Angel's Tide (Theole's Story)

It was impossible to say at what point his life had become untenable. Randall simply knew that it had. The cold beat at him; the wind laughed at him, and the pain just sat there chewing slowly with needle sharp teeth.

He looked up from the sidewalk. Pairs of legs passed him by, their owners not looking; the snow swirled about his legs and their thin blanket and settled to the earth and him without melting. There was no change in the cup before him. There was no food in the bag next to him. There were no warmer clothes in the pack behind him.

He imagined he could hear the slight crackling tinkle as his flesh began to freeze. The pain was fading, replaced by a vacuum; a bad sign, but not one he could do anything about.

There really was only one way out of this, and unfortunately it required him to get up and expend energy, energy he wasn't sure he had. Ice crystals were beginning to accumulate on his beard, a scraggly growth of three or four months now caked with dirt and ice and saliva.

The subway might be warm.

That's what Old Norm had said, before he disappeared some weeks before. The subway. Transit, they were calling it now, the enormous stylized icon appearing on the entrance stairways and kiosks. Struggling, Randall sat up, gathering his limbs about him as one might gather belongings; they had no feeling other than a vague sense of belonging.

Just like he once had.

Tears came, despite his thirst and the biting cold; their salt prevented them from freezing long enough for the tracks down his face to turn icy cold with their passage. Belonging. He had. His memory was vague; there was so much missing, stolen by the cold and by the alcohol. Brain cells dying in flourescent illusions of warmth; liver failing slowly under the barrage of ethanol and God knows what. Oh, for a drink, now.

Sometimes, when he tried quite hard, he could see faces; three of them. One was Natalia. One was Edwin. One was Kelly. Wife, Son, Daughter, faces, now, illusions dangled before him in the miasma of starvation, cold and post-alcoholic toxicity. It had been so warm. So warm at the beach.

Golden sand that beckoned them; warmed their feet and relaxed their muscles as the four of them had laid out the blanket and their lunch, eating before subsiding into the lazy nap of the post-prandial afternoon.

He woke to screaming; unknownst to him, he moaned now, saliva dropping from his beard as he stared unseeing past the hurrying commuters who paid him scant notice. Rolling off the blanket, he'd seen Ed thrashing in the surf, some few meters out; his face was blotched and distorted. Kelly, smaller and younger, nine years to Ed's twelve, was running through the surf towards him, and their mother was halfway to the water. Randall lurched upright out of sleep with the cold shock of fear for his son, and loped after Natalia.

Edwin vanished beneath the water with nary a sound, his screaming ceasing, as Kelly suddenly screamed and fell, sliding impossibly swiftly out towards the ocean.

Rip tide, was all Randall had time to think, before Natalia threw herself into the tide as well. His thoughts stopped, and the cold impact of the salt water enveloped him, bringing involuntary paralysis for a moment. When he recovered, he could feel the surging rush of the tide propelling him back up the beach. Edwin's head was barely visible, some meters out; his struggling was weaker. Of Kelly there was no sign. Natalia surfaced; she'd always been the strongest swimmer, and called out for her children as she stroked powerfully towards them.

Randall felt the tides stop, and his feet hit sand. He turned to gauge distance, hoping to avoid the main rush of the ebb.

He never saw the branch that hit him in the head.

He never saw his family again.

Waking, he found himself in an ambulance, with people clustered around; trying to call for Nat and the children, he clumsily pawed at the oxygen mask. There was a hissing, and the world ebbed away, sliding under itself like the water had with sand grains twirling in heretofore crystal space, obscuring the view; Randall could see them spinning in from the edges of his vision, and the light receded down the spectrum from blue to green and down into deeper jade and into black and then there was nothing-

-and then he was on the street, shivering, sniffling, hating the dream, wanting to die.

They wouldn't let him. He begged and pleaded, but they were inflexible; they restrained him when he fought, and drugged him when he withdrew, and shouted at him when he sank into catatonia.

Then he was free, and in his home, turning over a cheap ring that Kelly had given him on the way to the beach. A single crystal set in some plated metal.

His family was still dead.

The pain wasn't locatable inside him. He just knew that the Scotch would find it; the warmth went everywhere, didn't it? It did. The pain retreated slightly before the onslaught of the alcohol, and he drank another.

And another.

It only took three months for the safety nets that modern people build around themselves to fail; the family to stop answering the calls from emergency services, the friends to stop opening their doors, and the doctors to look at his empty bank account and his lapsed insurance and to gently shake their heads.

When, in the end, he found himself on the street, he cried with perverse joy; his utter loneliness meant that there was no-one left to stop him from his descent.

The alcohol continued. He remembered being amazed at how easily one could procure a drink even when flat broke and homeless; in a brief moment of clarity, he wryly noted that his standards were sinking at a rate possibly even faster than his finances; as he swilled the dregs from a bottle found in a dumpster, he would have laughed, but there was no room through the pain.

He'd kept it at bay. He seemed about to finally triumph; with the cold and the sleet and the wind, he'd achieved a numbness of the body, and soon there would come a numbness of the spirit, brought on by the black.

His body, beggar traitor, betrayed him. Randall felt himself struggle to his feet and stagger off down the block. Raising his head, he could see the brightly lit sign of the subway, but try as he might his feet would not turn aside, nor would his legs throw him down.

At the base of the steps, he shuffled over to the turnstile, praying that he wouldn't have the strength to climb them. The gate buzzed, and old, old reflexes fired; he caught it, pulled it open. Looking over at the token booth, he saw the clerk giving him a sympathetic smile. It seemed rude to offer her the angry, anguished scream he felt; his face smiled weakly back, and he shuffled inside.

The subway was warm. It was dry.

His mind sought the third rail, but there was none on the newer systems. There was only the procession of stolid induction rings, and the everpresent dirt and grime of the underworld. Tears began to flow down his cheeks again. A light grew at the end of the platform as the Transit capsule began to enter the station. He was perhaps one-fifth of the way from the tunnel mouth from which the capsule exited to the other end of the platform, near to where it typically stopped. Although smaller than the trains they had replaced, the capsules ran far more frequently; occasionally they stopped in the station in strings of two or more, their induction fields hissing slightly as they hovered over the floor of the tunnel with maglevs humming.

One fifth of the way.

The capsule was still moving at perhaps five to ten meters per second.

Randall smiled as he felt himself step forward into air.

Then there was blackness, blessedly, and the pain vanished.

Silence.

"Nat?"

No response.

"Ed? Kel? I'm here…" Randall coughed, and realized his eyes were closed. Doing the only logical thing, he opened them. His first emotion, he later recalled, was deep disappointment.

He was lying on the floor of the Web. The capsule was nowhere in sight, nor were any stations visible in the immediate vicinity. The rings in the area were silent, indicating that no capsules were near. He sat up.

There was a boy sitting against the ring across from him. He was clad in leather pants and a leather jacket with an amazing quantity of metal studs embedded in it. Despite the gloom, he wore a large pair of mirrored sunglasses. His arms were crossed, and he appeared to be watching Randall, so Randall addressed him.

"I'm not dead?"

The boy grinned, teeth a shocking white, and shook his head.

"Damn." Randall felt the sobs come, and gave in; he lowered his head down to the ground again, letting it fall the last few centimeters, and relished the pain. His sinuses clogged instantly, and tears ran from his eyes down his temples to drop from his earlobes.

There was a pat on his leg. He looked up again.

The boy had moved; was kneeling at his side, looking down. As Randall watched, the boy extended a hand towards his forehead. He had time to see a brief flash of actinic light and reflection, a silver flare-

…with all the reasons gone defenses gone desires gone the Randall that was blew away in fragments, shards, wisps of dusty uselessness under the cold pure light that shone upon him, he couldn't look up, he had to look up, he looked- there was nothing, just a glare and a sharp sudden pain in his fingers which he couldn't see but the glare was beating on his eyelids and then there was the sound of bass drums and imagination crashing up against the flat granular plane of reality and he watched the web curve around him in helical shapes of dreams and nightmare before the boy, Shan, he knew, Shan Shan Shan, removed his hand and the silver flowed out back with it and the web was thee and it was solid under him and he was sitting against the wall, naked as a newborn and feeling only the grit beneath his feet and the pain in his hands.

He looked down. There was a small crystal in his hands, attached to a small circle of cheap metal; he'd been clutching it, and the crystal edges had drawn some small amount of blood. Kelly. The name came unbidden, and came alone; the pain had gone. He stood without pain, without cramp; he looked down, to see his skin smooth and unwrinkled, the trials of the past months gone. Kelly? He called, within himself, and he heard an answer, wordless and laughing. Tears began again, for different reasons. Nat? Ed? They called back to him as well, in wordless voices, soundless cries; he could point to them, now; he knew where they were.

The boy tugged his arm, his face questioning. Randall felt the tears falling on his skin and said, "I know where they are now. I can feel where they are."

The boy touched his chest with one hand, palm out; there was a flash of silver thought; testing it in his mind, closing his eyes, he saw the endless plain of the ocean, blue and ruffled; this time, however, he could hear the laughter of his family from beyond it. He knew where he was. His being was knowing that, knowing where, knowing the water; memories from his history came to him unbidden, showing him the instrument that measured the span of his world.

"Theodolite."

The word was alien. The boy shrugged. Randall smiled through his tears and made the image of the surveying tool, touched the boy; he was rewarded with a grin and a nod. The boy tapped his chest.

"That's me?"

Another nod.

"Theole."

The boy took both his hands and brought his face close to Randall's - no, to Theole's, Theole realized, and then pointed to the ground. Theole looked down to see a rivulet of water passing between his feet, runoff down the tunnel.

He scooped up a bit of it in a palm.

It called to him of the ocean. He knew where the water was in relation to the ocean; where his family was. He could feel the connection to them in the water resting in his palm, and with a sudden effort to hold them there in his mind forever he closed his hand about the water. There was a flash the color of the ocean on a sunny day from high above; a crack of displaced space and air, and when he opened his hand-

There lay a small shape; the water within the clear smooth shell, sealed in; he could still feel his family laughing and calling to him through the glasslike substance that held the water in his palm. It was glowing deep shades of lapis.

"Theole of the Blue."

The boy grinned, then cocked an ear; nodding, he leapt to the nearest induction ring and scaled its edge. He waved Theole back. The latter moved to the wall, hearing nothing; but soon a slash of light from down the tunnel moved across him, and he understood. He sheltered the phial with his body, watching; as the Capsule passed, the boy -Shan- dropped from the ring and vanished in its wake with a flaring of silver and color; although Theole felt noting but the wind of its passage, his hand warmed. When he looked down, the phial was glowing.

Regarding it thoughtfully, he wandered off into the tunnel in search of clothing, warmth, and explanations.

Two out of three wasn't bad.