NOVEL NEXT 83: The Teardrop Hotel
RYST
"Peydran Madrano," I spat at the video in front of me. "Peydran Madrano, you tell me right now. WHY DID YOU TRAIN SO HARD AFTER YOUR SURGERY? You tell me the truth, and tell it to me right now!" I demanded.
He looked stonily at me. The guile was gone. The lighthearted best friend was gone. "I'm not messing around, Ryst. I don't play around when it comes to the safety of all I love. I don't care what you think or what you want. I'll do what is necessary and have no regrets. Can you live with that?"
I stepped back, stunned. My day had been too loaded with feeling. Nayth's "Tempest" guitar song still had me floating away, and Peydran was not Peydran. Was that why I could never hear his mind or feel his thoughts? Who was this man? He wasn't my Peydran.
I stepped closer to the video and peered in through the screen, looking for more. Ren was right there next to him. He wasn't grinning; he was agreeing. I glanced over at Nayth and saw the same resolve on his face. I stepped back away from them all, just taking them in. Seeing something new. A new edge of a prism I hadn't known I'd been looking at.
Songs had different levels of complexity.
Dances had different levels of complexity.
People had different levels of complexity.
My eyes wandered over all of their faces. "But, why? Why would you think you should hide this from me?" I asked softly. "Nayth, why? Do you think I can't tolerate violence? Do you think me incapable of hate?"
Nayth crumpled and pulled me to him.
"Ryst, I needed a reason," Peydran explained patiently. "I woke up from cybernetic surgery screaming in horror with visions of the amputation playing over and over. All I wanted to do was run away and never think about it again. But I had to. I HAD to find a way to look at my arm that'd been severed and had metal grafted onto it. I had to, and in order to do that, I came up with a reason: vengeance."
"I thought I was an avenger at first, but I wasn't. I wasn't going to go on a mission to Atraxis 7 and kill Darwin, Ryst. I just knew that if he ever came for you again, I would stop him and not think twice about it. But then I read a single word on a page, 'OPEN.' And my whole life changed. I stopped thinking of the augment as a thing, and it became my metal hand. I found a way to love all of me so I could love someone else with all of me—mechanical appendage included."
"It doesn't really matter exactly what my motivation was four years ago because all of it took me exactly where I needed to be. To becoming a grown-up man who can love with his whole being and be loved in return. It's not about violence or hate. It was always, always about love."
"But, no, I wasn't going to talk to you about it. It was something that I needed deep down inside of myself, and it was something far more complicated than I realized. I've only just figured all this out since Ren. And that's only been a few days," Peydran sighed.
"Do you want to know everything, Ryst? Do you want me to tell you all about it? It doesn't really matter anymore. I can tell you everything. Tell you about Punished by Peydran."
I sighed too. "Peydran, I don't care. I— everybody's allowed to have private thoughts in their own minds. You know I never, never wanted to be a mind-reader. But," I turned to Nayth, pointing at him accusingly. "What's with all the soft smiles and hidden laughter and strangling?"
Ren spluttered out a chuckle that was half snort.
Nayth grinned at Ren. "Don't worry, Ren, I don't have secret fantasies about strangling your lover in bed."
"Hummm, the possibilities," Ren said giving Nayth a sizing-up glance.
"Hah humh hunh," Nayth chuckled deep, rich, full baritone and all drippy sex. "I thought Madrano was scheming something sending you to Sturm with a plot like The Very Normal Thank You. I was pissed because I knew my sister would see me on a date with a beautiful woman. . . She and mom are coming tomorrow, by the way—"
Ren clapped, "Freya! Oh boy! Can you get that on video? That's better than stream shows!"
Peydran covered his mouth and pulled him away from the camera.
Nayth continued, "I knew that as soon as I left the restaurant, my sister would never let me hear the end of it. Even if you were some stars-forsaken harpy from the backwater of nowhere, Freya would've tied me down and yoked me to you, and nowhere in the 9 Galaxies would I have been safe from her. So, I blamed Madrano, and decided that I'd get through the dinner by thinking of strangling him in thanks for all she'd would put me through. It kept a calm, happy smile on my face the whole time."
Stolen story; please report.
Ren giggled, and Peydran joined in, muffling snorts of laughter.
I covered my mouth, laughing and rocking back and forth. Looking at all three of them. "You're all fucking ridiculous, you know that? What's wrong with you three?"
Ren patted the air with his hands raised. "Hey, hey, I'm not a secret assassin. I have fantasies, but they aren't murderous. Mostly, I think cuddle parties are in our future. So, all these threats of violence—"
"You want me to catch a starliner right now and come over for a cuddle, little buddy?" Nayth said in a low, rumbling, seductive voice. Holy hells. I wanted him to say that to me as soon as this video ended.
"No, Nayth, I want you to hold me in the moonlight in a giant glass teardrop," Ren said with an innocent little smile.
Several minutes of side-splitting laughter later I rasped, "Really, Ahtah, what is The Teardrop about? I mean really?"
Nayth hadn't stopped laughing when he choked out, "Trust me, I'm the butt of endless jokes around the galaxy. I'll never hear the end of it, and I don't care. That's one of the things, Methela, the things I just knew. I was always 100% sure that I had to build The Teardrop Hotel."
"It's a terrible waste. The thing will never, never turn a profit. It's a giant glass structure in the hot sun of Floria with a moonlight garden in it for fucks' sakes. It's the stupidest, most ridiculous idea of a building. It fries in the heat of the day and costs ten fortunes to keep cool. But do you think you would have found me— Madrano, would you have found me if I hadn't built a giant monument to pre-cum?"
It was minutes before we all caught our breath enough to speak. "So, seriously? I mean—"
Nayth shook his head, "No, I never knew what it was for. I don't know why I'm doing what I do. I just know that there are things I need to do, and when I feel that way, I can't afford to doubt it. I am certain with all that I am that it is what I must do. The only person who never questioned The Teardrop was my assistant Rahel because he thinks that everything I touch turns to gold. He still doesn't doubt The Teardrop because despite 5 years of financial loss, he believes that someday I'll turn it into gold. But he doesn't know that you are more priceless than gold, and I don't give ten fucks for The Teardrop's financial success. It doesn't matter to me; it served it's purpose, and that purpose was far, far greater than anything I could have ever anticipated."
Peydran piped in, "Wait, Nayth, are you Talented, like Ryst and Ren? Did you foresee us trying to find The Teardrop on stream? Did you know we'd be looking for it?"
"I don't know what 'Talented' is supposed to mean. I'm not like Ryst. I don't perceive a giant tangle of the threads of the future. I'm not trying to unravel the fabric of reality in my mind, I just know that I'm supposed to do something, and I do it, even though I don't understand why or where it will lead. Do you call that 'Talented?'"
Peydran sighed, "I don't know if any of us has words for what is going on." Shaking his head, he continued, "I don't know if people would say that Ren is Talented, but he's clearly attuned to something more than I am."
"I don't know what I'm doing either," Ren spoke up. "It's not what Nayth said, but it kind of is. It's just music. I sing it, I play it, I record it, and I compose it for other people to play. I don't know that it means something. It just is," Ren summarized with a nod.
"And I think that's true for you and also a much bigger metaphor, Ren," I interjected. "Because everything you just said is true in an absolute sense. But when we think of what music is. . . Well, it's greater than the notes on the page or the sound coming through a speaker, isn't it?"
"It's the emotion you felt the first time you heard the song. It's what you thought about the second time you heard it. It's the memory of the first kiss you had listening to that song. It's the smell of the chocolate the anniversary you made love while that song played. It's the friend you buried the day you played that song again. It's every memory and every sensation you associate with the song."
"And not just you, but every listener, every musician who records it, every mother who hums it to a restless child. It's notes on a page and sound through the speaker, and it's the sum of every human experience of that song. As though the sound itself is feeling. I barely even know what I'm saying right now, but I know I'm saying something that is too deep for words. It's like Nayth's knowing—"
I broke off then, because I was holding my head, and then I whispered, "Somebody write this down. It's important— I see a line. It's a vivid line of light. I think it's magenta, but then it looks teal. And it's not a straight line anymore. There are waves in it. No, there's two lines now," I panted as I spit the words out.
"Two lines that are wavy light, and I can't tell if they're wrapped around each other, but it doesn't look like it. It's not a double helix. It's just these overlapping wavy lines. And that's important. It's about sounds and wavy lines."
I stopped, stood up, and blinked rapidly. Shaking my head, I focused on a pad Nayth held up showing me where Peydran had pushed images onto the screen. There were several depictions of waves.
"Any of those, Ryst?" Peydran asked.
"Um," I grunted. "Yes, and no. Electromagnetic waves? Longitudinal waves? Sound displacement waves? It's like, that's all correct, but also not correct." I closed my eyes.
"Hold on. That helps me focus. We have to think of something different. Not think like medicas inventing an ultrasound. Think like Ren. Think like my dreams. There's a lotus flower, just a bud, and it's made of moonlight. That's not just symbolic!" I got excited. There was something new to see about that!
"So, is the flower literally made of moonlight? Oh," I clarified for them, "I dreamt that. Of a single lotus that was glowing, as though it was made of moonlight. What is light, guys? What is light!! Yes, light is a wave, isn't it? But it's a feeling— looking at a flower made of moonlight, it's a feeling. Like listening to a song. The sound itself is feeling. And I hope you're writing this down because I'm going to—." My eyes blinked a few times, then I felt arms around me as I fell into darkness.
Dream Journal
My feet were on something rough, and in front of my toes there was nothing. There was nothing around me except for a lack of something. As I leaned forward, I saw far below a distant green pool of light. As I fell towards it, my arms went above my head, and my feet pointed behind me. My right hand palmed the back of my left, and I smiled as my fingers broke the surface of the pool.