I've changed so much with you. Maybe not in appearance but inside, year by year. That was all you, Laura. Have I ever told you how grateful I am?”
“Many times.” Her smile broke out like the sun through clouds. “But I think you might need to tell me a few more times.”
“I will, then. At least once more, hey?” Carmilla smiled back through the tears. “That was how we made it, wasn't it? Every time we thought we couldn't make it – every time people told us we were doomed, or unsuitable. We just tried one more time and we came through.”
Laura nodded and then broke into a fit of coughing. When she had settled herself down, she said, “I don't want you to be sad.”
Carmilla winced. “Don't think you can stop me, creampuff.” Laura looked stricken, so she added hurriedly, “but I'll clamber through somehow. Don't you worry about me.”
“You won't forget me, though?” Her voice was that of a small child again, the voice of a scared nineteen-year old who needed her cool vampire girlfriend. “Not even in, like, a thousand years when you're able to break people's minds by screaming?”
“How could I? I don't think,” Carmilla went on with a pretence of haughtiness, “that there could possibly be anyone more annoying than you in the world. Or anyone I'd rather have annoying me forever and ever.”
Forever and ever. The words hung in the air with their impossibility.
“I'm so sorry to leave you,” breathed Laura.
“I wouldn't have had it any other way, cupcake,” she said, just as she had told her time and time again in the long years of their life together.
“Carm-”
The pressure on Carmilla's hand released, and her world ended with a breath.
It was not like her parents' funerals. Carmilla had attended those centuries before, black-veiled, sneaking in the back to merge unnoticed into the crowd. Under the veil her face had been as young as the day she died, and her now-matronly younger sister did not recognise her through the lace and tears. There had been a Requiem Mass and a choir and everything that attended the death of a Count and Countess. She had felt shut out – shut out by her anonymity, shut out by her undeath. Most of all, shut out by the prayers and promises of eternal life, but amid her own tears she didn't know whether she pitied the congregation's fragile hopes for immortality elsewhere or envied them the possibility of that elsewhere.
Her own immortality had no sure and certain hope, and her resurrections before and after were agonising.
For Laura, though, there was no Mass. Carmilla sat at the centre of the greenery-decked hall. Danny Lawrence, scarred but still young and red-haired, stood on the dais and read the poem Carmilla and Laura had chosen together.
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.”
On Carmilla's left sat JP, clutching his white hands tightly and staring lifelessly at the floor. To her right, Mattie leaned close enough for Carmilla to draw some comfort from the tangibility of her presence. LaFontaine cried openly. Perry's tears had already been spent. The space where Kirsch was no longer present was everywhere.
There were not many others. The funeral had been kept deliberately small so that only those who knew the twists and turns of everybody's history were in attendance. Danny no longer pretended to be twenty-one, and spoke openly of meeting Laura six decades before. Carmilla let the past come into the present around her.
“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die”
It had been inevitable. This was how it had always been going to end, since their first kiss in the room at Silas. Carmilla had known it then and Laura had known it too, even though they had both pushed that knowledge to the back of their minds. That which is living can only die, while that which is not living would have to continue in some other way.
“Or say that the end precedes the beginning
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end
And all is always now”
It was all one, with Laura dead. Everything they had experienced together was all united in one single past, written up to the last page and now to be closed.
But at least with a book you could turn it over in your hands and start again. Carmilla shied away from that thought.
“Love itself is unmoving
Only the cause and end of movement”
There were other readings, but Carmilla gave none of them herself. She sat unmoving through the remainder of the service, and then stood unmoving by the graveside. One by one, people drifted away. LaFontaine and Perry supported each other and were supported in turn by JP. Mattie went to wait in the car.
“It doesn't seem right,” Danny said when only the two of them remained under the gathering clouds. “It being some of us, I mean. All of us, or none of us, I could understand. But not some of us having to go on without the others.”
Carmilla stared fixedly at the roses piled against the gravestone. “You don't have to tell me that, Red.”
“Yeah, I know. I think I understand you better now, sister.” A flicker passed over her expression and she turned absently the simple gold ring on her left hand. “When Maria died, I realised: she only died today. But she'll stay dead for so many days to come.”
Carmilla watched the first few drops of rain make dimples in the loose soil over Laura's grave. The headstone recorded only her name, her dates of birth and death, and the epitaph: Beloved forever.
“Everyone dies in all times at once, Danny. They die in the past because you can't change it. They die in the present because you can't ignore it. And they die in the future because you'll never be able to escape it.”
There were things needing to be wound up. She boxed away their possessions and divided or donated them wherever seemed appropriate. Most of Laura's things went to Danny, Perry and LaFontaine. Carmilla's own effects she stuffed into a storage locker before dropping the key into an envelope along with a carefully written letter.
“I'm going to disappear, Mattie,” she said a few weeks after the funeral. Her sister looked up sharply and narrowed her eyes. “Don't look at me like that! I'm just going to go. Away.”
“For how long this time, Kitty?” Mattie stroked her shoulder. Carmilla had disappeared before. Quite a lot of the nineteenth century had been marked by periods of isolation. Carmilla handed her the envelope without replying.
“Don't open it until a week's time. It will worry you if you read it before I'm gone, but it needn't. I'll be just fine and besides, you can't follow me. Oh, and promise me something?” she added, standing up from the chaise longue and casting a look around her sister's luxurious apartment as she turned to go.
“Anything.” Mattie gestured expansively.
“Don't kill JP.”
“Why, are you leaving the house to him instead of me?” Mattie pouted and rose. “You know I've always been jealous of that delightful studio.” Carmilla smiled slightly, the most she could manage at present, and hugged her sister.
In truth the house was already sold, as quickly as she'd been able to arrange it. None of it mattered without someone to live in it with, and so Carmilla shed her skin, coolly and efficiently.
Leaving Mattie's apartment, she went straight to the cemetery. The day was crisp, a hint of winter still clinging to the air despite the sprouting spring. Ordinarily this would have been the kind of day to set Laura skipping – not that she had been able to skip properly for twenty years, but she had been limber enough and sunny enough to give the impression of skipping even while not much faster than a walking pace.
“JP,” she said into her phone, “Are you ready? Yes? Good. I'll be there tomorrow evening. Look, I'll explain everything there, okay? I've got to go.” The black-painted cemetery gate was ajar, and she slipped inside.
“All right, cupcake,” she said to the gravestone still covered in flowers she'd renewed several times over. “I'll not be coming back here again, so I've come to say the last goodbye. And – well, you know. And I hope you do know. Be patient a little while.” The grass was damp under her knees when she knelt, but there was no hurry to stand up.
She pulled out her gold locket and held it in the palm of her hand. Inside was an old photograph of Laura taken when she was young. It had been in Venice, after all the mess at Silas had finally been cleared up and the two of them had disappeared from the turning world for a year to immerse themselves in each other. Laura's face shone, the clear sunlight striking golden filigree in her hair and, echoing that, the narrow form of a snake carved delicately in the gold twined around the portrait with its tail seized between its teeth. A bit dramatic, Laura had commented when she bought it. Maybe to your cutesy taste, she'd shot back, but I like it.
It was only later that night, after Laura's lips had worn away the last ragged remnants of her reserve, when she'd managed to get up the courage to whisper that she'd wanted something to show how her love was without beginning or end. Laura had giggled, and then laughed out loud at her soppy vampire girlfriend, and finally thought up a very creative reward for her gallantry. Every time Carmilla looked at it anew, the weight of her claim pressed down heavier on her shoulders – and yet also lifted her up, prouder than ever with her metamorphosis under Laura's hand.
On the stone wall at the nearby edge of the cemetery, a thrush landed and beat out a rhythm with the snail clutched in its beak. Carmilla watched it and felt her mind recreate what she would have done were Laura there. She would have turned to watch Laura watching the bird with that look of perfect, amazed enthralment. And then Laura would have noticed her, and turned, and half-giggled with the smile that unlocked her heart. And then she would have kissed her, because her lips always had the look of lips that are kissed.
She knelt silently on the grass and waited until it had finished. And then there was nothing more for Carmilla to do - except for the last thing. Because suppose one night...
Silas University seemed never to change. There was, it was true, more plate glass and steel than there once had been, and the students scurrying about the campus were in the latest iteration of incomprehensible fashion. But it was still the same Silas, with the great crater where the Lustig used to be filled in with a duck pond, and of course the Library was always the Library.
JP met her in the cellars under the stacks. He had cleared out a room and filled it with a bewildering array of equipment spilling out of crates. There was a lot of wire, glass valves and flasks, a set of grilles covered in clips and clamps. And there was, of necessity, a large and dramatic lever.
“I've done my best with what you said, but I confess I don't understand your purpose,” he said by way of greeting. “We naturally kept all the materials and designs from my, ah, extraction from the catalogue. But you do understand this was purely a matter of transferring a consciousness from one location to another? If you were – excuse me if I mistook you – but if you were wanting to attempt a resurrection...”
Carmilla shook her head. “I'm not. I know that won't work. Laura's gone,” and that admission choked her as it had choked her every day since the last day.
JP squeezed her shoulder and after a moment she placed her hand on his.
“Laura's gone. And soon I shall be gone too. This is what all this is about.”
He looked at her, afraid and uncomprehending, so she began her explanation.
“It has to be here,” she said, “in the Library. Because what I want to do is go somewhere else and the Library's very good at that sort of thing.” She pointed into a corridor lit by uncertain lamps. “That, for example, is the way to the impossible staircase, yes?”
He murmured in agreement. “Oh, yes. The library is, as you once so succinctly put it, a 'sentient Escher painting'. Although if I'm being pedantic, Escher was in fact a draughtsman and engraver and never actually painted... you know what, I'll stop talking.”
“Good idea, bookworm. But that's what I'm getting at. The library warps the dimensions. Turns width into length and length into height and height into width.” He nodded to her explanation. “And time into all of them.”
“Time.” A few seconds passed as her implication sank in. “No, you can't. It's impossible. You can't go back.”
“Well ordinarily I know, but-” she tried to interrupt, but he ploughed on.
“I mean it quite precisely. Matter can follow the curvatures of spacetime, but not rupture them. Now, if you wandered around the library for long enough it might lead you somewhere and even somewhen, but there's no way you could choose, and-”
“That's not what I'm-”
“And even if you did, do you really want there to be two Carmilla's running around? You risk destroying everything with a paradox. I know you just want to see Laura again and I appreciate-”
“JP, could you just shut up!” snapped Carmilla. “I know what I'm doing. Listen. You can't send matter through time, not by design. You violate conservation of energy or matter or something like that - whatever. But information. Immaterial things. You can do that, I know you can. All you need to do to me is the reverse of what the little scientist did to you and make sure you can beam that to a particular place and time. Right?”
She pointed at the pile of crates. “Get to work, digital boy. I'm going to take after you.”
It was clear he still didn't understand her intention, but seemed to accept that she knew what she wanted. The frames and grilles were arranged in one corner of the room to serve as a connection board. From them, wires led off in all directions to batteries of valves and flasks and to points of contact in the room itself. One spool of slightly tarnished copper wire was spun out, and JP busied himself tying it into a sort of crown.
“When? And where?” was all he asked.
“Crowley Building,” she directed over his shoulder while he did something abstruse with a box of knobs and dials. “17th of August, 2014.”
“All right, I can do that – relative position from the library, so not too difficult... there.” He tapped the box of controls. “Now we only have the insurmountable problem of finding a suitable host for your consciousness. For which we need an exact understanding of the physical form of the host and confidence that it will actually be able to hold you. Any ideas?”
“Easy: me. Match the target to me. My body doesn't age, right? So me then is me now and there's nowhere I'll fit better.” She smirked a little at his expression. “You're impressed, aren't you? Big sister has some science under her belt after all.” He rolled his eyes.
When the last connection was wound around its fixture and duct taped into place, he wiped his brow. “You understand I have no idea what this will do to you? You could become like I was, disembodied and trapped. Or you could be blasted into some other poor soul's head. Or you might just be a passive observer without sensation – there are just too many possibilities to be sure.”
Carmilla shook her head. “It won't be like that. It's not.” She scrabbled around for the words to explain. “It's like... you follow the tracks laid out for you, but they still feel natural because you are the one feeling them for the first time. There's no detachment, you're not a spectator. A lot of the time you're so busy living you don't even remember the other times you've lived.”
He looked at her, very deeply and seriously as he took in her words and rearranged his understanding of the situation. “You speak from experience, then.” She nodded. “Carmilla. How many times?”
She shrugged helplessly, and saw in his face slow and horrified comprehension. “I don't know. I don't keep count.”
“You can stop any time you like, you know. There won't be a paradox.” There was an edge of pleading to how he said it.
“I know, JP. And maybe one day I will, but not yet.” She managed a small smile. “Like I keep telling you – one must imagine Sisyphus happy. You must imagine me happy, because I am. I've got everything I've ever wanted out of life.”
He sighed, then a thought dawned in his eyes. “You told me once you saw Laura as everything, as your past, present and future.”
“And you told me that time is a moving image of eternity. Which is bollocks, but – well, I'll give you it just this once.” She grinned and took a breath. “Is it these wires?”
He nodded, and came forward to help plug her in. The crown of copper bands encircled her head, with wires wound into it and trailing to the great array of valves and grilles at the back end of the room. When she was fully connected, JP took her by the shoulders and, carefully avoiding disturbing the connections, gave her one final hug.
At the other side of the room was the control panel, and he allowed himself no second thoughts before pulling the lever.
The wires sparked, and the crown of copper started into glowing life. Carmilla saw her brother's face waver and blink back the tears before darkness took her and the tendons of her body collapsed into unlife.
.
.
.
She shuddered as the world swam back into view. The door in front of her was plain and wooden, the subtle grain and every knot in the surface standing in familiarity before her eyes. She took a breath, rolled the tension out of her shoulders and let her hand hover over the doorknob.
It was opening night once more, and she stood in the wings with her lines on the tip of her tongue. Because, as she'd read in Nietzsche, suppose one night...
Suppose one night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more'. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine'?
She opened the door and marched quickly inside. “Hey.”
“Um - excuse me, but who the hell are you?”
“Carmilla. I'm your new roommate, sweetheart.”