Laurus is visiting Torreya in her room to see how she is settling in. Over four days the guest bedroom has metamorphosed beyond recognition. Holographic posters cover the walls, windows looking out across Tropicana's northern polar continent. Dazzling temples of ice drift past in the sky-blue water. Shorelines are crinkled by deep fjords. Timeless and exquisite. But Laurus is the first to admit that the images are feeble parodies compared to the candy bud fantasies. The new pastel-coloured furniture is soft and puffy. Shiny hardback books of fictional mythology from his library are strewn all over the floor. It's nice to see them actually being used and appreciated for once. Every flat surface is now home to a cuddly Animate Animal. He thinks there must be over thirty of them. There is a scuffed hologram cube on the bedside dresser, containing a smiling woman. It seems out of kilter with the deliberate cosiness organic to the room. He vaguely recalls seeing it at the old office building.
Torreya clutches a fluffy AA koala to her chest, giggling as the toy rubs its head against her, purring affectionately.
«Aren't they wonderful?» Torreya says. «All the people in the house have given me one. They gave some to Jante, too. You're all so kind to us.»
Laurus can only smile weakly as he hands her the huge AA panda he's brought. It's almost as tall as she is. Torreya stands on the bed and kisses him, then bounces on the mattress as the panda hugs her, crooning with delight.
«I'm going to name him St Peter,» she declares. «Because he's your present. And he'll sleep with me at night, I'll be safe from anything then.»
The damp tingle on his cheek where she kissed him sets off a warm contentment.
«Shame Camassia had to go,» Torreya says. «I like her a lot.»
«Yes. But her family need her to help with their island plantation now her cousin's married.»
«Can I go and visit her?»
«Maybe. Some time.»
«And Erigeron's away as well,» she says with a vexed expression. «He's nice. He helps Jante move around, and he tells funny stories, too.»
The thought of his near-psychopathic enforcer reciting fairy stories to please the children is one that amuses Laurus immensely. «He'll be back in a couple of days. He's driven over to Palmetto to sort out some business contracts for me.»
«I didn't know he was one of your company managers.»
«Erigeron is very versatile. Who's the woman?» he asks to deflect further questions.
Torreya's face is momentarily still. She glances guiltily at the old hologram cube. The woman is young, mid-twenties, very beautiful, smiling wistfully. Her hair is a light ginger, tumbling over her shoulders.
«My mother. She died when Jante was born.»
«I'm sorry.» But the woman is definitely Torreya's mother; he can pick out the shared features, identical green eyes, the hair colour.
«Everyone back in Longthorpe who knew her said she was special,» Torreya says. «A real lady, that's what. Her name was Nemesia.»
• • •
After lunch, Laurus took Torreya down the hill to the city zoo. He thought it would make a grand treat, bolstering her spirits after Camassia's abrupt departure.
In all his hundred and twenty years Laurus had never found the time to visit the zoo before. But it was a lovely afternoon, and they held hands as they walked down the leafy lanes between the compounds.
Torreya pressed herself to the railings, smiling and pointing at the exhibits, asking a stream of questions. She would often narrow her eyes and concentrate intensely on what she was seeing, which he came to recognize as using her affinity bond with Jante, letting her brother enjoy the afternoon as much as she did. It would be interesting to see if the visit resulted in a new fantasyscape.
Laurus found himself enjoying the trip. Tropicana had no aboriginal land animals, its one mountain range above water was too small to support that kind of complex evolution. Instead its citizens had to import all their creatures, which were chosen to be benign. Here in the zoo, terrestrial and xenoc predators and carnivores roared and hissed and hooted at each other.
Torreya hauled him over to one of the ice cream stalls, and he had to borrow some coins from one of the enforcer squad to pay for the cornets. He never carried money, never had the need before.
Ice cream and an endless sunny afternoon with Torreya, it was heaven.
• • •
Laurus wakes in the middle of the night, his body as cold as ice. The name has connected; one of his girls was called Nemesia. How long ago? His recollection is unclear. He peers at Abelia, a child with a woman's body, curled up on her side, wisps of hair lying across her face. In sleep, her small sharp features are angelic.
He closes his eyes, and finds he cannot even sketch her face in the blackness. In the forty years since his wife died there have been hundreds just like her to enliven his bed. Used then discarded for younger, fresher flesh. Placing one out of the multitude is an impossibility. But still, Nemesia must have been a favourite for even this tenuous yet resilient memory to have survived so long. The Nemesia he is thinking of stood under thin beams of slowly shifting sunlight as she undressed for him, letting the gold rain lick her skin.
• • •
While Laurus was an entity of pure energy, he'd roamed at will across the cosmos, satisfying his curiosity about nature's astronomical spectacles. He had witnessed binary sunrises on desert worlds. Watched the detonation of quasars. Floated within the ring systems of gas giant planets. Explored the supergiant stars of the galactic core.
He had been there at the beginning when spiralling dust clouds had imploded into a new sun, seen the family of planets accrete out of the debris. He had been there at the end, when the sun cooled and began to expand, its radiance corroding first into amber then crimson.
A white pinpoint ember flared at its centre, signalling the final contraction. The neutronium core, gathering matter with insatiable greed; its coalescence generating monstrous pulses of gamma radiation.
The end came swiftly, an hour-long implosion devouring every superheated ion. Afterwards, an event horizon rose to shield the ultimate cataclysm.
He hovered above the null-boundary for a long time, wondering what lay below. Gateway to another universe. The truth.
He drifted away.
• • •
Torreya has confessed that she's never been out on a boat before; so Laurus is taking her out onto the glassy water of the harbour basin in his magnificent twin-masted yacht. They are sailing round the crashed cargo lander in the centre of the basin, a huge conical atmospheric entry body designed to ferry heavy equipment down to the very first pioneers before the spaceport runway was built nearly two centuries ago. The vehicle's guidance failed, allowing it to drift away from the land. Its cargo was salvaged, but no one was interested in the fuselage. Now its dark titanium structure towers fifty metres above the water, open upper hatches providing a refuge for the gulls and other birds that humans have brought to this world. At night a bright light flashes from its nose cone, guiding ships back to the harbour.
Torreya leans over the gunwale, trailing her hand in the warm water, her face dreamy and utterly content. «This is lovely,» she sighs. «And so was the zoo yesterday. Thank you, Laurus.»
«My pleasure.» But he is distracted, haunted by a sorrowful fading smile and long red hair.
