Principally Uncertain
I wake up with my mind in a tangle. For some reason, I'm having trouble sorting one sense from another, and what is memory from what is only an imagined dream. I'm comfortable, so I start there. With my eyes still closed, I'm not certain if I'm in the big four-poster on Cold Island 12, in a pile of soft animal skins in a castle somewhere with Jamie, in the narrow double I share with Frank in North-3, or in the soft truckle bed in my parents' house in Central.
When is it? Who am I?
Even after I open my eyes, the world remains unclear for a disturbingly long minute. In the grey light of yet another dawn, I stare at a small couch and low table, without really recognizing them.
Where am I? What's going on?
Then, the past month, the past week, the past two days, and yesterday night in particular crash into my conscious brain, and I groan, as though I have a hangover.
My head doesn't hurt, but I feel like it should. When it comes to impossible and crazy things happening to me, I've been on quite a bender.
And when it comes to doing impossible and crazy things, since when am I the daring, fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants dragonslayer? I'm a farm tech from North-3, who spends her days churning out ration packs for the Planetary Fleet's armed forces. My husband is a sanitation worker and the foreman of Decon Team 7. It's 2273. That's who I am. That's what my life is. That's when my life is. Common as rust, normal, completely un-extraordinary.
Isn't it?
What the hell am I doing playing sudden-death rounders with Scottish clan Lairds in 2078? At the moment it's hard to process that even this isn't the half of it, nor the strangest half, either. My husband is dead, my home with him was bombed, my old home in Central was bombed, and I am living on the Rim, just barely making do with power-salvage and dealing on the black market. It's 2279. Everything I am is gone, and no matter how hard I fight to survive a little while longer, I'm already half-dead, just waiting to actually die.
Aren't I?
And what if all that is a dream? When if, in reality, I am a doctor, living in a castle in the eighteenth century, married to Jamie and carrying his child? What if we are blissfully happy, and safe, and secure, with nothing but the ordinary worries and troubles of a couple intensely in love? What if Jamie is the Laird, and I, his Lady?
Or, maybe that was the dream?
Can all that possibly exist only while I'm drifting in a rose-tinted past that never existed? Some part of it must be real. It feels too certain, too solid, to be a mere dream.
It can't be real.
But, is it?
This and all the rest of my real and imagined pasts jumble and tumble though my brain in a random, incoherent soup.
Cold Island 12. Craigh na Dun. Druids. The wine dark sea. Scottish Highlands. Time travel. Farms of trees. The Battle of Culloden. Rowanberry jam. Scry. The signs of the past. The Witches dance under the moon. Two husbands and maybe three. Human sacrifice. Brimstone moths. Focus. Beauty. Truth is in the hand. Venus. Names in the rust. Fire. Power. Freedom. The Devil's Eye. Mist and stones and Fate. Alisanders. Alexanders. The power of hope. . .
I don't know if there are words for the wavering, floating chaos in my mind.
Surreal?
No. Doesn't go far enough.
Hyper-surreal.
In a waking dream, the lines of light come back to me, from the fire dishes and the lightning, and the music of flutes and drums. Stars swirl before my eyes, but one singular bright one calls my name with the clang of a bell. A clean, deep scent, sweet with passion, turns the world dark blue. The stones are as tall as trees, and the rivers flow with red berries, tart and crisp and good. The golden wings of fairies and dragons sweep the wind into smooth, rushing gusts that catch me up over the sea.
Over the sea. . .
Over the sea, in the sky.
Islands and trees. . .
All that was me is gone.
Hands reaching towards me. From the past. From the future. The past is the future, the future is the past. Time is Chaos, the Mother of Time, and Fate lends a hand. A portal to another world. No more than a door. Eyes I do not know. Faces I cannot forget. A bolt of lightning to the heart. Red. Red hair, red flames, red blood. Black and amber and blue. Truth does not need to be believed in to be true.
The music sounds and the stones ring and sing, and call, and call, and call. . .
Words and images pound endlessly in my head, and I don't know what is happening and what isn't. It's too much, everything, all at once, like I am a conduit, a live wire, a fusion coil and my flow regulator is broken.
I fall back to sleep, out of pure self-defense.