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Thursday, November 24, 2016

Bartholomew Bumble's Midnight Tumble, Part Two



THE PROPHET AND THE VICAR


“What is good? If that is known, it is reasonable to believe that evil can be described as its opposite. Is good that which benefits others? Is good sticking to a rigid code of morality? Is good doing whatever your god tells you? Is good self-benefit? Is good doing what is pleasing? Is there some as yet undiscovered path to goodness?—Kam Hijat

A blue meteor streaked across the sky and crashed into the eastern side of the Pillar of the Sun, making a brilliant cloud of smoke and sparks. As Nekes-Suth watched, it seemed to him that the impact had awakened the morning, for he just then noticed that the Sunfire atop the Pillar had begun to glow red as deep blood. He took time to gaze at the light, as it became hot red, and then orange. “No more time to waste,” he said to no one in particular. Then he picked up his bright-burnished bronze sword and began hacking at the well-beaten ironwood post anchored into the ground before him. Soon his brown body was slicked with sweat, while the morning sun turned to yellow.
Basost-Nesush sat watching him from her white, broad-roofed veranda, admiring how fine his form was, not a sinew or a bundle of muscle out of place, all knit together into a beautiful, godlike being made for action. As the sun turned from white to blue, announcing the noontime, he finally came into the shade and sat on a stone bench. A servant came quickly with a towel and a pitcher of cool water. As he poured water into the waiting clay tumbler and then drank deep, Basost-Nesush admired this too. “Nekes,” she said, “I love you, but I do not understand what drives you. The Sunfire is hot. The work-water flows from you like a river. You are the noblest of all nobles, but you are as brown as a field worker. You are truly beloved in the court of the king, but none there comprehends you. Why do you strive so?”
He put down his cup and leaned back on both hands and stared at her in his special way, seeming to pierce deep into her soul. She shivered, but did not let her gaze drop away from his. “Bas, my love,” he said finally, with a voice as soft and smooth as fine linen, “have I not spoken to you before of this?”
“I have never understood, my Well of Cool Sky-water.”
“The time comes for great deeds, my Hall of Shade,” said Nekes, only the slightest hint of roughness in his voice, “and I shall be prepared. I feel that the Time of Awakening is near. The People of the Sun shall outshine the Sunfire, and I shall stand blazing before them. This dream comes now to me every night. You shall be beside me as my glorious jewel, more wondrous than the Great Topaz of the crown of the king.”
“I wish you would not say such things, Nekes. The king will be ill-pleased if ever he should here of it.”
“Should the king be displeased at the thought of the increase of the might of his people?”
“Yes, my love, for it comes now into my heart that you speak of things which will bring an end to peace and mirth. You speak of actions and deeds which will make the People of the Sun greater than all the other peoples of the world. I will always worship you, but my heart is uneased.”
      “Well, then we must soothe you,” said Nekes-Suth with a slightly condescending smile. “Tomorrow, we will go to the Tree, and we will drink of the sweet waters.” He stood up and stretched like a cat bored with too much lounging. “But today, I will spar with the guards.”
      Nekes-Suth summoned five of the guard, and they spent the rest of the afternoon fighting with swords of bundled reeds.


An old man sat on an overturned basket in the shade of three bushes in the central yard of the town of Anosh-Abar, a wide, shallow, wooden bowl at his feet. In the bowl, there were three obsidian coins, and he played on an old pan flute while a girl ambled by, seeming to enjoy the ancient tune, and dropped in a marble coin. He lifted his first two fingers from the flute to bless her offering, but he did not stop playing. He played until the Sunfire turned blue-white and everyone had gone inside to eat and take a cool nap. Then, he lifted his aching old bones from his perch and shambled to the middle of the courtyard to stand staring at the Sunfire atop the miles-high obsidian pillar, his ragged robes stirring slightly in the hot breeze.
Coming out to have a stretch after his lunch, a young man standing in the shade of his front step saw the old man. He waited for the old man to move, but he did not. Shaking his head, the young man braved the early afternoon heat, walking out to the old one with heavy steps, so as not to startle him. The young man gently took the old man by the shoulder and guided him into the shade of the bushes. “Why have you taken hold of me?” croaked the old man.
“I’m trying to save you from the Sunfire, grandfather,” replied the young man.
“I did not ask to be saved,” breathed the old man.
“I know, old one,” acknowledged the young man, “but I must do what I must do.”
Struggling to his feet, the old man responded, “I know it. But I will do what I will do.”
Pushing him back onto his overturned basket, the young man said, “I cannot allow this. You will go blind, and maybe die.”
“I am old,” grunted the old man. “May I not be allowed to decide for myself if I wish to go blind, and maybe die?”
“You will be a burden on the community,” said the young man.
“I give the community permission to ignore me,” said the old man.
“How can we do that?” asked the young man. “You are part of the community.”
“Easily,” said the old man. “Just walk by and pretend in your hearts that I am a stranger.”
“We would not watch even the worst stranger blind himself and then thirst and starve.”
“What kindly hearts you do seem to have,” said the old man. “But is not my ability to see and to survive my own business?”
“The town hurts when it sees your weakness and your pain, grandfather. It then becomes our business. To help ourselves, we must aid you.”
“Goodness!” said the old man. “What arrogant creatures you seem to be.”
“How can we be other than we are?”
“You could allow me to be what I am.”
“So, grandfather,” said the young man, “you would force us to do evil in order to satisfy your selfish desire to harm yourself?”
“You would force me to give up my own will in order to satisfy your selfish desire to save me,” replied the old man.
“We are many, and you are one.”
“The many should rule the one?”
“In matters that touch us near, it will be so, whether you would have it so or not.”
“That does not seem fair,” pouted the old man.
“Of course, it is,” responded the young man. “If you do not like it, you must go somewhere where you can be a majority of one. Then, you can be as selfish as you desire, and who will say otherwise?”
“Can I govern my own affairs in no way?” grumbled the old man.
“In matters that are less important to us, or on which we cannot all agree,” answered the young man. “What say you to this, old man?”
The old one hesitated a moment, then responded, “That you are wise for one so young. Perhaps your heart is so kind that you will bring me inside your house and give me to drink and to eat. And, we will speak to one another of matters less grave, and I will watch the children and the dogs play.”
‘Hah, hah! Grandfather,” smiled the young man. “You have outmaneuvered me. I will bring you inside, and you shall partake until your belly is ready to burst. If your stories are good, and if the children and the dogs love you, you may stay with me as long as you will.”


The shapely, silver sandal upon the shapely, lightly tanned foot disappeared behind the white silk curtain. The palanquin in which the curtain was hung was also beautiful, made of the wood of an ancient baobab and ornately gilt with gold and silver. The servants who hefted the carrying poles were also beautiful and already slicked with sweat from the preparations to depart. At a word from the beautiful voice of the beautiful man who sat inside with the beautiful woman, the servants beautifully carried the lovely palanquin into motion.
In the orange morning light, the puffs of dust kicking up from the busy heels of the servants made a cloudy trail of glowing cinnamon, and it smelled like flint and iron. The road they travelled was wide and paved with broad flagstones, shimmering like topaz in the new day. Far ahead, atop the greatest hill in all the land, stood the glittering golden palace of the kings, and in the midst of it radiated a golden glow in answer to the Sunfire.


The adobe-walled house was simple, only one room, with clay counters, clay bed foundations, a clay hearth, and shelves, tables, and chairs made of old pieces of acacia wood. The crooked rafters overhead held up the roof of bundled reeds. It smelt like dust and the odors of baking bread and a piece of salted pork sitting on a plate in the middle of the dining table.  An old man, a young man, and a black-haired girl sat round the table, and the noises of a busy woman and a young boy (equally busy wrestling gigantic hyenas, by the sound of him) came in from the open back door.
“I must go today,” said the withered old face over his bowl of plain couscous.
“But, Grandfather,” cried the little girl. “You were going to tell us the tale of the buck-toothed jackal today.”
“I will return, if I can, little one,” said the old man in a kindly voice, “but I have business to attend tomorrow.”
“Where do you go, E’Bah’?” asked the young father.
“I go to the court of the king and the Yellow Tree, Aru-Akam.”
“That is a long way, especially for one so old.”
“Maybe,” said the old man with a smile, “but, at least, I shall burden you no more.”
“You have been no burden, Old One,” the young man said, with an answering smile. “But, if you must go, take Ankh-Amat with you to be your servant.”
“Hurray!” cried the little girl. “We will walk and sing together, and mother will give us waybread to eat and new wine to drink!”
“What think you, my wife?”
“Are you sure, my husband?” said a voice from the rear of the house.
“Yes, my love. Enkher-Bakh is no dodderer, whatever he would have us think. And Ankh-Amat is young and strong. They will care for each other very nicely. And, I will follow them tomorrow after my work is complete. We will sit under the Tree and drink the sweet waters that fall down out of it. We will listen together to the Song of Dusk. It will be A’Amat’s first time, my wife.”
“I suppose I have no choice, when you put it like that. At least give them daggers and a stick to fend off unruly creatures.”
“It will be done.” The young father smiled broadly and clapped the old man and the young girl on the shoulder. Ankh-Amat’s hazel eyes gazed up lovingly at her father. The old man did not respond, but he tolerated the well-meaning touch.

The western parts of the land of Ba-Enkher-Ra, the parts near the Great Mountains, were perpetually dark and cool. Little grew there, except scattered fungi of various sorts, for it was dry and rocky. Only the kings slept there, after they had died and the Tree-Under-the-Earth had taken them back into her loving bosom. Because the remnants of the kings of old were there, temples were there also, temples carved out of the standing towers of black stone.
The middle region of the land was hot, so hot that even the people of Ba-Enkher-Ra seldom ventured out into the furnace of midday. And there was terrible dust, gritty dust, grinding dust, and powdery dust that crept into everything and made a heavy coat on everything, and which, if one left the safety of the towns and villages, would drown the lungs if one did not wear the ni’-keka, the twisted veil, over the mouth, nose, and eyes. Towns and villages only existed here because of the oases and because they were stops along the trade-roads of the Mountain People. The People of the Great Mountains were harsh and hard, but they were much-loved by the folk of the towns and villages of the middle lands, for they brought wealth and news, and from time to time, when the mood struck them, songs from under the sacred earth where they dwelt closer to the Mother Tree than any other folk.
But the Mountain Folk were not friendly at all, and they seldom desired company. When they travelled, they treated the lands they entered as if they were their own. They did what they wished and went where they wished. Those who endeavored to prevent them always paid a price. The People of the Mountains were the only people in all the Great Lands who ever went to war, and though they seldom took their idea of justice so far, none in the Great Lands forgot to take care in their dealings with these Men of the Dark Depths.
The old man, Enkher-Bakh, and the young girl, Ankh-Amat, were dressed in their brown robes of sackcloth, faces wrapped in their ni’-kekas, packs strapped to their backs, prepared to depart Anosh-Abar. It so happened that just then, in the red dawn, two short, broad figures came round the corner of the main street, together pulling a wooden cart piled high with boxes and wrapped bundles. When they reached the central yard and the well and dropped the tongue of their cart, the old man began to approach them, and the girl, who had never before been allowed to come so near such strangers, was pulled along, awestruck, in his wake.
They removed the scarves from their heads, revealing craggy, weathered faces with broad noses, wide, strict mouths, and deep eyes shaded by thick, bushy brows. They drank deep from the clay ladle, until their stiff, black beards began to drip. They sighed and leaned back against the side of their cart and watched intently as the girl and the old man came near.
“Greetings, friends,” said the old man.
“Good morning,” replied the smaller of the pair in a slow voice so deep and rough it was like crushing stones. “What is your business with us, old man?”
“I was just admiring your endurance,” answered Enkher-Bakh.
Both of the small men lifted their eyes to stare with great intensity at the old man, and then the girl, who was now a bit frightened and stood half behind the old man, peeking around his waist at the forbidding strangers. Suddenly, the smaller one let out a short, barking laugh. “Of course!” he said. “Everyone does. We are admired near and far, for no road daunts us, and our feet never tire. And, we are ever so friendly.” Then, he pulled a grimace so fierce that the girl hid completely behind the old man and came within a hair’s breadth of sprinting back to her home.
“Come now,” said the old man. “May a poor, old man not express how the strength and vigor of the young impresses him?”
“He may,” said the smaller Mountain Man, “but we would rather hear something new. We are well-travelled, and we are not so youthful as once we were.”
“Hmm,” mused Enkher-Bakh. “Ka, la, ma, ta, ek, ek, nu, kil.”
“That is new,” said the Mountain Man. “What does it mean? It sounds silly.”
“I do not think it means anything,” said Enkher-Bakh. “But, as you say, it is new.”
If it was possible, the two travellers gazed upon him more darkly, and for what seemed an eternity. A growl was building in their throats, and it seemed they had become very annoyed. Short as they were in stature, it did not feel like a good thing to work up their ire, and the little girl now ran as quickly as her legs would carry her back to her house and the safety of her mother’s embrace.
At that, the growl let loose into a thunder of laughter that lasted more than a minute. Puzzled, and still a bit frightened, Ankh-Amat peeked around her front door, her mother’s hands lightly on her shoulders. At last, the Mountain Man who had spoken, said, “Come back, little girl. We did not mean to frighten you so much. It was only fun. Do you know how many little children have run away from us? And we have not bitten or trampled even one of them. Have courage. Come sit atop our cart, and we will tell tales and sing.”
While Ankh-Amat was making up her mind, the Mountain Man said to Enkher-Bakh, “Really, old one, what do you wish?”
“I really do admire your great endurance,” he responded, “and I wish you to teach it to the girl. I am old, and I am myself well-travelled, and I could benefit in no way from your instruction in this matter.”
The Men of the Mountains reacted as if they had been slapped in the face. “Indeed?” said the speaker. “You are a wise fool if you think there is nothing more for you to learn concerning any matter. But to praise us and shun us in one breath is beyond foolishness. I challenge you to travel with us to the city of your king, and we will see if there is nothing you could learn from us.”


Eb-Ekkar-Net, the palace of the king of Ba-Enkher-Ra, was set at the western edge of the eastern region of Abar-Rishib. Though the palace had an outer fence of black-veined limestone it was no fortress. There was no part of it other than the observation tower, carved out of living basalt, which stood more than two storeys. It rested within the Great Oasis, an outlier of the Green Fields of Abar-Rishib, and was surrounded by a town of fired-brick homes and shops with clay-tiled roofs, the most ostentatious place in all the land.
In the midst of the Great Oasis was the Golden Pool, and in the midst of that, on a small sandstone island was the Golden Tree. It was a being of unique race with the semblance of a colossal fig tree, save that it never bore fruit, and its rind was amber and its leaves glowing gold. At this hour of evening it was still bright, having been charged by the Sun, and as the light of the Sun faded into night, the Tree stood as a tranquil, eternal beacon, showing weary travellers the way to the hospitality of the City of the King.
And weary travellers were indeed inbound. The palanquin of Nekes-Suth and Basost-Nesush, carried by proud-stepping but exhausted servitors, scintillating in reflection of the illumination of the Golden Tree, was approaching out of the west. But two armored men on horses came out of the city to the palanquin, and the servitors, trying not to show their relief, unfolded the palanquin’s legs, and set it down.
The riders were clearly unsettled, but like the palanquin-bearers, they managed to contain themselves. For some time there was no response to their presence as the two passengers conversed quietly and tenderly. At last there was a feminine sigh, and then glorious Nekes-Suth, Captain-General of the Falcon Guard, emerged like a god simply appearing to his worshippers out of thin air. The riders dismounted and abased themselves before their shining deity. With an elegant gesture of uplifting he said, “Arise, my Birds of Prey, and speak the reason that interrupts my progress.”
Up they came, as if truly raised up by his hand, and stood at attention. The older of the two said, “My Lord, the Ancient Wanderer comes to Eb-Ekkar-Net. With him are two Men of the Mountains and a village girl.”
A moment of consternation clouded the perfect face of Nekes-Suth, and his warriors seemed to wilt under the pressure of his lowered brow. But he quickly recovered himself, and affirmed his men. “Very well,” he said. “Neither the Old One nor any who go with him must be suffered to approach the Golden Tree. Now go, and by whatever means, see to it.”
He quickly disappeared behind his curtain and settled himself into an attitude of repose. The riders flew away on their swift steeds, and the servitors, having gained a second wind, were away with the palanquin.
“Not to worry, my Hall of Shade,” he said in his most silken voice. “This is nothing more than a test of my resolve. The Old Crow will soon have his own eyes pecked out.”
Basost-Nesush made no response, but even her placid visage could not completely hide the awesome dread wheeling within her.


The Mountain Men plodded at a burro’s pace, their large, rough hands gripping the yoke-tree of their heavy cart like iron bands. The Sun was hot, and though they were facing away from its radiance, their hoods were up to shade their eyes. Their dusty black ni’kekas hid their faces, but there was no mistaking their alien nature. The old man, leaning on a stick, kept pace with them, and they often glanced sidelong at him, waiting for signs of weakness. Ankh-Amat perched atop the packages, breaking from thirsty daydreams every now and again to act as lookout. If she added anything to their burden, the Mountain Men said nothing of it.
Earlier the girl had skipped merrily along beside her elders, poking holes with her stave and swatting scorpions. The wind was calm and they let down their ni’kekas, and there was much singing and laughter. But the heat was building, and resistant as they were, being of a folk who spent so many of their days in the forge, the Mountain Men now grew silent and kept their minds on their task.
Some time after noon they sat down for a meal under a tarp that stretched from the cart to two poles planted in the dust. As Ankh-Amat clambered back atop the packages, and the Mountain Men were rolling their tarp around the poles, the girl happened to glance eastward. She cried out that there was a band of horsemen approaching.
With surprising alacrity Enkher-Bakh lofted himself on top of the cart to have a look. The sun-dazzle and heat-shimmer made seeing details difficult, but the brilliance of their burnished bronze armor was unmistakable. “Indeed,” he said. “They are the Falcon Guard, and they seem to be coming straight to us.”
The Mountain Men swiftly girded themselves with belts upon which hung heavy hammers and daggers.
“I hope there will be no need of that,” said Enkher-Bakh.
The Mountain Men grunted and replaced their ni’kekas.
“Greetings, Men of the Mountains,” said the Guard-leader as he dismounted and bowed.
“Greetings, and well-met,” said the Speaker gruffly, returning only the slightest bending toward the Guard-leader.
“And why are we met?” asked the old man.
Turning a dark gaze upon the old man, who leant heavily upon his stick, the leader stated. “You are the Ancient Wanderer.”
“I suppose I am,” said the old man. “That is as good a name as any I have borne, though you say it with little respect.”
“It is not my duty to grant any respect at all to anyone other than my lords and my king,” replied the Guard-leader. “I am certainly not employed for the purpose of showing honor to malefactors.”
“Malefactors!” said Enkher-Bakh. “Does that include my friends from the Mountains and from Anosh Abar? Or is it a slur aimed only at me?”
“Of course the Men of the Mountains are above reproach,” declared the Guard-leader quickly. “And the girl has done no wrong of which I am aware. But you, old man, are a malefactor. There could be no other reason I might have been sent to deal with you and keep you from the city. Thus, if you desire my respect, you will earn it by complying swiftly and without complaint, with all my commands.”
“Well, I choose to respect you and all who are under your command—which I am not,” responded Enkher-Bakh.
“You choose?” the Guard-leader almost screamed. Composing himself, he said, “You do not choose to grant respect to the Falcon Guard: you just do it...And you are under my command if I will it so, old man.”
“Not so, young man,” replied Enkher-Bakh, “for it is not your will that you are to obey, but that of your master. And I submit that you have strayed.”
Clearly nonplussed, the Guard-leader did not reply in a rage, but instead said quietly, “How do you suppose?”
“First,” said the old man, “I think your orders from the Captain-General were to prevent me coming to the Golden Tree—and no more than that.”
The Guard-leader actually stumbled back a step as if struck a blow. “How could you...?” he breathed.
“Second, your master’s master, King Kaku’-‘Ror, has never before forbidden me travel within his bounds. Young man, I would not have you obey one master by disobeying the other, higher master.” The members of the Guard-troop became restive, some glaring at the old man, some with their hands resting on the hilts of their long swords.
“I appreciate your concern,” said the Guard-leader quietly. “I think, however, that I will decide for myself how to carry out the commands given me.”
“As you should,” said Enkher-Bakh. “But I should like to suggest to you that you might obey both masters and save yourself from the displeasure of both equally. You see, my friend the king will wish to see me, for it has been many years since we sat together in the shade of his halls. And I and all who go with me will sit in honor at the table of Queen Ashu-Tith, and we shall eat and drink, and the harpers shall play sweet music.” He paused a moment and smiled at the Guard-leader. “You see, I shall not go to the Tree, but I shall go to Eb-Ekkar-Net, to King Kaku’-‘Ror and Queen Ashu-Tith, and we shall be merry together. You shall come with me and see to it that I do not come to the Tree, and Nekes-Suth shall have his way, and you shall give no offense to the king.”
Slowly, the Guard-leader said, “Very well. I place you under my charge then, and I shall deliver you to the king.” He then mounted his horse and ordered his troop to arrange themselves at a respectful distance around the cart. “Let us be off, for the heat of the day is upon us, and the sooner we come to green places the better it will be for our charges.”
The Mountain Men chuckled softly but nonetheless returned to their cart and picked up the tongue. The larger of the two, who had not yet spoken, turned his head toward Enkher-Bakh and said quietly, “Your words are a weapon as mighty as my hammer.”
As they walked along at a deliberately leisurely pace, the Guard clearly irritated and suffering a little in the heat, Ankh-Amat said, “I thought we were going to see the Golden Tree, E’-Bah’. I very much wish to see it and swim in the Golden Pool if the Warden will let me.”
“Well, A’Amat,” responded the old man, “we shall see. The king may have something to say about that. And your father is coming along after us. Perhaps he will be allowed to take you to the Tree.”
“I do not wish to go without you, E’-Bah’,” she said.
“And I wish to go with you,” he said. “But things will be as they will be. The king is wise. We shall see.”
“Very well,” she replied. After a moment, with a twinkle in her eye, she said, “I would like to hear more about the Great Trees. I know that our Golden Tree is very special, and that it is very important, but I don’t know why. They say the tree glows like gold in the sun, and I have never seen a tree do this. I like trees, and they all seem precious to me.”
“Such a story will take time,” he responded with a smile. “But we have much time before we reach the palace of the king. And maybe there are some here who have not heard the story told aright.” He smiled again, for he saw the Guard-leader looking sidelong upon him and the girl.
“I suppose I should start at the beginning,” he said.
“Once upon a time, a very, very long time ago, many thousands of lifetimes ago, there was only dust, and air, and water drifting amid nothingness. And there was the Great Mother. She wished to bring a harmonious order, to make a universe in which creatures other than herself might thrive, and sing, and have joy. So she made the Great Seed which sprouted in the darkness and which drew to itself the dust, the air, and the water and formed them into a round world. Watered, the Seed grew into Roots which spread themselves all throughout the world. And as the rains fell and the seas filled up and the dry land became dry, the roots thrust up, and from them grew the trees and forests that we know today. There also grew up hills and mountains. And it was hot in the middle of the world, so mighty pillars of stone also thrust up out of the earth, and atop these pillars were Great Lights that illuminated the surface of the world. These lights in those days threw off terrible sparks that burned forever amid the Outer Darkness beyond the upper airs of the sky, and we call these the Stars.
“But all this only prepared the way for the living things that the Great Mother wished to be. She guided the development of the world, and there came to be other plants, and then beasts to eat the plants. This was a harmonious world indeed, but the plants and the beasts were dumb and could not think or speak in the manner that the Great Mother could think and speak. There was no other thing in the universe that was remotely like her, and she grew sad.
“On a time she sat herself down in a dark place, for her mood was unhappy, and she began to sing the Song of Creation in which she recounted all that had come before. And her song turned into a Song of Longing, into which the poured all her thoughts, imaginings, and hopes. The dumb things of the world heard her beautiful, sad song, and they became wise. Of these some remained wise after her singing ended, and she took communion with them and was happy. These first Wise Ones were immortal, and they dwelt with her for many lives of Men. But at last they yearned to go forth and to spread their wisdom into the world, and she gave them leave to go. They went out, and using the powers they had learnt from her, they raised up the dumb things that were like themselves and created thereby the First Peoples. As a parting gift the Great Mother bestowed upon each of the Wise Ones a Little Seed, and she bade them go forth and find a place where their hearts could rest, and in that place to plant their Little Seed.
“So the Wise Ones did as they were bidden. There were then Nine Kings and Queens who led their People out into the world, and each found the place that spoke to their hearts and planted their Little Seed. Nine Great Trees grew up, and each was linked in life and thought both to its People and to one of the Great Lights so that the lives of the People, and the life of the Tree upheld one another, and the Great Light gave energy to them all.
“By planting their Little Seeds and becoming the Kings and Queens of their people, the Wise Ones lost their immortality, and when they died, after many lives of Men, it is said that their spirits went into their Trees and gave them full awareness like that of Men. It is also said that there was a Tenth Little Seed, but that its holder never sought to have a People and that it was never planted. None know why, or who he or she is, or where this person may live in the world if he or she still has immortality.
“At any rate, there were Nine Lights and Nine Peoples. There was the Copper Light that stood atop the mountains that are called the Spine of the World where the Mountain Men dwell.” A grunting chortle of acknowledgement came from the head of the cart. A few of the Falcon Guard smiled in response.
“There was the Amethyst Light in the southwest portion of the Land where dwell the Little Folk of the dales that many name the Halflings. There was the Citrine Light in the South on the shore of the Summer Sea, and there the Marsh Men, that some call the Saurians, live. There was the Silver Light in the west of the Land, and there dwelt the Hill Men whom many call Gnomes. There was the Emerald Light of the forests of the East where the Green Men live that some call Elves. There was the Ruby Light of the East where the Sun Giants make their harbors, and from there they sail upon the Seas of the world. There was the Sapphire Light of the Snow Giants of the North. There was the Obsidian Light, the Black Light, the shade under which dwell the Daemons, the Mad Men who have the visions of that which is to come. And there was the Golden Light under which we wearily tread as I speak.” Ankh-Amat smiled, and the Falcon Guard sat bolt upright in their saddles to show that neither were they weary nor did they tread.
“The People loved their Trees, and their Trees thrived on that love and radiated it back out into the world. The Lights shone on the Trees, and the Trees took in that light and gave it back out. The people lived in harmony with one another and at peace with the other Peoples. Of all the Peoples only the Mountain Men ever went to war.”
“We did not start those wars,” said the Speaker. The riders dared to chuckle softly.
“I did not say that you started them,” replied Enkher-Bakh, “but nonetheless those wars with the Mad Men and the Snow Giants did happen.”
“So, why does the Captain-General not wish you to see the Golden Tree, E’-Bah’?” asked Ankh-Amat.
“Who can say, A’Amat?” he answered. “But he does not wish it, and we may discover it in Eb-Ekkar-Net from the king, or maybe from Captain-General Nekes-Suth himself.”
“But there is more to the story of the Great Trees. I have not yet gotten to perhaps the most important part of the story. You see, the Great Mother does not make her home in the Outer Darkness where the stars live. No, she resides at the heart of the world among the Roots, listening to the world, thinking of the world, imagining the world, and singing songs of the world. But she does not live alone among the Roots.
“There is also an ancient Beast. He is ever-hungry, and he is angry, for whatever reason none, save maybe the Great Mother alone, knows. He is stupid, but he is persistent, and he gnaws at the Roots, hoping to destroy the Trees, even though the Great Mother always makes the stuff that he consumes grow back. It is said that some of his hate bubbles up into the world and that it infects living things, things that are far smarter than he is and who are clever enough to work wickedness. It is said that the Daemons, living in the darkness that is beloved by the Beast, are the most apt to receive his infection and to act upon the urges it puts into them. But they are not the only ones ever to contract the Sickness.”
Ankh-Amat shivered and said, “Several of the people got the Spotted Fever last year. Two of them died. I’m very afraid of sickness.”
“It does little good to be afraid, A’Amat,” said Enkher-Bakh, “for you will become ill or you will not. And there are those who love you and will attend to you when you become ill. But this Sickness of which I speak is not an ailment of the body, but an illness of the spirit. It causes those stricken with it to lose their love, or it causes their love to be twisted so that they think hate is love and love is hate. Those who get the Sickness seek to dominate the lives of others, to ruin all good things, and to spread their Sickness as far and wide as they are able.
“If they are allowed to spread their Sickness too far, the People will begin to hate one another, and to hate their Tree and their Light. If just one Tree should fall ill, because, as I have said, the life of the Tree is the life of the People, all else will be in jeopardy. The world might not end, but the Beast will be pleased, and there will be much suffering upon the earth. So, when some creature gets the Sickness, we must tend to that creature and nurse it back to health.”
“But such creatures seem to me like monsters, E’-Bah’,” said Ankh-Amat. “We should kill them like my father killed the mad dog who came into the village a couple of months ago.”
“Maybe so,” said Enkher-Bakh, “but we do not wish to get the Sickness ourselves. As I said, this Sickness is not a malady of the body, but of the spirit. You can’t get it the same way you get a bodily ailment. You get it by thinking and acting the same way the Sick Ones think and act.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you may before too long.”

Nekes-Suth and Basost-Nesush reclined in long chairs, and the silver-haired Queen Ashu-Tith reclined opposite them. They all sat round a shimmering pool sipping wine and talking. In swept the king, still tall and commanding in his gem-studded saffron robe, and he sat down on the edge of one of the lounges facing Nekes-Suth.
“Lord Nekes-Suth,” he said, “it comes to me that you have sent men to see to it that my old friend, Enkher-Bakh, shall not come to the Golden Tree, as all in the land are free to do. You are my trusted Captain-General of my trusted Falcon Guard. Will you speak to me of your misgivings?”
For a moment, elegant Nekes-Suth was nonplussed. Someone in his Guard had been talking. Basost-Nesush looked on with anticipation.
Slowly Nekes-Suth sat up to face the king. Slowly, he said, “I would not speak ill of your old friend, my king. But everywhere Enkher-Bakh goes unrest swiftly follows. He is a harbinger of ill-omens, a prophet of doom. Where he is present the Light is dimmed. This is a joyous season, my lord, and I would not have gloom radiated all through the land because he is near the Tree.”
King Kaku’-‘Ror considered carefully how to respond to this god-among-men who viewed his old friend as a threat of some sort. “I think you misjudge Enkher-Bakh, my captain. He goes where unrest already is and helps us bring peace. He is a harbinger only of better times to come. I wonder if it is wise to prevent him approach to the Tree.”
“Would my lord not indulge the misgivings, the premonition, of his trusted Captain-General?” replied Nekes-Suth. “What harm can come of it? Surely if he is not the bringer and ally of bad news he will not heap curses upon us. And the Golden Tree has remained golden and lovely in his long absence.”
“Well, Lord Nekes-Suth,” said the king, “we shall see. He will soon be here to sue his own case. Your Falcon Guard is escorting him and his companions to this court even as we speak.”
For a brief moment, a spasm seemed to twist the body of the bronze god and made him almost hideous. But he recovered himself swiftly and relaxed back into his lounge. Taking a sip of wine from a golden cup, he said, “It is well, my king. My men do all as they should. It is not at all remarkable to be told what my men do by my wise king. That is why he is king, and I his Captain. Thank you, my lord, for the news.”


In the great portico which opened out into a view of the Golden Tree, shining brightly as the light of the Golden Lamp waned into evening, sat an assemblage of the great personages of Ba-Enkher-Ra. And among them sat wizened Enkher Bakh, and the taciturn Men of the Mountains, and little Ankh-Amat. They were positioned near the head of the table, next to proud King Kaku’-‘Ror and motherly Queen Ashu-Tith, and opposite them were the perfect couple, Nekes-Suth and Basost-Nesush. There was bread on the table, and new wine, but the meal had not yet come.
There was much talking at the table, for the queen had not yet called the assemblage to order for the prayer. As was his wont, the king spoke little, but listened intently to all the conversations around him. Queen Ashu-Tith did most of his talking for him.
“Master Enkher-Bakh,” she said, “it has been long since you favored the Court with your sage wit. We have missed you.”
“And I have missed you, my good Queen,” he said. “To see your grace and hear your sweet voice is a delight that I do not lightly eschew.”
“You speak of necessarily long absences, Master Enkher-Bakh,” said the queen. “You have been about the lands making trouble, yes? Or so Captain Nekes-Suth tells us.” She favored her audience with a broad smile.
Nekes-Suth smiled as well, but his smile was the smile of a wolf about to fall on the neck of his prey.
“I do seem to go where the trouble is, good Queen,” said Enkher-Bakh, gazing directly into the lupine gaze of Nekes-Suth.
“Indeed, Master Wanderer,” said Nekes-Suth through his smile. “Do regale us with the tale of the Vermillion Worm of Chlamath and how he ruined the entire harvest of that city. You were there, yes? And tell us of the High Dam of Laufenrit Minor, how it broke and carried off thirteen families of the Sun Giants. You were there, too, I hear? And what of the wasting sickness that struck the Great Concourse of the Daemon-folk seven years ago? Right in the thick of it, I am told.”
The queen cast a look of displeasure at Nekes-Suth. His smile only broadened.
“As you say, Captain...” Enkher-Bakh began.
“Captain-General, if you please,” interrupted Nekes-Suth.
“Very well,” responded Enkher-Bakh, “since that distinction is of much importance to you—As you say, Captain-General, I am here and there, wherever I think I am needed.”
“You do think well of yourself,” said Nekes-Suth. “You have survived a long time, it seems, so I imagine you deserve it. But what did you do for the people of Chlamath? I heard they did not get back their crops and that they had a very hard season until the new harvest came in. Did you defeat the Worm, Master?”
“I did not defeat the Worm, Captain-General,” replied Enkher-Bakh. “The people of Chlamath came together and did that for themselves.”
“Then what did you do for them?” asked Nekes-Suth.
“I gave them counsel that they found useful, Captain-General,” stated Enkher-Bakh. “Today, almost all of them are alive.”
“Would they have survived without your useful counsel?” asked Nekes-Suth.
“Who can say?” replied Enkher-Bakh. “I came to them and counseled them.”
“And the High Dam has been rebuilt, I hear,” said Nekes-Suth. “Did you do that with your own hands? Do you know a mighty spell that set things to rights? And what of those lost families? Where are they? Did you call upon the Great Mother, and did she bring them back to life?”
“I did not rebuild the Dam,” Enkher-Bakh said wearily. “I did not conjure the people of Laufenrit a new Dam, nor did I resurrect the lost families. I did have good words for the Sun Giants, and together we prayed to the Great Mother.”
“Words,” said Nekes-Suth. “Of these you have many. Did these words weave a spell to cure the Great Concourse? Is there such a spell? If so, I have never heard it.”
“Captain-General,” said Enkher-Bakh, “my words did aid the Daemons in effecting a cure for themselves. And my words did ease their sadness for a time. You may take note the Daemons did not slay me, nor did they hinder my coming and my going. In all my travels this has happened only thrice, and two of those incidents occurred before the peoples of the Nine Worlds of Arydna came to know me.”
“I say it again, my queen,” said Nekes-Suth, turning his sunlight smile upon the queen. “He does think well of himself.”
“And we think well of him,” she responded, turning toward her husband, who returned her loving gaze.
“I would not gainsay you,” said Nekes-Suth. “Yet I think deeds of far more value than words. The miracle is in the action, and not the contemplation. To know what is right, and to do it: that is the thing. Talk is delay. Tonight I indulge in talk. Tomorrow, I will go out and do.”
The entire assemblage had ceased their own conversations to listen to Nekes-Suth and Enkher-Bakh. After a few moments of silent delay, Enkher-Bakh asked: “What deeds will the Great Captain-General do tomorrow? Are armies mustering to war even as we speak?”
“I have not heard that any armies were gathering or marching,” said Nekes-Suth, “but who can say? And what matter is it? We need not only respond to threats that we can see, but we may ensure that no threats arise.”
“Are you saying that you wish to go forth and make war for the sake of preventing war that nobody has threatened?” asked Enkher-Bakh. King Kaku’-‘Ror was studying Nekes-Suth with great intensity, and the two great ladies, Ashu-Tith and Basost-Nesush, were looking at one another with great concern.
“I say no such thing,” replied Nekes-Suth, “though such an action cannot be left out of the list of possibilities simply because some might think it distasteful. How long can the world remain stagnant and at peace? Forever? I think not. And why should it? When there is peace and plenty, there is no need for anything new. It is a repetitive cycle of boredom. With no true challenges, what is the meaning of life?”
“So, is it not enough that we compete, as brothers and sisters compete,” said Enkher-Bakh, “to see who is best at running, at horse riding, at baking bread, at raising cattle, and a great many other things? Are these not challenges?”
“No,” replied Nekes-Suth, “they are not challenges—or at least they are not exciting challenges that lend us much meaning. Men and women in the millions have had such competitions, and some small portion of them have come out best. What of it? They have done nothing new. They are born, they have their day, and they die. With the Great Mother hovering over us, giving us all that we need, so long as we are nice to her and her Great Trees, what are we? We live. We do the same things as those who came before us. We die.”
“So you might like to stir up the boiling pot by stepping away from the light of the Trees into the darkness of the unlit night?” asked Enkher-Bakh.
“What good is the light when it shines only on what it has always shone on?” Nekes-Suth responded.
“Well, then,” said Enkher-Bakh, “I ask again what actions you would do.”
“Who knows?” said Nekes-Suth. “The great do as they will.”
“Who is great?” asked Enkher-Bakh.
“I am great,” said Nekes-Suth. “The king is great. The queen is great. My lady love is great. These Men of the Mountains are great. Even you are great in your way, Ancient Wanderer. Against you, I can have a very interesting competition.”
“Perhaps,” said Enkher-Bakh. “So the great do as they will? And what will restrain their wills? For it comes to my mind that without any restraint upon their desire the great, as you call them, might do anything that a human can do.”
“Why, they will restrain one another,” said Nekes-Suth. “That is obvious.”
“And who will suffer the consequences of their competitive restraining of one another?” asked Enkher-Bakh.
“Anyone who gets in their way, I suppose,” replied Nekes-Suth.
“And the people,” said Enkher-Bakh, “who desire peace and only to live and to love the ones they love, what of them?”
“If they cannot compete,” said Nekes-Suth, “then they are best off to stay out of the way of the great.”
“So,” said Enkher-Bakh, “if I have understood your philosophy...”
Nekes-Suth interrupted, saying: “Say not philosophy, which is the word of those who do not compete in order to justify their standing back from life. Say way. Say truth. Say meaning. The truth is felt. The truth is known through action. The truth is not conjured up with words and abstractions. It is a shame, I feel, that your name is Father Truth, for you are all words.”
“Alright,” said Enkher-Bakh slowly. “If I have understood your truth, then you do not believe that the right to rule derives from the people. You care little for the lives of those who grow your fine food, make your fine clothing, maintain your fine house, take care of your fine horses, and forge your fine arms and armor. Should the competition among the great cause them harm, well, it is just too bad for them, for they are not among the great and should just accept their lot.”
“You misstate my feelings,” said Nekes-Suth, “as is the custom of those who look on while those who can take action do so. Any temporary harm caused to anyone is just that—temporary. In the end, everyone will be better off when the great do as they feel they must. Those who are not great fail to understand, and so they are not great. If all they understand is peace and plenty, then let them look to it. They do as they must.”
“If all this action is not for the cause of making peace and plenty,” said Enkher-Bakh, “which we already have, then what is it for?”
“It is for being,” answered Nekes-Suth. “It is for escaping the state of half-life in which there is little fear to drive us to great deeds. There is no threat in this world. Even the beasts keep mostly to their beastly business and do not trouble us. It comes into my heart that there is a greater world in which there is being and doing and strife and great deeds. We have no worthy songs. We sing only of our love of family and friends. We sing of rivers and clouds and trees and mountains and bluebirds. These are all fine things, but they are all things of a world that is so much in balance that it is out of balance. The family, the friends, the rivers, the sky, and the Lights are there, and they will for the most part always be there.” He made a show of yawning. “But yesterday I acted. Today I have rested, and that was a day too long for me. But it was necessary. Tomorrow I shall act again. What do you say to that, Ancient Wanderer?”
Enkher-Bakh, and all the gathering and the servitors, was silent for a few moments. At last, with a grimace, he replied: “I say only that I know what you are going to do, and I suppose you have guessed that already. You will have your competition, I guess, for I will do what I may to preserve what I may.”
With that he excused himself from the table and went to the room that had been prepared for him. Ankh-Amat followed close behind him, sensing that she should stay near but should not disturb him. All he said to her when they came into his room and sat at the window facing the Golden Tree was: “Your father will be here tomorrow. Find him and stick near him.”


Later that evening, when the light of the Golden Tree was just beginning to dim, Enkher-Bakh ambled back out onto the portico. The cleaning up had finished, but he found the king and queen still there, sitting near one another in high-backed wicker chairs. They held one anothers’ hand and gazed lovingly into one anothers’ eyes, and the golden light made statues of them, as if they were a king and queen of a long age ago. Enkher-Bakh turned to go, but Queen Ashu-Tith called to him and bade him sit with her and her husband.
“Oh, Enkher-Bakh,” she said, “we are ill at ease, for we believe that something catastrophic has been set to befall our beloved land and people. You have declared that you know what our much-loved Captain-General will do. Will you not open your mind to us, for we fear that his ambition may do some harm to the Tree?”
He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes, and it was obvious that he had been weeping. “My graceful lady, what would you have me say?”
“What will he do?” she begged.
“You have guessed it,” replied Enkher-Bakh. “Beyond that I can tell you nothing, and I am not sure that I should tell you even if I knew for certain.”
“But if we knew, we might prepare against his actions and thwart him,” she pleaded.
“If I have guessed rightly the situation,” said Enkher-Bakh, “there is nothing you can do aside from slaying him or laying hands on him and imprisoning him in a distant land. But you may not have the might to slay him, and you do not have the time to do the second thing, even if there were any who could be persuaded to take responsibility for him. And it comes into my heart that fate has called us all, him included, to this place at this time to do the things that we will do. I can tell you that if he succeeds, the world will change. Will it be for the better or for the worse? Who can say until we live in the changes?”
“In any case,” put in King Kaku’-‘Ror, “our law forbids me. He has only thought, and he has uttered no clear threat upon anyone, or upon anything that we hold sacred. If I were to act as he would act, and slay him to prevent what I perceive he will do, then of what use are our traditions or our laws? What would I be protecting? I would be protecting lies and misdeeds. If we fail to protect it, we will lose it. But if we give it up in order to protect it, then we never really had it. No, I will do what I can to prevent his success, and we will hope it is enough.”
“But is there nothing we can do to stop him before he starts, my love?” said Queen Ashu-Tith. “I would not have the people come to grief, and I would not lose the Golden Tree, or the Pool, and I would not see our city laid to ruin.”
“But what do we have if we lose ourselves, my queen?” asked King Kaku’-‘Ror. “We might preserve all the things we love as a tapestry preserves the images of the things woven into it. But all that we save would be hollow, a paper monument with only darkness inside and no substance.”


The Falcon Guard formed a shimmering cordon in the rising light of the Golden Lamp, holding off the crowds that had gathered at the Pool. Ankh-Amat and her father Aru-Akam were in the crowd, she sitting atop his broad shoulders. A wooden bridge had been laid across the water from the west to the isle of the Tree, and upon that bridge stood glorious Nekes-Suth. Before him, between him and the Tree, stood ragged old Enkher-Bakh, leaning upon his staff. The king and queen sat on throne chairs, one on the north side of the Pool, and one on the south side. Radiant Lady Basost-Nesush stood alone at the east side of the Pool, and even her dread could not dim her in the morning Light.
The two men only glared and said nothing to one another, and neither moved. They stood for a very long time, and the crowd began to murmur. Still they stood, and the crowd became ever louder in frustration, and a few among them shouted for these men to do something. At last, Nekes-Suth unsheathed and held up his sword, as if to strike the old man down. Enkher-Bakh did not move, and Nekes-Suth did not strike him. Instead, the bright-burnished sword caught the morning light and glittered like a star fallen to earth. The light built and built, as if Nekes-Suth had captured the Light from atop its pillar. The heat was tremendous, so that their servants picked up the thrones of the king and the queen and carried them back nearer the crowd. And suddenly a fiery beam flashed out toward the Tree.
But the beam did not strike the Tree, for the old man raised his staff, and the power that came out of it deflected the flaming ray into the Pool, which went up in vapor and spread a heavy fog for hundreds of yards, a fog so thick that the crowds could see the king, the queen, Nekes-Suth and Enkher-Bakh only as hazy figures, ghosts from the world of the spirits returned to earth to play out the terrible scene of their own demise.
Nekes-Suth had now done a thing so heinous as to be unthinkable. Maybe the mad Daemons under the eternal night of the Obsidian Light had foreseen this thing, but if so, they had chosen to do nothing to prevent it. And the king and queen were now in no position to do anything but bear witness, for they could be certain that the Falcon Guard held a greater allegiance to their Captain-General, especially now that they had seen his true power in action, than to their king and queen. But the thing they were seeing as it played out before them was so awesomely unimaginable that they may well not have even considered putting a stop to it, or whether they had the power to do so.
In the space of a short moment, the sword of Nekes-Suth blew up in a puff of black smoke, though it did no harm to its master, nor did it even besmirch his beauty with its sootiness. Nekes-Suth was undaunted, and instead of lowering the arm that had upheld the sword, he raised the other arm, and the Light seemed to collect between his arms. At this ancient Enkher-Bakh dropped the heel of his staff onto the bridge, and the bridge bucked and twisted, causing Nekes-Suth to stagger backward. But Nekes-Suth kept his concentration, and the Light continued to intensify. The heat continued to build, and the fog became so heavy that the crowds could see nothing as their fate was decided.
The shield that Enkher-Bakh had made around the Tree began to glow, and slowly the Tree began to glow, although this was not the right time of day for it. All the illumination of the Great Light was collected between the arms of Nekes-Suth, and the day beyond the terrible fog turned to night. Finally, the sun that Nekes-Suth had made began to dim, but the light of the Tree came to its fullness. And old Enkher-Bakh knew that he had failed, that his opponent had used his own connection to the Tree against him, and had channeled all the power of the Great Lamp into the Golden Tree.
The Tree could not contain all this Light, having taken it in all of a sudden instead of having gradually taken only a part of it in over the course of the hours of the day. The Tree shone with a heat so great that no human should have been able to withstand it, but Enkher-Bakh and Nekes-Suth stood in its corona, untouched. The fog burned away in mere seconds, and the king and queen and poor Basost-Nesush, taken at unawares, flashed into nothingness. Some in the crowds, and all of the vaunted Falcon Guard, were burnt to ashes, though many, shielded by their fellows, were badly scorched but able to flee.
Abruptly, the light of the Tree shut off, and the Tree turned to black ash. The earth began to tremble. Ancient Enkher-Bakh leapt across the dry moat of the Pool as if he had the combined power of a hundred gazelles, and he ran toward the spot where he had last seen Ankh-Amat and her father. Nekes-Suth only laughed at the old man, for the day of the Triumph of the New had come. As the Tree began to disintegrate and fall to the ground like black snow, Nekes-Suth drew its remains into himself. The ground began to shake with greater intensity, and Nekes-Suth grew to a size greater than a Sun Giant, and he laughed with a mighty laugh.
Enkher-Bakh found Ankh-Amat, but she had been dreadfully burned, and her father held her in his arms, weeping, thinking that she was dead. Aru-Akam looked up at the old man, and he whispered: “You could not stop him.” Gently, he laid the girl on the ground and kissed her forehead. Then suddenly he grappled with Enkher-Bakh and took his staff from him. He ran into the wasteland of Nekes-Suth, staff held on high, screaming. The two Mountain Men, having waited patiently behind the crowd, but with a score to settle against Nekes-Suth, followed Aru-Akam, their heavy hammers swinging as they ran.
As Nekes-Suth drank the Tree into himself, the heat drained out of the air and it became cold as ice. The cloud that had formed overhead from the evaporated Pool began to let loose with snow. But Nekes-Suth was hot as a volcano, and as the flakes came near him they disappeared in puffs. His laughter died away, and he went silent.
The three men assailed Nekes-Suth with all their might, but they seemed to have no effect on him. The hammers of the Men of the Mountains began to glow with blue heat, and the staff of Enkher-Bakh lit up with a green flame. At last their power had all flowed out of them, and the three of them collapsed in exhaustion. Nekes-Suth stood like a pillar of jet and did not move or speak, or even breathe.
Recovering a little of their immense strength, the Mountain Men levered themselves off the ground and staggered to the black statue of Nekes-Suth, and they laid hands on him. He was still hot as lava, and even they were not proof against his heat. Their hands sizzled, but they did not let go. They began to sing a song in their strange, slow tongue.
Aru-Akam, hearing them, began to crawl to them with the staff in his hands. When he came to Nekes-Suth, he climbed up the staff and stood on his quivering legs. He touched the staff to the killer of his child, and though he was not the master of the staff, it responded and sent green fire into the hated statue. Nekes-Suth exploded in golden, blue, and green flame and was gone. The three men disintegrated in the outrush of his fire. Enkher-Bakh shielded the body of Ankh-Amat with his own body, and he was consumed.
But Ankh-Amat remained, and after a few moments she breathed, and the black scales of the fire that had slain her dropped away, and her body was whole.


The shaking of the earth spread out from Eb-Ekkar-Net, and the entire world was eventually wracked in a mighty spasm. The pillars that upheld the Great Lights fell down, and the fire spilled out of the ruined orbs, and millions of men, women, children, beasts, birds, and plants, and entire forests beloved by the Great Mother perished in that most terrible hour. And the seas were disturbed so that they formed mountains of water that overwhelmed the coasts. Great clouds of smoke and vapor rose up and covered the world so that even the light of the Stars was blotted out for years. Of those that survived the initial cataclysm, only a handful yet lived, and the rest starved or slew one another.
Ankh-Amat remained, for she had been resurrected from death, and a little of the power of the Golden Tree was in her, and she remembered the days of its glory. She became the queen of the remnant of the human world. Though few among humankind remembered her in later ages, it was because of her desire to bestow good meaning upon the death of her family and the death of old E’Bah that anyone at all survived the catastrophe.
At last the Light returned, for the Great Mother salvaged what she could, and of the energies that remained to her she fashioned the yellow Daystar and the white Nightstar, greater than all the other stars of the heavens, and she caused her new Great Stars to sail like ships across the lower part of the heavens. And she made no new Great Trees so that Men might not assail them. And the world was diminished.
But a new world rose up in the place of the old world. It was a hard world of few pleasures, and therefore Men sought the more after pleasure, and many did harm to one another in the name of difference of philosophy, or because one had treasure and the other wanted it. The Nine Worlds of Arydna became a thousand contending worlds.
But one miraculous Tree of Many Hues grew up in a garden called the Navel of the World. It did not shine, but it was unlike any other Tree. It seemed to be like all trees in one tree, and Men, even the worst and most greedy, found that they could not bring themselves to do it any harm. Though they fell away from their love of the Great Mother and recalled no more that she ever had been, and they worshipped now many gods, some of love, some of wrath, there was Hope in the world, for as long as the Tree lived there was one thing that recalled how the world began, and the Great Mother would not totally abandon the earth and leave her children to fend for themselves on a lonely island in a sea of stars.






SHROUDS OF THOUGHT


I see without seeing,
And be without being,
Imagining,
Visions all flowing together
With knowledge gained in length of life
And desire to see beyond my eyes,
Embracing
The possibility of ignorance
In the hope of banishing ignorance,
With a need to light up darkness,
Igniting
A new torch to show the way
Down a new path toward
A new place of deepest shadow,
Finding
A sign that points in ten directions,
And tracks down many ways,
And rent cloth clinging to bushes,
And bent twigs to give a sign,
Knowing
That whichever road I choose leads somewhere,
And any way I go leads to nowhere,
And any way I go leads everywhere,
Enveloping
A mind in shrouds of thought,
A mind that seeks to learn,
A mind that risks its ego,
A mind that seeks to see the world,
A mind that seeks to see itself,
Reflecting
The universe as it unfolds,
That sees the only constant,
Changing as it sees the change,
Realizing.




INTUSSUSCEPTION

Bartholomew Bumble found himself standing on a grey metal catwalk, gripping the handrail like death. Before him was the most humongous sphere of darkness anyone but God could possibly have imagined, so huge that it seemed to Bartholomew that the universe was only the blackness before him and the catwalk from which he viewed it. For a time that seemed like ages, he was overawed. It was as if a black hole had been stilled. The globe did not spin, nor was there a stream of axial ejecta, nor was there anything being drawn into its eternal, infinite hunger.
The thing seemed completely inert, but he knew it wasn’t. There was a vast intention within this thing. He wasn’t sure whether that intention was regarding him now, but, if it was, he was only one of an infinite number of things it might be attending. Though he was sure it could have crushed him to a greasy pellet with one trillionth of a thought, he felt no menace from this immense thing.
Dammit! he thought. I’m not out yet. I’m a billion light years from out.
Apparently, the revelations were just going to keep coming. For a person who had never willingly sought out advice, a person who had always stood off, even from his beloved parents, this series of enforced revelations was just about the hardest thing to bear. Real pancreatic cancer was easier for him to be sanguine about than this succession of mind-jolts. Bartholomew Bumble was a creature of the mind. The outer world was less real to him than the inner world, his inner world, which had been hijacked—by what? Was this a real thing happening because of an accident with some magic clocks? Was this a fevered nothingness, his brain swollen from his head having been cracked open on Linus Gimbal’s study floor? Were these “events” merely the results of an undigested bit of beef, as Dickens might have said?
If only he could say what it was, he might have borne it all more easily. If it was a mind-rape, he could have gotten very angry, and maybe could have fought off his attacker. If there was no attacker, there was no fight, and anger was futile. And if it was for his benefit, he was an ingrate: he certainly didn’t appreciate the effort.
How was it being done? Parapsychology was bunkum. Maybe Doctor Spargus had slipped him something with a long-delayed reaction. Maybe he was on an extended trip, but had never left the airport. Whatever it was, his trolley had certainly jumped the track.
What could Bartholomew do with such thoughts? Whatever the source, he was having thoughts. They weren’t the thoughts of dreams: they were too consistent, too dense with detail, too lucid and self-insistent. Dreams like that were important. Such dreams were the attempt of the sleeping mind to pass something on to the waking mind. He supposed he’d better pay attention.
Of course, he could hardly help paying attention. These visions were very much like the reality he lived every day, a twilight realm of sorts, a middle ground between the infinity of the universe and the unpalatable finitude of time and place.
These visions could not be reality: they were surreal. Gods, elves, magic, alien planets?
But they smacked—hard and repeatedly—of some kind of reality, of a full reality that could be experienced by the body. They were more than point-of-view: they were point-of-hear, point-of-smell, point-of-taste, and point-of-touch. Even in the ones that were obviously otherworldly myths, Bartholomew felt that he was the storyteller. They smacked, he smacked, he was gob-smacked, and he was God-smacked. His lips smacked of the taste of it, and his feet smacked on solid ground. His brain smacked on the LSD and opium haze of it.
He hated what the vision-people hated, and he loved what the vision-people loved—and that made him feel disgusted, violated. It was obscene.
He was naturally a person who found it extremely hard to focus on the things and people outside himself. To do so with any semblance of ease, those things and people must jibe with some known or unknown interest. He was a person living in the world between worlds, the time between times.
Bartholomew Bumble was a free-floating mind. Paradoxically, the brain that scaffolded his mind was hyper-sensitive to the outer world. Sensations overwhelmed him at all turns, and the world pained him. It was thus hard for him to connect to the world around him and the creatures in it. He could observe, though, and he could use what he observed to construct a world for his mind. But the damned outer world kept intruding on the inner world, upsetting its careful balances, disrupting its peace. And now, even the inner world was rebelling against him.
So what? he thought. I’m Popeye: I yam what I yam. I can’t change any of this.
Even as he thought this thought, he knew that it was his fear trying to get at him.
To be open. To be vulnerable. To be frightened. These were emotional qualities, objects of extreme disdain. Feeling these feelings was too hard; even knowing about them was too hard. Knowing about these things necessitated self-assessments. Honest self-assessments necessitated change. To change was to admit wrongness, and amounted to an insufferable blow to the ego. What’s more, to change was to step out into the unknown.
Bartholomew Bumble was an audience captive to whatever was causing these delusions/shifts of perspective/dyspeptic meanderings. He would like to have felt galled in the extreme, but the realization that he was killing himself in the name of his resistance to change made it impossible to feel anything other than psychic apocalypse.
Bartholomew’s bravado to Doctor Spargus that he would die and be a cheap funeral was only reflexive bluster. He did not want to die, but he lacked the ability to perform even the minimal change that would allow him to connect to the human world just enough to obtain the help he needed to survive.
There is was. Bartholomew’s fear of the painful outer world was stronger than his fear of death. Maybe as a free-floating mind, he was unable to grasp the reality of his own death. He had seen his mother die, and then his father, their corpses cold in their caskets. He believed death was real, but he was Bartholomew Bumble, living in Bartholomew Bumble world. How could that ever end?
But there he was on a metal catwalk. looking at Death-in-Repose, the uttermost source of destruction, stilled, made into the ultimate focus of meditation, a mirror that could reflect nothing so crude as a catwalk or a human body.
He turned to see if there were any humans, humanoids, or tentacled space monsters he could talk to. It was then that he noticed a form, maybe that of a woman, sitting cross-legged, her deep cowl facing the hyper-immense globe. He could see no one else, and she was meditating—or she was dead and unwilling to fall over. He was, as usual, alone. If there were more visions forthcoming, these would have to satisfy and guide him. If there was an Intention in all of this soul crushing, it was going about its business competently. Direct, too-challenging contact with another person would have caused him to slide back into his comforting obstinance. Only visions had any chance.

            BOOM!

            As he faded out of this vision, he thought he saw a spider climb onto the back of the cowled woman. He tried to shout a warning, but the woman didn’t respond. The spider bit through the cloth and into her neck.




T’ELMACH AND LEBIANTHRIS

“Truth is infinity: you’re always approaching it, but never reaching it.”—Kam Hijat

We were initially shocked, almost to the point of being appalled, when we began going over the proceedings of the interview between T’elmach and Jare Omsted. His arrogance, magnified by his libido, seemed to have run away with him. And on further rumination, most of us still believe that sexual intercourse with such a creature as T’elmach, a criminal of such encompassing proportions, was the satisfaction of some horrendously perverse lust on the part of Jare Omsted. But we also came to see that it was a valid method of investigation. He got two birds with two stones, so to speak. We believe he cozened from her information that would have been impossible to obtain in any other way. We believe T’elmach still to be a sociopath, and possibly still a psychopath. She lied about ever having been a professor at the College of the Three Moons on Tadlat, unless she took the professorship under an assumed name using falsified credentials. She also seemed to have no qualms about using sex, or any other non-violent form of manipulation that seemed expedient, to achieve her ends. We wondered whether, were she properly pushed, she would revert to her former methods of making her desires reality. But we also learned that she at least gave convincing lip service to an ability to feel love (or positive love, as she would put it). She made a good show at least of having feelings, and of making great emotional sacrifices to maintain her objectivity. Moreover, our concerns about her willingness to reveal her identity to us were augmented. She seemed to actually be T’elmach, unless she was another talented and charming sociopath trying to profit in some manner from our belief in her origins and subsequent wanderings. Why then did she admit to being T’elmach, and why let herself be cornered now? We were able to identify her, and though our people are dedicated to the ethics of our Society and would not have revealed our discovery—since we had a great interest in obtaining her information by non-coercive means—no organization is able to achieve perfect adherence from all members to its standards. Word would have gotten out within a few days, if not a few hours, that T’elmach may have been at the Philosophical Conferences on the Third Pillar Orbital Platform of Pallyan. The constabulary would be looking into the matter, and even though she was not known to have committed any crime within the Harmonic Confederation, the authorities might very well desire her to make her exit from their territory. And others with less lofty motives might be interested as well. It was quite a risk she was taking, and she had heretofore evidenced no overriding desire to pay for her crimes with physical pain or death. We felt it important to discover this secret before any move could be made against her. We decided that, in the interest of time, our third interviewer must be our most brilliant, and our most beautiful. We sent Lebianthris to her, the most senior of our nine Kemin Gwaros ranking members. Lebianthris was the most experienced, insightful, and sexually alluring of our membership, and we had no doubt that T’elmach’s appetites would be whetted by her. Perhaps we are also sociopaths, or at least borderline personalities.


T’elmach: Oh, my. I see the game is truly afoot now. The Society has sent in the Android Goddess, the Computer-in-Stunning-Human-Skin. It will be Goddess on Goddess tonight! Hahahaha!
So, what have I said or done to expedite your interviews? Surely the plan was to save you for last. You would sweep in and finish me off once the others had worn me down.
Lebianthris: I do not think it would be wise to give you a full response just yet, T’elmach. Suffice to say that we do not act randomly or rashly.
T’elmach: Well answered! Haha! You will make a worthy opponent.
Lebianthris: Are we to be opponents?
T’elmach: In your case, Lebianthris, I think considering you a friendly competitor is the safest course of action from my point of view. You’ll behave as charmingly as you are able, but you’ll compete with me perforce. You are simply too competent, too accomplished, and too sure of yourself to do anything else. I’ll relish every moment of our competition.
Lebianthris: Hm. Well met then. Let us have at it.
Since you are busy studying me, waiting for me to make the first move in the match, I will go first. In many ways you behave like a Kemin Gwara. You have emotions, but they are in service to your logic, and not vice versa. You do what is needful before considering pleasure. Your behavior is that of a person of the mind, and not a person of the spirit.
T’elmach: Is there a question hidden in your statement?
Lebianthris: There is nothing hidden. At least that is not my intention. You have expounded on morality and on love, so we now wish to know your thinking on spirits and souls.
T’elmach: More to the point, you want to know if my thinking on such things has changed. Am I still a psychopathic, power-obsessed goddess, older and wiser now, more patient—but still bent on rule by whatever means present. I don’t think so, but how can I ever be truly objective on such a matter?
Lebianthris: If you like, once we have had time to do a thorough analysis of your dialogues with us, I can discuss the results with you.
T’elmach: Oh, how kind. How often does the insect-under-glass get to share in the knowledge of her observers? Would I even comprehend your assessment?
Lebianthris: I doubt it. Your objectivity seems to be slipping.
T’elmach: Haha! You’re indeed a good match for me.
Lebianthris: I speak only truth as I understand it.
T’elmach: Enough truth for a little while, then. Let’s descend into the fiction that is our comprehension of matters intangible. I understand the Kemin Gwaros don’t believe in spirits and souls.
Lebianthris: That may be true, but so much depends on definitions.
T’elmach: Under what conditions could a Kemin Gwara believe in these?
Lebianthris: I would not wish to say. Rather I would have your definitions, and then I can decide whether I believe the common philosophy of my people would be of benefit to you. Your own thinking on the matter may, in my opinion, by quite sufficient to your causes—supposing I can divine your causes.
T’elmach: Divine? Is that a figure of speech, or have you diverged from Kemin Gwaros dogma on matters of the divine?
Lebianthris: A figure of speech. Divinity remains a very elusive concept. Proof of God, or gods, and the divine right, remains impossible—or is easily established—depending on one’s orientations.
T’elmach: Hah! Then it’s true. A Kemin Gwara will say both yea and nay to any question. Even “the rising sun is red”, when everyone can see it’s red, remains a question for study, experimentation, and consideration for a Kemin Gwara.
Lebianthris: It seems to be so for a T’elmach, as well. I think you are hedging your bets, as one might say, and stalling, while you consider the best answer for me and the Society.
T’elmach: I suppose I am hedging. But I’m not thinking of the best response for you, but of the best response for me. I’ve encountered many cultures, both as a demon and as a self-declared monk. I always paid a lot of attention to belief systems. You can get a great deal of bang for your credits, so to speak, if you rule a society according to its own beliefs, all the while making sure that you stand at the head of their religious hierarchy. And if you’re not the ruler, you can procure a lot of survival among them if you know how to both act in accordance with and influence a group’s mores.
At any rate, the groups I’ve dealt with have fine and noble beliefs—and gross and foolish beliefs; every one of those groups has both. My thinking on this subject has been fairly muddy. I am stalling—to consider what’s the proper amalgam for me—at this particular moment. Within the next few minutes, I may feel differently. My spiritual beliefs are plastic and elastic, changing definition from moment to moment. I have to keep them that way—so that I don’t relapse.
Lebianthris: I will give you some more room, then, to consider. You continue to give us to know that you have changed, and that you are constantly going to significant efforts not to revert to your former methods. Do you fear that you cannot maintain your gains—assuming you think your new ways comprise one or more gains—which it seems obvious you do?
T’elmach: Fools don’t consider the possibilities. I’m guessing you don’t think I’m a fool—or that you think I’m the Grand Fool. Either would be interesting to you, but something in between wouldn’t.
Lebianthris: Unless everyone is a fool, I do not think you any kind of fool.
T’elmach: Hmm. Thanks are in order, I guess. The Kemin Gwaros seldom give compliments.
Lebianthris: When we give personal commentary, we give observations. I have given you my observation. I say “we give personal commentary” since you seem fond of generalizations today.
T’elmach: I use them every day, when I have nothing better to work with. I do not know you personally, Lebianthris. What I have to work with is your appearance, your manner, and the idea that, at the moment, you are representing both your philosophical compatriots and your species. When I have more that I’m sure of to go on, I’ll refine my methods.
Lebianthris: I have nothing to refine. This is me. I am no different with you than I am with anyone else. My lover gets more lover talk, but otherwise, he gets what you are getting.
T’elmach: I appreciate the—honesty. But let’s go back to eyeing one another for a while, while I have a stimwater or two, and consider my response to your line of inquiry. If my response isn’t just right, the rest of my encounter with you will not go well.


Lebianthris: Have you had enough time, T’elmach? Is it time to proceed?
T’elmach: Such impatience in a Kemin Gwara! Are you pressed?
Lebianthris: I do not know how pressed I am. I do not suppose I have forever. And there is one more interviewer awaiting its turn. Nöman Kabë, an important elder among the Felari, will be the final interviewer—unless you say something that truly requires further and immediate investigation. So, if you would like to continue talking with us, you might say something outrageous and convincing about your plans for the future.
T’elmach: Haha! Well, I don’t hear any fanfare, or emotional anthems, or boots marching, if that’s what you mean. I intend to go on living as best I can until death snatches me up and hurls me into the Black Maze. At that point, the Black Maze will either be soluble, because it exists, or insoluble, because neither it nor I exist.
You Kemin Gwaros are genetically fortunate. You are longer lived than any known sapient species, and you live until you die. That is, once you reach adulthood, you don’t age, but simply die at some point, a thousand Standard Years or so after your birth. We Kurakai are relatively long-lived, but we age drastically. In another hundred and fifty years, I’ll be a meter or so tall, and I’ll have the features of a dried fruit. Unless something awful happens to you, Lebianthris, you will still be in a beautiful prime. Would you like to enjoy my fruit while it’s still plump? And would you allow me to enjoy you during the probably one and only time I am near you?
Lebianthris: That would please you, T’elmach? Is that your way to get inside me, as you might say? You will love me even as you watch my reactions to you, and decide how best to make use of me?
T’elmach: Are you often suspicious, Lebianthris? Do you often find yourself the center of attention? Do you think people talk about you when they think you can’t hear them? Are people trying to get at you and get one over on you?
Lebianthris: Of course not! But you are T’elmach, are you not? You are admittedly the one and only infamous T’elmach, daughter of the even more infamous Yul’seh, who has visited the ultra-enigmatic Great Brain of the Beta Quadrant. It seems unlikely that you will ever be completely trustworthy, and so one must have a care when dealing with you. This interview, to my mind, is the bearding of a dragon in its den. My only weapon here is my wit, and my only armor is sharp and constant attention.
T’elmach: Well, if your strategy was to put me at ease, your tactics leave something to be desired. If it was to draw me into battle by increasing the tension between us, you have achieved your aim, and then some. How a little sexual pleasure could have thrown a person of your caliber so far out of your track is beyond me. Sex with an idiot, or a naïf, or an arrogant fool, that is done for the purpose of quick manipulation. I would not have time to much manipulate a fellow confidence artist of long experience, through sex or any other means. And if you are indeed the Lebianthris of whom I have heard so much praise, the exchange between us would have been mutual. Apparently, I have inadvertently breathed fire on you, great Lebianthris, and cracks are showing in your armor, and your sword arm is trembling. Have a care lest I turn into the Devil next, hurl you into Hades, and offer you tea and crumpets.
Lebianthris: I—apologize. My sexual orientation is not toward females—although I have, on a very few occasions, had sexual pleasure with genders other than male. And I admit to some trepidation regarding my interaction with you. I think Jare Omsted let his guard down, and did not question you as thoroughly as he might have. I was determined not to become too friendly, but to maintain my business, which is to discover your mind, and how the influence of the Great Brain has affected you.
T’elmach: Hmm. I’m working out if your emotional outburst does you credit or not. As for your weak, conditional apology...
Well, I suppose I’m no longer one to hold a grudge. Haha. So let’s get on with achieving your purpose.
Souls and spirits. Yes, that was it. What do I think is the truth of them?
Lebianthris: Yes, please.
T’elmach: Ooh, deference! Are you properly chastised?
Lebianthris: It would not do to push this too far.
T’elmach: Haha! There’s your spirit, Lebianthris!
Lebianthris: That is not a worthy response to this line of inquiry.
T’elmach: No, but it pleases me to gall you just a little. Careful now, lest you tip me to the wrong side of my studious balance.
Lebianthris: I will keep it in mind.
T’elmach: Good. Good. So, spirits and souls.
I’ve decided that the Yulmabian view of spirit and soul are the best fit for me. No doubt you already know this view, Lebianthris, but for the sake of others who might one day read this transcript, if the terrible T’elmach is of any interest to them, I’ll expound.
Yulmab was a philosopher-priest who died about eight hundred years ago. His thinking had an overriding influence on the Jildini, the dominant group at the time on planet Koriban II. To his mind there were twelve souls and one spirit. Only two of the souls were personal, and the remainder could be described as various forms of zeitgeist. The entire affair, the multiverse and its antithesis, were the mestanyu, the ALL.
The core of any entity, living and non-living, was its gibil soul. This was the arrangement of particles and packets of energy that composed the entity. They formed a gestalt in miniature, the gestalt, wholeness of the entity, gave it its most important aspect: its physical identity. It was this identity that endowed the thing with the basis of its meaning—though not the meaning itself.
The entity’s interaction with the other things and forces in existence gave it its priban soul. This was the shell, the personality of the entity that was constructed by the various meanings it had in relation to those other things and forces. That is, the personality of the living thing, or the individuality of the non-living thing, was created by the many uses that could be found for it. Sex, friendship, companionship, hatred, admiration, degradation, symbolism, use as a counterweight, and functionality as a physical tool were some of the many uses that could identify any object or force. The personality, then, was the entity’s meaning in its own terms, but those terms were defined by the things and forces that existed around it and within it. Without something to interact with, there could be no priban soul.
From here the souls expanded outward from the self, the individual thing. They were a hierarchy of influences on the individual. The further out from the individual, the less direct influence they normally had on her as an individual—although there was never no influence.
This arrangement is sort of like the Aristotelian crystal spheres. The core of a person could be considered to be the core of the earth in the analogy, the hidden bit that generates all the fire. The personality would be the world we experience directly. The next sphere beyond that would be the family, the gimunot soul. The family orbits the individual as moons orbit the planets. Really, the individual and the family orbit one another, but that is a more complex analogy. At any rate, family for a living being could be genetic or adopted, so long as the bond, whether positive, negative, or neutral, was genuine and permanent. Family for a non-living entity could be other objects of that same kind that have proximity of place and time, or it could be other localized objects or forces without which the entity could not exist. For example, family for a shard of shale could be other shards of shale lying along the same river bank. Family for a burst of flame could be the fuel and the oxygen without which it could not burn.
In the next sphere outward are friends, the baibai soul. Friends are a tricky lot, since sometimes they stay strictly in their own sphere, exerting a moderate influence as fun buddies, or brothers in misery, or some such. But they can stray into the family sphere, exerting as great an influence as the most important familial connection, or an even greater influence. And sometimes they can drift out into the sphere of acquaintances, or even out into the world at large as life-paths diverge.
Friends for non-living entities are less exclusive. They can be any object or force in the vicinity of the object that often or always exerts its influence, but which isn’t enough like the entity to be considered family. Gravity and sunlight and temperature can always be considered the direct traveling companions of any entity, living or non-living, of course, but so could river currents, or children who skip pieces of shale over the water, or animals that come to the water to fish or to drink.
Beyond this sphere is the sphere of acquaintances, the patul soul. They’re like meteors or breezes that drift in and out of direct contact with the priban soul, that is, the personality. In general terms, these are fellow entities that create lasting impressions on the priban soul. They’re like recordings in the soul that replay themselves every time some reminder presents itself. Not every part of the patul soul is another living thing, but sights, sounds, smells, tastes, caresses, and so on, dances, rejections, injuries, instances of “being in the zone”, and other such, can be pieces of the patul soul. The people of Koriban believe that even non-living things can have experiences and can record them, and that people with the gift can read the recordings.
But these are all personal spheres, or inner spheres, within the impersonal, or outer spheres. The kajaya soul is the entirety of the world system, people, animals, plants, the four alchemical elements, the moons, and anything that happens to drift into a planet’s influences—gravity, electromagnetism, temporal differential, and so forth. The kajaya-nako soul is the sphere one degree outward from the world, and contains the entirety of a solar system and the stuff that surrounds it. Mind you, Yulmab conceived all this before his people achieved space flight or even telescopic observation.
The biju-ka-kata soul is the galaxy. The bikata-kata soul is the galactic group. The yabarhul soul is the entire universe. And the tulmafut-wishti soul is the multiverse, the cluster of universes whose number is infinite.
Among these soul-spheres are many eddies and currents. There are bits drifting into the wrong territory, so to speak, things from outside the normal parameters of the sphere that drift in, or outright invade. There are parasites and disasters. There are strokes of fortune and outright miracles. There are sapient aliens, that is, heretofore unknown human-like intelligences, that come for a visit. There are rogue planets that come in from other star systems. Things like that.
And there are whole metaphorical streams, rivers, puddles, lakes, and oceans of unseen connections that cross over spheres. There are vast drifts of dark matter. There are gravity tunnels and wormholes. There are black holes and intercosmic doors. There are whole systems of things that have remained hidden from the beginning of time.
So, souls are the collective what I am or what it is. But the thing that is you is only a part of the All, a set of coordinates, locations in space and time that identify the unique amalgam of particles and influences which an onlooker calls you, or it, or these.
And underlying and suffusing all this is the zo-oh-plahk soul, the Nothingness. This is essentially the Jildini hell.
There can be nothing, so there isn’t. We are something, so there is something: mestanyu, the All. The mestanyu is the spirit of existence, the Great Paradox. It can’t exist, but it does. Mestanyu means Perfect Illusion, because the reality-that-cannot-be is seamless, so that delusion can’t be separated from reality. There is no underlying reality to sift out, only a functional reality that is the rules by which the delusion operates. In the dominant religion of Koriban, the mestanyu is functionally God. It is the only spirit that exists, which is the essence of existence. The other three major religions of Koriban have found this ideation unacceptable—and Koriban has only recently emerged from its period of religious war.
Lebianthris: For a non-philosopher, you seem to have an intimate knowledge of the religion of this culture.
T’elmach: Well, I should. Just for fun, I fomented the last of their interreligious wars. Well, it wasn’t so much fun for me as a fit of pique: the fun was a side-benefit. You see, their non-belief in a Creator God rankled me. They didn’t seem to believe in gods at all. They were within my reach, and I decided to show them that there was at least one Goddess. I waited until the rebuilding began after their little dust-up. It was at this time, however, that the moment seemed propitious for my move against my father. So, I have left them in peace. I hear they are doing well and have petitioned to become a member of the Harmonic Confederation.
Lebianthris: Are you claiming that you actually aided their ascendance?
T’elmach: Who can say? What I did was evil, but I did it. I may have accelerated the schedule for their religious war and thus hastened the day of their joining with the Confederation. I may also have begun a war that would not otherwise have happened. I did what I did, and I’m not sure it should be undone, even if it could be undone.
Lebianthris: It does not seem like you are taking the full responsibility for your actions. Your admissions seem a little weak. What will become of your priban soul, or what has become of it?
T’elmach: Now you’re plodding into very dangerous territory, don’t you think, Lebianthris? You seem determined to inflict pain on me today.
Lebianthris: “Plodding” is perhaps a curious way of putting it, and “determined to inflict pain on me” is defensive. But it is necessary plodding, I think. Since we are on the subject of souls, particularly the individual soul, particularly, at the moment, your own soul, I must ask for posterity what you think of your current state, and in what state you believe your life will end. Your current picture of your soul, taken in the context of your admissions, may tell us something of the influence the Great Brain has had on you. The same can be said of how you think you will end, in what state of grace, as some might put it, or what distance from grace.
T’elmach: I think your inquiry goes far deeper than that, Lebianthris. I think you are constructing thin excuses for judgement. That seems very unlike the Kemin Gwaros Way.
Lebianthris: There are stereotypes that people make for their own purposes. But, especially in the case of sapient beings, there is virtually no such thing as a direct analog or a stereotype. I am Lebianthris, a sapient being who is of the Kemin Gwaros culture. I am genetically of that species. In no other way am I a Kemin Gwara. You are T’elmach, and the Philosophical Society of Edelos wishes to discover what a T’elmach is, and what connection it has to the Great Brain, which we believe is an anomaly from another universe, an intruder who is affecting our metaphysical, and maybe physical, eddies and streams. What is its purpose? Why did it catch and release you? Are you the apostle of an enigmatic god? Are you preparing the way for something? Are you a metaphorical missile aimed at an as yet unknown—to us, and maybe to yourself—target? You are no longer a goddess, you say, but, if your past is any indication, you are a formidable thing. And in the strictest sense of philosophical inquiry, you are simply interesting, and we wish to elicit from you whatever information we can. The judgement, I think, is your own conscience talking, constructing mechanisms to justify itself—or it is the internal scheming of a confidence artist who still hopes to save the game, even though she has been revealed for what she is.
T’elmach: I think you’re assuming a lot. And I still say you’re passing judgement and cloaking it as logic.
Lebianthris: If you are determined to take this personally, and I suppose you are, since it is only we two facing one another, then disabuse me of my assumptions if you are able.
T’elmach: That’s a very personal challenge, Lebianthris. That’s setting your own personal standard that I doubt I’ll ever be able to meet. Your mind is made up already, I think, and were I able to get near meeting your standard, your standard would morph—and you would retroactively convince yourself that this is what the standard always was. I think this is not so much an interview as an interrogation, and the goal is not to gain knowledge for philosophical study, but to gain confessions, justifications to rationalize what comes next.
Lebianthris: Are you seriously accusing the Society of plotting against you?
T’elmach: Not the Society, Lebianthris.
Lebianthris: Me?
T’elmach: The other two made serious inquiries. Even Jare Omsted’s sexual endeavor was an inquiry. Yours is an inquisition. That could just be your technique for driving information out of me, or drawing it out of me as the condemned person is eviscerated, drawn, and quartered. I sense personal aims behind your method. You’re looking for rationalizations.
Lebianthris: You are quite a work of paranoia, T’elmach, daughter of Yul’seh, Warrior-Goddess of the Kur-nu-mar Empire.
T’elmach: And you are too emotional, Lebianthris, Prime Locutor of the College of Ketharlion, Emissary-at-Large of planet Immarand. You have been among emotionalist sapients too long. I think you should re-dedicate yourself to the Way of Kroten.
Lebianthris: You think so, do you?! You...incredible...
Ahh. Alright.
Maybe you are right.
Very well. I will let the matter drop, if you are willing.
Maybe I have been too direct and touched too hard on matters that you are not prepared yet to have touched on. I have perhaps been a “very important person” for too long, and I am used to getting what I desire without so much struggle.
T’elmach: I’m far too strong for your attempts at mind magic. I sensed you probing before you entered the hotel. I have shields within shields, mind-mazes so complex the strongest telepaths have lost their minds trying to probe me. You’d best stick to the usual methods of probing. I’ll willingly answer any questions to the best of my ability. And if I probe you right back, well, that’s my prerogative, isn’t it? I’m allowed my own curiosities, am I not, my very important visitor? And my own paranoias and perversities, if I wish to indulge them. I am the important person in this conversation. Focus on me and my egotistical observations, and leave your own ego where it belongs—all squelched down into a quasi-physical knot at the lower end of your spine—near the anus, like a turd waiting its turn for expulsion. Isn’t that how a Kemin Gwara is trained to think of it?
Well, I’m still irritated. Ask me for another exposition so we can move on.
Lebianthris: Very well. The Great Brain inhabits a Dyson Sphere, so we are told. No one in the Society has ever heard of a piece of technology any larger than this, nor have we heard of one that held more lives within it. We wonder what you think of technology, in light of your position on souls and spirits.
T’elmach: You want to know if I think technology is helpful or harmful to the soul?
Lebianthris: If one believes in souls, it is a worthy thing to consider.
T’elmach: Meaning that you don’t believe in souls, and that you are asking this question for the benefit of the Society?
Lebianthris: As you have said, I am not the important person in this conversation. My personal ideas are my own. I ask because it seems necessary to ask.
T’elmach: The short answer is: I think technology has been relatively neutral as regards the twelve souls.
Lebianthris: Could you expand on that? Will you expand on that?
T’elmach: Such an expansion could be...expansive.
I’m feeling peckish. No, I think I’m actually hungry. Are you hungry, Lebianthris? Maybe a heavy noodle soup and some kind of fruit wine—good for sleeping. Yes, maybe I should have my last meal and sleep before the next phase. Do you sleep, Lebianthris?
Lebianthris: Are you determined to continue being difficult? Is your objectivity really slipping, or are you up to something?
Yes, the Kemin Gwaros sleep.
T’elmach: Hmm. But do you sleep? Ever?
Lebianthris: Now you are engaging in some kind of silly personal attack, I guess.
T’elmach: Nothing silly, Lebianthris. I have my reasons.
Lebianthris: Would you be willing to stop delaying and concentrate on the question?
T’elmach: I have my reasons for fighting a delaying action.
Lebianthris: If delay is your aim, maybe we should retire for the evening and take this up again tomorrow, or the day after.
T’elmach: You don’t mean that, of course. Your false magnanimity and patience is an amateurish maneuver.
Very well, for posterity, I’ll continue the game. No last meal for me. I imagine you’ll enjoy yours.
Lebianthris: What does this little piece of paranoia mean?
T’elmach: You know very well what I mean. Now, once more, for posterity.
Technology is no different from anything else in the universe. That is, it’s a part of the universe. It’s made of the stuff of the universe, by entities that are the stuff of the universe, and functions according to the rules of the universe. The functions of technology can have effects that might be seen as positive to some and negative to others, just as the functions of other objects in the universe can have effects that can be viewed as positive or negative.
Aren’t you going to ask me to expand a bit more?
Lebianthris: Why should I do that? Would it not simply provide an excuse for you to be petty and obstinate?
T’elmach: Not in the mood for more delay, eh? Want to get through the meat to the marrow as quickly as you safely can, eh? Patience. Patience is the watchword for all things. The spider must wait patiently for its prey to tire or to blunder—and then things proceed with great speed to their inevitable conclusion. So, be patient.
Technology is both the neurosis and the psychosis of the sapient and the sapient culture. It is because of innate neuroses that sapients begin to make technology. All creatures with nervous systems that reach a certain level of complexity experience fear. It’s more than the simple stimulus-response system of “lower” creatures. It’s an emotional reaction to any stimulus perceived as threatening or negative. But in sapients, from those of low-order ability to high-order, those who can reason in the abstract, fear has many manifestations.
In a less imaginative mind, or in the less imaginative regions of the mind, the fear is not overly specific. A person may simply fear heights because of something that happened to her one or more times, or even because her fear of something else has been transfigured into a fear of heights, because a fear of heights is more easily understood than the actual object of her fear. She may obsessively collect purple stones with green flecks because these have always delighted her, and she has transformed that interest into a ritual that, if diligently performed, keeps the world from falling apart.
This is neurosis. Neurosis, at low to high anxiety levels, drives the mind to seek comforts and props. At low anxiety levels, neurosis has many practical applications. Canes are a result of the fear of the old and the injured that they will fall. Weapons are the result of the fear of death at the hands—or horns, or hooves, or fangs, or claws—of large and dangerous creatures. Fluffy chairs are a cure for uncomfortable sitting-places, and sitting in them reduces anxiety.
At higher anxiety levels, neurosis approaches psychosis. Lordships, corporate empires, nations, and nationalist empires are built on high anxiety—as are the systems and the machines that make them all possible. I will go far as to say that all culture, society, and even thought itself, is driven by fear, that in a sapient being manifests as various forms of anxiety. Anxiety is the mediation between the stimulus-response system of “lower” life forms, and the rational capability of “higher” life forms. Innate fears are translated into inchoate anxieties, and there you are.
But fear can become personalized. That is, the thing feared can be made into a personification, or the thing feared can become a personal enemy. And fear can be projected into the future. If the personalized fear isn’t dealt with, and dealt with in a specific way, it will gain too much influence and turn into a truly horrific monster. This is psychosis.
Psychoses are delusional states, misperceptions or misapplied perceptions. On a small scale, a psychotic person can’t process data, at least at certain times and under certain conditions, in ways that have any application that is practical for either survival or the reduction of anxiety. So, manic-depressive people swing from the relative norm, through positive anxious states in which they can get a lot of useful work done, to high positive anxious states in which they are some form of Queen-of-the-World—and then they crash to negative anxious states, in which they lack all worthiness and purpose, or, at the lowest, in which their situation is the worst that has ever been—for no apparent rational reason.
A schizophrenic person can misperceive reality so greatly that up seems like down, chirping birds seem like landslides, or internal brain activity seems like voices handing out tortures—or the wisdom of the ages. Because of these misperceptions, the person can spend all her life trying to make sense of these impulses. Anxiety drives us to make sense of all inputs and outputs to and from our minds. A coherent structure must be identified so it can be acted on, so that the world becomes survivable, and, more than that, so a state of satisfaction and ease can be achieved. A schizophrenic person of intelligence can construct an entire alternate reality and live in it, and at times this reality can mesh well enough with the commonly perceived reality that she can function in the “normal” world.
Psychosis is largely an anti-technological state, if we define technology as knowledge applied for practical purposes. However, technologies, that is, physical, useful—and not-so-useful—artifacts and systems that effectively utilize creatures and non-living tools, have been created in psychotic states as well. In fact, whole populations can simultaneously exist in states of semi-psychosis. What is lock-stepping nationalism but the result of masses of people believing in and acting upon the construction of reality presented to them by an authority figure? What is religion but an unbelievable-but-believed fantasy based on suppositions and schizoaffective visions, given just a pinch of reality, stirred, then served, swallowed, and fully or partially digested?
And we’re all at least subconsciously aware of it. Fiction is rife with mad scientists who make machines that can affect the thoughts, actions, and even the physical health and appearance, of large populations, or even entire universes. It’s replete with terrible wizards who have schemes for altering their world either with the direct application of magic, or through the summoning of some overwhelming entity from beyond the universe who will superimpose its reality upon our own. And, to this day, even in the enlightened Harmonic Confederation, advertisers and propagandists strive to alter the perception of the general populace so that they will be loyal to this or that product. Regardless of how well such efforts succeed, those who undertake them have an innate understanding of the constructed nature of reality.
And all this trouble is caused by one small fact: we sapients are creatures out of time. We live in times not our own. Our bodies inhabit the Now, and attend to the current, or nearly current—since there is some delay in processing stimuli—need. But our minds, the construct of our brains, live elsewhere, trying to inhabit the past as we understand it, or the future as we project it. Our anxieties project the past into the future. What will happen if...? From this springs all technology. This technology then melds itself into our Now and feeds back into the system of things. It is us. It becomes us. It becomes part of the past that we project into the future. It’s a manifestation of our soul, and by extension, of all twelve souls, so how can it have positive or negative effects? If it comes to have effects on others not privy to, or on the receiving end of, its wonders, that’s because we ourselves have the seeds of those effects in our souls.

********************

T’elmach: You haven’t interrupted me.
Lebianthris: This is the exposition of T’elmach, not of Lebianthris. And you are, in your current state, so very good at making speeches.
T’elmach: I suppose so. I’m much more dangerous now—at least to certain people—than I ever was as a Goddess of Pain and Torment.
Lebianthris: I do not fear you. Your divinity is all stripped away, and your only power lies now in the minds of those who will hear you. This dialogue of ours is unlikely to circulate far beyond the Society. Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years it will be perused as a curiosity, a last will and testament of a petty despot in the decline of her years—desperately trying to cling on to that old mystique.
T’elmach: How emotional of you. How often have you sat as judge, jury—and executioner?
Lebianthris: I observe and report, and think. The judgement lies all in your own thoughts, and, if you have them, in your regrets.
T’elmach: Now that I’ve met you, hideously beautiful Lebianthris, I have no regrets.

RECORDING ENDS


Lebianthris: My recorder is turned off.
T’elmach: So is mine. The formalities have ended.
Lebianthris: You nearly ruined the fun for me, but I think it will be alright. When I leave, I shall do so leisurely, with no cloud of suspicion hanging over me. There will be a roiling black cloud hanging over you, I fear. Lebianthris will be nowhere to be seen, and T’elmach will have reverted to her old ways. Yes, they will waste years searching for T’elmach, the psychopathic daughter of the infamous Yul’seh, mass murderer of days gone by, and murderer still. But I shall have to enjoy the proceedings vicariously. When all is set in motion, I shall need to return home. Nothing ever gets done right unless you do it yourself.
T’elmach: I did a good job for you then—played my part up to the hilt.
Lebianthris: Yes, at first it was unsatisfying, when I realized that interfering bastard must have told you what to look for. But there are many sorts of satisfaction. Normally, these days, as my reputation precedes me among those who move in circles of secrecy, my joy comes at the moment of realization, when the prey understands who it is that they have encountered and what is about to happen. But with you, I had to take pleasure in the inevitability of it, your willing participation in the charade. But I realize it was more than that: he sent you to find me.
T’elmach: Not precisely. There were rumors of you in my father’s empire. When I came away from the Deep Orb, I understood what I must do in order to make a proper payment for my crimes. So, all those years have been spent in laying the trap for you—or rather, in tempting you to lay the trap for me.
Lebianthris: Hmm. When I heard about your encounter, I suspected what would happen. I sent spies to track you, as he knew I would. And my spies spied on his spies. I prepared the way for you with offers of employment that would put you in proximity to the clues I was laying out for you. That was fun. But, of course, some of the joy has been taken out of the experience, now that I know you were aware of it all the whole time. He chose you well. You are supposed to be a sweet, but poison, fly for the old spider.
T’elmach: I don’t intend to be sweet, but to be unsavory, and to give you as much indigestion as I can manage.
Lebianthris: You are no goddess, you know, and you never were. You were a dabbler, at best, an amateur. This will not be a battle of goddess and goddess. I will strike, and you will freeze in terror, and I will take you.
T’elmach: There are different sorts of goddesses. Some are sacrifices who offer their essence so that life and love may remain possible in a vast and cold universe. I am the Goddess of Terror. Terror is the meat of the Spider Queen.
Lebianthris: You fancy yourself a martyr. Hahahahaha! Your sacrifice will not be in vain? Indeed, it will not. I shall use every last drop of you. Not one iota of you shall go to waste.
T’elmach: Not if I can manage it.
Lebianthris: Oh, what fun! How delicious! You will be the greatest yet. Now is the time!
T’elmach: Expiation at last!
Lebianthris: Yes! Expiation is what you desire! Oh, and I shall give you more expiation than you could possibly conceive!



THE NO-GOD


The blind is open.
Sitting in my lumpy chair.
My gaze passes to the brick monstrosity
Across the cracked pavement.
The humming fan reminds me
Of the forced and captive movement
With which I have enslaved nature.
The very atoms of the air
Rush forth at my command.
Things tiny and large
Move upon my whim.
Others pass to and fro outside;
Gods we all.
Or, are we?
Am I a god?
Or do greater gods move me,
And do lesser gods serve me?
Are there gods beyond the gods,
Gods upon gods upon gods?
Thoughts of infinity disturb me,
And my thoughts shamble on.
I sit in my broken chair
Thinking my broken thoughts,
Striving to obey or not
My broken will.
If I am a god,
Then I have lost my godhead.
Perhaps I threw it in the closet
With the uncounted other
Broken things of my vast possession.
I fail, and I fail,
And yet my life continues.
If I am a god,
Then the other gods mock me
For my myriad flaws.
And they imprison me
In endless repetition
To ensure I create
No new flawed gods.
If I am a god,
Then I am shorn of all hope,
For a god is all!
I can only become a bigger god,
But I cannot become a better.
I am the god of failure.
I am its perfection,
And I do it better than any other.
My only hope is
That at the very last,
I shall fail utterly
And be lost forever.



AMON-PHARAIN AND FREYTAG

“I think we need a new breed of hero, one who wins the day by proving his goodness, and not by forcing his ‘goodness’ on others. He proves his goodness, not to impress others, but because he wishes to prove it to himself, and, to do this, he gives his goodness to others. He will thus see it reflected in them.”—Kam Hijat

The year that great Sheqarh, by the will of Arrus, became Emperor of Ur-Hakkad, I Lobaron Qasas, was sent forth by him as Ambassador to the Empire of Knol Bradin, which we had just defeated in war. As might be imagined, the Bradini were rather cold toward my assistants and I. We were not allowed to leave our apartments unaccompanied, nor were we to come near the Temple of Amon-Pharain unless commanded by the Amon himself.
      About Malartu, the capital city of Knol Bradin, lay an arid expanse, a great plain punctuated by short, twisted, thorny acacia trees. The marble walls of the city shone in the unrelenting light of the sun like a jewel, and the Temple was a mountain of silver and gold. As we approached the stout gates of polished ironwood we could see no hint of any watch. But the doors swung out, revealing a dark tunnel sloping downward into the earth. With much trepidation, I led my party into the death-trap; I could not see them but I knew the black upper reaches of the entry were shot through with murder-holes.
      When we emerged again into the light, we found an entire regiment of giant, white-robed, black-skinned men (they must have been more than seven feet in height) bearing broad-bladed spears and lined up on either side of the wide, paved way. The commander, whose shoulder was slung with a great green sash embroidered with intricate golden shapes, stood forth and bade us wait. Tamping their spears seven times upon the stone pave, the guards shouted: “Honor and praise to the Amon, our Great Intercessor!” Thrice more the spear-butts struck the paving, and then the commander ordered us to move on to the Temple. The guards stepped forth until they are directly beside us, holding up painted wicker shields so that all our view was blocked off. They marched with us.
      The Temple of Amon-Pharain was our goal. A mountain did I say? Of silver and gold? Not so great as a mountain is it, but more grand. Nor is it made of silver and gold but of amethyst and a golden variety of quartz and of light grey marble. The base was black as jet and stood at least two fathoms high. Its ziggurat rose over one hundred feet to uphold the many-pillared Temple, touched by the gods. Great onyx statues in the forms of cats and serpents, crawling and slinking, their heads tipped toward the red banner bearing a black death’s head in the hands of grey gargoyles which cowered at the apex of the edifice. One needed not believe in their pagan gods to be held in complete awe.
      Over the tramping feet of the guards, the sound of the city could be heard, the hawkers hawking and the hagglers haggling. We could smell the stench and could hear the spitting and complaining of those awful, humped beasts they call kelbatha, and under this was the odor of roasting meats mingled with exotic spices. From a distance we could discern the winding of horns and the deep beat of drums, which we took to be the drilling or cavorting of warriors. But for all the clutter and bluster of Malartu, it was the Temple which dominated all, and we knew that all the purpose of the city emanated from that nexus.
      The journey up the mighty stair was a tiring thing. It was not so much the length of the climb; but a will oppressed us, though not in the manner of direct terror but in assurance of extreme, confident power. My guess was that we felt the will of the Amon, and it was meant to cow all who would dare aspire to any form of ambition. Indeed, I felt a very reasonable humility.
      At last we came to the end of our climb. The guards halted, the foremost having stopped one step below the summit. Red-robed priests strode forward, and the commander commanded us to kneel down with our heads bowed. From bowls borne by naked boys, the bald priests daubed red ochre mud on our foreheads, explaining that red was the proper color of supplicants. Supplicants! cried my mind. The Ambassador of Ur-Hakkad a supplicant? But I clenched shut my mouth. When they grasped my beard and brought forth a razor, however, I could not keep silent. “I am the Ambassador! I will not suffer this! My plaited beard is the sign of my manhood and authority!”
      “My lord,” said the priest in the most placid tone, “the Amon will permit no other authority but his own in his Temple: your beard must go. And if your manhood is in doubt, we can always lift up your leg covering.”
      “No more!” I bellowed. “Insults are not worthy of the dignity of my station!”
      “Go home then,” the priest quietly replied.
      “Would you risk war?” growled I.
      “Would you?” he replied coolly.
      I thought of returning to Emperor Sheqarh without even so much as having spoken to the Amon. I loved my head better than my beard. I nearly wept as I submitted myself and my folk to the razor.
      Once we had been shorn and reft of all the signets of our authority and of our gods, we were led forth to a depression filled with water. This I understood, and so we removed our sandals, shaking the dust out, and then washed our feet. Finally, we were led into the Temple proper.
      The Great Hall of the Temple was relatively narrow, no more than thirty feet in width, but it was more than fifty feet high and at least seventy feet deep, and no pillars were to be seen. No furnishings were there, save for the high dais and throne where sat the Amon. Cold and dark was the Hall, lit only by the leaping flames of the two huge, bronze braziers which stood, held up by the hoary arms of two mighty beast-shapes upon either side of the dais. Dark-robed guards stood in the gloom with drawn swords, and in the dark recesses in the upper walls, barely discernible, crouched bowmen.
      This, however, was not the chief cause for our fear. Our disquiet came direct and potent from the Ivory Throne upon the great dais. Resting upon a grey, silken pillow, leaning back, he sat still and quiet inside his black robe and golden-horned death’s head mask. He did not speak even after the members of the ambassadorial party had done him their courtesies and had announced their names to him. Whether he was regarding us or was unaware of us, we could not say.
      Some minutes we waited, and the Amon did not stir, and his priests seemed not to dare disturb him. Awe indeed kept me from speaking at first, but finally my impatience overcame my restraint and good sense. “Am I to be greeted with less than indifference,” I croaked, for my throat had gone dry as dust, “who have come so far and have suffered such indignities as would offend even a peasant in my own land? Will you say nothing?”
      Still, he remained silent, but I was certain he had taken notice of us; the fear grew upon me and my party until it became stark terror. Unnamed and unshaped horrors flew at us from wellsprings of uttermost darkness. Our hearts and lungs rebelled against us so that two of my assistants swooned dead away. Somehow I knew that I had been tested—and had failed.
      Many long moments later the Amon spoke with a voice deep and terrifying as the Abyss. “You would do well to remember that you are not in your own land. You are in the land of the Amon, the special liaison to the gods and Emperor of Knol Bradin and the Fated Lord of All the World. Here, you will do only as I will you.”
      “I know your mission is not as you would have me believe. You say you would negotiate trading treaties with me. But you actually were sent to inspect my land and its people to search out my weaknesses. ‘Emperor’ Sheqarh imagines he might find a means to conquer Knol Bradin simply because he contrived to push back the paltry force I sent to teach your people that they are not alone in the World.
      “In older days when my power was less secure, I would have slain you for your audacity. But now I can afford to be more generous. So that you and your ‘Emperor’ may know that I have no weaknesses at all and that you in time will be absorbed into the true Empire, I will keep you here one year. I will have you escorted to any place within Knol Bradin that you desire; you may not leave the bounds of Knol Bradin, and you may not part from your escort. The Temple is not open to you save when I will it. And, fear not. A messenger has already been sent to tell your disposition. This is the word of Amon-Pharain.”
      I might have protested, but I was dumbfounded. That he saw through my purpose was not truly a revelation, for the Amon was reputedly a man of considerable intelligence and insight. However, that he would deign to treat an ambassador in such a way was beyond me. And he apparently supposed himself to be the greatest force in the World. Did all the Amons call themselves Pharain? The oldest legends of our folk speak of the Amon-Pharain in the South. How could he be the same Amon-Pharain—unless he was one of the Immortals of the North? But it was told that he worshipped Bashinu and other gods of Darkness. Would one of the Immortals turn against the One God? In time, I would find out. We were ushered out before there was more time for musing.
The walk to our quarters was interesting and informative. At first I thought that the Amon had been too clever for his own purposes. But the realization began to dawn on me that everything we would see or hear would be orchestrated according to those purposes.
      People of all sorts walked the ways of Malartu. White-skinned people walked easily with those of brown skin and black. Rich folk and plain folk haggled over the worth of goods to the penny. Proud warrior-women strode about girt with weapons of all description, and subservient women dutifully and sullenly followed their masters. Many slaves there were, marked by collars of leather or bronze or steel (some even wore torcs of silver and gold); but they for the most part went about freely. Wares of all sorts were sold from ramshackle stores standing (barely) side by side—stores vending silk directly adjacent to ones putting forth leather tack and harness. Unlike other cities, this one was not divided into districts of any sort, all the business being thrown together in a hodge-podge fully four miles in any direction. And no sign was there of any money-changer or collector of customs. Either this was a free city, or Amon-Pharain had other ways of coming by money—or, did he even require money to run his Empire and keep secure his power?

Our quarters were far from sumptuous, definitely not like those to which we were accustomed. There were no silken trappings, nor were there exquisite vases, nor could there be found even one silver or gold tracery scrolled into one column. No draperies covered the windows, only heavy papyrus blinds. Yet the rooms could not be said to be Spartan. There were numerous worktables, replete with writing materials, and many divans to lounge or sleep upon. The apartments were relatively cool, and water could be let into stone basins and let out again by a system of sluices.
      My assistants had much to say of our condition—now that they had had time to recover some of their courage—most of it not favorable to Amon-Pharain.
      “Our beards!” cried young Lamoch, who had so recently acquired his. “We are little more than children—or women!”
      “Two guards outside every doorway,” grumbled Qeharukh.
      “No doors,” remarked Qarmal. “Are we to have no privacy?”
      “Women,” said Hulbir, “allowed to walk freely—bearing arms! What kind of place is this? Have they no regard for men?”
      “At least,” Matah put in, “they keep slaves, as any civilized country ought.”
      When they had quieted down, Gizpri, my right hand, said, “You can see that the Amon is truly powerful: he can allow his people very much freedom, and still they obey him in every thing.”
      I had never liked Gizpri more. The last thing I needed was a group of indignant men running amok and saying foolish and damaging things without thinking. I required sober calculation if I was to bring us all through this thing alive. And Gizpri calmed me as well. Now that I looked more rationally at it, I had nothing but respect for Amon-Pharain. I do not believe that Emperor Sheqarh would blame me, and he may even have expected it.
Over the next months we saw and did much, and I managed to see to it that my assistants survived. Many blasphemies did they utter against the gods of Amon-Pharain, but the Amon seemed indifferent to it. I had, however, to call on his mercy thrice to save my fellows from the priests. And I was very hard put to it to keep Lamoch and Hulbir from the whores, whom I had heard would often rob and kill their patrons after they had rendered services. This I accomplished by purchasing several female slaves.
      We saw the length and breadth of the Empire of Knol Bradin. A thousand miles we traveled to the east, and many tribes we encountered, the graceful Silfi, the warlike Mbusa, the hunters of the Blue Veldt, and the herdsman of the Goluf among them. At last we came to a vast, rocky plain and a terrible, stinking, black sea. Northward of Knol Bradin lay a hot, sandy waste where wandered small groups of Saurians. On the southeast the Empire is bordered by a great, dark jungle brimming with apes and snakes and a breed of wild, red-skinned men: even Amon-Pharain had made no inroads there. And, at last, on the west thundered and rushed the Great Sea which the Northmen call the Great Encircling Sea.
      Cities and people we saw of all kinds. The borders of the conquered realms were maintained, but all were definitely and permanently affixed to the fatherland of Knol Bradin. Cities of stone rose nearest the nexus of Malartu, and the remainder of the Empire was dotted with towns and forts of adobe and some extensive settlements of soldiery, as well as sigils of power to mark the authority of the Amon, and all feared him. At first I deemed that fear can be turned to hate. But I began to believe that under the calm normality of peasantry and nobility alike lay a true terror and awe of the Amon which would be all but unshakable.
      Two months ere the end of our captivity we returned wearily to our apartments at Malartu. It was then that we were invited—no, commanded—to attend the Temple. There, on many a night, were we witness to many bloody rituals that would have made even the evil priests of Anath Orthan cringe. But it was here also that I found the possibly singular weakness of the Amon. By a bribe to one of his counselors (it was a minor miracle that the bribe was accepted), I discovered that Amon-Pharain was indeed a renegade Immortal from the North. And, by listening, I found out that the Amon had hired a barbarian mercenary from the Northman tribes called Freytag to fight the Saurians for him in their own land.
What could be done? I feared that if the Amon were allowed to continue, he would become, as he envisioned, too powerful to stop. Yet Sheqarh had not commanded me to assassinate the Amon if I could. I needs must smuggle out a message undetected to my Emperor asking for permission and for money with which to bribe the barbarian. But there was less than two months before the promised end of our captivity, and I feared we would be expelled or killed, and the opportunity lost. A close thing it might be, but I had at least to make the attempt—and to risk the wrath of both Emperors.
      My plan was simple, but its success would be greatly in doubt up to the moment of its completion. There was only one way to get out a message undetected: I had to allow Lamoch and Hulbir to visit the prostitutes, as they yet desired, in order that they might induce them to send our missive. I had resolved that I was going to contact Freytag even before a I received a reply from Emperor Sheqarh; time was pressing, and, besides, I hoped to find a way to coerce the mercenary to betray the Amon without promise of payment.
      It was not easy even to come near Freytag. I had to wait until he returned out of the Great Desert, the land of the Saurians, and that was but three weeks before the end of our captivity. When I got rumor of his coming I had to devise an excuse to speak with him that would not rouse the suspicion of the Amon. This I contrived to do, for I had heard that Freytag had come to Knol Bradin at first by way of Turon-mar, a renegade colony of Ur-Hakkad. Therefore, I wanted to converse with him on the matter of the political situation there, and Amon-Pharain, as usual, seemed unconcerned, making no attempt to hinder me or to warn me to take care what I said.
      So, I took the barbarian to one of the open-air restaurants that are common in Malartu. Once I had got the guards to sit a few feet away I could speak with the man in earnest. I must admit that he was a very interesting character. Freytag was the last of his people and had been their king. His folk, the Hafoc, had been a conquering people, but their numbers had been decimated by their enemies in the North, and disease had taken the remainder. Since then, he had become a sword-for-hire, taking any employment that paid to his liking. What’s more, the sword of the Hafoc kings was designed to kill wizards, for the Immortals, the greatest foe of the Hafoc, were mighty wielders of magic.
      We spoke, maybe longer than was wise, and learned much of one another—and I even learned some new information concerning Turon-mar. I found I liked him as much as I could like anyone with no discernible morality, and I think he did not dislike me. Nevertheless, I did not feel secure enough to speak openly to him of my deeper purpose. I did give him to know that I had a proposal for him, and he seemed interested. So, I told him that I would visit a certain brothel on the morrow and that I would leave a message with a certain prostitute there. Tempted as I was to ask that he keep our conversation secret, I did not. I did not wish to arouse any suspicion, and, besides, I was certain that he did not often have occasion to speak directly to the Amon.
      Apparently, Amon-Pharain was paying Freytag a pound of pure gold for every Saurian head he brought back to Malartu. He told me that he would probably bring in one hundred heads this year. Well, I could pay him ten years’ salary at that rate from my own treasury. So, I authored a note saying that Amon-Pharain was in truth an Immortal, an enemy of his people, and, if that was not enough reason to assassinate him, I would guarantee him one thousand pounds of gold and a ship with slaves of his own to keep. I left the note anonymous so I could deny any plot to kill the Amon if the prostitute betrayed me and looked at the note. Further, I did not visit the brothel personally, sending Lamoch instead; if Freytag had spoken to Pharain, and he had gotten suspicious, I could disown Lamoch.
      It turned out that Freytag had talked with Amon-Pharain. But he had not told of our meeting as it had happened, but only of what we had said concerning Turon-mar. He came to the brothel and received the message, leaving a message of his own agreeing to my terms. However, he would decide when to commit the murder, and we would have to be ready to spirit him away.
      I, of course, felt very uneasy about this arrangement, for not only did it leave so much to chance, but I had not yet received a reply to my missive to my Emperor. Further, I could not render payment to Freytag until we reached my home in Anath Urvaunt. I feared the barbarian might not trust me. What could I do? The chance to destroy Amon-Pharain might never come again, nor with such a perfect tool.
      It was not an easy thing for Freytag to find his opportunity. Nor was it easy to cover my anticipation or to keep my companions from letting slip any hints, no matter how obscure. All the while, I lived in terror that the Amon would discover my plot by some arcane power.
When the moment came, it was anti-climactic, for Amon-Pharain was so easily fooled. I suppose that as his power and ego grew, so did his belief in his invincibility. He could not imagine how anything of importance could evade his vigilance, and that was his undoing. Also, it likely pleased his ego that the last king of the Hafoc performed his bidding. Or maybe he was now so old that life had become wearisome, and he did not pay so much attention any more as he should. Or maybe both things were true, or maybe there were forces at work of which we were unaware.
      A week before the end of our captivity, before Freytag was to leave again for the desert, he went to see the Amon. Fortune was with us, for we were there as well. He asked that the Amon place an enchantment upon his blade that he might more easily cleave his Saurian foes, and the sorcerer could hardly refuse the request, lest his people think him capable of fear. Freytag approached the dais with the point of his sword toward the floor and the pommel grasped loosely, as unthreatening as possible. When he came to the first step and knelt to present the weapon and Pharain reached down to take it, Freytag deftly flipped the sword upright and thrust it into the waiting breast of Amon-Pharain. The ancient sorcerer did not scream, and his arms flopped to his sides. His eyes stared vacant disbelief at the bloody wound. His mouth worked, but not so much as a whimper escaped his throat. I feared he might still make some stroke of power before he perished, but he was perhaps too stunned to discover that he was not omnipotent.
      Freytag wasted no time in taking advantage of the astonishment and confusion. Arrows flew wildly into the Great Hall, and Lamoch was killed, but most of the missiles clattered off the stones or struck our clothing. Not risking even a moment to retrieve his weapon, Freytag sprinted from the Temple, and we followed in his wake. He did, however, halt momentarily, long enough to throw down one of the tall guards and slay him with his own spear.
      I had commissioned a freight wagon the day after the assassination contract was made, ostensibly to haul a load of fine silk to my ship as we departed the land of Knol Bradin. We made our way to the waiting wagon, and we hid ourselves among the cargo. I was amazed at how well the subterfuge had worked, but later it came to me that the breaking of the Amon’s spell had probably wrought great confusion among his people.
      When I told Freytag that he would have to wait for his gold, he became irate and held his spear to my throat for an entire day. When Gizpri presented him with his iron sword, having rescued it during the disorder at the Temple, the barbarian calmed himself and settled in, realizing, I suppose, that he would have to sleep at some point before we reached Anath Urvaunt. Well, we came to Ur-Hakkad, and Freytag got his gold and his ship (neither, thankfully, at my expense). He departed, and I never heard what became of him. For some years after, we heard rumors of armies gathering in Knol Bradin to assail us, but they never materialized.




THE GREAT ABYSSAL EMANENCE


I saw a thing that could not be seen.
I heard a thing that could not be heard.
I felt a thing that could not be touched.
I smelled a thing that could not be smelt.
That selfsame thing could not be tasted.
I tasted it.
I loved it.
I feared it.
I needed it.
It ruined me.
It made me.
I am what cannot be.
You are strange to me.
I am not what I thought I was.
Are you effect, or are you cause?
Are your thoughts your escape clause?
Mother made me.
Father made me.
I made me.
They made me.
You made me.
God made me.
What made God and made God God?
What was it made God the Great Cattle Prod?
What right made your righteousness right?
Wherever there is darkness, there is no light.




THEORETICAL EXTRAPOLATIONS

“Cogito ergo sum. Yes, but I will dare to add: ‘Quaesit summum?’ Why existence?”—Kam Hijat

Cuthaur ambled along the red-cobbled boulevard, past the multitude of domed hills with their round doors, past all the wonderfully healthy trees and flowering shrubs. A sleek, brick-red autopod whispered by and turned bright yellow in greeting, and Cuthaur put up his left hand, palm outward, in acknowledgement. The autopod slowed, but, smiling, he waved it off with the satchel in his right hand. The pod picked up speed and disappeared into a deep dip in the pavement.
At Liminial Street he turned to his right and found residence Five-One-One. Its door was larger than the others nearby, white, and divided in two. As he approached, the double-door slid into its pockets, a chime announced his presence, and he walked straight in. “Are you home, Glingil?” he asked <Inquisitive Mode> in his deep bass. The audio system piped his query throughout the house.
Out of an interface nearby a falsetto answered <Interpersonal Mode>: “In the library, Cu.” And Cuthaur quickly strode to the library.
“Are you well, Cu?” asked the tall woman <Inquisitive Mode>. She was very beautiful, and her skin was nearly black, her hair silvery. “You’re in a great hurry, aren’t you?”
“Nothing’s amiss,” replied Cuthaur <Interpersonal Mode>. He was a youthful man, moderately tanned, with black hair and light grey eyes. “In fact, things are very well: I have exciting news.”
“The young always seem to have exciting news,” said Glingil <Interpersonal Mode>, smiling broadly.
“Indeed, we do,” Cuthaur agreed <Interpersonal Mode>, returning the smile. “But our enthusiasm helps the old recall that they were once young.”
“It also helps us recall why we can’t quit yet,” she replied <Interpersonal Mode>. “Without us, you young fools would fly off into the aether, chasing every rainbow you calculated would appear just over the horizon.”
Cuthaur laughed heartily. “This rainbow,” he said <Interpersonal Mode>, holding his satchel up, “is predicted by Falmath at Luinagon. It’s quite a spectacular one, showing all the colors of the spectrum, and even some hues we didn’t know existed.”
“What’s this?” she replied <Interrogative Mode>, turning her head slightly sideways. “Do you wish me to see it now, or would you like tea and cakes first?”
“Are you serious, Glingil?” said young Cuthaur <General Mode>. “Falmath sent me with this for you to review, and he was very excited. Falmath doesn’t get excited, Glingil. I was told to get this to you immediately.”
Glingil chuckled. “So easily fooled,” she said <Interpersonal Mode>. “Pay more attention to your senses, Cuthaur. My words played with you, but you should have sensed my playfulness.”
“Yes, Glingil,” Cuthaur replied <General Mode>. “So, you will look at it now?” <Interpersonal Mode>
“Give it to me, please,” <Mandative Mode>. Cuthaur promptly handed the satchel to her. <General Mode> “It’s quite heavy. I’m definitely intrigued, now. None of Falmath’s treatises has ever been so thick. If he’s as concise as usual, this should take some time to go over.
<Interpersonal Mode> “Cu, why don’t you make yourself at home? There’s plenty of food and drink, and I have the latest interactives. This could take a great deal of time: Falmath has a complex mind and doesn’t include much commentary in his papers.” She ordered a mug of tea from the food vendor, found a comfortable chair, and settled in with the text projector for some heavy reading. <Mandative Mode> “Reveal,” she commanded, and a projection resembling a book appeared at eye level with Glingil. A UNIVERSE THAT SHOULD NOT BE: PARTHENEMERGENCE read the title.


The projection faded, and the sunroof of the Source Academy great hall slid away, flooding the hemi-amphitheatre with light. Glingil and Falmath could be seen again, seated in great, comfortable chairs beneath the great polished brass symbol of the Source Academy, a ten-rayed star inside a hundred-toothed gear. Glingil smiled, as was her wont, and said <General Mode>, “We will now gladly converse with you. We will obey the Palamis Rules of Order for the first round of questions.”
Falmath maintained a stony countenance on his lean, bearded face; he didn’t appear ready to answer any questions. Falmath was the closest thing the Kemin Gwaros still had to a creature driven by fear. He had been allowed to remain among them because of his stupendous logical and intuitive abilities, even though something in his make-up had resisted the genetic therapy which would have corrected his tendency toward resentment in the face of criticism, especially when its source was those whom he considered barely sapient. There had been a great deal of criticism, even derision from a few quarters, in the face of the presentation of his paper (before Glingil had deciphered and edited it), especially as regards the subjectivity of his interpretation of the nature of the Neogenerational operations.
Glingil was beautiful and black, sitting like a benevolent queen in audience, but she was no more beautiful than Falmath, whose appearance was like that of a god come down from on high. His countenance was in its way darker than her skin, thunderous and angular, and it seemed lightning might at any moment burst from under his craggy brow. His arms crossed over his massive chest, he seemed to be shrinking toward detonation, while her slighter body seemed to expand to embrace the room. It was likely that she would have to carry the entirety of their side of the conversation/confrontation.
The audience, composed almost entirely of the faculty and student membership of the Source Academy, along with important minds from the outlying Academies, had come to the official presentation with a plethora of questions. They were both excited at the prospective applications of the hypothesis and skeptical concerning the fallibility of its seeming subjectivity, and they wished to understand the reasons behind Falmath’s assessments of its operations. The first, and eldest, Imragoth Anester, stood and asked <Interpersonal Mode>, “Will you, Falmath, truly accept that your hypothesis may have to be emended as other minds probe your reasoning and as evidence either confirms or contravenes various aspects of it?”
Falmath was silent, fuming at the use of Interpersonal Mode. After a few seconds, Glingil looked over at him and said <Interpersonal Mode>, “You’re going to have to field this one yourself, Falmath. I can’t answer for your feelings.”
He knew she was right. He deliberately composed himself, placing his arms on the arms of his chair, gripping slightly, and erasing the scowl from his face. “I will answer your question,” his voice boomed <Interpersonal Mode> <switching to General Mode> “though I do not completely comprehend its basis. I have always been like an alien among my own people, more like those you once expunged from your numbers than like you yourselves—in your estimation, as I have often been reminded. Your question seems bigoted to me, predicting that I will not accept logical criticism, or, indeed, any criticism at all. This has happened to me all my life, since I was very small, and even moreso since I was administered the personality test at the age of five years. And so, if I show the slightest hint of my inclinations, it is thought automatically that I will go to the extreme of stubbornness and resentment. I have never been stupid, and I have never been oblivious of your reactions to me—and, because I have the tendencies I have, your predictions have fulfilled themselves. I can almost read your minds, saying to yourselves: ‘There. Once more we see it.’ Your question offends me, and as a Kemin Gwaros I am not to be offended. But if you were to quit reacting to me the way you do, eminently logical creatures that you are, maybe I would never again fulfill your expectations—and you might develop better expectations in my regard. It is not for you to correct me. Are you considering rescinding your decision not to put me out to survive amongst the Dothrim? I hope not. I have had many joyous times among you, despite being incessantly reminded of your misgivings, and I have given you much good service. Why must you continue trying to reform me? Accept me as I am, and love the good work I have done.” He paused to assess the effect of his words and saw true abashedness from many—mixed with pity. He decided to accept the pseudo-remorse and ignore the pity. He had never before expressed his feelings on this matter, inappropriate as it seemed to do so here, and the response to his words was better than he had imagined.
“In answer to your question,” he continued <slipping again into Interpersonal Mode>, coming near to a smile, “I have always, with reason, put down my gene-inspired truculence and accepted what it is logical to accept. Now that I have said what I must—and hope never to feel the need to say again—I accept even your offensive question, Imragoth. The asking of it was good, and I hope now that I will not ever need to hear it again.”
Glingil thought that he had gone much too far with his response, but said nothing to him about it. She would afterwards corner some of the academics and find out what they thought, and maybe try once again to explain the fear-mentality to those who could hardly conceive of fear. “Well,” she said <Derisive Mode>, “I hope that answers your un-procedural question, Master Imragoth.” <Changing to Mandative Mode> “We will have the next question, please.”
Salach of Mondalial Academy said <General Mode>, as if nothing untoward had happened, “You have given us twenty-one generations of your generational procedure.” <Inquisitive Mode> “Are there further generations? Or, will you make further generations?”
“I am mid-way into the twenty-second generation,” Falmath replied <General Mode>. “The calculation of each operation, because of its unconventional nature, takes a great deal of time. Thus, by publishing my early results at only generation twenty-one, I am hoping to enlist the aid of a few members of the Academies to calculate to at least one-hundred generations. Otherwise, I will either have to spend the remainder of my life on the project, or I will have to invent a computer that calculates instantaneously—and I still can never hope to generate a universe faster than ours was generated.” A few of the audience comprehended the jest and clapped.
“Next question,” said Glingil <General Mode>
“Master Falmath,” <Inquisitive Mode> “how does particle spin fit into your hypothesis?”
<Tutorial Mode> “Because particles exist in—or rather are tied to their counterparts in—multiple universes, they appear to spin, either clockwise or anti-clockwise, as they interact with this universe. Because they are simultaneously energy and nothingness, their ratio of positivity to negativity affects their spin. This is only a guess, of course. It is one of the sticking-points in what is otherwise a working hypothesis. I cannot say precisely why the connection between corresponding particles in multiple universes could cause such an effect, but there is no other working hypothesis to explain spin. The idea is that the weak interconnectivity between analogous particles in the various universes works as a sort of multiversal gearing system. As these corresponding particles in each universe do what they do, interacting with the forces in their own universe, they change state and possibly reverse spin. The accumulation of changes in state and spin across the multiverse, accounts both for spin, and changes in spin, and quantum randomness, that is, apparently unprecedented changes in particle state.”
“Next question,” <General Mode>.
<Inquisitive Mode> “It was unclear in your submission how you think particle spin, amplitude, frequency, and charge are related. Will you expand and expound?”
Falmath was clearly irritated by these (as he viewed them) mindless questions, to which any competent scientist should already have reasoned out the answer. But he clamped down on his ready exasperation, and answered <Tutorial Mode>: “The six forces—in my hypothesis space and time are also considered to be forces—are generated by interaction with the Temperoreferent, which I have shortened to PPe, or Primary-point existence. As shown in the equations and the reasoning leading to them, this is enough to explain the six forces. I can give you no shorter answer than the explanations that appear in the presentation. As for spin, I have just explained my surmise.”
Glingil could see that most of the audience was befuddled by this seeming non-answer. <Interpersonal Mode> “We will explore this topic more expansively when the Academy gives its approval for further research, as I am certain it will. In the meantime, consider, please, how counterintuitive the Valisian Relativity Hypothesis was when it was first proposed. Some scientists saw the truth of it quickly, and some took a great deal more convincing, depending on their native mathematical ability, their intuitiveness, and their creative imagination. It may take some time for everyone to work this out.” Many in the audience were obviously unsatisfied, but Glingil nonetheless said <General Mode>, “Next question, please.”
<General Mode> “Master Falmath.” <Inquisitive Mode> “Your hypothesis seemed to indicate that there are unlimited numbers of alternate universes. Not only were there unlimited numbers of universes at the moment of creation, but, each time there are possibly divergent outcomes to a quantum interaction, we find out which universe we are in because the universe we are in is the one in which the thing that happens is the thing that happens in that universe. That is, if, say, an up quark bumps into a charm quark, and A, B, or C could be the outcome of this interaction, we know we’re in the universe in which B happened because we see that B has happened. This is difficult to contemplate. Not only does it fly in the face of Uncertainty as we know it, in which universes are created in response to this interaction in which A, B, and C happen, but, according to your hypothesis, all the universes which will ever exist have already been created.”
Falmath sighed, and Imragoth regarded him intently. <Derisive Mode> “That was not a properly formulated question,” he said, “and I don’t comprehend why this idea is so challenging to comprehend.”
“The idea of multiple universes is simple enough,” Glingil put in <Tutorial Mode>. “Each possibility of existence is accounted for by the apparent randomness of every aspect of existence. In essence, at the ‘moment’, as you call it, of creation, every possibility that could exist—which is every possibility—was generated. The universe doesn’t diverge at each point of decision: you are living in the universe in which each thing that exists is the result of all the decisions that came out in the form that we see them.
“Let’s make a simple example. Let’s say that during the interaction with particles one, two, and three, there is possibility A-one, A-two, A-three, B-one, B-two, C-one, C-two, C-three, and C-four. Let’s say we can observe A-two, B-one, and C-four in our universe. That means we are in the universe in which A-two, B-one, and C-four happened as the result of the interaction of particles one, two, and three. But there is also a universe in which A-one, B-two, and C-one happened, and a universe in which A-one, B-one, and C-one happened, and so on.”
<Mandative Mode> “Next question.”
“I have been examining your calculations closely,” said Balin of Canegarth <Inquisitive Mode>, “and though I do not agree with all your intuitive assessments, I accept the general premise as probable. I wonder if you have noticed certain anomalies in your peripheral calculations concerning how our universe fits into the overall scheme. These anomalies seem unrelated, but my preliminary analysis shows they could indeed be connected. These are anomalies which seem to indicate that we may be cut off from the ‘community’ of the rest of the multiverse, that only one possibility is possible at certain interstices in our universe where in other universes there would be a multitude of possibilities at those same junctures. It seems to me that this would make our universe completely unique among all the others, that there is some ‘cosmic hand’ manipulating what is possible in our universe. Will you comment, please?”
<Interpersonal Mode> “A perceptive observation, Balin,” said Falmath. <Speculative Mode> “I have noticed this as well. My initial calculations of our peripheral universe did not include these anomalies. But then I put into the calculations phenomena which we had actually observed. Were I prone to belief in deities, I would say that God was interfering with the growth of this universe and universes directly adjacent to this one. Because of this interference, there may be only a few hundred thousand universes of our type. But I am not speaking to you in Tutorial Mode, and that is because I can conceive of no rational explanation for these anomalies other than the interference of one or more very potent and profoundly intelligent individuals.” There was a long silence as the audience pondered the possibility and the consequences if this were really true.
When Imragoth signaled that the contemplation had gone on long enough, Glingil said <General Mode>: “Fascinating indeed, but we don’t have time to work this all out right now. Will the next questioner please submit his or her question?”
<Inquisitive Mode> “What about gravitons?”
Shaking his head, Falmath responded <Derisive Mode>: “What about them? I can’t understand why someone would still be trotting out that tired, old pseudo-hypothesis.
<Changing to Tutorial Mode> “Gravitons are unnecessary. Particles, massive objects, interfere with one another—because they are always in contact with one another. All particles exist at the same point at the same time. As we said in the presentation, existence cannot exist—but it does exist. Thus existence and nonexistence must be simultaneous phenomena. But existence—and existence needs be no more than one infinitesimal dot of something—cannot exist at more than one point within the nothingness. There is no specific where for existence to exist at: in order for two or more points of existence—that is two or more points that are spatially distinct—to exist, there would have to be space to separate them. ‘In’ nonexistence there is no space, so all the things that exist must overlap one another. Thus, all the points of matter in all the universes are constantly interfering with one another. This interference generates the six forces, of which gravity is one. In such a short time as we have allotted, I can give you no clearer an answer to why we need not worry about gravitons, which have never been proven to exist. I will ask you to please review the presentation, which will be posted to the Interconnection directly after this conference.”
Eager to move the conference along, Glingil said <Mandative Mode>:  “Let us have the next question.”
<General Mode> “Your logic seems precarious, at best,” said Losgal. <Speculative Mode> “Yet there is something very attractive in your elegant hypothesis. This, in itself, makes me skeptical.” <Interrogative Mode> “Explain anti-matter and neutrinos, if you can.”
Falmath’s back was up again, and he stared hard at Losgal, who was easy to see, even in the dimly-lit audience. Once again Glingil felt the need to intervene. “I will answer this one, if you please, Falmath,” she said <Interpersonal Mode>. <Derisive Mode> “I think I see the source of your challenge, Losgal,” she said, looking directly at Imragoth. <Tutorial Mode> “You should be able to easily see, by looking at the basis of the generational mathematics which makes the function of this hypothesis possible, that neutrinos are accounted for.” She turned her senses into the audience to gauge their reaction and saw that they were uncertain. The reasoning was sound enough for further investigation, but they seemed to be reacting poorly. This reaction, she knew, was based in their distrust of Falmath’s volatile nature.
Glingil deftly removed her palm-pad from a pocket in her voluminous blouse, wrote on it with her light pen, and handed it to Falmath: <Mandative Mode> “If you don’t curb your reactions, we’re going to lose them entirely. We still have a chance, but your pettiness is causing them to react to you in a way I have seldom seen in our kind.” Falmath grimaced but took the hint and straightened his shirt and trousers which had become rumpled in sympathy to his discomfort. He sat up and smiled as if he were happy. Maybe he wasn’t fooling anyone, but they would hopefully recognize and appreciate the effort. “Let us proceed,” he said <in strained General Mode>.
<Interrogative Mode> “Explain, please, the Cosmic Speed Limit.”
“A tall order,” Falmath responded <General Mode>, with real amusement, despite the use of Interrogative Mode. “Essentially, I don’t depart from Valisian Law.
“But I guess you wish to know why light speed is what it is, and not some other velocity. That’s still a matter of speculation. I focused on the generation of matter and forces out of nothingness. But I believe the speed of light is specific to each universe and is set according to the size of the universe—that is, how many generations of particles are created in that universe. The size of each universe is limited. There are an infinite number of universes, from universe number one to infinity. The higher the universe’s number, the higher the number of generations of particles it will produce. The bigger the universe, the greater light speed will be.” Smiling, Falmath added, “You should join our team and make the discovery of the basis of the speed of light for yourself.”
For a moment, his audience was feeling neutral, their uncertainty toward his negative emotions temporarily allayed. Glingil was eager to keep the momentum. <General Mode>: “Let us move on to the next question.”
<Speculative Mode> “What do your peripheral calculations have to say about other planets in our universe?”
<Responding in General Mode> “Nothing. So far they are neither included nor precluded. By the twenty-first generation, massive gatherings, such as atoms, are just beginning. We may never work the hypothesis out to the formation of nebulae and planets.”
“Next.” <General Mode>
<Inquisitive Mode> “What relationship would you say exists between your calculations and biological evolution?”
<Responding in Speculative Mode> “We haven’t got that far. We’re at the point where chemical reactions are nearly possible. But, we’ve shown that chaos can organize itself. That tends to support the Law of Evolution—as if it needed further support.”
“Indeed,” said Glingil <General Mode> distantly, caught studying her beautiful hands by the brevity of both the question and the answer. “Let’s go on. Next.”
<Speculative Mode> “You have indicated we cannot currently hope to directly sense the other universes from our own universe. I wonder what are the chances of travelling to and from these other universes.”
<Also in Speculative Mode> “I don’t believe that, within the next hundred years, we have any significant hope of travel, or even communication, to and from other universes. Unless another breakthrough of enormous implications is achieved, we will spend at least the next century exploring our own universe, which, as we calculate, is about one-hundred thousand light years in diameter.”
Paying attention this time, Glingil said promptly <General Mode>: “Interesting, if, perhaps, disappointing. Let us get on to the next question, please.”
For the next few minutes, the question-and-answer discussion went very well, since it had become very technical, just the sort of thing scientists enjoy. Pleased at the reception Falmath was getting, basking in the emotional warmth, Glingil simply waved her hand, indicating that the next question should be asked each time it seemed appropriate to do so. Then, before the next scheduled speaker, she heard a voice say quietly <Derisive Mode>: “He thinks he’s acting like one of us. But how long can it last?” It sounded like Imragoth. Fortunately, he was too far away for the distracted Falmath to hear.
<Inquisitive Mode> “Master Falmath, how subjective do you believe your quality assignments in these operations are? How you have interpreted the results of the various operations obviously depended on how you viewed each constituent of the operation.”
“Very subjective,” Falmath agreed <General Mode> “Less so after Glingil consented to go over my work. And hopefully far less so if you Academy members will put them through your screen.” That answer pleased all of them except Imragoth, who sat regarding Falmath with great intensity. Fortunately again, Falmath was too busy absorbing the closest thing to adulation that the Kemin Gwaros ever gave their important people.
To keep Falmath diverted, Glingil quickly said <Mandative Mode>, “We must keep moving along if we wish to have the day-meal—which you all should be able to smell in preparation.”
“Will you speculate, Master Falmath, on methods of obtaining energy which might derive from our new knowledge—assuming your refined hypothesis resolves into a practicable theory?” <Inquisitive Mode>
<Speculative Mode> “I haven’t had very much time to give the matter serious consideration.” He paused for a few moments, then he went on to give an exposition of the various technologies that might be generated to service the new theory. When, after several minutes—very happy minutes for Falmath—he had finished,  Glingil called for the next question.
<Speculative Mode> “It has just occurred to me, Master, that we might make an energy sphere of incalculable ability by forming a singularity and wrapping a universe around it. We would have the ability to manufacture pocket universes if your hypothesis is proved out. Forming a universe around a singularity would keep the expansion of the universe in check and create a sphere with a relatively infinite energy loop—that is a loop of relatively infinite frequencies and amplitudes. The resulting sphere could be used for any number of purposes, from a bottomless power source to an archive of endless storage capacity. Is that possible?”
“Yes,” replied Falmath <General Mode>, smiling broadly for the first time in his life, “and brilliantly so. Perhaps you could be induced to join my staff?” Much clapping.
In a few moments, Glingil said <General Mode>, “We are close. Two more questioners, since I have already made my allotted inquiry. Please continue.”
Salmar, Imragoth’s top assistant, said <Speculative Mode>: “Coherent matter is obviously possible: here we are.”
Falmath nodded his agreement, but did not speak, sensing that the question would be heavily loaded and insufferably irritating.
<Still in Speculative Mode> “Is coherent bioform energy or coherent bioform space possible—according to your hypothesis?”
In one sense, Falmath wasn’t disappointed. His voice raspy from the strain of restraining himself from flying into Derisive Mode, Falmath replied <Interrogative Mode>: “You’re asking if there are spirits? Or if we have spirits?”
Seeming not at all offended by this improper use of Interrogative Mode, Salmar responded <Interpersonal Mode>: “Isn’t that what fear-creatures value most, Master Falmar? Here you are talking of some unseen hand that has, according to the implications of your hypothesis, been manipulating our destiny. And here you are with your great revelation constructed seemingly out of divinely revealed suppositions. My question is the natural result of an interaction of the fearless with the fearful.”
In all of the one-hundred seven years of his life, despite all the veiled bigotry heaped upon him, Falmath had never reached a state of full-on rage—until now. This was the greatest moment of triumph he had ever known, and it was being reft from him by those who had the least excuse to act or think with bigotry. His face flushed. His nose wrinkled as his lips pulled back to bare his white teeth. His large hands clenched into claws. His back hunched like an alpha beast challenged for the first time.
With as much alarm as her Kemin Gwaros physiology allowed, Glingil arose and interposed herself between Falmath and Imragoth and Imragoth’s protégé/proxy. “What is wrong with you, Salmar?” she asked <Interrogative Mode> “You knew what would happen, and yet you chose to act the fool?”
He said nothing, but smiled. “You are perverse” <Derisive Mode>. <Continuing in Mandative Mode> “Speak!”
Despite the possibility of facing Imragoth’s derision later, the force of Glingil’s personality was too much for Salmar. “He cannot be trusted, Glingil,” explained Salmar <General Mode> “So long as all is as he wishes, he will remain calm, even happy. But when things go in a different way, he becomes like the two-legged beasts that we long ago put out from our midst. If he could not be happy that his strange hypothesis was receiving a hearing at all, we would know for certain that he was never to be truly one of us. His way is not our way, and how could it ever be?”
Knowing that Imragoth was behind this, Falmath shouted around Glingil <Derisive Mode>: “How much derision do you expect me to endure? Let me work on you for one-hundred seven years, and even you will break under the strain!”
“I did not tell him what to do,” Imragoth responded <General Mode>, “but neither do I disagree with Salmar. You are master of something, Falmath, but that thing is not yourself. This is not your moment of triumph, but that of the Kemin Gwaros—if your hypothesis proves itself.”
<General Mode> “You and your kind have made it personal to me, Imragoth!” said Falmath, heated, but no longer shouting. “The chance I had to show all the Kemin Gwaros that I was as good as any of them, deserving to be called Kemin Gwara. But you have managed to snatch that from me.”
“You took it from yourself,” said Imragoth <General Mode>. “If you have been chided and seemingly derided, it has been to nudge you toward understanding and community. It is not the Kemin Gwaros way to meet criticism with resentment. We accept all input and weigh it against the facts we know or can discover. You are brilliant: your hypothesis shows it, whether correct or incorrect. But it needs more than a superior logical intelligence to be truly Kemin Gwara. You are superior in one way, but all Kemin Gwaros are superior to you in all other ways. You are but a Dothir allowed to dwell among us because we have a use for you. But you simply cannot or will not learn the Kemin Gwaros way—or even accept that it is superior. You can expect more criticism in the future. And, knowing you have heard all this before, I expect further outbursts of the type we have seen here.”
Falmath’s mouth worked, but his intelligence at last overruled his insecurity, and he said nothing.
“Now,” said Imragoth <General Mode>, “I will, as President of the Source Academy, ask the last question as I asked the first.” <Now in Inquisitive Mode> “We have read your treatise and seen Glingil’s presentation, but some of us are still unclear on how you perceive time and the order of events.”
Falmath was still stunned. As he had turned to her so many times before to interpret the Kemin Gwaros for him and to interpret him to the Kemin Gwaros, he turned to Glingil now. Once more she entered the breach and asked <Inquisitive Mode>: “What is it that you, as representative for all of us, don’t understand, Imragoth?”
“It does not make logical sense,” said Imragoth <General Mode>. <Switching to Inquisitive Mode since he was speaking to Glingil> “Certainly, time provides a sort of order, but time is. It has a constancy even when time dilation is considered. But this ‘hypothesis’ says that not only does time not exist, but that nothing really exists, that existence exists but does not exist simultaneously. What are we expected to do with such an idea? It flies in the face of everything we are capable of conceiving. It seems more like a Dothiar fairy-tale, a work of magical wish-fulfillments, than a scientific hypothesis.”
“And yet you, and whose who believe as you do, don’t have it in you to forgive the apparent weaknesses of one who has the mind to conceive such things,” Glingil responded <Derisive Mode>. “It seems inconceivable to me that one of the mighty Kemin Gwaros, masters of mind and body, could have this weakness.”
“Others admire his intellectual abilities,” said Imragoth <General Mode>. <Changing to Speculative Mode> “What happens when the young, and perhaps some foolish elders, decide that his way is not so bad? They will emulate him in small ways, thinking it an interesting trend, a way to better contemplate the Dothrim, maybe. Or, maybe they will even grow to think that we have overstressed the expurgation of fear from our genome. He is successful in our society. But the weaker-minded will not see that his success is due to our patience with him, not because he is suited to our society. Why, his mere presence put something akin to the fearfulness of the Dothrim in me, and I would not suffer that any more, nor risk that it should happen to our people.”
<Going back to General Mode> “I must make certain that, if we are going to tolerate his presence among us and reap the rewards of his brilliance, we do not forget that he is not truly one of us. I must remind all Kemin Gwaros of what his weakness represents.” Turning his attention back to Falmath, he said <Mandative Mode>: “I will have my answer—from you, and not from your prop. If you cannot answer in a civilized manner, you will show that all I have said of you is truth.”
“I have no mind to give you and your ilk the benefits of my abilities any more,” Falmath responded <General Mode> after a long pause, studying the faces of the audience. “Nonetheless—because of Glingil and others like her—I believe that the Kemin Gwaros should go on to the greatness they deserve. Yours is the superior way, and if I had been born differently, I either would fully engage in that way, or I would be with the Dothrim. But I was born as I am, and I have no desire to disrupt Kemin Gwaros society. If the weak-minded, as you call them, cannot tell what is productive from what is unproductive, maybe we should consider culling them instead of making me responsible for them. And, the young—they are foolish by nature, having so little knowledge and wisdom, but thinking they have so much. Why am I responsible for one more way in which they might choose to be foolish? I think I can tell you why, Imragoth, and that is genetic purity. The Kemin Gwaros have become almost a separate species from the Dothrim, and you mean to see to it that the separation becomes complete. Thus, genetic purity is all-important. It is my genes that you loath, genes that too much for your taste resemble those of the Dothrim. That is the disruption you really fear but refuse to name. In your secret heart, Imragoth, you are less concerned with adhering to the Way of Kroten, willingly, as a matter of logic, than you are about enforcing the Way of Kroten, as you interpret it, by genetic imposition. You know the Dothrim have gone down that road more than once—to the sorrow of their world. But you will succeed where they failed because you are Kemin Gwaros, and they are the Wild Ones.”
Imragoth began to rebut his sarcastic words, but Falmath put out his hand to forestall him—and, amazingly, Imragoth went silent.
“Be that as it may, I will now attempt to answer your question in a fashion you will comprehend,” Falmath continued. <Switching to Tutorial Mode, a mode which pleased him immensely at this moment> “Consider a paper story book. When you look at it, you see first the most rudimentary things about it—its title, the pictures on the covers, the size. Has any time passed within the book? No. If you open it to any given page, but do not read, has any time passed in the story? No, but neither have you discovered anything, except that there are colored shapes on the paper. But if you begin reading, time begins to pass within the story. Is the story ordered in a certain way, or does the act of reading bring order to the story? It would seem that the story itself must be ordered, since all who read it perceive its order the same way. But we can never be certain of it, because we don’t see the order until we begin the reading.
“Now consider the author. The author exists outside the story, and isn’t ruled by it. Rather, she formulates the premise, the rules by which the story will operate and the general plot, writes the opening line, and continues from there.
“What about the characters? Do they make their own decisions, or are their decisions made for them? Do they affect time and order, or do time and order rule them? They may know what has gone before them in the story, but not what is to come in the story. Yet the author, who provided the rules and the premise of the story, has designed their past with the future of the characters in mind.
“If you could stand outside the universe, would time pass for you in the same manner as for those in the universe? It seems unlikely, since your time-stream need not obey the rules set within the universe being observed from the outside. Can you even observe this universe in question from the outside? How? You are within your existential membrane, and it is in its. In order to observe this other universe, then, you must enter it.
“If you could enter into another universe, you could enter in at any time and place, and this means that all times and places must exist simultaneously. The universe must all exist in one, infinitesimally small, moment. This makes no sense to those who dwell entirely within their own universe. Of course there is time. How can the future be before it is? How can anything exist all-at-once? A maze exists all-at-once, but you can’t see it all until you move through it—and it will take you time to do so. And, if you’re intelligent, it’s unlikely you’ll have to go through the entire maze to come to the other end. Does that mean the parts of the maze you never visited don’t exist?
“Without time, you couldn’t move from place to place within the maze: you’d enter and stick right where you went in. As soon as you have the power to move, and start doing so, time begins to pass.
“I can see that I have left many of you with less understanding than when I began the explanation. Given time, I trust you will work it all out. If not, I will be available to converse with you through communications channels, and, from time to time, in person.”


<Inquisitive Mode> “Are you still defending him?” queried Imragoth as they sat in his well-ordered sitting-room next to the holoprojected flame in his old-fashioned fireplace.
Glingil stretched her long legs, and her shapely feet appeared from under the hem of her extensive, multi-colored gown. <Interpersonal Mode> “What’s to defend?” she yawned.
<Mandative Mode> “Do not be deliberately obtuse, youngling,” said old Imragoth, his long white beard bristling. <Derisive Mode> “You have been shielding this person ever since you were a child, Glingil.” <Interpersonal Mode> “I am inclined to think this love of a throwback is a weakness in you.”
“Throwback?” Glingil said lazily <Inquisitive Mode>. <General Mode> “He has done us great service. He also has full access to all ten of our modes of thought, sensation, and speech. In all but one way, he is one of us.”
Considering her choice of General Mode over Interpersonal Mode, Imragoth countered <General Mode> “His one major difference—and I am not conceding that there is but one difference—is the most critical one. Since the Age of Father Kroten we have striven to rid ourselves of it. Genetically, we are still prey to it, but we now have the capacity to completely expunge it. We do not wish to increase the numbers of the dangerous Dothrim, and we no longer have to—only this hyper-resistant creature remains to trouble us.”
<Derisive Mode> “A double-entendre? Tricky word-games always were your specialty, Master Imragoth.” <Switching to Interpersonal Mode> “He can hardly help it, in any case. His personality was not formed with malice—unless it was our own. And yet, in most situations, he functions without resentment. Only when he feels that he’s being ignored because of his difference does his difference truly present itself. And he long ago agreed to sterilization.” <Inquisitive Mode> “Blackberry wine?” she asked as she arose and moved toward a nearby counter with silvery goblets and a decanter.
<General Mode> “Yes, please,” holding out his goblet. <Back to Interpersonal Mode> “There is more than one way to propagate oneself. And, given his ever-present fear behavior, how can we be certain he truly means it when he says our way is the better way? We cannot. This is a two-legged, thinking beast. We must not put our trust in it, much less love it.”
She looked long at him as she passed him his goblet, and she did not immediately let it go. <Interpersonal Mode> “You love your cat,” she observed as the panther-like feline padded through the deep pile, tail up and very cat-proud, at that very opportune moment. Sensing something, it lifted its great emerald eyes and issued a growling meow.
“Not now,” Imragoth said gently <Interpersonal Mode>.
“You use Interpersonal Mode with your cat,” Glingil said <Derisive Mode>.
“I do love my cat,” Imragoth responded <Interpersonal Mode>, smoothing back his sparse white hair. “But my cat influences me in only two ways: I love his constancy, and I have been trained by him to care for him. He does not speak to me of things that can sway my opinions on any matter, save matters which touch him near, such as the time of his supper and when I will pet him.”
“Your reactions to this situation smack of fear,” Glingil said <Interpersonal Mode>, smiling without humor.
“We can feel it, in a distant way,” stated Imragoth <Interpersonal Mode>. “We have lost our adrenalin, but we can still recognize danger and feel the threat.”
“Yes,” she mused <Poetic Mode>, “and is not the fear of the fear exceedingly queer?” <Turning back to Interpersonal Mode> “The threat,” she continued, “is a man who has mostly succeeded, a man whose disability is no fault of his own, and whose wound has been unendingly prodded by those to whom he is nonetheless faultlessly loyal.” <Going to Inquisitive Mode> “Do you fear he will turn against us and give to the Dothrim knowledge they shouldn’t have?”
“I suppose not,” Imragoth replied reluctantly <Interpersonal Mode>, perhaps never having asked himself that question before. “Your reaction to my concerns also seems to me like fear. I do fear the fear.” <Speculative Mode> “And you will say that driving fear and fear of fear are not the Kemin Gwaros way. And that, I posit, is the problem. His presence among us has sparked in us a fire we have sought to douse.” <General Mode> “If we are no longer resolved to this, then we have been exceedingly cruel to the Dothrim.” <Inquisitive Mode> “And for what reason?”
“I admit that his difference, and your constant hammering away at it, have influenced my thinking,” said Glingil <General Mode>. <Changing to Speculative Mode> “When you speak like a Dothir, talking of murdering a person, without the excuse of immediate threat, you make me fear that perhaps adrenalin is not the only thing we should breed out of ourselves. Or, perhaps we have always been on the wrong path. Maybe the mere act of living makes us fearful, war-mongering creatures. Maybe we can never rid ourselves of the vices of the Dothrim. Maybe we don’t yet merit the ability to make the decisions of life and death.” <Mandative Mode> “Make me remember that you are among the greatest of us, Make me recall that the Kemin Gwaros differ from the Dothrim in any other meaningful way than our knowledge. Make me see that you still love understanding of all things above all other considerations.”
Imragoth was quite taken aback, and needed some time to consider his opinions, as well as to reassess Glingil while he sipped absently at his wine. “It has gone further than I understood,” he said at last <General Mode>. “You have been overwhelmed by this poisonous personality. Your intelligence has been measured as greater than mine, but you are obviously still too young. If you persist, I will reconsider my recommendation of you to succeed me as President of the Source Academy.”
“Either old age has unhinged you,” she replied <Derisive Mode>, “or Falmath’s presence has affected you, yourself, more than it has any of the rest of us. Maybe we should have your genome scanned. Have you been near any poorly-shielded nuclear experiments?” <Changing quickly to General Mode before he could respond> “It is you who are not behaving as a Kemin Gwaros ought. We do not fear a single beast, or even a lone Dothir, when we are in our own haunts. We think clearly, and so don’t worry that ‘poisonous’ personalities and insidious Dothir plots and spies will do us any harm. We are able to outthink the brightest of the Dothir because we think with order and calm. You worry about one man who has never tried to do you harm because there is something you see in yourself that disturbs you when you perceive it in others. You’re reactionary and too conservative, and all things that don’t conform to your own ideas are to be viewed with suspicion. Fear, Imragoth, comes from more sources than chaotic hormones.” <Mandative Mode> “Examine yourself before you fall off a self-made cliff!”
      For a moment, Glingil had surpassed him, and he sat still, thinking, unable to ignore her command. Her powerful voice was the reason he had considered her for the Presidency of the Source Academy. When she had arisen, she placed her goblet in the cedar-paneled sanitation slot beside the kitchen door, and walked out into the night, Imragoth remained in his faux-leather, high-backed, cushy old-fashioned chair, his eyes blank with concentration.


“How is it with you since the submission conference?” Cuthaur asked <Inquisitive Mode> around his mouthful of crackers and cheese. Somehow, his beautiful face in its youth lost no dignity as he wolfed his food and slurped his wine. Together he and Falmath sat atop Falmath’s Hill, an actual, natural and irregularly-shaped hill set within five full acres of trees, whose leaves, in the middle-autumn sun, were turning colors nicely. It had been several months since the contentious conference.
“Well enough,” rumbled Falmath <Interpersonal Mode>, absently tapping a cracker sandwich against his plate. “I know that Glingil spoke to Imragoth after the conference. She had never told me what she said to him, but he and his cadre of devotees have been much less openly critical of me since then. I doubt that their feelings toward me have changed, but they seem to be studiously applying themselves to quietly disapproving of me on a scientific level instead of attacking me directly.” Finally, he took a bite of his cracker and chewed thoughtfully.
“I hear they have already begun construction of the accelerator-expander,” Cuthaur offered <Interpersonal Mode>, thinking that maybe he shouldn’t have touched that nerve.
Falmath smiled. “Don’t mother me, Cuthaur,” <Derisive Mode>. <Quickly changing back to Interpersonal Mode> “The expander is going up at Parines and should be generating within two years—if my hypothesis proves correct.” <Going to Inquisitive Mode> “How is your Physical Sciences testing proceeding? Is Glingil driving you too hard?”
“Don’t mother me, Master Falmath!” Cuthaur responded <Derisive Mode>, chuckling. (Switching to Inquisitive Mode> “I also hear that Source Polytechnic is beginning work on the equations for the new anti-matter factory based on your hypothesis.” <Turning to Speculative Mode> “If the two projects work, you will gain immensely in cachet. You’ll be able to do basically whatever you like. Will you keep working on Potentialization Theory yourself, or will you turn it over to us so you can move on to something else?”
“Hm,” Falmath mused <Speculative Mode>. “I’m afraid I may have hit my apex. What do you do after you’ve determined the nature of existence? Perhaps I’ll take up pottery or the defensive arts: those will be useful if Imragoth decides to turn me out.” <Changing to Derisive Mode> “Maybe I’ll take up overeating and become the largest man ever known. Imragoth seems to believe that’s what I’m aiming at.”
Cuthaur laughed, and then stopped himself abruptly. “Look,” he said <Mandative Mode>, pointing at the edge of the clearing round Falmath’s Hill.
“It’s Glingil and Imragoth,” breathed Falmath <General Mode>. He tried not to speculate as to why Imragoth was at last daring to enter his presence again. He watched in silence as they approached together with the afternoon sun behind them, so close to one another that their long white and silver hair mingled in the stiff breeze, giving them a sort of double elfin halo. It hit him that, no matter what, they were both Kemin Gwaros, and he was suddenly not certain that he was, even in the eyes of his good friend Glingil. What would she do if it came down to a choice between being his friend and being what was commonly thought of as being a true Kemin Gwara. He had a feeling unfounded in any sort of fact that he was soon to find out. <General Mode> “Please go down and greet them.”
Cuthaur rose up on his long legs, his red hair like the flame of the sun, his sallow skin like the surface of a golden idol in the lands of the Wild Ones. Falmath realized that he was surrounded by them, and that they would do things in whatever manner they pleased; he would, in the end, have to match them, whatever the cost to himself, or he would have to accept that he would eventually be driven into the wild arms of the Cast-off. Even avoiding them, becoming a virtual hermit was no protection, for they were so very social and would regard that ploy as the most un-Kemin Gwaros thing he had ever done.
So, he waited for the youngster to bring along the elders. They would pass through the parts of the maze of rooms that he had personally dolven into the Hill. And they would calmly assess all that they sensed in that thorough and deliberate Kemin Gwaros fashion. He would be forensically dissected and analyzed, once again, before they ever got near him. And the curiosity that was Falmath would again be considered for expurgation, even by Glingil, because she couldn’t help herself—and because she could never even consider losing the ever-present logic that made a Kemin Gwara different from a Dothir. Of course, he too was ruled first by cool thoughts, the need to see, clearly, without the heat-shimmer of anger and fear, but then his own thoughts didn’t threaten the end of his time in the physical comfort and emotional exultation of those he wished most would regard him as a peer and fellow.
After what seemed to Falmath too long a time, the three appeared at the head of the stair and virtually glided out onto the flat, stony top of the Hill to the grassy spot where Falmath and Cuthaur had set up their folding chairs and table. “Greetings” said Falmath <General Mode>, smiling. “I have wine, cheese, crackers, and cold meats, and I’m willing to share.”
Glingil threw open her arms and flowed forward to embrace him, and he embraced her in return, though somewhat less wholeheartedly. When they were done, and Glingil had withdrawn to his side, Imragoth put out his hand, palm outward, in the traditional Kemin Gwaros greeting. With reservation, but trying not to show it, Falmath returned the greeting.
“Will you dine with Cuthaur and me?” asked Falmath <Inquisitive Mode>.
“Maybe later,” responded Glingil <Interpersonal Mode>. “But first we have good news for you. There is a new therapy designed specifically for you by Source Polytechnic, and it’s ready now.”
That hit him like a sledge hammer. He had become comfortable with the idea that his genes couldn’t be re-formed—or at least he was in the grip of the momentum of that idea. When he recovered from the blow, he found Glingil and Cuthaur regarding him in their soft way, but Imragoth was once again staring at him with his laser-beam gaze. His mind screamed for him to turn and walk away down the stair, run to his bedroom, and lock himself in. At least, roared his mind, he should verbally assault Imragoth. Imragoth’s hand was all over this. Who had commissioned the genetic study at the Polytechnic? The physicians had long ago given up the idea as hopeless. The co-opted viruses which were unique to Kemin Gwaros defense against disease and genetic damage were stronger in him than any other known Kemin Gwara. Who had told the technicians which modifications were to be made? There must either be some way to mask the genes that made him the Angry Kemin Gwara, or there must be genes that were less well-defended, that could override the parts of his mind, and the atavistic adrenal glands, which initiated the fear-response. How would his personality and intelligence be affected?
These thoughts tore through his mind like wildcats. He responded <General Mode> after only a moment of hesitation: “That’s interesting. Quite interesting. Please tell me something about this new therapy. You should understand my innate skepticism.”
“First,” said Imragoth quickly <matching Falmath’s use of General Mode>. “I must tell you that it could kill you. There is a significant chance, about nine percent, that you will perish within thirteen hours after administration of the serum. If you pass the thirteenth hour the chances of death within two days decrease to about three percent. There is also the chance that you will come away mentally diminished or comatose: that is about two percent. If you pass those two hurdles your adrenalin glands will shut down, and the primitive parts of your brain that control bodily functions will be weakened. You will need to take certain nutritional supplements for the rest of your life, but you will become even more intelligent as your synaptic connections in your higher brain functions strengthen. Your already legendary memory will become practically eidetic. There are possibilities of genetic damage which are numerous, but for which there is a minuscule chance—about point zero zero six percent. The technician will discuss these with you before you make your final decision, although, given the potential benefits, I cannot imagine how your answer can be anything other than an enthusiastic ‘Yes!’”
“Really?” asked Glingil <Inquisitive Mode>, her brow furrowed. <Continuing in Speculative Mode> “If you had had Falmath’s experiences and his disability, I don’t think you’d be so certain. We have given Falmath our company and our resources, but we’ve made him pay a very high price for them. Maybe one might think that the Wild People might be more understanding than the Kemin Gwaros. What power one of us could achieve among them! And, the only cost of going to the Dothrim for one such as Falmath is that he would be forced to leave the warm glow of our derision.”
“What you’re saying then,” said Falmath <General Mode>, “is that it’s say ‘yes’, or go to the place of execution. We have developed this therapy whereby you can become acceptably one of us, and if you won’t accept it, you’ve shown that you have no true desire to be truly Kemin Gwaros.
“I’m strangely just a little concerned about possible damage to my intelligence and to my personality. I understand that you’re not in love with my personality, but it’s what makes me me! Without it, I’m someone else. Time may change it, but that will be due to experiences, possibly hard-won experiences. If you say that my concern doesn’t matter, you’re saying I’m just a fleshy husk—insert new brain. And I say, in that case, you should discard me and make another piece of flesh which will be more pleasing to you.
“It’s my personality, believe it or not, and not just my intelligence, which has been of such great benefit to the Kemin Gwaros. Without my peculiar drives, my strange way of seeing things, who can say whether I could continue to perform as I have. And, if it’s only raw computing power you wish, I can tell you how to make a better computer before you do me in.”
“As usual,” responded Imragoth <General Mode, though it was obvious he wished to use Derisive Mode>, “you are quite eloquent in the defense of your inadequacy.” <Switching to Speculative Mode> “Who is to say what might be gained by an alteration of your strange personality. It is your fear talking when you speak of what might be lost.” <Going back to General Mode> “It is the Kemin Gwaros way to seek the new possibilities rather than to stick to ways which have proven faulty.”
Falmath could have argued on that point for some time, but he realized than in Kemin Gwaros eyes he would just be proving Imragoth correct. He took a different tack: complete openness and honesty were always the best way to deal with Kemin Gwaros. “Both of you are wrong about what’s driving me,” he said <Interpersonal Mode> “No Kemin Gwara has ever regarded me as one of them, not even my birth parents or my childhood caregivers. Even Glingil—long life to her—has trouble thinking of me as one of her own kind, and she’s the most open and understanding Kemin Gwara I have ever met. You, Master Imragoth, I suspect of having motives here that you don’t speak of—but my perceptions are a bit skewed, I suppose.” He rolled his eyes, and Cuthaur couldn’t help letting out a little chuckle. <Going into Speculative Mode> “Your best hope is that I will perish. Barring that, your hope is to beat the odds that I’ll come away from the therapy ‘better’ than before. In either of those cases, you can show, without significant rivalry, that you were the greatest servant of the Way of Kroten. And if I should be ‘improved’, well, at least you’ve got rid of that troublesome throwback who has brought all your assumptions about fear-based creatures into question. I represent all the intellectual fears of the Kemin Gwaros, and I’m weary of paying for the fears of others.” Drawing himself up to his full height, his black beard bristling, his eyes gleaming, he said in his deepest voice <Mandative Mode> “Allay my fears, Imragoth.”
Master Imragoth actually staggered back a couple of steps, his eyes wide with wonder and alarm. The voice of Falmath had achieved an inconceivable potency. His command had been issued without emphasis, but it had driven itself into Imragoth’s head like a hammer-drilled spike. Glingil and Cuthaur moved to Imragoth’s side as if to stand by him against a foe’s attack. Falmath’s command was irresistible, and Imragoth breathed <Interpersonal Mode” “You are correct in your assessment. I cannot do as you ask because you are correct. Please do not do this thing to me again. I will be as open to you as the pages of a book. I have misjudged you greatly.”
Falmath’s eyebrows went up. He had intended to grill Imragoth intensely, but he had reached a height of ability he hadn’t known was possible. He had to think quickly so as not to lose his momentum. “You see now,” he said <still in Mandative Mode, but with less power> “what can be done with proper motivation. But you cannot do it without passion.” Softening his countenance, he went on <Speculative Mode> “But maybe it isn’t for all Kemin Gwaros. I am a creature of fear, and I fear to lose myself in the Kemin Gwaros sea of joyful community. But my fear is unique, and it has intensified my inquisitiveness and my need to distinguish myself through great works of intellect—which is what the Kemin Gwaros should value most. With my uniqueness, I have hoped to make myself more one of you. This may not make sense to you, but it’s true.”
There was silence for a time as the three opposite Falmath studied him, and he waited patiently, for the first time in his life truly at peace. Make of it what you will, he thought. I now have power. I have something that you don’t have but will want very much. At least you must keep me around a while longer for study. He also knew that if they trusted him too little and put him out, he would have a bright future among the Dothrim.
“You can see,” he said aloud <Tutorial Mode>, risking overplaying his hand, “what we might have lost by expunging the wild genomes.” <Slipping into Speculative Mode> “What have they lost by being reft of our higher culture? How they have suffered through every aspect of their existence. They are contentious and petty and low-living, and our Great Plan has intensified their fearful ways while diffusing ours. At what cost?” <Changing to Derisive Mode> “When we were a young people, during the time of Ranimir, we could have been excused. The Great Plan was untried, and we weren’t the creatures we are now, but now we are great in every sense, and we can see the results of our actions.
“The Great Plan isn’t Kroten’s Way; the Great Plan is Ranimir’s Way. Kroten wanted us to reason ourselves to a better way of being. Ranimir, thinking he knew best, wanted us to breed ourselves to a higher state.” <Going back to Speculative Mode> “Maybe he was right. Maybe there was no other way to get here. Maybe we’ll never know. If we are deaf and then gain the ability to hear, can we then ignore the screams of those who are drowning? Are we to be kinder to our cats than we are to two-legged fellow travellers? What did we lose to gain so much?”
“That’s fear speech,” posited Cuthaur <Interpersonal Mode>.
“Is it?” Glingil put in <Inquisitive Mode>. <Turning to Poetic Mode> “Is it not fear to hate the arm that raises the sword, to cut it off with the other arm and hurl it away? Is it not strange to turn the eye which sees the war, rather than weep the tear that sears the cheek but strengthens the will to eschew the fear which makes all war?” <Turning to Speculative Mode> “Maybe Melketh’s poetry is more than a little heavy-handed, but somehow is still appropriate. Are we to become a race—or have we become a race—which reckons nothing of its own passage through the world, a herd of stamping elephants, bellowing and knocking over trees? Do we care only for ourselves and believe we have no impact which doesn’t redound to our own glory? Are we gods, that we see all ends? Have we achieved the apex of being?”
They all turned inward into full Speculative Mode and stood, still as stones, wandering strange paths that the Dothrim could only begin to imagine. They meandered in their minds in reconstructions of the distant past, in mental models that enabled them to speak to people long dead, to walk unseen paths through places far away and long gone to dust. They strode in mind through the future as far forward as they could project it with confidence.
The new sun rose in the east to a clear day, limning them in red flame like a long-dreaded wrath. But the mounting sun turned them to golden monuments, to a dream made real that was dreamt on a far day in the childhood of the human race.
The Kemin Gwaros were not gifted yet with telepathy, at least not in the definitive sense. They couldn’t transfer thoughts from mind to mind, but when they stood together, and entered the trance-state of Speculation, their senses joined with their thoughts, and their thoughts flowed together into one long Thought, imbued with the elder wisdom of Imragoth, the immeasurable intelligence of Falmath, the irreducible warmth and steadfastness of Glingil, and the ever-wondering, youthful seeking of Cuthaur.
The moment was but a quick blink to Time, and a few heartbeats in a long Kemin Gwaros life, though a Dothir would not have had the patience to have observed it, much less to have been a part of it. But it was a moment of rare moment, even amongst the Kemin Gwaros, and when they emerged from their Thought, they knew that a new gate had opened to them, and a new path that only the very brave could walk.
When they returned to the primary world, the four of them sat down on the rocky overhang overlooking Falmath’s pond, and they consumed the remains of his food and wine in silent afterglow while multicolored autopods slipped obliviously through the cloudless sky above. Falmath’s black cat came slinking up out of the stairway to join them, and they fed him and petted him, and he purred contentedly for them as he wormed his way through their arched legs and around their backs, and rubbed his face on them, as cats will.






A CROWNLESS KING


I have built a fortress, tall and strong.
Its roots are dungeons, deep and dark.
None can overlook its walls.
None unwanted pass its gates.
There is no memory of the light of day.
There is only night: all is void.

I have made my armor, black, impenetrable.
I have made my sword, hard, cold as ice.
None can overtake my arms.
None can escape my wrath.
There is no army which dares assail me.
There are no heroes: all are gone.

I have raised a rampart, high and sheer.
Its stone is seamless, crackless, smooth.
None can withstand its fall.
None can survive my ire.
There is no emotion that moves me.
There is not love: all is lost.

My walls are impregnable.
My towers frown upon the plain.
My banners hang in windless gloom.
None enter in.
None ever leave.
All is death to me.




INTUSSUSCEPTION

“You don’t interest me in the least, Little Bumbler,” said a deep, soft, female voice. “You have no power and no ambition to obtain any. You have no brilliance: you are as dull as dusty shit. In short, you are common.
            “But those in contact with you are of interest to me.”
            Bartholomew Bumble found himself all alone in a dark place. As his eyes focused, he saw unfamiliar stars in a moonless night sky. His bare feet were half-buried in gritty dust. He could feel the beginnings of dampness collecting on his skin. He felt himself and discovered that he was naked, and, as if on command, he felt the night chill coming on him.
            Some tiny, cold, desert thing skittered over his cold feet. “Ack!” he cried as he started away.
            Bartholomew took that as a cue to begin walking. Finding it almost impossible to make out the landscape beyond ten feet or so, he simply began walking in the direction he was facing. Anyway, he had a feeling that, whatever direction he took, he was going to end up right where he was supposed to.
            So, on a desert journey, a person is supposed to do a lot of soul-searching and communing with God and stuff like that. Bartholomew was properly alone in a vast open space, but he was not hot and dehydrated, he was cold and clammy. He was not in the condition that induced spiritual awakening, but rather in the condition that induced soul-shriveling fear. Walking was enough to stave off hypothermia, and that was sufficient to ward off the fleeting glimpse of eternity that was freezing to death.
            If this little dip into the inner workings of his visions was going to be like the others, there was some kind of personal revelation upcoming. Bartholomew wanted to find it and have done.
            “Dammit!” he said to the black air. “How can I believe this? It’s damn near pitch black, and I haven’t even stubbed my toe or stepped on a cactus spine.”
            With that, Bartholomew Bumble both dashed his foot on a stone and felt something long and sharp go into the sole of his other foot. As he danced on the bruised foot and tried to keep the other off the ground, laughter rolled like thunder across the desert floor. Clouds boiled into the night sky, lightnings flashed, sonic blasts pounded Bartholomew into the dust, and torrents poured forth. Hurricane wind howled, and, above all the uproar, a soft, sweet voice said: “Is this enough discomfort for you, Little Bumbler?”
            His teeth chattering, Bartholomew retorted: “For someone who’s trying to make me feel insignificant, you’re paying me an awful lot of attention.”
            “Well, I have to overcome your resistance, don’t I?” said the cosmic female voice. “How else are we going to build the proper relationship?”
            “Do I want a relationship with you?” Bartholomew shouted over the blasting wind.
            “Of course, you do,” said the disembodied voice. “You want your revelation, and I’m just the one to give it to you.”
            “I’ll get something no matter what you do,” cried Bartholomew.
            “What if I kill you?” asked the voice.
            “This isn’t real!” proclaimed Bartholomew. “You can ‘kill’ me, but I won’t be dead. I’ll just come back for another revelation. Besides, if you actually did kill me, you’d lose more than I would on the deal.”
            The storm stopped, the sky cleared, and the sun began to rise in the east. “You’re sure of your hypothesis, eh?” said the voice. “We’ll just see what kind of prophet you make.”
            Now, Bartholomew could see he was located in the midst of a muddy flat ringed by high, stony hills. He felt like he was standing on the pan of a colossal bear trap. He was closer to the east side than the west, if the sun rising into his face was to be trusted. The only other living things he could see were the scattered barrel cactuses. There were many flat rocks revealed to him as the mud dried with preternatural speed and turned back to dust. There were standing stones, many of which canted this way or that, appearing as if they might be on the verge of some species of movement. But there were no animate things to be seen, not even little lizards or mice, and there was no sign of anything sapient. He wondered how the voice was going to carry through on her veiled threat.
            Bartholomew Bumble walked, and the heat grew, and the thirst grew. His skin reddened and began to sag, his lops pained him, and his tongue became very thick. His eyes struggled to keep themselves moist, and his vision blurred. He couldn’t lift his feet, and he seemed to be tripping over everything. But he hardly noticed, for his thought was elsewhere. His body was running on automatic, for he knew he was a fly in the spider’s web, and he was determined to make himself as hard to catch as possible.
            Thus, Bartholomew survived as no human could have under such a sun in such a wasted place. He refused to even try digging at the barrel cactuses, and his feet, the skin long ago blistered and torn away, just kept going. For seven long days and six short nights (each night just long enough to let the desert freeze set in), Bartholomew’s feet hammered at the desert floor, the remainder of his body apparently incapable of bringing itself closer to the eastern side of the ring of stone hills.
            At the precise end of the seventh day, just as night dropped over the desert like a weighted curtain, Bartholomew stumbled and came to a halt. He had had his eyes closed since the middle part of the second day, walking blind across the blazing grit, knowing the spider wasn’t ready to let him either die or ‘die’, knowing he’d end up right where she wanted him, whatever he did or how he did it. He opened his eyes and could barely make out the adobe mound he was weakly levering himself off of. He smelled moisture. It was too much temptation for him to think any more of his suspicions. His blackened body wasted no time in tottering around to find the entrance. Into the Bartholomew-sized hole he went with utmost, excruciating dispatch.
            It was absolutely black inside the mound, as if the open portal to the outside did not exist. The funk of the accumulation of dried swat was so compounded and ancient that the place was like the inside of Death’s tattered robes. In fact, this place felt awfully fuzzy…
            As he realized he was in contact with millions of hairy, little legs, Bartholomew’s mouth (Bartholomew—that was the name of this lump of charred flesh, right?) stretched wide, and his head threw itself back as if to scream, but only a long exhalation came out of him. In response, his shriveled ears could hear millions of microscopic hisses. He would have collapsed to the floor and rocked back and forth, but that would have meant crashing onto a hostile, living carpet, and then rubbing in the insult. Not that he was capable of thinking in those terms, or in any terms.
            Eventually, after one final, thunderous hiss, the millions of legs withdrew with a sound like a brush rasping over felt. Bartholomew’s sickening terror left him after a few moments of dry heaving. Suddenly, he realized that he could breathe more easily, and his mouth was only desert-dry and not surface-of-the-sun crisp. And he could feel skin on his body again, tender and easily pained by touch, but supple and only moderately scarred. Mercy? No, he would be shown no mercy. Of this, he was absolutely certain.
            Moments drew out into minutes. Bartholomew now noticed that all was complete silence. He could not hear himself breathing, nor could he hear his feet shuffling as he stiffly moved to find a wall. Now, the minutes seemed attenuated, and the wall was ages away. Finally, he bumbled into an upward-curving surface, and he heard no thump. He punched the wall, and felt only staggering pain. He slid downward in despair and tumbled to the floor, too stiff to follow the outward angle of the mound-wall. He wallowed, struggling to haul or heave himself upright. He gave up quickly and lay sprawled on the compacted grit, and just breathed in the stultifying funk of his fresh sweat mixed with the ancient sweat.
            The long minutes drew into long hours. His physical condition improved no further, but neither did it deteriorate. His breath remained raspy: he couldn’t hear it, but he could feel its raggedness. He was still desert-dry, and his eyes were painfully crusty—and though his sight would have adjusted long ago, he could still see nothing. His joints and muscles were pained and rigid now, and his skin was still over-sensitive; just breathing hurt like knives and fire. Stillness was misery, and movement was beyond racking.
            Bartholomew was close to losing his sense of self again when he felt another presence enter the room, and with it came the yet stronger smell of water amid all the funk. Stones embedded into the walls of this lonely Hogan began to glow pale silver, bringing a soft, necromantic moonlight. The eldritch illumination revealed a withered crone, hunched, iron-haired, black-eyed, skin as pale inside her ragged robes as a blind fish from some time-forgotten cave. She did not regard him but stood staring into the palm of her clawed hand.
            Fear gripped Bartholomew as it had seldom done in his life, for he had seldom been able to work up enough focus on the outer world to develop a worthy terror of it. But it wasn’t the world that had him now from gonads to brain stem, nor was it the ancient thing that inhabited his proximity. The object of dread was rather the unknown occupant of that horny hand, imprisoned (?) behind those great, ragged nails.
            “What have you got?” Bartholomew croaked.
            She didn’t respond but instead shifted her gaze to the wooden stool in the middle of the floor. Vaguely, Bartholomew wondered how he had missed this object as he had blundered across the room. Unable to control himself, his gaze also locked onto this otherwise unremarkable object. All his thought and ambition was given to this seat. What an amazing thing it would be to plant himself there! Surely, the entire cosmos and the reason for its existence could be discovered from that nexus only about four feet away. But somehow he knew the seat was denied him.
            Still concentrating on the stool, the crone said: “You are very thirsty, yes?”
            “Yes,” groaned Bartholomew.
            “I can give you drink which will make you strong,” she said, “stronger than the little demons that eat up your insides. Such drink as I can give will make you live and be forever young and hale.”
            Through his transfixion alarms sounded in his mind. The Spider’s trap! Here was the ultimate bait! It wasn’t the promised alchemical impotation that was the lure: immortality was no good without meaning. Bartholomew was being offered the meaning of existence, and all of eternity to make use of his absolute knowledge. He was being offered Joy! To know Why! To know every Why! And not simply to feel he knew Why, or to feel It for only a passing moment, but to know It absolutely and without ceasing, forever!
            And what little thing would obtain for him this boon of boons? Drink the drink. Imbibe the Spider’s venom. Be subsumed, eaten by the Spider, digested by Her, and excreted into Her existence. Bartholomew would certainly sit then upon the Seat of Revelation, but all the revelations would be Her revelations, whatever reality She chose to construct for him. The Meaning would be Her meaning, whatever meaning She believed would lull him and console him—and amuse Her.
            “No,” Bartholomew moaned.
            “No?” said the crone. She finally turned her whole body, one hand still held out, palm upward. She locked her eyes into Bartholomew’s. His consciousness collapsed as if disappearing into a black hole. As he spun into the roaring vortex, laughter rolled over the storm of imagined sound. You now have become interesting to me, said the profound, velvet voice to his flailing mind. I will let out a string and let you dangle on it until your are ready for my love. I am prevented touching your body by your Protectors. I cannot take you despite yourself. But you will nonetheless give yourself to me in time. It will be delicious for the both of us.



COMMONALITIES

“From each side of the infinite sides of the argument, those on the other side seem delusional, misguided, dysfunctional, and childish. No one has yet proven that there is an absolute, a certainly certain safe bet. No religion or philosophical system has all the answers, or there wouldn’t be so many sects claiming they have Knowledge. We fully and absolutely invest ourselves in our guess—and all be damned who gainsay us!”—Kam Hijat

Launch Day: A light, a fire maybe, a pinprick of hope on a field of dark despair. A seemingly distant, yet near enough to gently touch, hurricane lamp hung out by the door just for me. A beacon of hope, as they say, like a beautiful woman who casts her gaze in your direction, and your heart’s desire of the moment is that she does not quickly avert her gaze in disgust.

Melodramatic? Hyperbolic? No. Harper George was not the kind of man who was given to panic or desperation. He had all his life been steady-as-she-goes, sails furled or unfurled as needed, ship-shape, trim, and always properly tacked. He was Old Ironsides, a frigate, but nonetheless a ship-of-the-line.
This was the only sort of metaphor Mr. George cared for. He was by trade a sawyer in one of the few big mills that still had enough custom since the advent of Q-mole. Q-mole was quantum-molecular universal matter. It was great stuff—and he hated every yottagram of that evil stuff.
But by avocation he was a worker in wood. His speciality was the building of boats and small-scale ships from the Age of Wind and Sail. Whenever he had the time, which was more and more frequently as Q-mole really took the world by storm, he would set sail in one of his boats and tour the estuary, communing with the sea birds, running with a pod of dolphins that liked to venture up the river to Mirror Lake. Salt or fresh, water was buoyant to the ship of his soul—and much more trustworthy since the onset of damnable Q-mole.
Bloody Q-mole did everything. Its first major use was in carbon-catcher wind scrubbers that cleaned up the world’s skies like slow, quiet trees never could, making a riotous human world once again safe for democracy. Q-mole was a sunny sky, and weather like the weather when the world was young and Mother Earth less weary and aggrieved. Asthmatics no longer hacked up lungs, and old folks could lounge safe in the summer shade.
Oh, how Harper George hated Q-mole! With Q-mole, the cost of linen sails was sky-rocketing. Because of Q-mole, forests were being re-planted—and protected from logging. Because of Q-mole, paper could last practically forever. Even computers were made, inside and out, from this despicable substance, which, atop all its other amazing qualities, was a most excellent and inexpensive semiconductor. Combined with three-dimensional printers, Q-mole was eating up the world and shitting out all sorts of useful and wasteful products—and eating Mr. George and people like him out of house and home. Workers of the world, unite, dammit!


Survey Vessel Kamanta was on its twenty-eighth survey mission, which was nearing completion, and its crew was space-weary and very ready to return to the Commonality. The ship was engaged in a long-range scan of twelve uninteresting star systems on the galactic rim, and no surprises were expected. It was a dull sky, with two burnt-out solar systems a little under four light years apart: otherwise, it was too normal and boring, no Commonality worlds here, present or past, no signals emanating from here, no nothing.
Just as the survey-leader thought: forty-two hours, fifteen minutes, and then back to my pouch-siblings for beer and rejoicing, the thing happened that always happens when one stops expecting the unexpected:
“Mushkhath,” said the spokesperson of the third watch, looking up from a monitor.
“Yes, Etim’-cheth,” said survey-leader Mushkhath through the hand on which sat its uninterested chin.
“There are several objects in the fourth target area that are absorbing the energy of our scans,” responded Etim’-cheth.
“Damn,” said Mushkhath, its head rising off its hand, its three eyes all looking toward Etim’-cheth’s monitor, “something interesting always happens when you least want it.”
The three other crew-people on the bridge issued the squeaking noise that was the rough analog of a chuckle where they came from.
“Okay. Copy it to the holo.”
Suddenly, the open area of the bridge sprang to life with lights. There were icons that looked like stars and planets, and a few black objects with red auras, arranged like two solar systems, one of which had a pair of largish objects in the center (one larger than the other) and five orbiting objects—and the other of which had one large object at the center and six orbiting objects. There was bright writing attached to all the representations of the space objects, and a blue cone fading to black over all the black icons. The largest blue cone stood atop the first globe out from the great orb at the center of the single-star burnt-out system.
“We’ll start our detailed scan there, I think” said Mushkhath. “Please set a course.” No one objected.
“An entire planet converted to Uncertainty-Nullified Matter,” Etim’-cheth said quietly, “And everything within five light years is thickly coated.”
“Hmph,” responded Pliktul. “I’ll mark these systems UNuM alpha and UNuM beta. I guess the idiots who lived here fifteen million years ago were just smart enough to destroy themselves but good.”
“Maybe it was a suicide ritual,” said Ugi, “A sacrifice to the sun-god. Primitives do that kind of thing, don’t they?”
A pealing squeak passed through the Kamanta from stem to stern.
After the laughter died away, Mushkhath said seriously, “Yes, some do, Ugi. But I’ve never heard of a Class Seven culture that still held to such rituals.”


When the owners announced that the mill would close about the end of the year, Harper George girded his loins and prepared for the worst. Forty-four years he had given himself to the lumber industry in one way or another, and twenty-eight of those dusty years had gone to the mill itself. As a parting bonus, the remaining workers would divvy up whatever lumber was left on the lot, and this was a gift more precious than gold, considering the price real wood now fetched amongst those still devoted to making stuff out of natural products. Mr. George reckoned there would be enough that he could fashion one final small ship, a tiny, floating fortress of xylem and phloëm that he would call Eternal Ironsides.
So, in the spring of the following year, he took a job as a cart-boy at a local supermarket to stave off starvation. He knew that this job, too, would soon be obsolete—as soon as the store converted to Q-mole robotic carts and automated shopping. That was okay, for he did not plan to remain in his no-longer-sweet maritime town. He would soon sell the house for whatever price he could fetch for it in four weeks—and then he would be free to set himself adrift on a sea of flame and ashes, as it seemed to him, in search of waters more amenable to the survival of a human life.
In his spare time—and there was a lot of that, though not enough to satisfy his urgent desire to be away—the master of timber, sail, and treacherous waters began a-building. She would be a 1 to 5 replica of her semi-namesake still afloat in Boston Harbor, sealed from rot with a fresh coat of Q-mole that the conservators believed would stand her in good stead for more than a thousand years. Harper George reckoned that, properly rigged, his own ship-of-the-line, pride of King George’s navy (irony intended), could only just be managed by her heroic captain on fair to rough seas. In a gale she’d heel over and founder, but that seemed appropriate enough: there was plenty of good company in the Locker.


 “We’ll never be able to land and get back against that gravity well,” said Etim’-cheth.
They all silently studied the holo-simulation of their scan data.
“Shouldn’t matter compressed to this density at near absolute zero be all uncertainty, like a condensate?” asked Ugi. “Sorry for my ignorance, comrades, but I had never heard of Uncertainty-Nullified Matter until just a few hours ago.”
“That’s not to be wondered at,” replied Etim’-cheth. “Psychologically stable cultures don’t make UNuM. Making this stuff is an attempt to force everything to become one thing that is completely unreactive and therefore eternal and unchanging. Cultures such as this one probably was have not been able to emotionally take into themselves the concept of infinite uniqueness in infinite combinations. They yearn for the static stability of uniformity, and they don’t realize that when you achieve it, it tries to spread itself out and bring everything around it into conformity.”
“That might be a little too abstract for our youngling comrade,” said Mushkhath. “Think of an ocean with its thermal current, and the winds, and the life, static and mobile, inside it. Kill the plant life, or put it in stasis, and it doesn’t make oxygen, and both oceanic and atmospheric levels drop, and the animal life starts to die off. Kill the animal life, and it stops churning up the coastal mineral deposits, and this hurts the Great Conveyor that carries both nutrients and warm water around the seas, which, in turn, harms both plant and animal life in the sea and on land. As the Great Conveyor slows, temperature differentials become less, the winds therefore become less active, the weather stabilizes, and the whole planet begins to desertify. This, in its turn, reduces the diversity of what life forms can survive the new conditions. Everything tends toward uniformity and away from creative chaos. Where the sentient creatures on the planet might have felt hampered, and even pained, by diversity of forms and ideas, we now have a dull, unlivable torment of sameness.”
“Ugh!” said Ugi. “That’s what happened here?”
“I don’t think I can say with absolute certainty,” replied Mushkhath, “But, yes, I’m quite certain. It has never been recorded in the Commonality that UNuM has ever been produced naturally, or that any other type of culture has ever made it.”


The gulls wanted him asea: more than ever they seemed to cry for leaving. And the dolphins congregated in the estuary, dancing and sparkling, worshipping in the Temple of Oceania. With the mill down, and Q-mole-fired fuel efficiency, no great ships wailed in traffic this year. The continental storms were milder this year than they had been all his life, but still they seemed to eagerly push him toward the day of parting. The ancient roaring walls of grey were no more than sough-and-slosh this year, but they seemed to yearningly draw him toward his launch.
The keel laid down as if it had just appeared in its crib. The ribs went up as if they had been formed like Eve by the Hand of God. The hull pulled itself on with the ease of molded clay. The members and decks went in as if they needed no hand at all to form them. The masts and spars sprouted as if grown from magical seeds. The rigs and sails attached as if woven special by a giant, friendly spider. She was joined with such loving, masterful precision, by a hand wielding tools both ancient and modern, that she needed no caulking. Her name-plate before the wheel was like a Rosetta Stone, Eternal Ironsides carved out in cuneiform in the ancient tongue of Sumer, and in Roman Uncials in Latin, and in modern English. She was a ship for the ages, and after cracking a bottle of champagne across her bow (he couldn’t get a pretty lady to do it, since the whole town thought he was barking mad) and quietly uttering a prayer of thanks-for-the-memories, Captain George shoved her down the launch slide, leapt in, tacked the mainsail and a lateen, and coaxed his tall ship out into the everlasting Sea.


 “Our sensors are showing significant deposits of the three UNuM precursors,” said Etim’-cheth. “We’re picking up Q-mole, or quantum-molecular universal matter. We’ve got StAQ, or stabilized anti-quarks. And then we have HyNeP: hyper-massive neutral particles. When you have these, the next step is either quit while you’re ahead and accept UNuM as theoretical matter, or start the experiments that lead to self-annihilation. The layers of the precursor materials are thin, so progress must have been pretty quick. They were either really intelligent, or they had outside help. But interfering aliens always come back after the deed is done to mine the material for use in stargates and singularity bombs.”
“Hmph,” said survey-leader Mushkhath. “There’s not much more we can do here. Please give the planet one more sensitive scan, and then we’ll pack up, finish our sector survey, and go home. The rest is for the archeo-historians.”
After about an hour of intensive scanning, Etim’-cheth looked up again and issued a soft whine like quiet laughter. “We’ll need to belay that last thing you said, Mushkhath. I’ve discovered a cave at the top of an oceanic mountain that is almost completely free of UNuM precursors. It must have been cleaned: it’s too near the surface and too open to the elements. Yes, there are clean bones, plant matter—and a perfectly preserved humanoid mummy inside.”
“Amazing!” said Mushkhath and Ugi together, and a noise like a mass coughing fit passed along the length and breadth of Survey Vessel Kamanta.
“Can we drop a couple of robots in and retrieve them?” Mushkhath inquired.
“There’s a good chance,” replied Ugi. “I’ll get to work.”


The great Sea seemed to embrace Harper George, and she treated him with utmost tenderness. For a fortnight and a day weather and water were fair, and the wind favored a heading of south southwest, toward the mid-ocean ridge where there were many small islands that were the royal crowns of Neptunian mountains. The thought seemed fitting for the flagship of King George’s navy.
Just as His Majesty sighted three grey piles of stone on his horizon, a storm blew up out of the clouds that had been chasing him since just before dawn. The sea became brine, and the brine became heaving, and the heaving became walls of liquid stone sledgehammering ship and master in headlong jolts toward the now waiting maw of the upthrust islands. Had he not battened down and furled every sheet but the foresails, Eternal Ironsides would have foundered. As it was, he and his ship retained just enough control to slip away from the slashing shoals that stood outside the small group of isles, uncovered in the troughs of mighty waves. She flew past the outer barrier of teeth and heaved up and beached in the only sand on her side of the biggest island. Her master was flung out, into a tangle of brush and boulders and had just enough wits to watch in horror as a great piece of flotsam, a log from a thousand miles or more away, bashed a three-foot hole in the naked side of his iron ship just below her waterline.
King George was once again Harper George, for his fleet was scuttled, and his first high seas adventure had come to a crashing end.


 “Good news, comrades!” Ugi called out a few hours later. “Our robots are safely back aboard, and I’ve analyzed their data. There are the remains of at least two hundred small animals in the cave, probably meals eaten by the occupant. There are piles of plant matter. There are well-preserved coprolites, of course. There are metal, wooden, and several plastic artifacts, among them a few knives, a flare gun, a pistol, and several improvised spears. Outside the cave is a Q-mole radio. And, of course, there is the mummy, a seemingly average, if a little tall, humanoid specimen. But the really interesting thing is a collection of page-books, actual cultural literature. I left all those things as they were—except that I had the robots bring back just one of the page-books, which appeared to be hand-written. Curiosity got the better of me. I hope the Academy will forgive.”
“Well,” said Etim’-cheth, “It’s too late to worry about that now. Have you run it through linguistics?”

Exile, Day One: My situation may be as ridiculous as Gilligan’s Island, and as much to do with hubris as the wreck of the Hesperus, but I prefer to think of it as being more like the surrender of the Serapis. I did honorable battle on the high seas, but now I have struck my colors, abandoned my ship, and have come aboard the enemy vessel. May God have mercy on my soul.
Exile, Day Four: Provisions are running thin. There are no natural streams or springs on this island, but I have managed to throw together a crude distillery, and so I have fresh water. I saw a freighter pass to the east today, but she was too far out to signal. I’m guessing that there are reefs standing offshore and that no vessel is going to come anywhere near these three obscure little islands. When I finish my outrigger, I’ll go out and see if I’m correct. Meanwhile, I’d better perfect my spearfishing technique, or my only food will be the meager supply of bitter berries that grow on my rock.
Exile, Day Fourteen: Things are going well. I have a full belly, and a couple of finches have decided I’m no threat to them. I’m determined that my situation is not a shipwreck at all, but rather a mutiny, and that the sea has done for me what I would have done anyway: scuttle my ship. I love her, but I’ll pick her bones nonetheless to meet my needs. Yes, I now declare my island New Pitcairn, and all the captains Bligh that I left behind can be damned.
Exile, Day Thirty-Three: Have dug out the entrance to a shallow cave. Have a better home now. Call it Harper’s Deep. Very defensible, and bat-free.
Exile, Day Forty-One: Wasted too much of the life of my tools on the outrigger. Finishing up my furnishings is doubtful unless I learn to knap the local stones. Oh, well. Not even curious about the extent of the reefs any more. Ships stay away. Good enough.
Exile, Day Forty-Three…Day Eighty-Eight: Bored. bored. BoreD. Bored. BORed. BOREd! BORED!!
Another Day: Tried to kill myself last night. Tools too dull. Wooden spear too uncertain. Couldn’t bear to keep sawing myself with my dull draw knife. Only motivation today to learn to crack stones for good edges. Almost out of ink, so I’ll say GOODBYE, INDIFFERENT WORLD! now.
Another Day: Learning to scrimshaw with a stone blade on a dried sea turtle shell. (Yes, the lovely scientists brought sea turtles back to this ocean. Don’t know why I said that. Who’s going to read this?) Getting pretty good. Turtle was delicious. Praying to the Great Sea for another.
Another Day: Paddled out to the sea lane and traded scrimshaw with a kindly freighter crew for a goddamned Q-mole radio and some pens. Q-mole radio was all they had that wasn’t infused with some new substance they’re calling StAQ, some crap that’s supposed to make things made of Q-mole last forever. They say Q-mole is so ubiquitous now that it’s even in the dust in the air. Going to clean Harper’s Deep today. Think I’ll clean it thoroughly every day. Hope distillation can keep the stuff out of my water.
Another Day: Traded with crew of al Qafaz Abu Qamal today. Got a pregnant goat and old-fashioned piano wire. Going to make a bow.
Another Day: Got first clear reception in a year on the radio today. News woman says Israel and Palestine signed a treaty of alliance last week. Credited it all to modern tech: MAS, mutually-assured snooping. No more privacy. Brought to you by Q-mole and StAQ—whole bloody world covered in super-conducting nanobots—PanGaia supercomputer. Everybody safe and secure because nobody can sweat without somebody analyzing the content. The Überguv must know I’m here. They must not want me in their safe-because-we’re-watching-you world.
Another Day: Traded for a billy today. Milk and meat till I die. Can’t be many more years off. Arthritis bad. Moved radio outside. Think it’s contaminated with bots. News creature says USC labs testing some new abomination called UNuM next week. Supposed to make Q-mole indestructible. Goody. Eternal Q-mole. Take that, Eternal Ironsides! New Pitcairn is closed for business. Not enough spunk to row out to sea lane, anyhow. Think I’ll tinker with the radio and see if I can use it to drive away the nanobots. Probably a dumb idea. How will I know? Oh, well—something to do.

“Hmm,” said Ugi. “If this person wasn’t completely paranoid, it seems as if the people of his planet were trying to achieve some sort of Commonality by assuring peace and prosperity.”
After a couple of minutes of contemplation, Etim’-cheth responded, “I think, instead of Commonality, they were trying to achieve Unanimity, peace through chemistry.”
“Huh?” asked Ugi. “I don’t understand. Peace is acceptance, is it not?”
“Yes,” Etim’-cheth said hesitantly, “But acceptance of what? Difference or sameness? Imposed peace, or willing? Freely-given love, or suppressed hate?”
Ugi cocked its head to the side, and its four eyes stared at Etim’-cheth.
“Don’t they both work out the same?” Ugi finally inquired.
“We’re a Commonality,” responded Mushkhath. “This vessel has surveyed the ruins of five cultures overpowered by UNuM. Our Commonality has catalogued over three thousand cultures done in by UNuM. Not one culture that has achieved UNuM has ever survived. We know of seven Commonalities in this galaxy, and forty-one in neighboring galaxies, separated not by opposing ideologies or enforced borders, but by distance alone. What do you think the difference between Commonality and Unanimity is?”
“I’m still not sure, Mushkhath,” replied Ugi. “I’ll research and analyze, and I’ll compose a report.”


 

BENEATH


Lift me up toward the exalted starlight.
Uphold me to the sheen of the lofty moon.
Thrust me higher into the holy sunfire
That I might be burnt to pure ash and smoke.
I am impure, lowest of the ragged low,
A dweller in deep, deep, fathomless places;
Dark, heavy walls wind me in an impenetrable cocoon.
Confused hollows echo with the creaking
Of the imponderable, oppressive weight
Of years upon years of layered earth, labored thought,
To form an insoluble maze
Of unseen but inescapable conclusions.

Mine me like ore and wrest me from the depths.
Hurl me to the furnace and fire me with coke.
Stir me in the heated cauldron and draw me forth.
Cut me, hammer me, heat me, forge me anew,
And make me into a wheel, roll me round.
And when I am of no further use
Send me to the furnace once again
And beat me till I become a glittering wing
And hurl me hard to give me flight
That I might reach the sun’s everlasting heat
To find there the oblivious knowledge of Icarus.
What shall restrain me then, withhold the wildness
Of unlabored thought, unfettered hand, unheeded eye?




THE DANCES

“For me, the word ‘God’ rankles, as do ‘holy’, ‘sacred’, ‘divine’, ‘perfect’, and ‘sin’. These words say God began is sentient, that It intentionally Created, and that It has the absolute right to judge. From this devolves the idea that we have the ability to be infallibly guided by God and to know that we are being so guided (and that others can know it, too), and the right to judge and rule over others. I hear we should ‘beware of false prophets’, and that’s a caution I can take to heart.”—Kam Hijat

The Dance of the Abyss

In the power hierarchy of demons, Lord Greed is subservient to King Terror. Greed is an answer to Terror, which is itself a response to the howl of the Great Predator, the Fathomless Abyss that lurks beneath us, atop which stretches the thin consolation of the hair-trigger trap door of Life, forming a vast drum-head of existence, as Time taps its finger along the edge, beating out, “Doom! Doom! Doom!”  King Terror laughs and rocks as Lord Greed cavorts and howls, snapping up the dust kicked up by the vibrations, gobbling up whatever he can fit in his maw. He stuffs the rest into a sack to be carried off to his ephemeral lair that he knows in the back of his mind will collapse when Time finally perishes and ceases to tap the drum. Meanwhile, Time sneers at King Terror in his throes, knowing that when he, himself, leaves the coil, all things will come to a screeching halt, all done and completed, held just as they ended for all eternity, the Great Cosmic Last Supper, indicative of being, but devoid of the act.
And here we are now, still in the midst of the performance of existence, slaves to Time and Space, King Terror taunting us and goading us, Lord Greed shuffling his actuarial papers with one hand and sharpening his knives with the other, he caught in a dreamland of silver and gold, and we caught in our own dreamscape of gnashing teeth and fleeting moments. And we hate our overlords, and strive against our overlords, and strive to be like our overlords, and we tick our tock, and we tick seven billion ticks all at once, and, one by one, the tock is gone from our clock.
And, for one of those passing instants, Lord Greed, wearying of his gambol, grants us a moment  to look  up to the  eternal sky, to look up  from the ploughed and harrowed and seeded earth. King Terror interrupts his howling laughter, pondering how to get old Greed dancing and snatching again. The moment is twilight, day-night, and as the far-flung, fateful stars kindle, we ask ourselves: “Was it for this that I was made? Was it for this that stars were set afire? Was it for this that there is thirst, and hunger, and murder, and rape—and slaking of thirst, and satisfaction of hunger, and life among friends, and sweating, rutting, stinking sex behind the bushes with that one other being who thinks I am the be all and end all?”
If you did not seize the moment, that rare moment amid the halted gears of the Clock, the checked beat of the Drum, the Time-Between-Times of the ancient druid, you are why I sing my song this twilight, this evening of night and day that can be made any time you choose to place your thumb on the scale. Singing together, we can put Lord Greed to sleep, and as he staggers back into his chair at the Great Table of Lords and Ladies, Forces Great and Fantastic and Little-Principles-That-Pass-Unnoticed, Things-Too-Many-To-Contemplate, we can steal out into the wild meadow that struggles to abide alongside our stone boxes and our poisonous black ribbons of conveyance, and we can lie in the tall grass or under the tall trees at the margin. We can wrest and rest our brief moment of serenity and sing a few bars to the stars.
“Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am” you sing. “Quod cogito quo summum,” is my counterpoint: “I am what I think.”

The Dance of the Beast

A ravening beast has come down out of the hills like the horrible tarrasque of Frankish lore, ripping up the countryside, destroying the crops, trampling the villages, and fouling the water. The heroes and cavaliers have fled into the hollows and into their castles. The kings have hauled shut their drawbridges. The people scream beyond the moat, but the lords and ladies within cannot hear them as they devour their shanks of fatted lamb and the band drones on.
When the beast is sated, goes the story, it will repair to its lair and slumber for many a year, till its belly begins rumbling again, and it awakes again from its dreams of devastation and wailing maidens, and it stirs, galumphs to a gallop, and once again remakes the world in its own image.
All legendary beasts of terror diminish or grow greater with each re-telling of the Tale of Ages. And why should the awful tarrasque be immune? Our New Beast begins in diminutive size, but in greater numbers, and he has an infinite maw, and is never sated, and we label him (them) in binomial nomenclature status monetis corporalae. He is in apparition less fearsome than the dragon of old, but do not be bedazzled by his diamond rings and silk suit: he is no less the Old Thing, and he is no less the son of his intemporal, intemporate Lord, and he swirls and stomps his dancing destruction no less to the pleasure of his King.
And the little kings within his domain seek peace with him and to appease him, and the heroes hide in the shadows or are overthrown. But the castles are no longer shut to him, though they are still closed against the people who must, even in the Enlightened Day, bear the brunt of his ravening lusts. The lords and ladies are in league with the New Dragon, the Old Thing in new skin, and while we brave the moat to hang on the bell at the gate, and we wail and bemoan that such should befall us, the Powers and the Dragon gather up the treasure of the countryside, they to lavish it pettily upon themselves and their kith and kin, and he to heap it in his lair and sit upon it, as dragons will, and brood upon further destruction and higher piling-up.
And there we stand in hot sun and cold rain before the gates and say: “At least send out the knights to do battle with the beast.” And someone in the high shade of the gate-tower says with practiced sincerity: “Yes, the chivalry will be right along. Why, they’re saddling up and girding themselves even as we speak. Go to your homes and bake the bread please. Tend the fields and the lowing cattle. The king would never let the old beast get you.” Not like he has done a thousand times before. Certainly not.
The beast will not be managed, and he will not be put off in the name of king and countryside. When the wine-sotted king puts in a word edgewise against him, the fangs and claws are revealed and the long-stoked fire is fueled and set at the ready. The knights rush out into wold and wood and set upon thorp and cot and haul him back a dainty tribute to set him at ease. And the Old Thing gazes upon the king and chortles and says: “All in good humor, I suppose.”

The Dance of the Prophet

The people in village and field are befuddled and beleaguered, and, being denied and put off at the gates of the castle they built with their blood, sweat, and tears, they go about their usual business, or they mill about in a stupor, or they run willy-nilly, bumping, jostling, cursing, falling off things, burning up in fires they lit, drowning in rivers or in wine bottles. And down the dusty road, into the insoluble mazes and looming detritus of the Great Village ambles the mad-woman of all tongues and incomprehensible purpose.   
At first, she buttonholes a few of the bedazzled denizens and speaks in a misapprehended language, and they fling her away and spit after her. But she then settles upon one of the tongues in her vast store that those standing near are able to interpret intermittently, and they gather from her that she has come into the Common Space and set up her tent in order to do the bidding of the “One-Who-Transcends-Drums-and-Drumming.” And the denizens of the Great Village, some of them sneer at her hubris and tap their feet to the Drum and envision the cavort of Lord Greed, some of them turn a deaf ear in deference to the guffaws of King Terror, some of them mistake her for Lord Greed and King Terror all swaddled into one, and a precious few listen to her garbled speech, her mad attempt to express the inexpressibly blessed and simultaneous, coëval and coequal, sameness and difference of all entities, and wonder. Does the language she has selected make the difference? Was she selected or self-selected because of her gift of tongues?  Or was her floodgate of verbiage and inability to set on the right words for all ears coincidental to the needs of the hour, the reason she has come, to set a buzzing in all ears, even those that refuse to hear?

The Dance of Redemption

What if the denizen became a citizen, a Cosmopolitan sibling of the multitudinous regions and spaces? What if citizens became truly constituent, sentiently integral to the Villages, great and small, that they inhabit here in our little realm amid the heavens? What if the mobs became throngs became gatherings became concordances became a mighty Choir of Infinite Voices? What if the Choir was a choir of manifold choirs all blending the music of disparate, dissonant, and dissocial singers into the “Om”, not of a tripartite divine entity, but of a poly-partite meta-entity known as Humankind. The Choir of Infinite Voices merges all stirrings, all vibrating forces and things, all words, all discord, all songs into a musical existence of such intricate complexity that it emerges, from moment to moment, as a parthenogenic, self-sustenant, inexpressible but fully expressed, inexactly exact, incomprehensibly ineluctable, intransigent, intransient, inaudibly audible, moving, inhaling, consuming, living, still, exhaling, excreting, perishing work of miraculous, mellifluous, maximal and minimal everythingness, and amazing, squandered, squalid, effulgent and effluvient, but somehow still pre-biotic and hyper-potentialized, nothingness.
What if that existence was the existence in which we actually dwell, which has already been realized, which is constantly being re-realized, in which every moment proceeds from each previous moment and foreshadows the next moment? What if the laughter of King Terror, and the whirling and grappling of Lord Greed, and the Drumming of Time, and the destructiveness of the beast, and the movement, and the cacophony, and the stench, and the eating and playing and slaying and love-making are all tributary to the glories of an indescribably gloriously creative thing?
Could we, now as aware as a homo sapiens can be, laugh back at King Terror and discomfit him, knowing him for what he is, robbing him of his elemental power? Reductio ad redemptio, two peas in a pod, two sides of two coins in a fountain, two lovers in an ever-fatal, ever-creative embrace. If you do not understand these words of imprecise precision, it is not to be wondered at, for me or for you. Just keep listening to the music, attend to the laughter, dance the dance to whatever music moves you, beat the drum, and look up to the kindling stars as day melds into night.









UNENDING MASKS


I, even I,
The exhorter,
The extoller,
The whip of conscience,
The examiner,
The exhumer,
The cradle of truth,
The ex-patriot,
The expurgator,
The beadle of righteousness,
The x-factor,
The Excalibur,
The hewer and crier—
Even I look down into my soul
And see the well of darkness,
And smell the miasmic chaos,
And feel the unseen fangs,
And hear the silent howling
Of monsters which would rather pass unremarked.
I throw open the blinds to the light
And rob the beasts of their power,
And I pick up the shovel and open another layer—
And am greeted by the abyss once again.
Unknown to me I wear a million masks—
But they are only one mask:
The face of well-meaning and candor—
And my every intention is truth,
But ignorance makes of it a mask.
I, even I,
Am not more, but less,
At least less than I think.
I have gained but one thing:
The Uttermost Truth.
The mask will never leave me.
I, even I,
The infiltrator,
The inquisitor,
The black-and-white in grey spaces,
The insipid,
The insolent,
The counter of common sense,
The inexact,
The ingrateful,
The harangue of known and unknown,
The inventor,
The investor,
The liar who tells the truth—
Am a mask and wear a mask,
And mask a mask in removing all masks.
Even this is a mask.
All this bluster? Why ask?




T’ELMACH AND NÖMAN KABË

“There may be some arcane mechanism by which a God can dominate. I don’t know. However, I do have an imagination. So, I ask this question: ‘Can a being who is so attuned to the universe that It understands everything completely still have a human perspective and human emotions?’ This being, having achieved full sentience, is the image of the cosmos, and not the other way round.”— Kam Hijat

The third dialogue was intriguing, and disconcerting. To say the least, T’elmach certainly did not find Lebianthris as comfortable and alluring as we had hoped. We wondered if T’elmach found Lebianthris to be a sexual rival, rather than a prospective partner, and an intriguing fellow female of great success. In fact, her reaction to Lebianthris seemed to us an indication of her dormant psychopathy, and we feared that another negative encounter might push her too far and put her interviewer at grave risk. But we found T’elmach so fascinating—not because of the originality of her opinions, but because of the fact that she, of all people, held them—that we elected to take the risk if any of our members were willing. So, we selected Nöman Kabë, probably the least offensive of our ranking members, and one who was very interested in T’elmach’s thoughts on community, given what T’elmach had so far professed.
For those who are not versed in knowledge of the peoples of the Harmonic Confederation, Nöman Kabë is the most prominent philosopher of the species known as the Felar. It is of the catalyst sex of this three-sex species. The three sexes are the corpifer, who in mating passes on most of the physical traits of the species, the mentifer, who, as one might expect, donates most of the intellectual traits, and the catalyst, who bears the young and whose RNA contribution determines the sex of the offspring. (When speaking of members of the Felar species, we refer to the corpifer as “he”, the mentifer as “she”, and the catalyst as “it”.) The catalysts of this species are, generally speaking, given to negotiation and comfort-making.


            T’elmach: Greetings, Nöman Kabë. I was told this would be a one-on-one interview. You’ve brought the whole triad.
            Nöman Kabë: We three are one, Sarai T’elmach. Meet, please, Nöman Arûl, my he-mate, and Nöman Shakhta, my she-mate. Or, as you might say, my corpifer and my mentifer. I am the veh-mate, the it-mate, the catalyzer of our triad. I suppose you know this, but I am accustomed to explaining our sexes to a person of diadic or monadic species.
            T’elmach: Yes, I’m quite aware of your three-faceted sexuality. I learned some time ago that, once they reach adulthood, Felar cannot long survive outside a mated triplet. This made them very difficult to maintain in a menagerie. To keep his menagerie stocked, Yul’seh had to form a captive Felari colony planet. Last I knew, planet Krintur, our game preserve, had three-hundred twenty-two breeding triplets. Yul’seh finds the simian antics of the Felar very amusing.
Nöman Arûl: That’s very off-putting, T’elmach. Very insulting. Very rude. Very inhospitable.
            Nöman Shakhta: Truly, if this is going to be the tenor of our conversation, we should perhaps come on a more auspicious day.
            T’elmach: Thank you. I feel on more solid ground now. I was feeling a bit ganged-up on. You are now in mind that a formidable foe confronts you.
            Nöman Kabë: Will this be a continuation of your interview with Lebianthris? I was hoping we could be collegial, rather than adversarial.
            T’elmach: I don’t think I feel very collegial. The first conversation with Minorka was mild enough. The second conversation with Jare Omsted was flattering and a little fun. But that conversation with Lebianthris was a bad turn in my relationship with your Society. I’m prepared for the worst yet, and, seeing how you choose to confront me, I certainly expect the worst.
            Nöman Kabë: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to be a confrontation. I have misgauged your response. I thought a family would be comforting for you.
            T’elmach: Really? after all you’ve heard?
            Nöman Arûl: Our triad comforts us. What kind of person is not comforted by love?
            T’elmach: This kind.
            Nöman Shakhta: We’re left to wonder what does bring you comfort.
            T’elmach: Being in control, of course. Thus, I am always in a comfortable state.
            Nöman Kabë: Is this a situation in which you feel the need to be in control, Sarai T’elmach?
            T’elmach: Yes.
            I notice that you refer to me as Sarai, Nöman Kabë. You call me by this honorific in order to reassure me of your respect. You thus show me that you imagine that it is actually you who are in charge. Who knows? Maybe it is you. Hahaha.
            Nöman Shakhta: We are here to interview you—Sarai T’elmach. You know what we’re after. So far, you haven’t given us much in return for what we’ve given you.
            T’elmach: You mean to say that my allowing you to bask in my radiant glory is insufficient? Hahaha!
            Nöman Arûl: You don’t have any glory left. It is we who un-fade your washed-out glory with our interest in you.
            Nöman Kabë: Arûl!
            T’elmach: Hahaha! If I were anyone else, what he says would be very true. Haha. But I’m me. No one can touch the glory that is me. My glory is self-contained! There will always be millions who adore me.
            Nöman Shakhta: Still, it was foolish for him to say what he said.
            T’elmach: Why? Do you think you can lull me? No, Arûl merely performs the dance of the bees.
            Nöman Kabë: What do you mean, Sarai? What are bees? What does their dancing mean in this context?
            T’elmach: Bees are a communal insect of planet Ascension, one of the few species they managed to save from the destruction of their original planet, Earth. A bee who finds good food returns to her hive and waggles her abdomen and spins her whole body in a dance that indicates the direction and distance to that food.
            So, make Arûl happy. Follow him to the food. Ask me some questions.
            Nöman Arûl: What’s happened to Lebianthris?
            T’elmach: What do you mean?
            Nöman Arûl: I think you know quiet well what I mean. She left here and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
            T’elmach: I hope nothing I said to her caused her to run off and sulk.
            Nöman Arûl: Oh, come on—Sarai T’elmach! You are the T’elmach. One little murder of someone who challenged your cosmic-sized ego? No problem.
            Nöman Kabë: Arûl!
            T’elmach: Well, I asked you all to ask questions. But, what do you think—that I ate Lebianthris? You saw her walk out of this room, you say. I haven’t been out of this hotel since I registered. How could I have harmed her?
            Nöman Arûl: You might have poisoned her. Or, you might have planted a timed explosive on her.
            T’elmach: Have you searched the local medical facilities? Have you heard about any exploding Kemin Gwaros dignitaries?
            Nöman Arûl: You might have hired someone.
            T’elmach: Come now, Arûl. The Society has been monitoring me. Have I communicated with anyone other than the hotel staff and members of the Philosophical Society of Edelos?
            Nöman Kabë: Can we leave this alone now, Arûl? Whatever’s become of Lebianthris, T’elmach can’t have had anything to do with it.
            Nöman Shakhta: Perhaps we could get on with this. The mystery of Lebianthris isn’t going to be solved here. If T’elmach has done something to Lebianthris, she’s not going to admit to it under the pressure we can bring to bear here. And we wouldn’t want her doing anything nasty to us, would we?
            Nöman Kabë: T’elmach isn’t going to eat us, or poison us, or blow us up. And, it’s her experience of the Great Brain we’re after, anyway.
            You know what, Arûl? Why don’t you and Shakhta go down to the dining room? Or, better yet, why don’t you two go down to the spa and have some fun? When Sarai T’elmach and I finish our talking, I’ll meet the two of you for dinner.
            Nöman Arûl: Kabë? You’re sure?
            Nöman Shakhta: Come on, Arûl. Let’s go down to the garden and play in the trees. I saw a Felari family headed that way when we came in.
            Nöman Kabë: I’ll see you two later.


            T’elmach: Nöman Kabë, you are a most agreeable selection. What a great opening gambit you’ve employed. I’m put on my guard and put at ease simultaneously. You’ve got me feeling really ready to cooperate. But, really, what more information do you think I have? I’ve explained everything I believe about the nature of social sapience, haven’t I? Did any of that tell you anything about the Deep Orb?
            Nöman Kabë: Who can say? I’ll leave that kind of analysis to smarter brains than mine.
            But, Sarai, you’re very much an individual. You began as an individual raised above the community. And, though your situation and your outlook have changed, you yet stand outside all community. Though I could speak with outsiders of almost any kind almost any time I’d wish, I’ve never had such an opportunity as you.
T’elmach: Yes, you are a most agreeable selection. I have never before done more than lay eyes on one of your people, from a distance. Thank you for this opportunity.
Nöman Kabë: You’re quite welcome, Sarai T’elmach. I’m also grateful to meet you.
T’elmach: Sarai again. What is Sarai?
Nöman Kabë: Sarai is a title of simple meaning. I simply greet you as Master, or, since you are of a two-sex race, Mistress.
T’elmach: There is no need for titles or honorifics. I am only T’elmach now.
Nöman Kabë: I understand. I hope it won’t offend you if I sometimes slip up. It’s the custom among my people, the people of Lumyat Valley, to use the title, even in close and affectionate relationships. I mean no disrespect. But I may become so comfortable with you that I’ll forget.
T’elmach: I will overlook such slips then.
Nöman Kabë: Thank you, Sa—T’elmach.
T’elmach: Should we get right to it? I must confess: I’m eager to be done with these interviews. I’m certain that you are considered to be a very personable personage wherever you go, but I desire to be off. I have only a couple hundred years of life left at most, and I would like to spend them free among the stars and not cooped in a rehabilitation facility or in any number of interrogation chambers. So, please tell me the subject on which you would like me to expound, and I will do my best to satisfy you.
Nöman Kabë: Okay. Right to the point—um—T’elmach.
Very well. My people are perhaps the most communal of the speaking species of this galaxy. Perhaps the Koldorakh are the absolutely most communal of the sapients, but they speak only telepathically, in pictures and emotions. The Sh’I’Adh, as some call them, the Green People, are probably the most individualistic of the sapients considered to have a culture. Wherever I go, I’m very much interested in how creatures, especially sapients, organize themselves. So, I’d like to have your thoughts on culture and commonality.
T’elmach: Alright. Since you noted that I am an individual, both by circumstance and by choice, I’m thinking of an essay that especially struck me when I wr—read it many years ago. It was written by a Terran named Innen Younger in the age before their Great Accident that brought the Terrans to the Maelstrom Galaxy to found the Harmonic Confederation. This essay speaks of a concept called “rugged individualism”.
Nöman Kabë: I think I’ve heard of this concept, although its meaning eludes my grasp. It is the myth that people can be independent and self-sustaining.
T’elmach: This myth goes much further. It grows out of a very skewed interpretation of the principles of Capitalism combined with the desire of rich people to convince themselves that they have a right to gather huge amounts of resources and keep these resources to themselves.
Nöman Kabë: This essay was about emperors, then?
T’elmach: No, not exactly. You see, operating under these ideas that these rich people invented, each person was conceived of as a free-floating entity who had a choice about whether or not to act cooperatively with other free-floating entities. No one should depend on anyone else for any reason. Thus, each person was a king or queen unto herself. Therefore, no one was obligated to do anything for anyone. They could gather as many resources as they were able to, and either keep them, or trade them for other resources. No one had to give anything to anyone, even in times of great want. And they had the right to kill anyone who tried to take from them what they had gathered up.
Nöman Kabë: This seems like the culture of the Pallyans, except the Pallyans don’t kill to protect the things they have, nor do they garner huge stockpiles of stuff, because they are fair-traders.
T’elmach: Yes, well, the individuals to whom Innen Younger refers also believed themselves to be fair-traders. Their idea of fair trade was to get as much advantage as they could over the people with whom they traded so that every trade brought as much profit to them as they could manage. In other words, “let the buyer beware” was their motto.
In their culture, the person who could amass the greatest fortune was the best person.
Nöman Kabë: And they believed they could do this without the help of other people, so they deserved to have all these things that they collected and then withheld from their tribe?
T’elmach: They no longer lived in tribes, Nöman Kabë. Living in a tribe carries obligations. They refused all obligations. Obligations restrict individuality, which, in turn, restricts trade.
But, yes, they believed they deserved all this wealth. They believed that their work was more valuable than the work of others. They believed that if others weren’t good at garnering wealth for themselves, their only useful purpose in life could be service to those who were good at getting wealth.
And that is where the myth of rugged individualism becomes really insidious. In this system of thinking, the people who were less able to gather resources were made to believe that they were lesser individuals. They were made to believe that their work was less valuable than the work of others, since they weren’t able to demand large amounts of resources as compensation for their work. The people who are able to earn more must be worth more.
Therefore, if a person lived in poverty, it must be because she didn’t work hard enough or because she had chosen a line of work that would pay less. She should either work harder at her low-paying job, or she should simply go find a better-paying job.
Nöman Kabë: Why didn’t they use robots to perform menial tasks? Then everyone could do the higher-paying work.
T’elmach: They didn’t have robots yet.
But you’re looking at things from an altruistic viewpoint, Nöman Kabë. Believers in this rugged individualism would also say your view was very simplistic, and, ultimately, unworkable.
Nöman Kabë: It works for the Felar, and for many other cultures.
T’elmach: Well, they didn’t believe it would work on a large scale. That is, they didn’t believe a nation-state of millions or billions could survive that way.
More than that, these ideas were compounded with an idea called the “work ethic”. That is, these individuals were supposed to work as hard as they could, for as many hours of the day as they could, in order to earn their resources. The more resources they had, the harder they must have worked, and the more deserving they were of the resources they had acquired.
Nöman Kabë: Didn’t they believe in crime? I mean, didn’t they believe it was wrong to lie, steal, and kill to get resources?
T’elmach: They did believe these actions were wrong. This just created confusion for them. They had virtues and mores, but they also exalted those who could acquire large amounts of resources, however, these individuals were able to do it.
Nöman Kabë: How did they survive? Do you think this way of being is responsible for the Great Accident that brought the Terrans to our galaxy?
T’elmach: I don’t know what ultimately caused the Great Accident. The Terran records from the time surrounding the Great Accident are spotty.
As for their survival as a culture, I have to guess these people weren’t evil, so they maintained enough community to support one another. They simply didn’t, or couldn’t, understand how they depended on one another. They thought that the work done by the few was more valuable than the work done by the many. So, to a question you asked me earlier: yes, these people were taught to view themselves as each being her own emperor. Each was supposed to build her own empire, as big as she could make it. If others got in her way, she was supposed to roll over them. She was supposed to use whatever methods weren’t proscribed by law. And, if she had to cheat the law, that was okay, so long as she didn’t get caught at it.
Nöman Kabë: You seem more than a little disdainful of these people, Sarai—I mean T’elmach. But, isn’t this the way of the Kur-nu-mar Empire?
T’elmach: You’re baiting me now, Nöman Kabë.
Nöman Kabë: Maybe a little.
Since we’re dispensing with honorifics, maybe you could call me Kabë. Nöman is the name of my family.
T’elmach: Unless you insist, I think I’ll maintain the formality.
Nöman Kabë: If you must.
T’elmach: I think Arûl would insist on it, if he were still present. He was too set on my guilt in the matter of the missing Lebianthris, or he might have said something about me dropping the familial designation when I spoke of him.
            I think Arûl would really be pressing me on this idea of individuality.
            At any rate, I hope I’ve given you something useful to think on.
Nöman Kabë: Yes, Sarai—um, T’elmach. It could be instructive, if a bit simplistic, since it doesn’t give consideration to the basic psychology of individuality. I still don’t follow the logic of individualism. It seems so obvious to me that we all depend on one another when we live in groups. You explored that idea in your talk with Minorka.
I want to know more about your view of the psychology of individualism. I have spoken with Minorka on this subject, but she can say little beyond economic theory applied as life theory. That perspective seems to work well enough for Pallyans, but I have trouble comprehending the individualist’s mindset.
T’elmach: I was briefly a professor of linguistics, not of psychology. I am not certain I can tell you, from a psychological point of view, any more about an individual’s individuality than Minorka could. Individuality is very—individual. As I said to Lebianthris, the gibil soul is my only notion of true individuality—that being the genetic/corporeal makeup of a being. The rest is strongly influenced by environment, so it is not truly individual. Not all sapients seem to have a strong sense of their individuality, their aloneness and independence. Such ideas are, of course, confounded and conflated with ideas of free will—a special quality of sapientness that some cultures subscribe to with great vehemence—and with no positive proof. They use these ideas of freedom of will to justify all sorts of punishments and systems of quid pro quo interactions, but they can never say how much freedom an individual actually has, and they base their judgements about the actions of others—and themselves, if they are basically ethical beings—on their feelings about free will.
Nöman Kabë: I see. But can you tell me anything about how an individualist comes to the conclusion that it’s an individual? I mean to say, how does it believe that its actions, and its very thoughts, are unconnected to the All? How does it conclude that the influences on its psyche don’t begin in gestation? How does it deduce or induce that it’s not influenced from all sides, from conception onward? How can it say that it can make decisions that aren’t influenced?
T’elmach: Most sapients are sane enough to admit that they are so influenced, but they nonetheless maintain that there is some elusive spirit connected with them and possessed by them that enables them to nonetheless be free, to think and act with moral independence. I do not truly understand it, but I have observed it in action—that is, this belief and its consequences.
But you must understand that this belief in free will is an ego construct, an artifact of evolutionary competition. The individual seeks to rise above fear and mortality by some means, but she finds in her struggle for survival a dependence on others of her kind. That is, she wants her body and her ego to survive. A sapient creature cannot survive long, or she at least cannot survive well, unless she wants to. Wanting to survive is a product of the procreative drive, I think. A creature must survive at least long enough to procreate, or the species dies. Thus, from an evolutionary viewpoint, a creature must be inculcated with the desire to live, and live with as much security as it can manage. From this comes all fear, and all striving. Combine this drive to security with sapience, and you have this strange ideation of individuality, the entity seeing herself as being in competition with all other entities and forces—the struggle to live, and to live better than others so that one’s genetic heritage is the most likely to get passed on to succeeding generations.
Oh, since I suppose you would like to know, I got this from a Terran Lama I once met. We had a very good conversation before I took his individuality from him.
Nöman Kabë: I hope it’s okay to say that I find the ease with which you make such admissions—unnerving, to say the least. Should I be concerned, um, T’elmach?
T’elmach: What use is it to ask me if you should be concerned, Nöman Kabë? If I am still the sort of person who will be a matter of mortal concern for you, I either will not tell you of my ambition to take your life, or I will tell you of it for the fun of watching you decide whether or not to press your panic button. In fact, if I am not still that sort of person, I might nonetheless be the kind of psychopath who likes to watch you squirm.
Nöman Kabë: Uh, thank you for the primer on T’elmachian psychology.
Suddenly, I feel like letting you say whatever you wish, with no interference from me. If you’re of a mind to, please go on.
T’elmach: On the subject of...?
Nöman Kabë: Come now, Sarai—um, T’elmach. You’ve got a very good memory. I think it best that I don’t squirm for you. I’d like you to enjoy the opportunity to expound to your heart’s content, instead of enjoying the idea of working up my fears to a froth before you eat me.
T’elmach: So, I am the dragon, and you must flatter me while you search out my weaknesses? But I tell you, I will give you my treasures for free, with no strings attached and no fear of fang or flame.
Nöman Kabë: There are always strings attached—T’elmach. And if I understand your reference, isn’t the game of flattery of the dragon’s ego only the appetizer, from the dragon’s point of view, before the main course. Yes, it loves to be flattered, but it loves its treasure more. These are its chains: it must guard its treasure. I never understood why it wants treasure, but then it’s not my duty to understand, only to make use of what I know.
T’elmach: I very much understand the desire for treasure, but I do not understand the dragon, the solitary guardian of ill-gotten gain. I am not truly a creature of solitude. I once needed the adulation—however faithful or false—of trillions. But now a worthy sapient contact, or even semi-sapient contact, from time to time, will satisfy. In this encounter, Nöman Kabë, there are no strings attached—and least none of my own devising—and I have no desire to rob you of anything. But now that I have had my fun with you, I wish to get on with satisfying your desire for my thoughts. I will tell you a couple more things, both of them relying on the thoughts of this author, Innen Younger, that I referenced earlier. When I have said these things, I wish to be done with these interviews and on my way.
Nöman Kabë: Where will you go?
T’elmach: That is a foolish question. I go where the rivers of the cosmos carry me.
Nöman Kabë: I’m sorry for asking.
T’elmach: No, you aren’t. You had to ask, I suppose.
Nöman Kabë: Very well. I’ve got one more thing to ask.
T’elmach: Which is?
Nöman Kabë: For the record, then, will you carry on with your recitations, or allusions, or whatever we should call these informed opinions? If you’ll allow it, I’ll interrupt you no more.
T’elmach: Alright. Here is what I have remaining to say on the subject of culture and commonality. Well, it is not what I have to say, but what Innen Younger has to say—and to which I subscribe. And more to the point, I think the essay I am about to quote speaks only indirectly to the proposed subject—and to the subject of individualism. Here is the first bit that I will quote:
“The drive toward individualism started with an accident. Someone dropped a rock in a hot fire, et voila!, part of the rock’s contents melted—and there was beautiful and utile copper. Some enterprising and very smart person noticed that some of the copper he smelted was stronger than the rest, and then we had bronze. Suddenly, we humans had better tools for farming and for warfare. This meant more wealth and more ability to acquire goods from other tribes, not only through raiding but also through trade. This made the tribal smith a very important person, a person with a secret process for ensuring the prosperity of the tribe. That was good news for the smith and bad news for the continuation of the tribal way of life. The individual now had something he could withhold from the tribe: a special skill that only he knew how to perform. This was the beginning of skill-based pay. Maybe the tribe could physically force the smith to do his duty if he got snotty about wanting special compensation, but he was regarded as a mystical figure with his special knowledge that made his people prosperous: he was given special privileges.
“Smithing was the second human specialization, the first being the knowledge of the shaman. Now the warriors, armed with bronze weaponry, became more powerful within tribal society. This was the true beginning of the class system, the system of ruling hierarchies. Warriors and priests and craftsmen, a class system that would be replicated over and again in every culture that became civilized—that is, that took to living in cities.
“With the rise of priest-kings and cities came more specializations. Hierarchical rulers saw the power of increasing regulation in order to sustain and further their spheres of influence. For regulation to work properly, the functions of governance must be compartmentalized so that everyone knows who does what and who has what authority. Areas of knowledge, therefore, became specialized as people devoted themselves to learning and doing the special tasks assigned by their kings.
“This has only furthered and strengthened the idea that some people are more equal than others. Some people hold indispensable knowledge and skills, and therefore, they are to receive more compensation for their activities than are those with a more generalized skill set. This is also, I suppose, a natural outgrowth of the progress of human knowledge combined with the natural human need for self-security. After all, we couldn’t survive very well if we didn’t have a driving desire to keep on living, and given that drive, we naturally seek advantage. But I argue that this individualistic way of life is not a good thing in and of itself, that it is a species of ongoing hostage negotiation: give me what I want or I’ll give what I’ve got to someone else—rather than, give me what I want or I kill the girl. I argue that the tribe will honor skill and ability utilized in its service, and that this honor is much more conducive to continued survival than existing in a state of antagonism—perhaps friendly antagonism, perhaps not—with the tribe.
“Some will declare that this individualism and its fierce competitiveness makes all humans better, that it is a rising tide that lifts all boats. I think there is a great deal of truth in this observation. After all, this idea is basic evolutionary theory. Those who fit best into their ecological niche survive best. The more fit each individual is, the better the chances that the species will survive. But I also submit that cooperative individualism—that is, individualism balanced by the needs of the community—offers a much greater chance of surviving and flourishing than lone wolf individualism. Cooperative individualism is based on the leadership of one or of a few individuals governing the mass of the community. We’re human. So our leadership can be democratic—cooperative—tribal. As it was in the beginning, so can it remain—with accessions to the modern world.
“When we speak of rugged individualism, we speak of it as some sort of ideal, some sort of lifting up of human beings from a baser state. But have we considered the ultimate end of the quest for independence—for one is not a truly unique individual unless one is fully independent, self-sustaining right?—or so our thinking seems to be? The only means of being truly independent, free of all rules and restraints is to be omnipotent—to be God. When our state is anything less than all-powerful, we are bound by the rules of relationships and by the very rules of Existence. In the quest for full individualism, then, using the rules of full competition as the means, we are trying to become God. Good luck with that.
“If that is not our driving purpose, or if we believe it would be sacrilege to try, then we must not worry so much about our individuality: we will have it, no matter what the conditions under which we survive—even in the worst days of the Soviet Union, the oppressed people were oppressed individuals, each with their own quirks and with their private dreams of freedom. We should be more concerned with the conditions under which we must endure survival, that our conditions should be conducive to happiness, that we should not be slaves to the quest for complete independence through competitive acquisition of wealth—which is really the quest to impose our wills on one another through patronage—like a feudal lord—and to insulate ourselves completely from need and want—a futile aim, considering that we will still need people to guard our castles and to produce our goods. Competitiveness may be natural, but so is cooperation. Willing cooperation, with friendly rivalries to foster excellence of skill and virtue, with thoughtful competition with oneself to foster excellence of insight and moral fortitude, is the means of achieving happiness in a world that, like it or not, is filled with other people, other competing wills, other perspectives.
I have this one last thing to say. It is from also from an essay by Innen Younger. Though you may not agree that it pertains, you have told me that this is my stage to strut. Here  it is:
“What is a nation? Is a nation a boundary? Is a nation a culture? Is it an idea? Is it a set of laws? There are nations—territories, provinces, even sovereign states—within nations. Do their denizens hold dual citizenship? Or can a nation be subsumed into a larger nation and still exist?
“A nation seems to be the place where you were born: the word refers to the state of being native to a place. If so, then a nation is the happenstance of birth, under the command of fate, or chance, or God, or whatever force is in charge of such things. A nation springs out of the soil and is influenced, driven, by the soil from which it has arisen. Is there then pride to be had from having been born in one place and not another? Is there shame to be heaped upon those whose luck seems less fortuitous, having been dropped into another place? In other words, is one superior because his mother bore him in a hard place of dust and thorns which has made all the people tough and prickly? Is one superior because he came out of his mother in a place of apples and clear waters which has made the people fat and rich?
“What is the case when a nation encompasses many kinds of soil, and many kinds of waters, and many kindreds of trees and beasts and crops? Are the people of the river valleys more human than the people of the mountains, or of the forests, or of the sands, or of the salty sea? If so, how can they be one nation?
“Is one only as human as the other when he accedes to the creed and traditions of the other? The ancient Romans seemed to think so. If only all the world were Roman, then chaos would be tamed and all the world would be brothers in the Great Order, the Pax Romana. By this logic, only the one who can enforce his ways upon all the other members of the species homo sapiens is a true human. Hitler seemed to think so. Only the whole world would be sufficient lebensraum for the Aryan race, the other groups fading to oblivion as the workhorses of the Great Race. Only the hills of Bavaria and the flood plain of the Rhine could produce a truly human people.
“But what happens when the superior people spread into new soil in order to get their breathing room—and what happens if they do not?  If they spread, can they hold themselves apart, immune to their new climes, forever? And if they cannot, will they not be changed? Will the change be for the better or for the worse? If for the better, then maybe their old soil was not the best. If for the worse, should they have stayed home? And if neither for the better nor for the worse, what was the purpose of the effort?
“If they do not spread out, do they change? Not willingly. But what happens if their neighbors spread onto their soil? What happens when the river dries up and the soil becomes barren? Time and tide wait for no man.
“Spreading out is dangerous to the people of the soil. Not spreading out is equally dangerous. The nation is always, in time, forced to test itself against other nations—and against earth, wind, water, and fire. Rome was born in the revolt against the Etruscans. The Republic was forged in the Punic Wars. The Empire was created in the expansion into Gaul. Many soils and many peoples comprised Greater Rome. And yet, Rome eventually fell, poisoned by its own riches and stagnated by its inability to assimilate more new climes and more new cultures. Empires are founded and fed on the blood and bones of those who will not change, whose soil has made them. Empires die when they grow roots in the soils they have come to occupy, and new empires overtake them.
“Does this mean that the conclusion to draw is that it is best to dwell in an ever-expanding nation which proves its superiority in its inexhaustible conquests? Many have thought so, since it jibed well with their insatiable daydreams of illimitable avarice.
“There is another seemingly obvious conclusion to draw, and that is that the soil is what it truly is: a place to be. To be born here instead of there is only an accident of birth. To hold allegiance to dirt, stone, and water is an act of possession, which is sparked by the desire to hold on to one’s security—ultimately an act of fear. But should a human, supposedly—aside from God—the ultimate in sentient entities, not recognize fear as fear? And when one is led to thinking and speaking of national pride and manifest destiny, is one not wallowing in fear?
“The idea of a nation is abstract and arbitrary, and nativity is a matter of fortune. The boundaries of a nation are defined by whatever we can grab and keep hold of, and denizenship is granted by getting the privilege of having been born there. Keeping hold of it involves competition with other groups who want to grab it and keep it. In order to justify keeping it—beyond the animal level of dog eat dog—the denizens of the nation have to believe that they deserve their patch of dirt more than others who would like to have it. This may once have been necessary, and may yet be necessary, but is it how we wish things to be forever?
“To love a nation more than to love humanity is to live in fear of humanity—on all the levels on which such a fear can exist.
“Further, most nations encompass many kinds of soil, and thus are made up of multiple nations. Within these encompassed nations are many nations: each city and its surrounding lands is a unique place. And within these tertiary nations there are nations: every neighborhood has features of it own. And within these quaternary nations there are nations: every family is a nation unto itself, living under its own circumstances and with its own traditions. And within these quinternary nations there are nations: each person is herself.
“If the nations which make up a nation are truly one nation—under God, or not—then all these little nations must accept all the other little nations as valid constituents of the greater nation. They must accept that all the various soils generate people who are not more or less valid than the other people of the nation, that superiority is subjective, and that all soils and all peoples have their advantages and disadvantages. To say that a denizen of the nation does not belong in the nation is to say, ‘I fear that person. He is a threat to the nation, and therefore an inferior human being.’ This must mean that ‘inferior’ beings are quite powerful.
“Ultimately, a nation is an impediment to the true belief in equality of humans. It is a yoke of fear and territorial jealousy which can be thrown off only by loving humankind more than arbitrary boundaries. Such love does not mean making all nations one nation by force or deception, but rather by attaining the advantages of all nations through respectful interactions, adopting attitudes and practices from other cultures which seem to be beneficial, and leaving the rest. Doing this encourages others to do likewise—though it doesn’t ensure that they will do likewise. And if others choose to engage with us on the level of nationalistic jealousy and fear, we retain our universal right of self-defense.”
Well, there it is. I hope you will find it useful. With that, I am done. The conversation with your Society really ended with Lebianthris. What we have done here has been merely a bit of tidying up. Hahaha. My purpose here is done, and I weary of being T’elmach for you. I’m going to go off somewhere and be someone else.
Nöman Kabë: Hmm. Well, I hope you enjoyed having the stage to yourself, Sarai T’elmach. I’ll go now and leave you to your star-wandering.

In the end, we are left pondering if these dialogues have been a colossal waste of time and money. And we are concerned that Lebianthris’ encounter with this dragon-thing, or spider-thing, or goddess-thing—whatever she is or was—may have proved fatal. It has been more than a year, and after many inquiries, we cannot find any trace of our much-esteemed Lebianthris.
Whether she had anything to do with the disappearance of our sister, T’elmach is still most certainly an entity not to be trusted. Therefore, we must conclude that, whatever its influence on her might have been, her encounter with the Great Brain was at best only moderately positive. And we cannot therefore conclude anything about the thoughts and motivations of the Great Brain. We do not believe T’elmach ever had an original thought, but we have no way to verify if any of her professions originates with the Great Brain.
We will continue to petition admittance to the Great Sphere, though after two-hundred thirty-eight years of trying it might seem pointless to do so. And if we ever get wind of T’elmach again, we will alert the proper authorities.


 



  
ALL OTHER WAYS PREVENTING

I wandered forlorn in a forsaken land,
Wasted, loveless, lifeless lands of thorn and dust.
I ate and I drank with shriveled hands,
Shaking, purposeless hands that slew for lust.
I looked with shrouded eyes at tasteless viands,
Waters long vaporized, and food like stony crust.
I grasped with wraith-claws to meet demands,
Offending swords long cast away and rotted to rust.

I bellowed and I slew a phantasmal hour,
Glorious moments of jutting bone, starburst grue.
I cast down panting in a stony bower,
Tangled, thorny, sun-roofed bower from which my spirit flew.
I exploded into a starry flower,
Flora wafting on a celestial breeze, silently, completely new.
I became a gale of welkin’s power,
Purposeless, purposeful elemental air, ranting power grew.

I snatched one silent breath, dreadful and clear,
Lucid wind that caught me back from a heaven or a hell.
I saw I sat on a verdant plain, dripping out my fear,
Pine-crowned kingdom of bird and beast, both fair and fell.
I racked my mind to recall how I ended here,
Fog-enshrouded memories where lurking monsters dwell.
I trembled to think a thought to bring the demons near,
Black, sinking, creeping thoughts that no sane man would tell.

I heard the voice that spoke to me, retrieved me from a brink.
My face did shine, and the baleful things that oppressed me fled.
“No darkness shall touch you, so long as you do not blink,”
Said the voice, “nor shrink, and recall always the day we wed.”
I was on my knees, so I arose, to a sky as black as ink.
Only I shone to dispel the void; my spirit was fully fed.
“With you my guide, with love, my thought does fully link.
You will rule, and I will do, and my meaning is perfected.”

I found myself on a dusty street when the darkness passed,
Ragged street of wheels and feet, indifference and despair.
Sorrow and rage did battle in me, and weeping with a blast
Did surpass all doubt of purpose, and inner fire laid bare,
Grinding teeth, I flew with hate to the nearest unlightened man.
“Do you not know I have found love in the loveless world?”
I screamed into his face, fists knotted in his coat.
“Do you not know there’s no love for you until you hear the voice in me?”

But the man did not bow, nor cringe, nor weep a joyous tear.
His placid gaze withstood my fire; he, smiling, said to me:
“Wandering, wondering, you come to me, despising my disgrace.
Offering a love to me, a grace, unless I miss my guess, that you do not possess.
You take in me a fallen state because in joy I do not shout.
You offer me another’s love that you do not comprehend.
You see in me benighted folk, the darkness to drive out.
I see in you only you; will you not become my friend?”

I stood a time in molten fury, heat and cold at war.
Doubts flew shrieking round my head, worldly rhyme and lore.
I stood again upon a brink, and the voice said, “Never more.
In a friendless world your only friend bids you keep your oath.
If this creature does not receive my light, he is of little worth.
Just smile at him your inner peace, and walk to greener fields.
In our new world, the light that shines emanates from Me.
Lightless folk are swept away in a rising tide of Me.”

I smiled my smile, and charged along into a growing fray,
Battling where there was no war; where there was war, entering.
I slew and slew for better cause, my darkness fled away,
Driven into other hearts, unenlightened oaths preventing.
I became in Heaven’s name the brightest of flaming Day;
For Heaven’s sake my empire grew, all other ways preventing.
I labored against the flame of Hell, and blood lost in that way
Became the cost of Heaven’s due, all other ways preventing.





THE INVESTIGATION

“Yes, I believe the universe talks to us. No, I don’t believe it does so directly, nor do I believe it needs to. All my essays, poems, pictures, deeds, thoughts, and emotions are a conversation I am carrying on with the cosmos.”—Kam Hijat

The fog was ubiquitous, infinitely dense and cloying—even through glass and rubber seals—making an abyss-on-earth where even gravity seemed on the edge of failure. Mrs. Herringbone had no idea what sense had the power to guide her through the everywhere-and-nowhere, objects appearing and disappearing at random, powerless guideposts with no discrete location. As the car bounced, the windshield wipers labored, and the defroster blasted uncanny wind, Mrs. Herringbone flew with determined, human turbulence through the absolute silence, the evidence of her struggle encapsulated in a ten-foot cocoon. She and the car were seemingly their own, pointless universe, on a slow-fast non-course to nowhere in particular, and only the too-infrequent, intermittent signs—Brockton, Sternberg, Armitage...—confirmed that she really existed, and that there might be other universes into which hers could merge and find meaning.
When she finally found herself in the small town of Bogan, fog as thick here as anywhere else, basking in the comfort of the periodic, red-blue flash-flash of the sheriff’s cruiser, her wave-function collapsed, and she knew she had returned to a quantum reality she understood.
Sheriff Nussbaum radioed her: “Welcome to the Happiest Little Place This Side of Heaven, Detective Herringbone. If you’ll just follow me out to the Boonies—yeah, that’s really what we call it—I’ll show you the sanest, craziest, most sickening thing I ever seen. Don’t mind the bogies on the way; I’m gonna show you something scarier than any bogies ever been dreamt up.”
Although she didn’t see anything that she’d willingly call a bogie during her short-long journey from Bogan to the scene, the town and its surrounding countryside did seem strange to her, strange beyond the strangeness of the unfamiliar. The roads were too narrow and paved with flags and cobbles. In several places their course cut through amazingly steep hills, and the exposed red stone of the hills’ innards was festooned with slightly iridescent blue hanging moss. The fog seemed unable to quite touch the ground here, cut off ten or fifteen feet short, so that the trunks of trees could be clearly seen, pillars upholding the watery roof of some ancient hall, radiating gnarly support beams that disappeared into an unearthly thatch. Grey-green boughs dipped down now and again from high embankments like the arms of great trolls feeling the bottom of a colossal cooking pot for just one more taste of human flesh. Some primitive impulse made Mrs. Herringbone’s guts crawl, as if she really could become just a dainty morsel for some hell-spawned giant.
But strangest of all were the trees themselves. At first, the reason eluded her. Her rational mind, of course, understood that she was experiencing a multitude of optical illusions. The lights in Bogan were lurid in the moist night, though they were really no different than the lights of other little towns. The countryside was like something from a Gothic novel, as viewed in the headlight-illumined obscurity. Part of her wished to see Gothic houses with spiked gables looming over the road, and it would have made things complete if she had seen black carriages on the road with hunchbacked drivers who had one squinch-eye and one pop-eye glaring at her as their skittish horses whickered and squealed and tried to keep their footing on the slick roadway.
But it was the trees themselves that were strange, and in a way more ancient and visceral than suspicious coachmen forcing carriages through the late night on mysterious errands. She couldn’t keep her eyes off those trees, and she almost rear-ended her guide several times. They induced a nausea in her that didn’t begin to subside until the realization suddenly slammed into her consciousness: the trees all seemed to be leaning away from a central point—the point toward which they were headed.
Without thinking she stomped the brakes and skidded to a halt on the slick stone, the rear end of her car almost sliding into a ditch.
Her radio lit up with calls from Sheriff Nussbaum. But she didn’t answer. He finally got out of his cruiser and walked seemingly casually up to her window, right hand on the butt of his service weapon, left hand making the roll-down-the-window sign. Still, she made no move to respond until he stuck his jowled head right in front of her vacant line-of-sight. With an unwilling hand, she put down the window, turned her head slowly toward Sheriff Nussbaum, and asked: “Where the hell are you taking me?”
With a sly twinkle in his eye, he replied, “These are the bogies. Where am I taking you? I don’t suppose you’ll understand, even when we get there. I don’t. Lived in this county all my life. Don’t really understand the things that happen in the Boonies.”
Still a bit shaken, she nonetheless followed Sheriff Nussbaum the rest of the way to the site, and they at last came into the hazy glow of the crowd of spotlights. As she drunkenly exited her car and stretched her legs, she saw that the scene was in a deep depression with bare red walls. She wobbled gingerly to the edge and looked down into a flat space about thirty feet below, red mud strewn with boulders and rubble. As she gazed toward the center of the bowl, the light from the spots coming in just right, the mist seemed to draw apart like the curtain of a macabre play. The scene was like a stage put together by an incompetent director, footlights misplaced and casting shadows out into an audience already blinded by the stark illumination.
Double, double, toil and trouble, she thought. And she half-expected to see three high school witches tossing bits and dribbles into a plaster cauldron heated by a cardboard fire. Just a little prank, Detective, to lighten your load. You can thank your friendly captain back in the Big City. We go wayback. He lived round these parts when he was little, you know.
No such luck. But truly she would have been disappointed if it had been just a ruse to get her out into the Boonies and away from the lifelong (or so it seemed) case. If this was what she had been told by Captain Campioni, she had come out here into the nothing to witness (wallow in) once again the consequences of her destiny (obsession).
The sheriff brushed by her and went first down the ladder into the muck below. She robotically followed, and together their shoes squelched an impromptu rhythm as they approached the circular rumple in the ground that the spotlights surrounded. She stopped on the stony ring and squatted down, her face making a squinting rictus as she shaded her eyes against the glare.
Sheriff Nussbaum went on an shooed away his people so that Mrs. Herringbone could get a good look at the scene. Clinically, she beheld a nude male, age unguessable, spread eagle and eviscerated, pale skin flaps lining the hollow torso. There were four extra naked legs, two on each side of the still articulated legs. There were four extra bare arms, and two extra heads, the still articulated head facing upward and the others facing to either side. Various organs were lying about, seemingly haphazardly, all with upright, white labels telling which organ was which. There was surprisingly little blood, only a few drops with almost no spatter.
After allowing her a few minutes, Sheriff Nussbaum said, “Well, what do you think?”
“The kill didn’t happen here. I guess you know that. There are two extra torsos somewhere. Did your people find those yet?”
“Yeah,” responded the sheriff, “on the other side of the Saucepan.”
She nodded.
“That all you got? That why they pay you the big bucks, Detective?”
She smiled and said distantly, “Okay.” Rising stiffly, she added: “Tell you something else. The extra torsos are hung on trees, on the side away from this depression, and they’re labeled ‘Spare Parts’.”
“All right. Apologies.”
“No need,” said Mrs. Herringbone. “I’m not all that impressed with me right now, either.”
“Hm,” said the sheriff. “So, what can you tell us about the Dirt Angel here?”
“He’s recently had both a manicure and a pedicure. He took very good care of his body. And if his eyes weren’t gouged out, he’d be handsome, even as a cut-open corpse. His genitalia are modest but with neatly-trimmed pubic hair. He’s shaved all over—except there and the top of his head. He’s too meaty to be a swimmer or a fashion model, not quite meaty enough to be a bodybuilder. Gigolo? Porn star? Actor? Did you find any personal effects at all?”
“Not sure,” answered Sheriff Nussbaum. “We bagged a ticket laying about a hundred yards away to a place called Carna-Val.”
“That’s a male revue in Capella City. Stripper, maybe. Although they do have male bouncers. I’m betting our person of interest didn’t choose a bouncer, although from all indications he is proficient enough to take one down. No, this is a different kind of statement than a declaration of male prowess. He killed at least three pretty boys to make this statement. Were the other torsos eviscerated?”
“No.”
“Dirt Angel, huh? Who calls him that? You didn’t find some other label, did you, and bag it already?”
“No, no. Lieutenant Keller said it first, because the extra body parts make him look like he’s in motion, like he’s making a snow angel in the only spot of dry dirt in the whole Saucepan.”
“Not a dirt angel, I think,” said Mrs. Herringbone. “Vitruvian Man.”
“Who’s that?”
“You know: da Vinci’s famous sketch of human range of motion.”
“Oh.”
“And da Vinci was suspected of dissecting cadavers in order to learn his marvelous knowledge of human anatomy and musculature. Mind you, this at a time when doing such things was strictly verboten by the Church. A body without all its parts, or with its parts mutilated after death might not get resurrected, you know.”
“Oh.”
“I wonder if he’s telling us he has power even over the dead—that he can stop them being resurrected. That’s a Dan Brown style leap, I know. But given the four other killings we can definitely attribute to this P.O.I., I think the evidence fits.”
“God...”
“Yes, it’s possible he sees himself as God, or a god. With his ego, I don’t think he sees himself as a servant or a prophet, but the real thing. At least a person so smart and able to manipulate with impunity that he might as well be God—and therefore has the right to kill anyone he wants and make any statement of fact about human nature that he sees fit. He’s so far above the rest of us, you know—especially Yours Truly—that he has a truly Olympian view of things. At least in his own mind.”
“You been chasing this guy—the papers call him the Morality Butcher—most of your adult life, I hear.”
“He’s almost worn me out, Sheriff. If I don’t get him this time, I probably won’t ever get him. I assume the F.B.I. is on its way.”
“Yeah. Estimate about three hours. Got a lot of equipment to set up here, I suppose.”
“No doubt. And they’ve been after him almost as long as I have. There’s a file of evidence and profiles as thick as the Oxford English Dictionary on this person. He’s known inside and out, but he always manages his kills and his statements with never a direct witness. We’ve had fifty-eight persons of interest. Nobody panned out.
“Well, I’ll trust you to guard the scene, Sheriff. I guess you know the F.B.I. is going to muscle you around when they get here. I’ve had more than enough of that. I’ll poke around here a bit, and then I’m going to go. An impression is all I need. Captain Campioni will get me the new F.B.I. file extension when they have it ready.”
“Alright, Detective. It’s been nice meeting you. Oh, also, you should know that they call him the Annihilating Artist. That’s a profile type, you know.”
She shook his hand and then walked stiffly around the ring, and then up and out of the Saucepan. She made a circle of the big depression and then got back in her car. The fog seemed to be blowing apart as the wind picked up, and her trip back to the city was a little less surreal.
When she got back home, Henry had breakfast waiting for her. “Hello, love,” he said. “Good to see you home and hale.” He kissed her forehead. “Was it him?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, dammit, it was him!”
“No need to snap, dear.”
“He’s not going to go away, just because you’d like more time with me, Henry. We’ve had this discussion before, anyway. Don’t start it up again.”
She sad down and unceremoniously began eating. “It’s very good,” she said around a mouthful.
“Well, I wanted it to be special. I was hoping to take a victory lap when you came home and told me you didn’t think this one was him.”
“Henry...”
“I know, dear. I just hate sharing you with the Monster of the Century.”
“You know, Henry, I do have a special feeling about this one. I think we’ve reached the Hitchcockian denouement.”
“I was afraid of that. The only thing I hate more than the Monster getting your devoted attention is the idea of how it’s going to end—especially if it has an end out of Hitchcock.”
She wiped her mouth, took his hand and kissed it. She was sure the end was going to be her own end. The Disarticulator (her name for him) was patient and precise. He would choose his own moment to deal with her, and then she would be another of his statements, his last if she had anything to say about it. But she couldn’t say that to Henry. Henry had stuck with her and her obsession for so long he deserved to think it could all end well. But it was more likely that the Disarticulator would destroy her and leave Henry a widower as a reward for all his troubles. She only hoped to destroy the Disarticulator right back and give the decades-long struggle its final meaning for both her own sake and Henry’s.
When she woke up about noon, she found Henry gone. There was no surprise in that, given the time of day and the nearness of McMullen’s Ale House. So she went down into the cellar, put the coffee maker together, and settled down at her computer to check her email and think. She tried to think of this morning’s crime scene, but it was hard. This was another in a long line of crime scenes she had visited, and the dead were just more piles of flesh that had gone permanently offline. Sometimes she hated that she had become so callous about these ended lives. She knew that every life counted for something, even that ones that belonged to seemingly discarded people, or even to very bad people—but there were so many. And she knew that she was close now (at least a lot closer than when it had all started) to becoming another one of the pile of billions.
Sometimes she wondered, if she had known how long she would pursue this creature (this person, she reminded herself), would she just have walked away from the case, even if it had meant the end of her police career? Maybe she should have, since the obsession had ended up costing her that career anyway. A private detective with a friend on the force. Imagine that. A private detective for whom paying cases were just an avocation, momentary distractions from the main event. A wife who was the dick in the family (and you could possibly say she was all the possible connotations of that word). A husband who was the worrying wife, who had quit his own career to minister to her needs, as if she had a chronic, debilitating illness and he were willing to suffer to the ends of time to serve his wedding vows.
And she knew that Henry suffered, mostly silently—which was why he slipped off to McMullen’s when he thought she was asleep, or when she was out playing with her madness. He was a fixture there, and everybody’s sympathies were with him.


The Disarticulator’s First Masterpiece: A layer of a Hindu temple with the dead figures copulating like the gods of the Vedas. All the dead had been disemboweled and then pickled for preservation purposes. They had been implanted with stainless steel braces with the skill of a surgeon so they would hold their poses. The internal organs had been laid out to spell a phrase in Hindi that equated, “rat food.” Hardly any blood was found—and no fingerprints or any other forensic evidence that could lead to a suspect. No witnesses. They began by looking at doctors, anatomy instructors, and morticians, but no one really popped out. That was fifty years ago when Mrs. Herringbone was twenty-two years old and two years out of the Academy.
The Disarticulator’s Second Masterpiece: A painting in blood on a rough concrete wall. Men braining rabbits with stones and clubs. The exsanguinated bodies positioned around an artificial campfire (i.e., a pulsating light shaped like a fire), all watching the shadows dance across the figures on the wall. They were all munching on barbequed rabbits. Of course, that had all been gutted, and their organs were being feasted on by taxidermied dogs. Again, no witnesses and no forensics. That was forty-one years ago when Mrs. Herringbone was thirty-one, five years after she married Henry.
The Disarticulator’s Third Masterpiece: Plaster of Paris Easter Island heads, all lined up on the shore of Lake Faroe, looking out over the water. Each hollowed head contained a disemboweled body. Back in the trees, other dead were consuming the internal organs of the prisoners of the heads. How could he murder twenty-four people within a matter of a day or two and produce no witnesses and leave no trace evidence? That was twenty-seven years ago when Mrs. Herringbone was forty-five. Three years prior she had found a torn up note in the wastebasket by Henry’s desk: a declaration of divorce.
The Disarticulator’s Fourth Masterpiece: A pieta. A black woman as Mary, and a black man as the dead Christ. At least he was an equal opportunity murderer. A dead crowd of varied ethnic backgrounds served as the Apostles and other disciplines of Christ. Christ’s internal organs had been burnt up. The organs of the others had been preserved in Canopic jars. All the figures had been mummified and left in a climate-controlled warehouse. The owner, of course, had no idea who might have done this, and he had proof that he had been out of the country over a year in Italy, and there had been no record of any trips back to the States during that time. The warehouse guards had been among the dead. That was eight years ago when Mrs. Herringbone was sixty-four.

Five mass murders, averaging one a decade. He was patient, methodical, well-versed in human anatomy and preservation, and extremely knowledgeable of forensic techniques. He was the epitome of a serial killer. In fact, he was the serial killer’s serial killer, considering that each of his “works of art” contained one dead serial killer and one spree killer. The Disarticulator had had to stalk and kill other highly motivated killers—and do so without leaving any evidence that could tie him to the crimes. His victims had been from all walks of life, and he seemed to have no preferred targets other than serial and spree killers, and these apparently accounted for his timing. But he had no apparent preference among these, either. It didn’t seem to matter to him who they had selected as targets of their madness, so there seemed to be no particular revenge motive with him. He murdered only as an act of art. He thought death depicting acts of life was art. He had brought life and death together as one thing. In that sense, he probably saw himself as very superior to all other artists, who were almost unanimously willing only to imitate life, or to go away from life completely into abstraction. To the Disarticulator, his symbolism was also the real thing.
And he had just taken what Mrs. Herringbone was sure was his last step. He had depicted the sex act, the creative act of the gods. He had shown the basic act of survival and the enjoyment of the act of consuming non-human prey for sustenance. He had portrayed the act of survival in which humans turned on one another when they had exhausted their resources. He had shown that humans are even willing to kill their own gods in an attempt to endow themselves with immortality. And he had represented his own power to deny immortality, to take away the resurrection for which Christians had slain their loving god. What could possibly be left to reveal? And this individual must be at least as old as Mrs. Herringbone herself. He had to be looking toward his own death, and either planning for it, or for immortality. Maybe he thought he could bestow unending life on himself by robbing others of it. Maybe he had foreseen his own death at a young age and was lashing out at life for cheating him. Maybe he hated everyone and wanted to show that their hopes were really delusions. Well, those were the alternate theories of the F.B.I.’s best profilers concerning the Annihilating Artist. Mrs. Herringbone felt that when the answer was discovered it would surprise everyone.
She got up from the computer, poured herself a cup of coffee, and moved over to the overstuffed chair and settled in to think some more on the case, as she had done for decades. On and off, it seemed that there was no solution, no resolution, that there was no rational reason to go on searching. This seemed to be the Ultimate Mystery, only clues left at the scene, but nothing substantial to go on. There was only the profile, but no perpetrator to fit into it. With nothing but his or her statements to work on—no provable means, no obvious opportunities, no apparent motivations—how could a definite, definitive personage become suspect?
She munched a ladyfinger from the mound in the bowl on the stand that wobbled slightly on the floor beside her as she withdrew a cookie. “It’s all so damned surreal,” she mumbled around a mouthful of cookie. “It’s like it can’t have happened—but it did. It’s like some alien—“ she paused to take a sip of her coffee”—in an invisible spaceship above us just teleported crime scenes in so it could study our reactions. Just gave the crimes enough sickness and enough of a theme to make them interesting—and then sat back to observe and take notes.” She sagged into the chair, took another sip from her cup, and sighed as she picked up one of the many well-stuffed file folders at her right hand, atop a sturdier stand.
Just when she was becoming fully engrossed in her review of the crime scene photos and her notes, her phone tweeted for her attention. She absent-mindedly picked it up and answered: “Hello?”
“Check your email, Mrs. Herringbone,” said a metallic voice.
“I don’t respond well to anonymous demands,” she said.
“If you will check your email,” replied the voice, “it will be very profitable for you, and mildly amusing for me.”
“Tell me who you are, and I’ll consider it,” she responded, her voice rising in irritation.
“If you consider it,” said the voice, “you’ll know who is saying you should check your email.” The caller promptly disconnected.
She clicked off the phone and said dully, “Bastard”. She sat stubbornly for at least ten minutes, staring angrily at nothing in particular, wracking her brain to think of who it could be other than the obvious who. But even her friend at the F.B.I. would have been less cryptic, and he had always addressed her as Detective. There was only one person it was likely to be, but this didn’t reasonably seem to be the likely person at all, since he or she had never before contacted Mrs. Herringbone. Yet something about the last crime scene told her intuition that she and her unseen nemesis were in the endgame.
Reluctantly, with trembling fingers, she opened her laptop and went into her emails for the second time that day. At the top of the list was one titled: “Regarding Henry”.
Eyes squinched, she clicked to open the message and was confronted with an obviously fake portrait of Henry nailed to a cross, complete with thorny crown, eviscerated. His slightly squirming intestines had been arranged so that they spelled out: “He died for your sins”. Then a bucket appeared and splashed the screen red as blood. A finger came on-screen and wiped away some of the crimson to leave a message: “You will find Redemption at Cold Hill Warehouse tonight at midnight. Redemption is for you alone, and only alone will you receive it.”
Her cup clattered onto its saucer and knocked off a chip. She swallowed hard and struggled to breathe. Her hands slapped up to her heart. Her eyes lost focus. She went red, then pale. Her breathing stopped and her mouth went slack. She felt like she was dead. She was sure she was dead.
But she was still thinking, imagining. And amongst all the images skittering through her brain, the scene of Henry being disarticulated by the Disarticulator was, of course, primary. She must now live for Henry as he had so long lived for her—to save him or to avenge him. She had no doubt that she would find him at Cold Hill Warehouse.
Filled with purpose, she now re-filled with color. She would go—with all her pistols, knives, and cans of mace. She would fly off like a dragon and tear apart that warehouse with claws, fangs, and flame. And, one way or another, she would come away with Henry—and the bloody carcass of the Goddamned Disarfuckingticulator! Their decades of frustration and cost would be at an end, one way or another, before day dawned again.
It never occurred to her to inform the Metro Police or the Bureau. This was always her personal thing, her pursuit, her investigation, her life. If others assisted her, or if they resolved it for her, her answers so long sought would be muddled or even scoured away. And if, after all her and Henry’s sacrifice, she lost her answers, she really would be dead—or, at best (or worst), a hollow, malfunctioning shell.
As she was packing a bag of clothes for Henry and stuffing her pockets, boots, and waistband with various weaponry, she stopped cold. A loathsome thought struck her like a bolt out of the blue. Henry. Infinitely suffering. Infinitely patient. Infinitely loving. Always gone when she returned from a trip to one of the Disarticulator’s crime scenes/piéces-de-resistance. Always full of helpful suggestions for the direction of her investigations. Now gone. Now in jeopardy at what seemed to be the approaching denouement. “No!” she said sharply. “No.”


Mrs. Herringbone sat all the remaining afternoon and into the evening behind a wall of rusty corrugated steel about a quarter mile from the indicated warehouse. She stared through a telephoto lens, and every now and again instinctively snapped a picture. Nothing came, nothing went—not even a bird or a stray cat. She sucked coffee till her eyes were made of glass. She peed in a rusty coffee can. She waited for her hour.
When the hour finally struck she was at the nearest door and quickly within. The main warehouse was an empty cavern and the door closed behind her with an echoing clang. A few lights sprang on with fumphs, a cascade of sound and illumination that led her eyes to the back of the cavern, when an overhead door was rolled up, letting into what seemed from here to be absolute blackness.
She had no further fears that could force her to caution, so she strode forth like some fantasy paladin to beard a dragon is his den and bring out the local princess who had been taken into his clutches. But when she finally came to the large opening, the darkness did not resolve. The light seemed to end precisely at the border between the big main warehouse and whatever lay behind this barrier. She stopped and dipped her hand in. It disappeared. When she pulled it back it seemed whole and unmutated.
The Detective seemed to be on strike, or at least on a very protracted lunch break. “Fucking surreal,” was all she said before stepping briskly through the portal.
The darkness beyond really was absolute, so absolute that it was obliterating. First, of course, sight was gone: there seemed literally to be nothing to see. Sound was also absent: she could hear nothing, not even the sound of her own breathing or her heart beating, which she knew from experience she would hear in sensory deprivation chamber—and which could quickly become the sound of madness. Smell and taste were negated: she could not even experience the rancid, cloying taste of her bad-coffee binge. Touch was banished: she had lost the floor, and when she reached for her Glock as an old, reliable anchor, she could feel nothing. (Even the urge to pee again, that had been building as she approached the warehouse and then crossed to the Portal of Mystery, had disappeared and was in the process of being forgotten.)
There was no sense of space, no echoes, no passing air, no sense of movement. Time was rapidly evaporating from consideration. And as it went, it siphoned off memory and purpose. In the absence of meaning and experience, there was no herself. She was a mote of unspecified size, massless, devoid of energies, forceless, without effect or affect, and without need or the conception of need. Seventy-two years of searching, longing, pleasure, suffering, doing, breathing, sweating, peeing, defecating—all erased in moments, or hours, or eons, or never wases.
Something in the composition of this mote of whatever knew, felt, reacted to, that there was something. There was something that required motion, that could cause the infinitely receding mote to take on mass and become a thing of present substance. Substance was the key to being, so motion was the thing. But a non-being could do nothing.
“I give it to you,” said a profound voice. The mote, uncomprehending in the way only a nothingness can fail to comprehend, did not respond.
A light came on from about twenty feet above the plane of existence and cast a cone of luminscence down onto a cube, which in turn cast a square of shadow onto the plane. The mote was drawn to this geometry, and as it approached it seemed to take on mass. As its tangent of approach touched the circle of light, it became a fixed point of reference and began to take on definition as it passed in and became illuminated. It was weak and confused, so it positioned itself to rest on the cube.
“I’m not sure I want it,” said the embodiment.
“The choice is not yours,” declared the basso profundo. “By observing you I fix you in time and space. You are. You were a thing-in-waiting. I acknowledged you. You are a thing-in-fact. You are mine. I am yours.”
“I don’t want you,” replied the body. “I want something else.”
“You never did think you wanted me,” said the voice. “I have always been a means to an end.”
“Who are you?” asked the body.
“I am,” said the voice. “The question that serves you better is: ‘Who are you?’”
“I’m the one who came to you at the time and place you demanded.”
“I demanded nothing. I made you an offer you could not refuse. I intend to come through on it if you meet my price.”
“Henry?”
“It is good you remember him. But, no. He and I have our own deal in the works that only affects you by association.”
“But you threatened him. You drew me here with that threat.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. Why else am I here?”
“Did I threaten Henry?”
“You showed him to me as crucified and disemboweled, and gave me the idea that I might save him by coming here.”
“Then it was you who felt the threat. It was your world I seemed to put into jeopardy. Henry is at home now, wondering if he should call your policeman friend. He will certainly be dead one day when I stop paying attention to him. So, I now threaten him with that. There. He knows that he has been threatened. Nothing a bottle of beer cannot cure.”
“You’re a real megalomaniac.”
“Is that what your profiler friend told you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Though I am sure you will be considerate of your associates when you decide whether or not to take it, I re-offer you the promised Redemption.”
“God! How is a mass-murdering serial killer going to grant me redemption? And, from what? Spending my days trying to put a stop to him? I suppose that would be a mortal sin in his eyes, wouldn’t it?”
“Amusing.” The voice actually did issue a rumbling chuckle. “But it is your Redemption. Everybody needs it. Everybody does wrong in the world, by necessity, or for amusement. Only you can tell me why you might require it so much that you have pursued me for so long to get it.”
“What?” she shrieked. “You freak! You turd! You mongrel! You monster! Chased your for redemption?! If I need redemption, it’s because I’ve been chasing you and neglecting everything else, you fucking pile of puss and maggots!”
The voice, unperturbed, responded, “The reason why you need to be given the Grace of Redemption is immaterial. Only that you must have it. Without it, you can never be free of yourself.”
“Fuck you!” she replied. “I only want to be free of you!”
“Impossible,” responded the voice without inflection. “Even if you could destroy me, which I have no intention to allow, you would always carry me with you until you have been Redeemed.”
“I’m not an aluminum can, or a coupon, or a lottery ticket,” she said.
“True, I value you much more highly than those things. Individually, they do not require much attention. But you are interesting. Attending you is stimulating.”
“You’re perverted!” she said. “You don’t care about people, except as objects of amusement. You tortured and killed dozens of people—to do what, exactly? Make me react and be of interest to you? Why me?”
“When you exist you do things,” said the voice placidly. “Did I torture and kill those people? Perhaps I did. I attended to them, and fixed them in time and space. They did what they did, and what was done to them was done. They have no further need of Redemption: they paid in blood and horror for their sins against one another. You would not pay in that way. You were cautious and canny, and relentless. But you must lose the weight you carry as you move. You must be free. You must move without momentum. Otherwise, you force me to keep attending to you, to keep you fixed, and that is such a crashing bore. It is bad for both of us. The more weight you draw in after you, the less your joy, the more torment for you. If you do not get free, I become bored with your repetitiveness. So, I start to manipulate events to make you more interesting, since you refuse to give up my attention.”
“You really do think you’re God,” she said.
“You have said it,” the voice responded. “I know that when I attend to things, they exist.”
She took a few minutes before responding. “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” she said. “I do need redemption, after all, I think. I need to slough off some weight. But I must see you for just a moment before you grant me your boon. Let me see your face first before I confess to you and enable your benison.”
“It has been my experience that when people lay eyes on me, their bodies do not survive the encounter,” replied the voice. “I do not wish you to die just when you renew the interest I have in you. You are not like those other people with which I constructed those artistic visions. Those were never otherwise going to be interesting people, works of art in and of themselves. They were put to a worthy use.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Herringbone. “Just be a burning bush, or a dream, or something else I won’t really understand. I’m a human. I need to see a body of some sort. I can’t be sure you’re real and can really perform on your offer until I see you. I need to see something identifiably you.”
There were several heart-stopping moments of silence. Then there were shuffling footsteps. A form appeared at the edge of the circle of light. It was a man, still tall despite his appearance of extreme age. He was thin. His hair and beard were long and white. He wore a grey duster that looked like a mantled robe. My God! It’s Gandalf! Her mind hesitated at the thought of killing this old man, but her hand seemed to raise itself of its own accord toward his head. In her hand was her Glock. She shot him between the eyes. His brains flew out the back of his head. His eyes rolled up and crossed as if he were trying to see the point of impact. His body crumpled to the warehouse floor.
After a long moment, Mrs. Herringbone walked over to inspect her handiwork. She saw that his dead eyes were staring straight up at her, and there was a smile frozen on his face. She tossed down the pistol onto the crate where she had been sitting. She walked toward the exit, which was covered with a black sheet. She felt remarkably unburdened, light as a feather, really. In fact, she could not recall having felt so free since she was a very small child.
But when she drew aside the black shroud, she heard and saw several people approaching. Some of them were local police. Some of them were F.B.I. They halted their approach when they saw her emerge. She took on a little weight. Oh, well, That didn’t last long.
Mrs. Herringbone removed her coat and began dropping the pistols and knives she had secreted in various places on her person. When she finished, the constabulary came on again with caution.
Captain Campioni said, “We heard a shot. Are we going to need an ambulance?”
“No,” she replied, “but you’re going to need to arrest me. I’ve committed a murder.”
Captain Campioni grabbed hold of her shoulders and studied her face while the others swept past him. Mrs. Herringbone felt a little more weight settling onto her.
Somebody said, “There’s an old man in there, shot through the head.”
“You did that?” asked Captain Campioni.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Herringbone. “I’ve put him to a worthy use.”
“We’re gonna need a wagon and a cart,” shouted Captain Campioni. He turned back to her and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get this sorted out. Agent Oneiwa found the email on your computer. Thank God Henry didn’t see it.”
“God,” she mused. “He thought he was God.”
“Well,” said the Captain, “he didn’t mean it this way, but Nietzche said it: God is dead. We’ll scrape up what’s left of him and send it to the Coroner.”
            “Why’d they let you go, Grace?” asked Henry. “They told me they couldn’t find a trace of a footprint of this creature’s life. He appeared. You did what you had to do. And that was the end of him.”
“Well, that’s a fine ‘Hello’,” said Grace Herringbone.
“I made you breakfast, Grace,” he replied.
“Thank you,” she agreed. “Well, he drugged me good. Some unheard-of combination of GHB, LSD, diphenhydramine, and some other stuff I can’t remember. Between that and the email, Captain Campioni convinced D.A. Jenkins to let it be. The F.B.I. is unhappy, but since there are no federal charges that would get me significant time, they’ve decided to officially leave me alone. But to them the case is still wide open, and Agent Oneiwa tells me they may be looking into me as a potential person of interest.”
“Hmph,” responded Henry Herringbone. “You’d better eat your breakfast then. You’ll be needing your strength.”
“What for, Henry?” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m all done chasing. Next time I leave, it’ll be for the Last Roundup.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling, “but I was hoping you’d make a run to the grocery with me later.”
“I don’t suppose I have to become a shut-in to keep my promise in spirit,” she said. “I’m yours, Henry, finally.”
But even as she said it, she felt the full weight of her life return to her. She would never belong completely to Henry, and she was sure they both knew it. Every bit of her collected weight was a rope attached to another existence. She would not truly leave her home again because the weight was too great to drag around any more. If she stayed with Henry, closed down her detective agency, and played at domestic bliss, the relativistic mass of momentum would not hold her back; and the only price she’d pay was to never move again. After a lifetime, she felt she could bear that cost. Her wave function would remain collapsed, and she’d remain in the one universe she thought she understood.





DILATING ASYMPTOTE

I lay upon my bed one night,
Covers drawn up tight:
Fear lay there beside me.
Windows admitted strangling boughs
In shadows on the floor:
Fear choked the strength from me.
Powerless, pinned to sweating sheets,
The calm of death set in:
Fear, confused, released me.
Dead, unbound in time and space,
The shadows covered all:
Fear could not see me.
Dead, unhitched from struggling yoke,
Life and love forgotten:
Fear did not know me.
Freed, my mind dilated out,
Out, past the earth and sky:
Fear was void in me.
My thought enlarged to Jupiter,
Then beyond the solar grip:
Fear recalled my name.
Vision exceeded the Milky Way,
Reached to Eternal Night:
Fear sought for me.
And then to another swirling light
With eyes that saw me pass:
Fear discovered me.
Out into Night with a trillion flames
To warm the cold expanse:
Fear snatched at me.
At last the wall-without-beyond,
I, ready to break through:
Fear grappled me.
I shrank back into shadowed walls,
Boughs still creeping in:
Fear coiled round me.
I had recoiled back into place,
But I was not there:
I left fear holding smoke—
But fear was there when I awoke
Into my fleeting dream.









THE OLD MAN, THE BEAST, AND THE GODDESS

“God is able to know everything that was, is, and will be; She Created it: She is thus responsible for how it all shakes out. She is paradoxically not responsible. Her natural state is no-time. Any idea She has occurs instantaneously. For Her, Creation is both an act of will and completely inadvertent.”—Fastito Calon

The darkness seemed complete, but he had the means to find his way here. The heat was immense, but he had wrapped himself in protective spells, and he endured it. The pressure of the profound deep was crushing, but he was immortal, and preternaturally strong: his chest ached with the weight of megatons, and his corporeal lungs screamed searing agony, but he suffered it.
Ancient and wise as he was, it was the anticipation of what he had come to find that oppressed his mind almost beyond bearing. He had suffered total, unflinching war, and he had endured cruel, numbing peace, and he had found his way—his way here. Enkher-Bakh had gone to the Keepers of the Center and had persuaded the Birds of Many Feathers to reveal to him the secret of their ages-long devotion. And Plucking Bird had flown him to the Through Crevice, the crack in the Most Sacred Mountain that let into the Navel of the Earth, and he had squeezed his way in, and the claustrophobic terror of it had nearly destroyed him.
Almost dead of dreadful enervation, he had discovered the Wall of a Thousand Beasts, and he had made the ritual fire, and he had watched the manifold Beasts cavort in the guttering light. And he had waited until the Beautiful Perilous Maiden had appeared dancing among the Terrible Beasts. And he had borne witness as the fearsome lions, and wolves, and crocodiles, and bulls had seemed to encircle her and devour her—only to do obeisance to her, and dervish round her.
And somehow he had felt this even more terrifying than all the other terrible things in this close, air-starving tomb. And he had run, stumbling blind, not knowing why he ran, or to what. He had run, fallen, run again, and fallen again—until his heart had to settle itself or kill him. And his mind had come back to him from its hiding-place, and it had forced him to take measures to preserve himself.
Here he was whose accomplishments were so many and great that he could be dismissed, with great pride, to eternal rest, Here he was seeking, he supposed, the whatever-it-was that had spurred him to come a-seeking. Had he not felt the hot, solid stone beneath his overwrought feet it would have been impossible to know that there was a here here. He had always been told that Everlasting Night lay in the Outer Darkness beyond the Stars, and that it was so black and cold that even gods froze there into icy statues and could never escape. But if that were so, then Everlasting Night was here, too, under the earth, and it burned away all thought except movement, flight from here to there, hell to hell, in the hope of some sort of escape—or, at least an ephemerally cool space, or even a dot of water to spare the tongue just an iota of surcease. The world of Lights that seemed so real when one was alive in it was a realm of passing dreams. The world of Night was the true world, for it was permanent, and it resented intrusion and exacted eternal payment for all intrusion.


The descent of Enkher-Bakh into the Center was interrupted by a vision. Queen Ashu-Tith and King Kaku’-‘Ror appeared, side-by-side, lounging on wicker divans, in the midst of their grassy lawn. They were sipping from cups of wine, and they were smiling.
Enkher-Bakh desired very much to greet them, but he found he could not speak.
“You have led us a merry chase, Lord Enkher-Bakh,” said King Kaku’-‘Ror.
“Yes,” agreed Queen Ashu-Tith. “Always moving. Your mind is never at rest. Always something to think on, somewhere to be, someone to counsel. We had to follow you to the Center of the Earth in order to get an audience with you.” She laughed like the tinkling of clinking crystal.
“You have borne such heavy burdens in the Ephemeral World, Enkher-Bakh,” said King Kaku’-‘Ror. “We wish to aid you, to bring you relief, but it is so hard to get past your defenses. We are a world away from you now, but still we think of you and care for you here in the World of Forever.”
“Oh, Enkher-Bakh,” said Queen Ashu-Tith. “A burden borne together is so much easier than a burden borne alone. We have brought friends.”


It was hard to tell directions here in the Navel of the Earth, but the old man found himself compelled to move forward?, to turn? this way and that?, to go up and down?, and to halt and then go? at unpredictable moments. It was hard to guess time, for it was not possible to sense its passing; even the beating of the heart seemed stilled here. So, maybe moments is a word to describe movements rather than time. But even movement is an inept description, for perceiving movement requires a sense of being here, and then here. There were no such sensations, only an apparent ordering of non-events, only a something-is-happening, a nothing-is-happening, and a something-is-happening again. His feet now felt no further burden, and he was sure that he drifted freely, yet with an unguessed purpose that came both from within and without, but which was nonetheless indiscernible. Enkher-Bakh lost all sense of Enkher-Bakh and sensed only minute immensity: he had become the embodiment of Darkness within the Night.


            The descent of Enkher-Bakh into the Center was interrupted again by a vision. The first impression was of great depth underground, dimly red-lit by the fire in the forge in the middle of the scene. The vision resolved into a smithy with a fire-well and bellows at the center, and a great anvil in the foreground, and hammers, tongs, and other tools hanging on a wall in the background. There were two, short, thick-built bearded figures in the scene, one on either side of the fire-well.
            “Greetings, Old Man,” said the one, holding a hammer upright as a sign of acknowledgement. The other figure was silent. “We come to you at the behest of Queen Ashu-Tith. The voice was deep, and it echoed as if the speaker spoke from within a vast cavern.
            “You did not think we came to see you on our own initiative, did you? You have nothing to teach us. No profit, no motivation.” The two Mountain Men laughed.
            Enkher-Bakh wanted to join their laughter, but he found he could not.
            “But, really,” said the Speaker, “you have earned our devotion with the deeds you did on that dreadful day long ago.”
            Enkher-Bakh wanted to tell them that they had also earned his devotion that day, but he found he could not say it.
            “Mountain Man do not forget a friend or a foe,” said the Speaker. “But it is hard to give the gifts of the kind Mountain Men make when the receiver is in another world. We will give you what we can from the Eternal Forge.”
            The Silent One took up tongs and pulled a red metal billet from the flames. He laid is upon the anvil, and the two smiths began to strike it with their hammers. Many-hued sparks flew into the air and fell like rain in the sun, and the sound of their hammer-strikes was like the ringing of stupendous crystals. And the two Mountain Men laughed with the pure joy of beings who know and love their place in the cosmos.

The non-events resolved into a something. A blurry blot of presence appeared—not a blot of light, or of sound, smell, taste, or touch: just presence, a clot of non-not-being amid the nothingness. The presence had no firm form and no distinct locus: it was both here and there, but it was not everywhere. It wanted to be everywhere. That is, it wanted to be everywhere, to devour everything, and thus be the only thing. It was not the Darkness, it was not in the Darkness, it was not outside the Darkness, and the Darkness did not emanate from it. It was itself, and it was apart from all other things, and it was illimitably, soul-crushingly famished.
But it was blind, and stupid. The thing that had happened into its place went unnoticed, for that novel thing was of the world that it gnawed upon without end. The new thing was without form or size, for all forms and proportions were rent away here. The new thing was immortal, and the world was immortal, so there was nothing really new here, and the intrusion was ignored.


            The descent of Enkher-Bakh into the Center was interrupted yet again by a vision. The first thing he saw was a shapely foot in a silver sandal. The vision moved upward along the leg until it reached the blue hem of a yellow shift. And then another leg was revealed, and female hips and torso, and pale arms, and finally the face and flowing, raven hair of Basost-Nesush.
            Enkher-Bakh wanted to tell her of his sorrow over what had happened to her during his struggle with her power-hungry lover, but he found he could not speak.
            “I was a long time in the World of Gloom,” said Basost-Nesush. “I could not break free of my sorrow. My lord Nekes-Suth was like a god standing as a mountain in the sun. I could only love him, and follow him wherever he would go. Even as I stood or sat beside him, I was nonetheless behind him, or under him. He was so glorious, and he chose me out of all the women he might have had—which was all of them. My devotion to him was total, and overrode all doubt.
            “Nekes-Suth was so very ambitious. He carried these driving ambitions to be ever greater in the esteem of the people, and ever more powerful in the world. I could not comprehend these needs; I could only walk with him on this strange path.
            His ambitions proved to be much greater than his love for me. After the death of my body, I stayed long in the World of Gloom. Such was my confusion and self-hate that I did not wish to pass on to the World of Forever. The Goddess of Gates proclaimed that my heart was pure and that I was worthy to pass through the Green Gate. But I could not believe it. I had supported Nekes-Suth. All those deaths. The Tree. All my fault, as if I had killed the Tree myself.
            “I killed myself. In fact, I killed myself seven times before I believed that death is impossible in the World of Gloom.
            “It took the Moth Goddess a very long time to convince me that my love for Nekes-Suth was not a thing of evil. Even if I had understood what my lord intended to do, I could have warned no one. Who would have believed it? Who could have comprehended? No, my Nekes-Suth was an elemental force. He was air, earth, fire, water, and time all in one body. What he did was the expression of fate. And it was fate that we came together, and I loved him.
            “Remember, mighty Enkher-Bakh, that fate and will walk always in the same shoes. We decide our own fate, often unwittingly, but fate presents us with the choices we make.”


      The intruder should have feared for his life, but he did not. Rather, he was curious to comprehend the life of an entity that existed in this manner. It seemed that in this realm all was stripped away, leaving only action and intention—or maybe only intention, the desire for acting that could never be fulfilled. The thing that dwelt in this state was immeasurably hungry, and it had always the desire to devour, but it had no means. But it was unfathomably stupid, and since it intended devastation, it considered this world to be in the process of being digested. It consumed by intention, and it consumed all intention, and its void offal became one with the Night.
Now there was another intention in this realm. The ravenous Beast noticed, and its intensity increased. Since it had all of eternity to consume, it was in no hurry, and so, for the moment, it was only curious. Its attention drew toward the new thing.


            A fourth time the descent of Enkher-Bakh into the Center was interrupted by a vision. It was Nekes-Suth in his full-grown youth, proudly nude and shining, as if freshly anointed and reflecting the glory of the morning sun. All about him was roiling grey like storm-clouds readying to let loose. There was the echoing sound of myriad wailing and weeping, barely discernable, as if the mourners were at the bottom of an unfathomably deep pit.
            Enkher-Bakh wanted to join in the lamentation, but he found he could not.
            “I am not your friend, Ancient Wanderer,” said Nekes-Suth, smiling. “I came to you, nonetheless, for I wish you to observe me. The World of Gloom is no gloom to me. My heart is light as a feather.
            “I shall return to the Ephemeral World one day, after I have taken my righteous command of this world.”


Almost Enkher-Bakh recalled himself. Almost he felt the dread of the approach of the mightiest of all Beasts. Almost he became again a thing separate from the realm in which he found himself, but that same almost-terror that was sparked by the oncoming destructive demiurge foretold for him the extreme danger of differentiation, for this was the true hunger of the Beast. The Beast was ravenous to reduce all difference to properly processed dung. The ultimate control is evenness, full miscegenation of all things into a fine, completely digested paste. This is the terminal aim of all action, even when the actor is unaware of the full fruition of his urge—and the Beast was the most uncomprehending of all things that act. All action gathers up energy and matter and reapportions it as desired by the actor. And this dumb thing had the simplest of all desires: consume and shit.


            A fifth time the descent of Enkher-Bakh into the Center was interrupted by a vision. There was a village of low, adobe-walled houses, with a well in its center. This village was laid out exactly as the village of Anosh-Abar was laid out, except that it was a green place, and well-shaded by large trees, heavy-laden with leaf, fruit, and nut. Children and young adults ran about, shouting and laughing. Music and singing seemed to rise up out of the earth, like the night mists roll up out of the wold. The sweet smell of fruits, breads, and baking meats wafted on the gentle breeze.
            Enkher-Bakh wished to eat, drink, and rejoice, but he found he could not enter that world of eating, drinking, and rejoicing.
            A crowd of villagers gathered around the well and began to sing a song like a hymn. Two smiling people, a man and a girl, came away from the crowd and approached Enkher-Bakh’s vantage point. These two were Aru-Akam and his daughter, Ankh-Amat, as he had known them at the time of the destruction of the Golden Tree of the land of Ba-Enkher-Ra.
            They halted to stand before the viewpoint of Enkher-Bakh, the father’s hand around his daughter’s shoulder, and her hand around her father’s waist.
            “We must not waste time,” said Aru-Akam, “for it strains the limits of our energies to come to you where you are now.
            “It is a terrible burden you bear, Grandfather. You knew what Nekes-Suth would do on that terrible day. And you knew the part that Ankh-Amat would play in the world that came after the Destruction. You saved my A’Amat, and your reasons were your own, but I love you, and I thank you, nonetheless.”
            “I love you also, Grandfather E’Bah,” said little Ankh-Amat. “The last life of the Tree went into me because of you. I came back to life, and I grew to womanhood quickly because the life of the Tree was in me. I mourned my family, but you were always in my mind, and Great Goddess was with me through the Tree’s power, so I came through the Destruction and became mighty. I am the spirit of Ankh-Amat before the day of my death and resurrection. I suppose you know the deeds of my elder self, though history does not recall me, or what my people and I did to keep humankind alive in those first dark years after the passing of the Trees and the Great Lights. I do not think you know that my elder self yet abides in the Ephemeral World. I became immortal, even as you are immortal. I change my form from time to time, and I walk the world doing as you have done. You are not alone. When you come back out of the Darkness at the Center of All Things, we will meet again, and it will be a merry meeting.”


Enkher-Bakh, being a thing reduced to only one intention, to know the life of the Beast, also had a very simple desire—not to be et and shat by the Beast. And in coming to know the motivation of the Dweller-in-the-Deep, he became less differentiated from it. The oncoming of the Beast slowed, and its intensity subsided, as it lost interest in this new thing that turned out to be only the old thing.
But the Old Thing had come close to devouring Enkher-Bakh, as it consumed all other things. Enkher-Bakh, during the moment of its curiosity, could feel the overpowering pull of its meta-primordial urge. It fed by drawing in, matriculating, and then excreting an overbalanced sameness that was the corporeal analog of nothingness, a sameness composed only of the desire to take further action to spread more of the same sameness throughout all existence. Thus, long ago, as it had found its way out of the Darkness and had combined with the Lights, it has promoted abundant life, which seeks to superimpose as much of itself as possible upon the entire fabric of the cosmos. Thus, the Beast was engaged in a self-defeating, eternal quest, for even as it devastated existence, it only re-formed existence—even as it generated living death it spread life of divers shapes and hues.
Even as Enkher-Bakh put his existence back into danger by comprehending the Old Thing, and thus fully differentiating himself from it by being aware of its Otherness, even as the Beast was again attracted to this differentiation, another new thing came into being. Another presence came into being, small but bright, if brightness is a quality one can use to describe a thing that sheds no physical light. This manifesting presence was intense without being intense, all-consuming without consuming, mighty with no display or threat of might, material without the requirement of corporeality. It had a form while remaining void of form, for Enkher-Bakh perceived that it was a female entity of astonishing and simple harmony, a thing that the Beast could not devour and process, for it was already a nothingness all its own, a creature of ultimate intention, devoid of the need for action, since its satisfaction was complete in its symphonic thoughts: it contained universes that need not be made manifest, for they were perfect in and of themselves, and enacting them would only spoil them.
Nonetheless, the attention of the Beast was rapt upon this intruder who, being perfection incarnate, could not intrude: how could perfection intrude upon perfection. Somehow, her completely different being was not incongruous here, un-Light conjoined with Darkness. A harmony within an a-harmony, the realm of the Beast of All Beasts, and the self-contained, all-sharing, realms of the Beautiful Perilous Maiden.
The Beast swelled in intensity, and it seemed that he overwhelmed her and blotted her out like an eclipse, and his simplistic order became a complex chaos as he became a multitude of Beasts conceived in all the myriad ways an existence could devour another existence and dedicated to the proposition that all other existence was an equal goad of hunger. It seemed that the Beast would make a meal of the Maiden, and the man that was Enkher-Bakh awakened in the Darkness and desired to rescue her from the Monster of all Monsters.
But the primal urge of the man was founded in eons of trying to answer the fundamental questions of human existence. Why has the warm, all-embracing intention of our mother gone away and left us to the hot, uncomprehending call to action of our father? Is the world so cold and unyielding that a blanket is insufficient to warm ourselves against its cryonic indifference? Must we meet the world with fierce fire in order to warm it sufficiently to our needs? Shall we all gather together, all in our natural and proper places, round the easy flames of mother’s hearth? Or shall we blaze in proving competition, body upon body, mind upon mind, will upon will, to earn our proper place with blood, sweat, and tears?
Neither the Beautiful Perilous Maiden nor the Beast of All Beasts required an answer to those questions. They were what they were. The Beast essayed to devour and matriculate the Maiden, but it could not. Neither did she tame the Beast. It simply could not perform its function against her. It did not cease to try, but its energies were translated into an act of combined, sustained, purposeless homage to her harmonious beauty. It could do her no harm, self-satisfied as she was, immune in her completeness to reformation, and she could take no action against its affronts, for she desired to take no action and needed to take no action. She remained aloof and unintensely intense as it focused itself on leveling out her utter, indifferent Difference.
Watching in complete fascination as the abstractions of his corporeal life played out their struggling non-struggle in his presence, the ancient chemical rip-tides within Enkher-Bakh ceased their rushing, mindless call to action. Observing the downright absurdity of it, no longer overawed by the seemingly titanic elemental powers with which he was confronted, Enkher-Bakh erupted into stentorian guffaws, or at least he felt that he did, though he could hear no physical evidence of his laughter. The combatant non-combatants seemed to notice it, for the Beast ceased his pointless, whirling, whorling cavort, and the Maiden focused all the intent of her un-Light upon him.
The idea that two such entities were attending to his seeming amusement at his expense should have been far beyond daunting to Enkher-Bakh. But he was so consumed, so to speak, by bemused indignation that no fear or good sense could touch him. And his vocalless laughter continued to reverberate even as the Beast and the Maiden grew yet more intense, appearing to approach him.
Through his amusement, Enkher-Bakh voicelessly spoke. I, who have dwelt in the World Visible century upon century, even I, had conceived our Goddess of Light and our God of Night as beings so high and so deep, and so awesomely mighty in their aspect that no human mind could compass them. But here you are, uncomplex things, driven by the simplest of urges, the urge to be right, to deny all wrongness, and the urge to make right, to make wrongness into rightness, according to your own stupid standards.
If the color red had been possible in this realm, he would have seen it, for he perceived extreme annoyed impatience from the Mighty Beast, and he sensed aggrieved self-righteousness, virginal peeve, in the Pristine Maiden. He did not care.
You have no choice, do you? For you have no other means to conceive yourselves. If you were humans I would name you fools—but fools have a choice to do this or that, and you have none. You are incorporated principles, and no more. If only you could yourselves see it, you would not fault my laughter. His laughter grew softer, more like affection.
I recall in my thought, as if it never happened to me, the time of the beasts and the trees, how I wandered free of doubt in the forests under the unchanging Lights. It amazes me that you do not recall me, and yet, I suppose it is not to be wondered at—you, with your cosmic concerns. I was nigh as your song began, and I was drawn to you as you stood in the four-lit world of the mingled Lights of Obsidian, and Sapphire, and Emerald, and Ruby, the myriad Stars glittering above like bright diamonds strewn upon a field of absolute jet. I felt your sadness and long-suffering—we all did—but I moreso than the others, damn you. I Awoke in that dreadful hour. I awoke to pains that did not concern me. I perceived beauties that were too poignant for me. I grasped sorrows that were too deep for me. My peace was broken for ever, and I have since labored under the burden of lore too broad for mortal minds.
Oh, the agony! I still recall it, for, from time to time, it still comes upon me as I glimpse a snow-capped peak from afar, glistening in the Light, or as some skillful singer sings of times long passed, almost recapturing the Opening Hour. Everything to which I Awakened was too much, and the agony of that awareness most of all. And, I crawled on my belly to your saintly foot, and I looked up your perfect, oh, too perfect, self-sanctified form, and became lost in your hallowed hair. And the sound that rang out of you, sorrows deeper than all abysms, wider than seas of stars—that sound would have slain me, and did slay me, or so it seemed to me—and then it breathed me back to life in the next moment. And you became life and death to me, and I hated you for it, for I had not known death in myself before that hour, and the things that died before that were only things that lay upon the earth and rotted away into unpleasantness. To know that I would lie down and rot away, or be chased down and shat away birthed in me a hate hot and fierce.
And when your song ceased a moment, almost I wandered away, but your glory held me. I hated you the more for that: I was the puppet of your will, having only just found a will of my own.
And when your song began again, and there was Joy in it, joy to pierce all veils of darkness, and deceit, and loneliness, and hate, I thrilled, for I felt the coming together of all living things. I thrilled, and I hated yet more, for the joining caused a fear greater than all other fears I have felt to rise up in me and howl for the security of vengeance. If only I could slay you all this would cease, and maybe my peace might return and the weight of knowledge be lifted. But you were too great for me, and as in my fantasy I leapt for your throat and ripped away breathing and bleeding flesh from you, only I tasted your foot. My teeth sank in, and blood came forth, but I did you little injury, and it seemed you, in your throes, were unaware of me—and that hurt me the most. And I slunk away and nursed my new-found pride, knowing that I had done a grave wrong, and knowing that I was so small to you that on my best day I would be no more than a gnat, and in this hour of your pouring forth I was nothing at all, no more than all the other things of the world into which you deigned to imbue your Intention.
Miniscule I was to you, but mighty you were to me, and in me. I had tasted the inviolable blood, only a drop or two, but it was enough to wright in me. And I had taken the blood in heat, and hate, and fear, and I became self-cursed with unending life. No mortal could conceive it, for no mortal has endured a hundred centuries, and no mortal has suffered a thousand wars, and no mortal has loved a thousand loves. And no mortal has seen it come and seen it go ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a thousand thousand times. And there is no other creature of mortal flesh who has had a life like my life.
And here I am: I have met my Makers. Here is the Beast, the Maker of my flesh. Here is the Maiden, the maker of my will. Here flesh is not flesh, and will is fleeting. Here I do not reveal by flesh or by will: I am revealed, and I cannot conceal. Do you not know me? I am what you have conspired to create. You had no Intention to make a Me, but here I am, Revealed to you. I am what you have wrought with your elemental passions. I am Intention, and I am Action, and I am Revelation. I reveal you to you. Do you not know me?

The Beast only seemed to grumble, and then to become greater, lunging, as it were, toward the thing that annoyed it and delayed its eating. The Beautiful Perilous Maiden sang, sorrow and joy together joined, and the un-sound of it seemed to both reverberate and to fall dead simultaneously. And Enkher-Bakh, now fully recalling Enkher-Bakh, fled and remained, regained life and perished.
How he had come up, out of the Deep, he never knew, and it mattered little to him. The heat of the all-consuming Darkness was still in him, for as he panted in the close air of the lightless cave, sweat rolled off him in rivers. He groped desperately for his little fire, but he found only cold ashes. Terror found him again, and he could not withstand the claustrophobic dark one moment more. He ran blindly again, hoping for Out and not once again In. He cut himself, and bruised himself, and cracked ribs and fingers, but he came out into the new-born Moon, naked, nearly waterless, and as famished as the Beast. He shivered uncontrollably as Plucking Bird plucked him and enfolded him into her moonlit feathers and bore him away, the black and silver world falling beneath him, and the terror fading as consciousness mercifully left him to dreamless sleep.
Enkher-Bakh awakened on a stony aerie among the many aeries of the Temple of the Birds on the slopes of Bikh-Ankhet-Bibaru, the Mountain of the Heaven of Feathers. He awakened under downy blankets into the red-golden glare of the new-born Sun. He smiled as well as his parched mouth could smile and weakly upheld his hand to ward off the powerful morning rays of the Sun that he had helped bring into being—but that was, he felt, another lifetime and another story: Enkher-Bakh, and the Man in the Sun, and the Woman in the Moon. A marble bowl of many fruits lay beside him, and he ate gratefully, the juices restoring him amazingly quickly.
In time, the heat grew too hot under the blankets, and he arose. He stretched and gloried in the singular, white light of the Sun. The corona was green today: there would be burgeoning life. Enkher-Bakh felt the life coursing in him today as he had not done for centuries upon centuries. And he looked down and saw that his body matched his feeling of renewal, for his nakedness was again beautiful, and as young as a boy newly come to manhood. Death had been good for him, and perhaps he could bear life now for a few more centuries. He mused on what he might do here to amuse himself and keep life young in the World of Light between the Outer Darkness and the Inner Darkness. Perhaps for the first few decades he would simply eat, and shit, and sing songs.




END OF PART TWO










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