Chapter Text
In the beginning, there is pain.
It is the first thing. The first companion, the first damnation, the first mercy: pain, sweet and sharp, brilliant in its glory.
Here are the first sensations it knows:
The shock of breath. The runaway gallop of a heartbeat. A tingle on the skin. The pain, yes, the bright shine in its chest, which it squirms from, and it bleats and gasps and strains until it rises up and liquid fonts from it, the holes left there. The liquid is warm; it is not. It is cold, bitterly, the cold of creation. It does the only thing it can think of, as instinctual as the first breath.
It cries.
Its first thoughts are formless. It has no names, not for itself, not for the strange world around it, and everything is fascinating. It touches the holes in itself where the fluid leaks from, and the holes close, and the fluid stops. The fluid is warm and sticky. The holes are painful, but no more or less than any other pain, and so it does not mind. It is pleasure, to touch warmth, the slick fluttering inside of itself, in the scant moments before that warmth is denied. It probes at where the holes had been, but nothing remains. It finds, instead, the cragged lines, grooves and canyons held together by something tight and pinching; these things, when it touches, are a worse pain, a sick, deep inside pain, like it is being pulled apart, and so it stops.
(It does not think of any of this in words. It has no words, not for pain, not for blood, not for the charnel cartography of its own body. These words will come later. It will remember them in dreams.)
It takes its first steps there, unobserved, tottering on foal-like spindle legs. It catches itself on the edge of the cross that birthed it, and goes down to its knees. This, also, is pain. It cries again, but there is no answer, and the pain is swiftly forgotten. More enticing is the wealth of information that its surroundings hold: light and color and sound. A rhythmic tapping that it bobs its hands to, coming from somewhere far above. A shine in the dark that, when it reaches for it, becomes a thing it can touch, smooth and cold and wet. Sharp-edged sparkles below its feet, crunching, pops of incandescent startlement, too small to be pain and so quickly gone that it forgets almost instantly. Smells, unknown, beloved and beloathed: an acrid burn from the great, red monuments standing sentinel around its metal womb, a pungent stink from the hulking beasts all asleep where they lay at guard with their circle-sawed teeth and their flaps of hide in tight loops on their sides. A vessel, pushed out of the way and forgotten, a few drops of liquid frothed and pale as seafoam. It sniffs, and the smell is faint; it touches the liquid to its fingers, and then prods at what covers its mouth until it finds an opening, and then it licks them clean. It does the same to another vessel, this with a few spurts of red clinging to its bellish curve, and it understands taste and difference: salt and sweet, metallic and mild, thin and thick. It drinks it to the dregs and licks until nothing but bland smoothness remains.
The place it is in is a wonder, a wealth of newness. It learns these things: that pain is a companion which is sometimes loud, and sometimes quiet and soft, but always present; that the liquid that falls from the hole above is cold, but not so cold that it makes it jerk away when the droplets fall on its skin; that it is cold, and when it touches the sleeping metal beasts with their grinding teeth and their chemical musk they are so hot that its fingers sting and it flings itself away, frightened. It learns the smell of its own burning flesh; it learns the feeling of skin reforming, reshaping, regrowing.
It learns that it is alone.
And yet something must have come before. Something left it drink and learning, sweetness and cold and beauty.
It thinks in a formless, wordless way: I must look.
And it learns that it is an ‘I.’ That there is a Self that inhabits it, and that it can look beyond its Self and understand that if it Is, then there must also be others who Are. That ‘alone’ is a thing it can change.
There are several holes that lead out of the place where it first became aware. The one above, where liquid drips, goes to a place that is open and cold, where the air has hands that try to knock it back, and there are no others to be found. Another hole leads to an even colder place, where the air is still and a few creatures lie on stop of clear shapes that stick to its fingers when it touches. The creatures don’t move, not even when it pats them and hits them.
This is how it learns about death.
(Weeks in the future, when it is gifted the word, it will understand in a way beyond understanding, in the same way that the fox understands the hare and the flower understands winter: death, like pain, is a constant companion.)
From the cold place it goes out and then down. The ground changes shape and texture under its feet. There are more holes leading to more places. One of them is empty, but there are things inside, marvelous and strange things like there had been when it was up. There are things here which are very soft, things shaped a bit like the different things that are wrapped around its face and legs and middle. It pulls the new soft things up in handfuls, rolling them between its fingers. They don’t stop being soft, and they keep their shape, and it is delighted. It uses one finger to stroke with the texture, and then a different finger to stroke against it. It touches the soft things to its cheek. There is a smell there, very faint: warm, and comforting. Nothing like anything it has smelled before.
There are other sleek wrapping things, draped here and there. It smells these also, and the smell is different: bracing, a little sharp, and then, underneath that, delicate and powdery. The wrappings aren’t as soft as the first ones, on the big square platform in the middle of the place, but the texture of them is more interesting.
It learns: this thing is soft, and this thing is slippery, and this thing is rough. It learns that things that are not soft can still feel pleasant to the skin. It learns that it prefers softness, but it also remembers when it had stepped on the glittering small bursts of pain after it had woken, and how it had been more startling than truly hurtful. Its feet had leaked afterwards, and then they had stopped, and so it hadn’t minded.
It learns: sometimes pain is necessary.
It moves on.
And in the final place, dark and humid-warm from sweat and sleeping bodies, it learns at last:
I am not alone.
And it settles in to wait.
The first body to stir is the one that is pale, slender, its head a pile of short, tousled curls all in colors of yellow and gold. They stretch and sigh, and push their mouth against the shoulder of the one next to them – head framed in waves of red – and then they sit up, and they see it, there at the bottom of the square place where they all lie curled together. They make a sound.
“Victor,” they say. They reach across the body next to them; there is a third there, dark on the head. All of them, all tangled together, evoke a new feeling. It wants. The playfully-constructed arrangement of limbs and wrappings and black and gold and red looks comfortable, and warm. Not the hot of the sleeping beasts above, but gentler. (It does not have the word for ‘gentle,’ but perhaps some skin-memory lingers, and it yearns all the same.)
“Victor,” they say again, and the one with the dark head grumbles.
“William, unless there is–”
“Victor, look.”
By now, the body in the middle has also begun to stir. They make a noise – mm – and it feels the sound of it, and tries to make it back. Mm, hm, mm.
The dark-headed one opens their eyes. They look at it. They see it.
It has never been seen before. It is another feeling, so vast that it cannot hold it, tingling in racing lines all through its body. Connection stretches between it and other, tremulous, new. They lean to the side, and it follows. They move back, and it tracks them. They move very quickly off of the platform and it shies away; nothing has ever seemed so fast, so immediate!
“No,” they say. “Please. Look.”
The other bodies are looking now, but it is focused on this, in front of it, the arms being lifted, the skittish approach. They hold out hands: five fingers, pale palms, and it stretches out to examine, to touch. Strokes finger to finger, prompting another sound, bubbling up.
“Yes,” they say. “The same. See? Same.”
“Oh, Victor,” one of the others says. “He’s beautiful.”
It learns: He. It is a ‘he.’ He learns: sound. The sounds mean things. The sounds are how the bodies turn thought into real.
The body that is Victor pulls away, and pulls some wrappings to the side a bit further on, and he knows light. Pure, brilliant, painful light; his eyes sting and water and he cowers from it, but Victor takes his arm and pulls him and says, “Hush, it’s all right. Come here. The sun, see? Sun. Light. Turn around, yes. Sunlight. The sun is life. Do you see?”
He does. He sees. He sees the dark curls and the mobile mouth and the flashing eyes. He tilts his head down when Victor reaches for him, the better to be touched. He sees the awe in Victor’s face when the wrappings are peeled away. Pain nips at his feet, at every place where his body moves, but the pain is old, and this is new.
Victor puts his hand on his own chest. “Victor,” he says. “My name. Victor.”
He watches the way Victor’s mouth moves. How easy he makes it look! His tongue moves and prods, trying to imitate. The sound is in the lips, and it comes from the chest: a breath out, teeth pushed against bottom lip, a hard stop at the back of the throat. “Vic,” he says. Oh, how this dark and beautiful creature beams when he tries! “Vic-tor.”
The light that comes through into the space (sun, he thinks, sunlight) is pale and wan in comparison to the light that comes from Victor, for he holds the sun in his mouth and wears everything else that has ever mattered, everything that is or could be, on his brow.
“Victor,” he says again, and Victor laughs, and sways. Cheek upon his chest.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, yes, of course you are. Of course.”
He learns quickly.
He learns what a person is, and that people are separated into men and women. He learns that the men in the tower are William and Victor, and the woman is Elizabeth. He learns that all people possess sounds, and that they call them words, and that everything that is or isn’t has a word to name it.
He learns that he, too, has a name.
“I suppose ‘Adam’ would be rather on the nose, wouldn’t it?” Elizabeth says. They are sitting in front of a fire in a room that is called a kitchen. There are a great many good sounds here: musical clinks, the pop of the wood in the fire, the tapping of William’s fingers on the table, the clattering of Victor as he bustles around.
Victor says, “It would be premature, rather. I will say this about God: He created Adam without a need for practice.”
“You intend to create more?” William says. Victor stomps over to them, where he and William and Elizabeth are all sat in chairs. Victor has to squeeze past William so that he can stand with his arms crossed in front of Elizabeth. Studying. The urge to reach for him is so immediate, so simple, and so he does. Victor’s mouth turns up.
“Be gentle,” Elizabeth says. He cannot tell if she is speaking to him or Victor. His hands pat at Victor’s arms, the soft white shirt, the bumps of his knuckles. He strokes a finger over each little hill and then down into each little valley, and watches how Victor’s throat works when he swallows.
“Why should I not?" Victor says. “Now that the framework has been laid, the only thing stopping a true conquest of death is repetition. I can already see…” He pulls his arm away. Flicks his fingers. “Things I would change, given the opportunity.”
“Is that…wise?” William says. His voice turns up at the end. Victor’s beautiful, bright eyes turn to him. Elizabeth takes his hand where he had let it hang in the air, waiting.
“Of course it’s wise,” Victor says. “It’s science. One doesn’t conduct a single experiment and call it done.”
“He isn’t an experiment,” Elizabeth says. Both men turn to look at her. Her voice is the softest in the room, but it has so much weight behind it that it takes all the air out. “He is a living creature, and we must decide how he is to be taught, and how he is to go on. And first he must have a name.”
“It doesn’t need a name,” Victor says. Elizabeth’s mouth goes thin. He touches the corner of it, and she takes his hand in hers and taps her lips to his fingertip. Her mouth is very warm, and soft. “It’s perfectly fine the way it is.”
“He should have a name because he is alive, and all living things have names.”
Victor throws his arms up into the air. He looks at William. He looks at Elizabeth. “Fine,” he says. He stalks away from them, and more sounds follow: thunk, thunk, thunk. A metallic racket. He keeps muttering even though he is not facing William or Elizabeth.
“A name,” he says. “Christ above. Shall we name the beetles next? Hm? Perhaps the rats?”
“Do not mind him,” Elizabeth says. She takes his hand and draws it to her throat; a rhythm thuds there, steady and serene. Thud, thud, thud. “My name is Elizabeth. Can you say ‘Elizabeth?’ Feel, here. Do you feel it? My throat makes sounds.”
He can feel them, the sounds. One of them had already left him, but it had come back, and there is no shortage of ways that he can make this sound. It is easy to reach for the same shape, the same movements. “Victor.”
“William, will you come?”
William is slight, pale, wide-eyed. He scoots his chair closer. “I ought to urge caution,” he says. “The last day has been…an ordeal.”
“A miracle.”
“Herr Harlander is dead, Elizabeth.”
Her hand flutters over his. Her eyes are dark and shiny and wet, and she closes them. A little bit of liquid comes out. “I have not forgotten. I watched him fall.”
“Elizabeth…”
“And I am not in hysterics.”
“No,” Victor says. He puts something on the table next to the chairs. Good smells rise from it. “You are every inch the naturalist. Put any shivering mongrel within arm’s reach and you’ll call yourself its mother.”
“It’s what I’ve done with you.”
“Can we please stop sniping for five minutes and discuss what happened last night?” William has thrown his hands in the air. Elizabeth’s throat moves under his fingers. With his other hand he reaches for William, for the smooth line of his throat. William goes very still as he touches, explores. There is a bump on William’s throat, and there is no bump on Elizabeth’s. He looks to Victor. Victor, like the sun. Victor, like flesh and blood. He is looking away, and his hands, on the table, are clenching and unclenching.
“Adam,” Victor says, “will suffice.”