Crawling Between Heaven And Earth by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

to belong to me; perhaps belonged to me already through some mysterious imprinting mechanism.

    Warm breezes blew through the open window, filling the curtains like a ship's sails.

    He looked vulnerable and lost and scared. An intelligent, self-sufficient man, and yet as dependent, as open as a child.

    I touched his finger, where the red ring glowed. I'd been bereft of my own kind for much too long.

    We made love through the night, with the smell of the sea wafting in on the warm breezes. And despite the injuries to my leg and to his arm, it was all the poets have sung about. Perhaps more.

    In the morning, while he slept, I limped out of bed, got on my private link and called up the price of the Doris line of artifacts.

    There had been only a hundred made and each of them had sold for ten million narcs only two years ago. Young as they still were, they would only have appreciated. He'd cost much more than I could afford on my ten thousand a year salary. No bank would finance him for me. He was not an appreciable asset, nor a necessity. And if I stole him, I could never go back to my life, my comfortable life. We'd be fugitives. He'd starve along with me.

    Not for me.

    Artifacts are born alone, without families, and they must learn early to survive alone. I must survive.

    I'd once read that no good comes of an artifact loving another artifact. Sage advice, if you could take it.

    I left him sleeping and, like a despicable feminine version of Theseus, deserted him to be claimed by the gods for whatever fate pleased them.

    I don't know where Pol is—alive or dead, contented or in unbearable servitude. I don't want to think of what he might have become.

    I remember him in that hotel bed, his hair black against the white pillow, his face serene, trustingly asleep, not yet knowing himself abandoned.

Thirst
When I first decided to work towards being a writer, I had this vague idea I wanted my first novel to be set in ancient Rome. With this intent I spent seven glorious years "researching" Rome. In retrospect, I should have decided my novel was going to be set in Hawaii and spent a year or so sunning on a beach. The cost would probably have been similar, considering how many Roman history books I bought. At the end of those seven years, I still didn't have even a glimmer of an idea for a novel. However, I had got pregnant and gone through a very difficult pregnancy during which I was hospitalized and had blood drawn all too often. So perhaps it is no accident that on the day after coming back home with my brand new baby, I woke up with the entire plot of this story in my mind. I dragged myself out of bed and to the office and wrote it in a single—eight hour long—sitting. It was the only thing I wrote for the coming year, which involved several house moves. The last line was a complete surprise. I "finished" the story and thought "that isn't right." Then my fingers typed the last line and I thought, "Wait a minute. That can't be . . .. Oh!" It was the first and so far the only time a story surprised me that way. For this reason it remains one of my favorite stories.

     

    "Sing to me of that odorous green eve when crouching by the marge You heard from Adrian's gilded barge the laughter of Antinous And lapped the stream and fed your drought and watched with hot and hungry stare The ivory body of that rare young slave with his pomegranate mouth."

    Oscar Wilde, The Sphynx

     

    Sometimes I wake up in the evening and think them here, immaterial wisps of dream in the cold twilight air, and yet undeniably themselves: the Emperor and the boy he loved, etched by time into heroic figures without flaw.

    The Emperor wears his purple, and the boy stands in one of those sweet, head-drooping postures immortalized in his countless statues.

    And sometimes, confused by a day of death-sleep and the centuries that have flown heedless by my changeless self, I reach for them, try to clutch them in my long-dead yet immortal