In the seventy-five years since he’d arrived at the remote Turkish community, Solon had rarely left the vast warren of narrow passageways that led to the cave he called the Bitter Cloud. He had a workshop on the grotto’s lower level. From there, a spiral staircase led to the living quarters—his salon—then up another flight to a small veranda. It offered a scenic view, overlooking a field of cone-shaped rocks that formed the rooftops of Solon’s neighbors’ caves.
The most magical feature in the Bitter Cloud was Solon’s waterfall. Tumbling fifty feet from top to bottom, the waterfall spanned two towering stories and comprised the back wall of the cave. Its salty water was dove white and always roaring, a sound Filiz heard even after she left work. At the waterfall’s summit, a fuchsia orchid clung perilously to the stony peak, trembling against the current. And at the waterfall’s base, a deep blue pool of water bordered Solon’s workshop. The Poet had told Filiz a long flume connected the pool to the ocean hundreds of kilometers away. Filiz longed to take a dip in the pool but knew better than to ask permission. So much inside the Bitter Cloud was forbidden.
Turkish rugs hung over small alcoves in the salon, sectioning off two bedrooms and a kitchen. Candles flickered on stalagmite candelabra, constructing ropy hills of wax with their drippings. Skulls lined the walls in elaborate zigzag designs. Solon had positioned each skull carefully in his Gallery of Grins, choosing them for size, shape, color, and imagined personality.
Solon was also the artist of a vast floor mosaic depicting the marriage of Death and Love. Most nights, after giving up anew on Ovid, he sifted through a heap of jagged stones in search of the right shade of translucent blue for Cupid’s wedding veil or the proper flash of red for Death’s blood-dripping fangs.
Filiz specialized in finding these russet stones on local creek banks. Every time she brought Solon an acceptable stone, he allowed Filiz a few moments to wander through the secret butterfly hall behind his bedroom. A hot spring burbled through it, so the hallway was a natural steam room. Millions of species of winged insects roamed the humid chamber and made Filiz feel like she was inside a Jackson Pollock painting.
“You know where they have real coffee?” Solon asked as he dug through a dented metal toolbox.
“Germany,” Filiz and the Poet said, and rolled their eyes. Solon compared everything with Germany. It was where he’d been old and in love.
Solon, like all Seedbearers, was haunted by an ancient curse: love drained life from him, aging him rapidly. Knowing this had not prevented him from falling desperately in love with an exquisite German girl named Byblis seventy-six years earlier. Nothing could have prevented that, Solon had told Filiz many times; it was his destiny. He’d aged ten years leaning in for their first kiss.
Byblis was a Tearline girl, and she had died for it. Her death had regressed Solon as rapidly as her love had aged him. Without Byblis, he returned to eternal boyhood by shutting off his emotions more completely than any Seedbearer ever had. Filiz had caught him admiring his reflection in the pool at the bottom of his grotto. Youthful beauty radiated from Solon’s face, but it was pore-deep, with no suggestion of soul.
Solon thrust his hand inside Ovid’s skull and probed the ridges of the robot’s orichalcum brain. “I don’t recall if I’ve ever switched these two circuits here—”
“You tried that last week,” the Poet reminded him. “Great minds think alike.”
“No, you’re wrong.” Solon clenched a pair of pliers between his teeth. “Those were different wires,” he said, and switched them.
The robot’s head popped off its shoulders and hurtled into the dark wilderness on the far side of the room. For a moment Solon and his assistants listened to a stalactite drip water onto the robot’s always-open eyes.
Then the wind-chime doorbell sounded. Its flat link pulleys and the triangular sprockets connecting them jerked back and forth across the ceiling of the cave.
“Don’t let them back here,” Solon said. “Find out what they want, then send them far away.”