The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 3: Only Lovers Left

• You're Always Haunted (1/2)
• You're Always Haunted (2/2)

Night spread thinly over the world. Zed woke again to find Shana sitting before him, dripping intangible water over the rocks.

"You helped Cynthia," she said. She saw no need for a greeting, though one would have been welcome while he got his bearings. Something was different. "Little Sara said as much, though who isn't talking about it? She says you vindicated her. She won't shut up about it, in fact."

Ghosts gossiped. They had little else to do. The dead would reiterate the strangeness, though there was not enough time for it to spread yet. "Don't exaggerate this."

Shana wouldn't let him dismiss this without a fight. "She's gone. She's stayed gone. That's not nothing, Zed."

"For now," Zed said. "We don't know if she will return or if she was going to fade anyway. It was theater."

Shana paused over something Zed could not read but said, "You don't glow like that if you are coming back." Whatever amusement Shana had held for him faded. "Why are you pretending not to know the importance of what you did?"

Because it wasn't important, he thought. How could it be? "I gave a near-Repeater a pacifier."

"You finished her business. When is the last time you heard that happening for anyone?" It was plain that this was not a rhetorical question or one that she cared to let him leave unanswered. "Are you trying to finish your own? Is that your plan?"

"I don't have a plan. I decided to fit two pieces together. Tab A went into Slot B. I did not reunite her with her baby, simply handed her something to occupy her. She would have been content with a doll if I could have found one. You know that."

If Shana knew this, she would never admit it. After saying it, Zed himself wasn't sure he believed this either. It couldn't be a doll. Cynthia was stuck, but she wasn't stupid.

Shana didn't huff because she did not have the breath for it, but her nose flared. "And the baby, Zed?"

He felt less cohesive at this question, as though it had been a long night and he would fade into the earth for a week. "She needed a mother. Any would do. Two puzzle pieces I jammed together because they were close enough."

"You helped two pass on."

"We've already passed on," he said. Giving it thought, he revised, "You can't know that."

"You cannot know that you didn't," Shana retorted. "But let's put that aside for the moment. I want to know what you expect to get out of it. Do you mind clearing that up? Then I will leave you alone."

She wouldn't, he knew. She would pursue him. This pursuit did not seem the worse use of his hours. "Nothing. I did not do this with any intentions beyond occupying some time and seeing what might happen."

"And what did happen?"

She looked proud at this prompting, as though it were not the simplest next step in the conversation.

"They glowed. They vanished," he said. "You know all this, clearly. Are you satisfied now?"

He knew rumors of what happened when business finished. He heard stories too of flying ghost whales, unsteady specters of ankylosaurs. There were tales of cars driving Mobius strip circuits, of whole buildings intact, or living animals dwelling in cool caves deep in the earth. He heard more about angelic visitations daily from the hopeful dead than he ever heard in church. No one mentioned demons. This world was too close to Hell to allow even its denizens' names purchase on insubstantial lips. As the dead, stories were about as close to solidity as they could retain from night to night.

Rumors here served the same they did for the living: a focus for imagination, a means of making the inexplicable less frightening, small morality plays.

Shana was nude, a rarity among the dead, who were otherwise in a familiar or final outfit. Some tried to change this, either through focus or holding found objects. Few could do these even to dawn. The effort toward pretense was exhausting.

Yet she was nude, looking damp, with deep purple rosebud nipples and a pubis soft as rabbit fur. There was no arousal now. Her nudity had made her more a landmark than a celebrity, for no one who saw her could fail to be surprised. In a world of feigning living, she looked as vulnerably free of it as one could.

She was beautiful, if just for being unusual. Likely she had been in life, her nose wide and flat, her forehead high, but he did not know how to judge this beauty now. He remembered in tatters what he had been raised to find attractive so that a phenotype would perpetuate to the next generation. It had no relevance here.

Little was beautiful in this world but seeing her reminded him of what it was to take a breath.

She did not care for conversation. She tended toward shade from the moonlight behind the remains of buildings, or the ideas of where buildings would be, the wide round spaces where the dead did not walk. She stared out at anyone who dared to let their gaze linger too long. The dead had nothing to hide, no embarrassment, no pride or shame. She didn't care they looked, but she had no reason not to return their leers. Let them taste some of the nakedness she could not herself escape.

He asked her once what she imagined her unfinished business might be. It was a common topic once one assumed basic intimacy.

She guessed that it might have been to wear pajamas or be more careful getting out of the shower. Either way, it boiled down to not being punished forever for a momentary error, something almost Biblical to the idea bothering Zed.

"Did you think I could help you?" Zed asked her.

"No. I want to help."

It was as though her words were a foreign language. "Help with what?"

"Others. Their unfinished business. I want to do what I can."

Why would she come to him with this? "You don't need me to do that."

"I'd like to need you," she said. "I don't want to do it alone. We are supposed to do this together. I can feel it."

He was being railroaded.

He could vanish from the conversation. It would be rude, but it was not a rare discourtesy. "I won't be any more help than you would be on your own."

"You are the only one who has ever succeeded that I've heard of in millennia. Then, it was always two of us, maybe more, figuring it out together. I don't remember the last time that happened." She looked out over the desolate earth. "It was never someone else helping people who could do them no good. I don't know why that didn't occur to me. We're a selfish species."

Zed followed her gaze to try to see what she did or how she did, but he didn't offer another defense.

"I am so exhausted haunting empty dunes," Shana said. "Let's do something with our nights."

"Why do you want to do this?"

"The same reason you do," she answered, her brown gaze sharp. "Even if you aren't going to admit it yet."

They didn't start that night or the next, though he kept to himself. He felt the sight of the dead on him, scrutinizing him, knowing what he had done. Was this what Shana dealt with nightly?

He passed her on his way to nowhere in specific and thought her looking was expectant. She did not approach or speak to him. He couldn't hope she had forgotten their conversation. He hadn't, but it made him tense and cautious.

Soon, they would talk again, and then he would have to begin this work with her in earnest.

"Lost lovers," she said one night, sans greeting.

He did not register her presence until Shana was beside him, the purview of the dead. Sneaking up on someone was considered impolite, but manners were a shibboleth now.

Zed had been working on a cairn but managed only to move small rocks barely worth calling pebbles, keeping his strength in reserve, somehow weak.

He did not care to pretend he couldn't deduce what she meant. "You assume that both pairs of lovers have returned as spirits." He didn't ask if she knew this. It would take a murder-suicide for that or a brutal crime cutting their lives short together. Then, the dead would have gossiped. A tragedy might make them ghosts, but its resolutions were too pat to have been prolonged. Lost lovers would have finished their business long before the world died.

"I am too old to be either idealistic or stupid, Zed," she said, some genuine irritation behind her words, a sneer to her lips. "No, there are plenty who died wanting of another's love. We just have to put them next to one another."

"Love is not a fungible. If I were in love, I would not take a substitution."

"Then you don't remember being in love," she said. "The best way to get over one person is to get under another."

The idea seemed ghastly. "These are the deceased, not the dumped. They are mourning an aborted lifetime with someone. A specific someone."

"Who is not coming back," she pointed out. "They are no better than Cynthia, even if they are sentient. If my other option were to wander through centuries, I would look for another date to the dance."

"We can't--" It had been so long since anyone spoke to him with this fire that he had a chance to defend his position. He had to recollect what he did think. "We are not capable of love."

She dismissed this without a second's pause. "We are as capable as we have ever been. We are only jaded and confused. This is going to work."

There would be no winning this, and maybe he didn't want to win. "So, you want to matchmake?"

"As an experiment," Shana said.

"Why would it be a couple, though? There are so many kinds of love. To focus on--"

"We are creatures of love," she interrupted. "You may not believe it now, but the whole human race only went on because they loved one another. We were better than the animals because love came before sex, to build families and defend them against the world. It has to be love." Shana looked at the dim horizon. "Cynthia wanted a baby to love. The baby, nameless thing, needed someone to love her. It's love, Zed. That's the key. That's how any of us get to move on."

Zed wondered at contradicting her, bringing up rape and selfish genes, but she interrupted again.

"Love is all we have anymore."

Shana began asking around for suitable souls, but there was only one real option for Zed, one dead woman who would be most willing to follow him on this folly.

He did not bring Shana with him, and she did not try to pursue him when he left her side. She might trust him. It could have been as likely that there was nowhere he could go that she could not find him.

He returned to the group he once watched as they reenacted traumas and forgiveness that may have never belonged to them.

Where once it was ten, he now found several thousand.

On the edge, his cairns had scattered as though someone had stumbled into them. It must have been the wind. Zed hesitated, wanting to rebuild his work instead of continuing this errand.

He could not find Renee within the throng. Twenty nuclei acted out plays surrounded by their observant crowds. It was cacophonous whispering. The edge of them was sharp, where a building that was no longer there stopped them, a larger stage whose players had yet to arrive.

Some of the dead recognized him and parted, though they didn't dare to speak directly, only letting him hear snatches of legends. From what they said, he could already note that exaggeration had taken over. He wouldn't be real soon. It would become something that no one believed had happened except those who had been there to serve as witnesses. Even they would start to shake in their resolve.

"I was right, you know?"

He heard the tiny voice over the quiet din of the dead. In the space of parting, he saw Sara, her hip cocked, an elbow akimbo.

"You said that we would vanish when the world ended, Sara," he reminded her. "You did not say I would become deified for giving Cynthia a baby."

"I was vindicated," she said, "because you don't believe this is all nothing. You think -- even if you aren't going to say so -- that we are something that has not ceased happening. You think we will go on. I don't know what took you so long to show up again."

He gestured to the crowd. "When did this happen?"

"Months ago, a year. After what you did."

A year.

Sara read his instant panic to the letter. "You just appeared again, didn't you? Some of them thought you were out there still, a folk hero righting wrongs and saving souls. You were asleep, and no one told you."

A year. He had helped a near-Repeater and lost a year of his existence. Shana knew, and she had not cared to tell him because then he might not be so willing to play this game.

She tapped her foot. "Is that why you are here, visiting the group again?" The way she asked this, he knew she was goading him. Had Shana already told her of the mission? Who didn't know what was going on?

"I want to find Renee."

Sara gave a "hm" through her nose, a sound of genuine surprise. "What are you going to do with her?"

"I want to talk with her."

Sara shook her head, signaling she was unsatisfied. "You never want to talk with Renee. You think what she is doing is silly." Her lips turned up. "Except you don't now, do you? No, you think she knows something."

"I don't think she knows something," said Zed, regretting coming here, desperate to know what happened in his absence. A year and he not only had not been forgotten but inspired this insanity. "I still want to see her."

"If you don't think she knows something you want to know, it must mean" -- she grinned like one who has perfected a look of "who, me?" innocence while oceans evaporated and life ended -- "Zed, are you trying to finish her business for her?"

There was no point in lies, not when experiencing so strange a truth. "I am not trying to finish anyone's business," he answered, which was far from a lie, "but I have agreed to help Shana. There is a lot I don't understand right now, but I aim to."

"If it had been me who asked you, not Shana, would you have agreed?"

Sara wore tight leggings and a loose top from an era Zed assumed would have made her ghost thousands of years his junior, but she had retained the impudent authority of her youth, even with the weight of knowledge that came from being dead so long. He imagined what it would have been to be charged with duty by her and decided it would have been insulting.

"Do you know where Renee is?" he asked again.

"Yes, of course I do. And you do too, or you could know soon enough, but you are wasting time talking to me. Haven't you wasted enough?"

"Talking to you is not a waste of time," he said.

"That's good of you to say. I am coming with you."

Was it worth it to argue?

Renee was on her fifteenth partner of the night. Renee's belief was not that her tack was wrong but that she had yet to land on the right combination of partner, words, scenario, and emotion. It could never be as simple as looking into the eyes of someone you never met and gasping, "I love you." You didn't, and you couldn't. You both knew that. You had to work yourself up to where you could at least remember what it was to feel betrayed by an unfaithful lover and come to a realization about the nature of forgiveness. Or it was about someone lost far out at sea or in the vacuum of space who one needed to find. Or accept that a lover died before their time. Or any one of a thousand variations.

Renee knew some of her scene partners well. She did not love them. She did not love anyone she could recall beyond a vague sense that she should love and had yet to remember quite what.

She had tried to approximate sex, a promiscuous effort of imagining her clothing off with man after man after woman after man. It had left her substance sheer, bringing her no closer to her ultimate climax, her last little death.

Zed thought it polite to wait until this partner had forgiven her for having performed a sex act on the other person's best friend while he was driving.

Renee finished. She waited perfunctorily. Nothing happened. She and the man nodded and returned to their corners so others could begin their dance.

He did not have the chance to ask her before she told Zed she was going with him. She had been waiting for him this long year, the savior of the dead.

"Is that why you are tagging along, Sara?"

Sara offered a moue. Few things vexed her more than being treated or spoken to as though she were her age at death. Now, they were equals in the world. All old beyond counting, having learned everything accessible.

"Zed isn't going to do a damn thing to help me," she said, returning to her even expression. "He is going to tolerate me, and I am going to watch as he watched you embarrass yourself for the last century." She pulled at the hem of her tunic. "I miss when you had orgies."

It wasn't a century. He couldn't know how long it had been, but applying numeracy to time had become nothing more than a figure of speech.

Renee shrugged, unbothered by the insult, knowing that it came only as a subtle retort for saying Sara was tagging along.

"How will we do this?" asked Renee. "Do you know where I might find a suitable match?"

Zed did not, but he trusted Shana would be full of ideas when next he found her.

She remained elsewhere for a week more while Renee went about her futile business. Did she realize that Zed must know by now that he had not been gone a night but a year? Or was she busy elsewhere? Or sleeping her own sleep?

She found him nights after. He asked without preamble, "Why didn't you tell me I had lost so much time?"

"Time isn't ours to lose," she said, "and I did not want you to think twice about what I was asking."

He tried to find anger within him, but the dead are a pragmatic people. Hating her would not give him back what he lost, and it had not been shaved from his mortal life. It was not her fault this happened. It may not even be his fault, as the sleep of the dead is unpredictable.

"You waited all this time?"

Shana nodded. "Not at first, when I thought you would reappear, and I could ask you. Then, when you remained gone, I kept my vigil for you the first hours after sunset."

If her omission required penance, she had paid it upfront. "Did you find anyone for Renee?"

She smiled. "I knew you'd go to her." Then, the smile dropped. "I don't know. I could point her toward as desperate a man or woman, but how would that be different than what she has been?"

Zed had considered this. "She didn't have hope for this before." He hesitated to say more, but it sounded twee without fullness. "She did not have someone who believed it would work and who did not want it for his own good."

"So, you are the missing factor?" She hugged him to her. He thought for a second that he felt the memory of water on her skin soak into his clothing, then he didn't. "You are getting quite the ego, savior of the dead," she teased.

So, that was not a phrase that had sprung out of Renee's mind. How unpleasant.

For weeks after, they would find Renee and play therapist to her and whatever bachelor or bachelorette consented to the sessions. It would last half the night, trying to unearth whatever psychological roadblocks might be interfering. Whenever they seemed on the verge of a breakthrough, Renee would fade. They soon learned that they could always find her back with the group, acting out a new play. She would make apologies and, for a few nights, agreed to return. Then they could not find Renee any longer.

She hadn't resolved her business, they knew. Sara told them that Renee was still around. "She is too used to her routine," Sara suggested. "She is stubborn, or she no longer has the desire to move on." The notion of it made Sara's lips purse. "We'll ask her again. She'll come to her senses."

For another month, Sara followed Zed and Shana as they walked the earth, trying to fit together uneven edges. As matchmakers, they were adequate. To their credit, members of the dead had companionship they lacked prior, and those who met Zed regarded him with gratitude and awe, to his chagrin.

No one found their business finished, though very few complained that he had not catalyzed what had been impossible as long as they could remember.

Sara faded from them after this. In part, she grew tired of the hopelessness of this activity. The rest was that they could not match her with someone who would distract her from the numbness of being, consigned as she was to always look like a child. She did not want to exist in a universe where anyone's unfinished business was that they never fell in love with a preteen.

Zed did not begrudge her. He had to want to believe this mission had a purpose, that it was more than an excuse to occupy his time now. He did not in his heart believe this, but he wanted to, and that was almost enough.

Shana made no complaints, and he willed her attitude to be infectious.

The night came when they were farther than they had been before, but they didn't notice for the walking. There was something more exhausting about walking without the use of muscles. Being physical meant only gravity and friction. Walking so much as a ghost took substance out of every part of you.

Their newest patron was Vivaan, a warm-skinned man in a robin's-egg blue kurta embroidered in gold. Vivaan told them a story of his lost love, arranged by his parents and hers an unknowable time ago. Zed doubted much of it was true. It sounded too dramatic, too grand, too precise in its recollection, but there was no means of true contradiction.

To Shana, it remained a simple equation, though one she had been so far unable to solve. She asked him what he did remember, or imagine, of his arranged bride-to-be, who became more beautiful and pristine the longer Vivaan had to think on it. Then she asked the dead until she found someone who met some of the qualities -- no one outside a goddess herself could satisfy them all.

Shana declared the two would be married. After that, she introduced them, saying that this was the proper way these things were done, though she couldn't know this for sure. This might be an easier feat than those that went before. Many assumed they would love someone first, then marry. Vivaan and his bride-to-be Adhira knew that love could better come after marriage.

There was no priest, of course. There might be somewhere, but they didn't matter at the moment. As usual, Shana had Zed conduct the ceremony. Then they all waited for something to happen.

"It's okay," said Vivaan. "I didn't expect it." His tone was so conciliatory that Zed felt if anything worse for this failure, thinking for a moment that it might have gone better if he could have found a reason in himself to believe it could work this time. Was it only his lack of faith that made this unsuccessful? If disbelief were enough to turn a victory into a failure, the dead had it in spades.

"If you want directions to the next one needing your help," said Vivaan, "you could talk to the angel."

Shana intruded before Zed could dismiss this, as he was going to. "The what?"

"Oh. There is an angel in that cave over there."

"You've seen this angel?" she asked, her dispiritedness evaporating.

"No. No one has seen the angel and returned. I didn't want to take the chance," said Vivaan. "Better to stay out here."

"Then how," asked Zed, "do you know there is an angel in there?"

"The way you know anything," said Shana, excited by the proposition. "Someone had to go in there and come out again to tell the tale. Right?"

She turned to Vivaan, mistaking him a moment for the first rays of dawn. Vivaan glowed to full brilliance and then was gone.

Adhira remained, on the verge of tears, then vanished not in the way of finished business but of the distraught and hopeless.

"You have to go into the cave," said Shana.

"I don't have to do anything of the sort."

"Maybe that's your business to finish. You must go into the cave. Vivaan finished his business telling you. That's all he was waiting to do for many thousands of years."

She thought he had an ego. "Or I am destroyed by what is in that cave."

"Or you are destroyed," she said, not giving much weight to the possibility, "but you took the chance. I don't think you will be destroyed. Would you mind if you were, though?"

Zed gave the cave entrance a pensive look. It had been a long time since he minded anything much beyond relieving his boredom. This would at least be interesting, and he would not exist to mind if he were wrong.