The Rosetta Codex (14 page)

In the spring, Cicero found Cale standing at one of the windows in the attic above the skin parlor, looking out across the adjacent buildings and up at the shining glass and polished stone towers of The Island. Cale heard the old man come up the stairs, and listened to his shuffling steps as he crossed the cracked wooden flooring, but didn't turn until Cicero was beside him.

“You think you want to live in there?” Cicero asked.

“I like it here just fine,” Cale replied.

“Hmm.” The old man sniffed. “I was not particularly powerful when I lived there, but I did have some influence. And a fair degree of wealth. Enough to live in one of the more exclusive residential complexes, in the upper levels. Enough to
drink and eat well.” He smiled wryly. “I'll be honest—I was wealthy enough to drink and eat to
excess.
To engage not in the highest, but at least in the high
er
circles of Island society. To be a regular attendee of certain expensive and vulgar entertainments. To pay for regular re-gen treatments.” He turned to Cale. “I
am
over a hundred and thirty standard years old. Though I'm now aging more naturally once again.”

“What happened?” Cale asked.

Cicero chuckled. “You might imagine some spectacular fall, a scandal, perhaps, or some disastrous business failure.” When Cale shrugged, Cicero went on. “I gave it up, that's what happened. Quite voluntarily.”

“Why?”

The old man waved expansively at the tall buildings. “All that comes with a price. A price I was one day no longer willing to pay.”

“What price?” Cale asked.

Cicero shook his head. “That's not for me to say. The price is different for everyone. For some it's not much of a price at all. For others, the price is truly terrible. You will have to learn for yourself what kind of price you'd pay. And whether you can bear it.”

“Only if I live there,” Cale said. “And I doubt I ever will. I doubt that I can.”

Cicero sighed. “You will live there someday, Cale. Or someplace like it. Someday you'll find a way. At least for a time. I sense an unstoppable drive in you, a drive to experience and understand all that this universe holds.” He nodded more to himself than to Cale. “You'll go.” Then he shrugged as if it was unimportant. “There's someone asking for you down by the canal. A woman.”

“I don't understand. Who?”

“A woman. A woman with a damaged face. She waits in a canoe. She spoke to the guards and asked for you by name, and described you quite accurately. She said you would want to speak with her, although she would not give her name. Do you know this woman?”

Cale shook his head. He felt a growing apprehension, remembering Karimah's words all those months ago about “a woman with a messed-up face” looking for him. Who could this woman be, and what would she want with him?

“I think you should see her,” Cicero advised him. “You should find out who she is and what she wants with you. Then send her away if you wish.”

“I
don't
know who she is,” Cale said. “But I know I don't want to see her.”

“Yes,” Cicero replied, “and that is why you should.”

 

Cale emerged cautiously from the rear of the building, at the canal's edge; the two armed guards looked at him with recognition, but remained silent. Tico tipped his head toward the water below them where a woman sat alone in a finely crafted canoe. Her face was scarred and misshapen and her left eye was clouded and rheumy. A wide swath of silver cut through her otherwise dark auburn hair. Cale did not recognize her.

“You want to talk to me?” he asked.

The woman stood and regarded him, the canoe rocking slightly. “Privately,” she replied.

Wary of her, he walked a ways along the canal, past the end of the building. The woman sat and paddled back to
him and tied up to a gnarled root that broke through the concrete. Cale kept back, a strange distress rising inside him as she disembarked and clambered up the bank on her own. She stood before him, studying his face as he in turn studied hers, searching for some sense of the familiar. He put her age at around forty, though the damage to her face made it difficult to tell. The left side of her head appeared to have been violently crushed and then poorly rebuilt; it was striped with scar tissue, and her mouth was uneven, the corner pulled into a kind of permanent grimace; he wondered if she could see anything at all out of the clouded eye.

“It
is
you,” she said quietly. He thought he could see tears welling in both eyes. “I've been looking for you for years, Cale . . . Cale Alexandros.”

Cale's chest tightened sharply, and a numb sensation spread through his limbs, his knees nearly buckling. Not only from her words, but from her voice, some familiar and painful aspect of it.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Sidonie.”

He felt light-headed and paralyzed, unable to move or speak, as if something terrible would happen to him if he did—collapse, or disintegration. He had to will himself to breathe.

“Do you remember me, Cale?”

“Yes,” he said, voice hoarse and barely audible. “I remember you.”

 

Sidonie sat in the rear of the canoe and paddled while Cale sat in front, facing her. She was taking him to her
home. There was only one paddle, but Sidonie's strokes were deep and smooth and propelled them steadily through the water. They quickly moved from Marlowe Canal to wider, cleaner channels, joining heavier boat traffic. Neither spoke, but Cale wondered if Sidonie's thoughts were as frantic and chaotic as his own.

Cale hardly noticed the city sliding past them; he was trying to hold himself together. Confusion and deep pools of emotion bubbled up in him, threatening to erupt and break him apart—rage and bitterness and an overwhelming despair that had been held down and hidden away for all these years. None of it directed at Sidonie—for her, he felt a painful affection and sorrow—but certainly released by her reappearance in his life.

An hour or so had passed when she pulled along a small dock southeast of The Island. From the dock it was only a short walk along an entertainment market to a four-story slagcrete building a few blocks off the canal. Sidonie led the way up to her apartment on the third floor.

The apartment was small, but had a large balcony filled with plants in pots of all sizes, long planters, hanging baskets. Two chairs were set amid the lush foliage, and she invited Cale to sit in one while she went back inside to make something for them to drink. Still distraught and confused, Cale settled into the chair and breathed in the damp and heavy aroma of the flowers, the pungent scent of herbs. The sun warmed the balcony, and the heat felt good on his skin, almost cleansing.

Sidonie brought out a pot of a hot, spiced beverage called kuma, and she gave him a cup and sat in the other chair, setting the pot on an overturned clay bowl. They sat in silence
for a time, sipping at the kuma and occasionally looking at each other, but not speaking. Cale reflected on old man Feegan's words, telling him his eyes looked old. Yet right now, sitting with Sidonie, he felt at the same time much
younger
than his age, and he did not know how to reconcile those two things. She sat watching him, as if waiting for him to speak first, to ask the first questions.

“What happened to you?” he asked. As soon as he'd spoken he regretted asking the question, though unsure why.

“I don't really remember.” She looked away from him, but there was something in her expression and in her voice that suggested to Cale that she remembered more than she was willing to say. It was then that his own memory returned, like a painful flash of light between his eyes: the men dropping the massive stone on her head. “I was unconscious for a long time, almost dead I guess, and when I came to, I was being cared for by an old couple who lived in the mountains. They'd found me near the wrecked flyer, and when they discovered I wasn't dead they took me in and nursed me. I stayed with them until I was recovered, then I made my way to the Divide, and eventually here to Morningstar.” She turned back to him. “I was trying to find out what happened to your father.”

She left it there, and he knew that she did not have good news about his father, yet he didn't know how he felt about that. “I hardly remember him,” he said, a way of biding time to sort out his feelings, which he knew was an impossible task. “I remember my mother even less.”

“I'm sorry, Cale. It took me a long time to find out what happened. The family ship, the
Exile Prince,
was destroyed, with no survivors.”

“Except for us.”

Sidonie nodded. She paused for a moment, then went on. “Your father told me that if anything should happen to him, I was to go to his brother here in Morningstar. Adanka Suttree. I tried, but I never did find him. I found where he'd lived, I found people who had heard of him, but he seemed to have disappeared around the same time your father was killed. Some of the people I talked to thought Adanka had died, but others thought he'd gone offworld. No one I talked to knew for sure.”

“And you've been here ever since.”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“Searching for you.” She moved her mouth into a sad and distorted smile. “Waiting for you to return to life.”

“All these years? Why?”

“I'm responsible for you.”

Cale shook his head. “I'm responsible for myself.”

“I
was
responsible for you. You were five years old, and you were my charge. I'd been responsible for you since you were born.”

“More than my mother, I think,” Cale said, a numbed anger and resentment tightening his neck and jaw.

“Maybe so,” Sidonie replied. “But you
were
my responsibility, and you still are as far as the family is concerned.”

“
What
family?” Cale asked, struggling to keep his rising anger under control.

“
Your
family. The Alexandros family. You may not know anything about them, but they
are
your family, and now that I've found you, it's time for you to return to them.” She shifted her position, her attention fixed intently on
him. “For several generations, your family was one of the most powerful on two worlds, Cale. Things changed. A series of misfortunes, deliberate or accidental, some poor business decisions. . . . The family was in decline at the time your father came here with us, and since your father's death that decline has steepened. They need you. Your mother needs you.”

“Where were they when
I
needed
them
? When I was a child?”

She turned away from him, and he thought it was because she had no good answer. He was frustrated and angry and confused, and felt guilty because he knew he was hurting Sidonie, but he did not know what else to say or do.

“Why was the
Exile Prince
attacked?” Cale asked.

“I'm not sure,” Sidonie said, still not looking at him. “Something to do with the family business. Competitors, probably. Trying to disrupt a special undertaking of your father's, a clandestine venture of his.”

“Why was
I
on that ship?” he finally asked her. “And you? Why was a five-year-old boy put at risk like that? Why did I grow up on the other side of the Divide alone and abandoned? Why did
you
have to go through all this?”

“You weren't abandoned, Cale. Your father didn't plan that to happen. No one intended it.”

“Explain that to a five- or six-year-old boy being beaten and raised as a slave for a bunch of criminals out in some godforsaken wasteland.”

When Sidonie finally looked back at him, there were tears dripping down her face, streaming from the bad eye and rolling across the scar tissue to hang and then drop from her chin. He ached for her, knowing none of this was her fault.

“Because the family horoscoper told your father that your presence was required for his venture to succeed. A strange reason, maybe an insane reason, but that's what it was, that's why you were on the ship.”

Cale felt bewildered. A horoscoper? He'd heard a bit about horoscopers since he'd been in Morningstar, and he didn't really know what they did or how, but they had sounded even less reliable than Harlock and his visions. He could hardly imagine a powerful family depending on one for advice. Had his life, all those years on the other side of the Divide, been the result of some charlatan's counsel?

Sidonie wiped the tears away, got up and poured them each fresh cups of the kuma, then sat back down. “All right, Cale. Tell me what happened to you over all these years.”

Tell me.
Cale sat motionless and silent, feeling paralyzed. He'd never spoken to anyone about his past, not even Karimah. But as he sat there with a strange electric buzz burning through him, he recognized a powerful urge to speak, and he realized that Sidonie was the only person he could ever imagine talking to about what had happened to him. He
needed
to talk to her.

He began with his earliest memories of life with Petros and the other villagers, and worked slowly and deliberately forward. He told her everything. The sun moved downward until it finally set and the stars began to appear in the sky above them along with the lights of Morningstar, holding back the night. Sidonie heated a stew, which they ate with fresh bread, then made another pot of kuma. They remained out on the balcony, Cale talking and Sidonie listening, until
he reached the day of his life when, while living with the Resurrectionists, a woman with a scarred and misshapen face appeared, wanting to speak to him.