Falling Idols

Now it seemed they had closed on both.

Certainly they’d closed on him.

*

A few weeks earlier, when during one of his hikes Austin encountered the Kyyth weeping in the desert, he’d first thought it was simply a man. Another hiker, lost or with a turned ankle, frightened of dying of thirst. Or a freight-hopper who’d left the train before it passed by Miracle, then gone the wrong direction.

Then he’d seen its eyes.

“I knew,” he told Gabrielle. “Right then, I knew.”

“David Bowie’s eyes are different colors. Would you have had the same reaction if you’d met him?”

“There was more to it than the eyes, I just don’t know how to convey it in a way that would make sense. There’s no vocabulary for these things, not in English. Maybe in Hindustani. But not here.”

He understood that Gabrielle expected him to be more or less the same man she’d left eleven years ago to his bitterness and dementia. Not necessarily in the worst excesses of the temperament she remembered, but at least in his capabilities and limitations. Yet even here he was not the same man she’d known.

How to explain moments of a knowledge that asserted itself like instinct, something inborn rather than learned? How to explain the growing manipulation of the properties of earth and air and fire and water? How to explain periods of monumental silence, brimming with lucidity? He felt like a tuning fork, set to vibrating but thrown by mistake into a drawerful of flatware.

Hardly the same man, which was for the better. The old Austin might never even have noticed Memuneh at all. It had been such an inauspicious summit. The Austin she remembered — an Austin he no longer even regarded as alive — would only have been disappointed by his initial encounter with the Kyyth. Appalled by its tears, disgusted by its display of weakness. That younger Austin she remembered would’ve expected no less than glare and thunder as the reward for his evocations, and if the being they heralded had no wingspan to unfurl, like a vain peacock, then by god he would send it back until it returned with the proper plumage.

What a wiener he’d been.

So maybe she wasn’t here to be taught after all. Maybe she was here to forgive him for what he must’ve put her through.

“I haven’t even asked you where you’re staying,” he said.

“At the bed-and-breakfast in Miracle.”

“How many days?”

“I left that loose. They accommodated.”

“I can imagine. Not the waiting list there was last year.” He laughed. “It’s like an Old West boom town where they struck angels instead of silver, and then it went bust really quick.”

“It has that feeling. A ghost town in the making.”

“You can stay here if you want. I know it’s not as tastefully appointed. But the offer’s there.”

Her refusal was softened by her smile and the bead of sweat at the tip of her nose. “It’s not even on my tab, Austin, now why would I choose splinters over a mattress?”

“Well, it’s purifying,” he said, and they laughed, then spoke for the next hour or more as the sun fell toward the stone spires and anvils in the west. The worst of the heat began to ebb from the day and he figured Memuneh should rouse soon. The first time he turned, impelled by some benign inner alarm, Austin saw him in the square of the front window, watching them in silence. Studying their conversation, maybe even their bodies.

Memuneh was so androgynous as to be a stereotype. Worse, he was familiar. After encountering him in the desert, Austin had combed through books in one of the silly shops that had sprung up like mushrooms last year and found the face he’d recognized: identical to the harpist in a centuries-old painting entitled Musician Angels.

Inspiration and artist’s muse? Hardly. As Austin understood, the Kyyth were not by nature corporeal, but when opting otherwise, they engineered bodies from the elements around them. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen … their comprehension of molecular biology was intuitive but staggeringly complex. Yet they had a refined sense of aesthetics. So long as they were shaping bodies, undoubtedly they’d make those shapes pleasing to themselves, and they weren’t too proud to mimic. There was no reason to believe they restricted themselves to human form, either, if others suited their purposes or whims. A Kyyth could theoretically incubate itself into a wolf or a Sequoia; into something extinct, or even otherwise nonexistent.

And then there was Memuneh, with idiosyncrasies all his own. As doe-eyed as if he’d stepped fresh from a Renaissance canvas, with flaxen hair center-parted and shoulder-length, swept to either side of a high, pale forehead. He could weep, Austin knew, but apparently hadn’t wanted his flesh to sweat.

When Austin touched Gabrielle’s wrist, she stopped talking and followed his gaze. Saw the face, expressionless in the window, then he heard her breath catch in her throat.

Memuneh faded from the window. After it became apparent that he wasn’t going to step outside, they followed. He’d retreated all the way across the room, by the iron stove.

“It’s only Gabrielle,” Austin said. “I told you about her.”

They watched each other in mutual apprehension, as if each was afraid to be the first to move.

“I find your name very beautiful,” Memuneh said to her. She actually blushed. “You watched me dreaming. In the other room.”

Gabrielle, looking at the floor now, stammering an apology.

“You fly in your dreams too,” Memuneh went on. “When you do, you never feel that it’s a new talent you’ve only just learned, but a very old ability—”

“That I’ve just remembered,” she whispered, and touched her lips with fingertips.

“Exactly. That’s the genuine you. Why have you brought her here, Austin?”