Knots in the House of Silence

Joy.

Joy that can’t be found in the most passionate kisses, or the most sought prizes.

Joy that makes the brightest moments of your life go pale (the long cry of victory and the trophy held high) (the touch of morning glories on his cheek and the kiss resumed).

Joy made of running, and running, and running, and feeling on each step your arms get loose and your legs fly, and each step and each leap brings you a little closer to Paradise. Joy that isn’t fit for a man, but for water that runs effortlessly to embrace the sea.

Aschoff had believed he knew what joy was, but now knew that never, ever, ever before he had felt its spell.

The spell cracked from side to side.

A call as powerful as a gong rang from the depths of night: the Home Call.

The atoms of Aschoff, shaken by the call, were routed and lost their liquidity. Aschoff wasn’t a river, but again a man, a confused hungry weak man.

His eyes turned towards Home in search of a guide. On the top of the Pyramid a light shone. And the light said, in the Code he had learned in his childhood:

“Danger! Danger! Danger!”

It said more. But it didn’t say anything he didn’t know, now that he was a man again, surrounded with other men. It said they were in the middle of the Night Land, next to the House of Silence. It said they were running towards their destruction.

Aschoff turned his eyes toward his companions, the two hundred and fifty conspirators that had promised to become heroes. He saw in his eyes the reflection of the same confusion he felt in his soul. Just like before joy had enveloped them, now the call of fear enveloped them, the deep echo of the gong of the Home Call accompanied by countless whispers that could be prayers or threats, all coming from the distant Pyramid, the Home they had deserted.

Aschoff didn’t want to be a frightened child.

Neither his companions.

The House of Silence was a cathedral of light and promises, beautiful and quiet like a prayer.

The two hundred and fifty men became again two hundred and fifty rivers that flowed in singsong joy towards the House of Silence.

Suddenly…

The magic beacon of the House of Silence was not any more. In front of them, cutting their way, a dense cloud of white steam came out from the ground, bright with the fluorescence of the creations of the ancestors. The cloud not only cut off the view, but also the conviction that the House of Silence was Paradise.

And the Home Call resounded again in the air.

Aschoff heard some of his men answer the call:

“Let’s go home!”

“It’s true, we are in danger!”

“Let’s flee!”

He looked again at the cloud of fog. He turned slowly, and looked at the imploring Pyramid that repeated again and again its message of danger and destruction. He lowered his eyes, and he saw his men, expectant. Five hundred eyes like beads in the middle of as many threads tightened on a frame, one end fastened to the Pyramid, the other on the House of Silence. “Tilt the frame,” said the eyes. “Tilt the frame so we know where to slide to.”

Aschoff weighed the decision up and spoke:

“Brothers!” An almost reverent silence answered him. “Brothers, I think we all know that today, now, we are going to take the most important decision of our lives. Perhaps a moment ago we were under an outside influence, but not any more. We can take the decision with open eyes and in full possession of our minds.” Affirmative gestures from everybody. “We can go back home. We all know what awaits us in the Redoubt. First, a punishment for our disobedience. Afterwards, a whole life wondering what would have happened if we had had the courage to cross to the other side of this screen. And the certainty that the happiness we have tasted today will never be ours again.” Murmurs. Aschoff silenced them with his hand. “We can also carry on. We don’t know what will happen to us in that case. Our elders warn us that nobody has ever returned from the House of Silence. But I ask: is it because nobody could, or because nobody wanted to? Yes, it’s possible that we are the victims of a decoy. And it’s also possible that the House of Silence itself has put up this barrier, to allow us to take our own decision. Let each one choose. As far as I am concerned, between living without hope and dying with it, I choose hope!”

And with a quick turn and a jump, Aschoff entered the fog, without even looking if anybody followed him.

All the men ran to the doors of the House of Silence, where the smile of the warmest light shone, the intoxicating quiet smile of goddess Possibility.

Joy.

Unlimited joy, that makes the brightest moments of your life go pale.

So felt the House of Silence. Only two of its emotions had some human equivalent but joy was one of them. The other was curiosity.

It had never received the visit of so many people at the same time. 251 men had crossed its doors.

The House of Silence was happy.

As he entered the House of Silence, Aschoff slipped. His feet slid, he turned in an unlikely direction and fell flat on his face. Willing to recover his dignity as soon as possible, he shook his head, opened his eyes, and… he was getting ready to stand up when he realised he was seeing something very strange.

His face wasn’t flat against the floor.

It was flat against the air.

His eyes took a moment to interpret what he was seeing. And what he saw was this:

In the foreground: the crystals of frost on the windows, a very long white mane floating on water, the down of goslings as soon as they have dried after coming out of their shell. Luminous filaments so delicate that the breath of a baby would probably break them, linking, tying, forking in all possible shapes.

Aschoff was separated from this filigree only by a layer of air so solid he’d be willing to call it metacrilate. Except that it wasn’t metacrilate, nor glass, nor any other transparent solid. It was air, but an air that resisted to be penetrated. The closer he brought his hand, the harder it was to go through it, until he reached the point where the resistance overcame his strength. Aschoff was lying down on this particular kind of air, his weight compensated by this unusual counter-force.

Looking further on, Aschoff could see his companions. Many of them, like him, were in not very elegant positions. And not only inelegant, but also unlikely. The bodies were positioned in all the possible angles in three dimensions, arms and legs leaning dishevelledly on the air. Like dolls trapped in a crystal ball, the youths made a blurred pile. Behind them, the gap they had went in through was still permanently open to the outside night, only lit with St Elmo’s fires.

Aschoff turned his eyes again towards the interior. The space was enormous, it made him feel like he and all his men were only straw scattered inside a huge circular drum. The House of Silence seemed much bigger inside than outside. And that enormous space seemed to contain only hangings of intricate web, with shapes the more fantastic the more distant they were, like the strange figures a drop of phosphorescent ink makes as it dissolves in water.

And that was all… or so it seemed to him until his eyes rested on the geometric centre of the room. Because there, round a giant snowball that stretched out frost tentacles in all directions, he could see some figures… and they were human figures. The distance made difficult to make out details, but their positions were such careful poses that Aschoff wouldn’t have hesitated to say they were dancing, if they hadn’t been absolutely still.

“What the hell is all this?”

Aschoff hadn’t even realised the deadly silence until he heard the voice of Nostrebor. Though it wasn’t the timbre of his voice, but the inflection and the choice of vocabulary what showed him the identity of his friend. Because the sound in itself was something almost inexplicable. The voice had turned into a tiny little muffled sound, with high-pitched echoes like the trill of birds, impossible for the human voice, and consonants like sharp bangs of wood beating against wood. The distortion wasn’t as heavy as to hinder understanding, though the volume was so low he couldn’t have heard it if the silence hadn’t been total.

Nostrebor seemed as surprised as Aschoff at the sound of his own voice. And he was even more surprised as he saw that only the three or four nearest men turned towards him; the rest hadn’t heard him.

“Well, at least now we know the reason it’s called the House of Silence,” joked Aschoff.

“What on earth is this?” repeated Nostrebor, visibly upset. “Why can’t we hear a damn thing? What are we doing hanging on the air?”

Aschoff had been asking himself the same questions and, although he didn’t have definite answers, he had at least a theory.

“Whoever built this could bend space as they wanted. It looks as if the force of gravity itself has changed. And gravity is determined by the curvature of space. This space must be warped in very strange ways, if it seems bigger from the inside than outside.”

“And the silence…?” asked another of the men with a hoarse voice, or what sounded to Aschoff like a hoarse voice.

Aschoff shrugged his shoulders.

“Sound depends on the shape of space. If our engineers don’t find it difficult to make rooms with shapes that amplify or reduce sound, what couldn’t somebody that controls the shape of space itself build? And if you ask me why would anybody want to lessen sound, I don’t know… but I imagine these things,” he pointed to the very fine luminous threads, “are very sensitive to vibration.”

Aschoff saw admiration painted on the faces of Nostrebor and the other three men, and he felt awkward. To hide his uneasiness, he stood up with a leap that unexpectedly became a somersault… but he managed to control it in time and he fell appropriately on his feet.

Nostrebor picked up the message and stood up, too.

“What are we waiting for?” he roared (and the roar was covered with trills) “Let’s go there!” And he pointed with his outstretched arm to the mysterious dancers.

“How? Walking on thin air?” It sounded like a child’s whisper, whose origin Aschoff couldn’t identify.

“Exactly,” replied Aschoff, taking a few determined first steps on the air, that gave slightly under his feet, like a feather carpet. “Walking on thin air.”

It was difficult for the House of Silence to communicate with gross human beings. Their telepathic ability was too primitive, and it could only transmit them the simplest messages in the form of emotions. It would have to be enough, until it could use a more effective means.

Reaching the centre of the House of Silence was, at the same time, easier and more difficult than it seemed.

More difficult, because it soon became obvious that they couldn’t follow anything as simple as a straight line towards their destination. They were in a three-dimensional labyrinth, with invisible walls and gravity changing direction constantly. To make it even more difficult, they also discovered very soon that they couldn’t trust their eyes to estimate directions. The knots in space made light follow incredible trajectories, so any point of view showed images typical of a deforming mirror. Any reference they had wanted to take - any shape in that mysterious amalgam of fibres - became unrecognizable only a few steps further. And the dancers seemed sometimes near and sometimes incredibly distant.

In spite of all these apparent difficulties, going in the correct direction wasn’t, in fact, very difficult. Because the House of Silence itself guided them. The correct direction brought with it a feeling of light, sweetness, music, caress, perfume. Joy, in short. Whereas if they took the wrong way they felt immediately an indeterminate discomfort that made them go back.

Once, Nostrebor insisted on carrying on with the opposite direction, only to see what would happen. The discomfort became a burning sensation, and he quickly returned to his companions. The expression he wore on his face wasn’t happy at all.

“Aschoff, we are getting into a trap without a way out.”

Aschoff moved his hand in a spurning gesture.

“And who says we’ll want to go out?” Nostrebor kept staring. “Also, it’s much better to have a compass that shows us the way out than to have nothing. Or are you frightened of a little pain?”

“No, of course not,” answered Nostrebor quickly, perhaps too quickly.

Aschoff looked away, perhaps in a hurry, too.

The House of Silence had another available primitive means of transmitting its intentions: direct demonstration. It hoped that at least some of the humans would understand.

Nostrebor tripped with a stifled cry. He slipped down a gentle invisible slope and he stopped gradually about ten bodies further on. Then he let out another cry, though Aschoff couldn’t hear it. He deduced it from the position of his mouth, a perfect O crowned by the other two O’s of his eyes. Aschoff threw himself to his lifelong friend even before realising that the expression of Nostrebor showed quite a lot more surprise than fear.

And when he slipped and collided with him, his face immediately showed the same surprise.

A motionless dancer was before them, so near it looked like they could touch her… but of course, it wasn’t true. The tricks of light made a lens effect that let them see almost without distortion the upper half of her body, while her legs seemed coiled like snakes.

The dancer was a naked beauty.

She was also the oldest woman they had ever seen.

The woman smiled with as much sweetness as mermaids when they pause in the middle of song. And she could well be a mermaid, because her very long hair (white streaked with hairs of the darkest red) floated around her body as if she were under water. Or in null gravity.

Weightlessness and immobility made the old age of the woman seem of the kind of a centuries-old tree or an eroded rock, rather than a human being. Her skin looked like a piece of paper that has been creased and flattened again so many times the lines melted into each other, and they stop being simple wrinkles to become a sophisticated random pattern. The skin spread like a creased silk glove directly over the bones, without a trace of filling fat, and showed the elegance of her high cheekbones at its peak, and the subtle line of her smile. Her hands, that she held at breast height with her fingers in positions so precise it couldn’t be doubted they had some meaning, had an appearance more vegetable than human, with veins and joints covered with a skin as fine as a petal. Each bone, tendon and blood vessel could be seen, the skin directly stuck on them, like an anatomical study.

Aschoff didn’t know so much harmony could exist in bones.

The combination of the impenetrable gesture of her hands and her mysterious smile was enough to drive mad any man that contemplated her for too long, certain that perhaps if he looked at her only a moment longer he’d discover the meaning of life.

The blissful view was interrupted by Nostrebor, who unexpectedly brought his face so close to the woman’s that for a moment Aschoff thought he was trying to kiss her. But no: he was looking closely, as if there were some little detail he wanted to make out.

“Her hair...! It isn’t hair… it’s that thing…”

He was right. A more attentive examination made obvious that the long filaments that came out of her head weren’t simple hairs, but the ramified down that filled all the inaccessible spaces in the room.

“What on earth is that?”

“I don’t know,” answered Aschoff.

But he wasn’t really answering Nostrebor’s question, but the ones that were stuck in his head: Where do those threads reach? Do they get into her brain? And where does the other end lead to?

The House of Silence changed slightly its plans. It got ready for the hibernation of 249 humans.

Neither Aschoff nor Nostrebor were the first ones to arrive at the centre. Neither of them could say why, but they had gone from being the vanguard of the group to becoming the rearguard. It was as if the image of the woman had bewitched them, and they didn’t wish to abandon it. And although both knew it was only a trick of light, and the closer they got to the centre the closer they were of her, the impression persisted, independent from any rational process.

Most men were scattered around the central sphere, just under the circle of dancers. Aschoff and Nostrebor couldn’t hear them, but their gestures full of pointing arms were revealing enough. They all wondered how they could put themselves on the same level as the dancers.

Suddenly, they perceived an upheaval on a section of the group to their right. A man was rising slowly towards the circle, his face raised, his arms almost outstretched, slightly tilted downwards. He was a lean agile man, and Aschoff recognised him as a champion of fast fight from the 327th city called Legin, that he had never talked much with.

Shortly afterwards they could see another man rise, and they grasped the technique, which consisted only of jumping as high as you could until you were attracted by a weak gravitational force that made you fall “upward”.

They soon were looking at dozens of ascents. The risers went up more and more slowly, until they floated, weightless and still, among the rest of dancers. All the faces they could see among them were broken with a smile of pure ecstasy.

The central sphere grew tendrils that tightened delicately around their heads.

At last, the House of Silence could contact the human minds. If its message could have been expressed in words, perhaps it would have been something like this:

“I am the House of Silence. I am the House of Memory. I will live when the rest of the universe has died. Space, time and entropy are my allies. The essence of my being is information, that doesn’t need energy to be processed. Only forgetting requires energy, and I never forget. You have come to me to remember.”

The men knew then that the House of Silence wasn’t the shell seen from the outside, but what they saw as luminous filaments. And those filaments weren’t matter, but the appearance space itself takes, when it’s twisted in all dimensions to build logic gates in it, crossed by pure light.

Their ancestors had discovered how to make the ideal computer, indestructible and eternal, and they had introduced in its fractal circuits the secret of how to expand itself.

But they hadn’t told it how to get new data. They had let it discover that by itself.

Aschoff and Nostrebor were coming back on their steps. They hadn’t talked between them nor had explained why to each other. Simply, they had looked into each other’s eyes, and both had known that the promises of the House of Silence weren’t for them. Who wants to live in perpetual illusion, however beautiful it is?

Aschoff had tried to talk with other men, to dissuade them from their stupidity, but silence swallowed his words in a few steps distance. And the few that had listened to him had only shaken their heads smiling, and had repeated his own words: “What awaits us in the Redoubt? Only the certainty that the happiness we have tasted here will never be ours again.”

Both men knew that their chances of coming back home crossing the labyrinth were remote. But it was the only thing they could do. Among the ghostly forest of shiny filaments, they walked towards the oblong of darkness that marked the way home. Sometimes it seemed near, sometimes distant, sometimes its edges were convex and sometimes they lost sight of it behind a bush of white thread. But they went on.

The House of Silence was very busy hibernating 249 men. It was difficult, because humans, because humans are beings with a complex maintenance. They need a whole series of organic compounds that they process in a complicated way, and to obtain them he needed all the help from the Silent Ones. And then, it had to take into account the problems inherent in removing the metabolites from their blood, and the extra matter they carried with them.

However, it didn’t let the logistical problems distract it from checking that the two remaining men it had so carefully chosen followed their part of its plan.

The Great Pyramid had seemed so near… it was there, framed with night, at the other side of the black gap that was the door of the House of Silence. Aschoff turned his back so as not to see it, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to refuse to run towards it.

The words of Nostrebor, sharpened by the strange reverberation of the House of Silence, cut like knives:

“How the hell have we arrived here?”

And there was only one possible answer. They hadn’t walked on razors; they hadn’t even lost their sense of direction. If they were about to go out, it was because the House of Silence wanted them to go out.

“Why?”

“It wants souls, Aschoff, the House wants human souls.”

“It has them, hundreds of them.”

“But maybe it wants more.”

When they told their story at home, how many youths would want to come? They were going to be the messengers of the House of Silence.

With their backs to home, they tried to make plans. Perhaps there was some refuge in the Night Land where two youths could live indefinitely. Perhaps there was some way of blotting out the memory from their minds, so not even the most skilful telepaths would read about the tainted joy in their minds.

They racked their memories, while they kept their eyes on the dancers, more numerous than ever, now that the majority were their companions. And gradually the silences in the conversation became larger and larger, as they realised the dancers were in fact moving, too slowly for the eyes to see it, but too fast to look away without surprises.

Arms and legs were slowly bending in angles they would have believed impossible…

Mouths opened…

If it hadn’t been so slow, Aschoff and Nostrebor would have known much before what they were seeing. But, until their companions were in grotesque positions, more typical of insects than of men, eyes open as if they had never had eyelids, hands tensed, they didn’t realise they were writhing in agony, as slowly as a rock cracking when a root gets into its crevices.

Understanding went through Aschoff like a spear, and he howled the same as if he were wounded. He jumped towards his companions, and he bumped into a wall of air as solid as a tombstone. Then, he turned round like a desperate animal and he ran towards the distant safety of the Pyramid. As soon as he’d made two strides, something hit the nape of his head, so violently it made him fall.

It was Nostrebor’s weapon, the sharp-bladed diskos that could cut bones as if they were butter as it spun. In the intensity of the moment, he couldn’t find any other way to stop him.

Nostrebor bent down beside his lifelong friend. Blood was gushing out from the wound, his breathing was superficial and fast. Aschoff had his eyes open, but he didn’t seem to see anything. In only a few moments, he stopped breathing.

Blood made an amorphous viscous puddle under him. Nostrebor watched with morbid fascination how the liquid found a strange surface to spread on the air.

The House of Silence couldn’t understand what could have gone wrong. However much it went over the data again, it couldn’t understand it.

When the two men had stopped unexpectedly in from of its doors, it deduced that perhaps they needed an additional motivation. A slight but persistent message of fear, encouraged by confirming facts, should arouse the flight mechanism, and definitely direct them home.

Instead, it had aroused aggression.

Why?

Nostrebor walked against the House of Silence. He fought against the invisible labyrinth, choosing deliberately ways that burned his lungs or made him crawl under unbearable weights. He didn’t know, nor he wanted to know, which part of his suffering was an illusion and which part could be real damage.

The only thing he wanted was to move away from home, move away from Aschoff’s corpse, move away from joy, move away from everything he had ever wanted in life.

He couldn’t sleep. When, exhausted and lost among the knots of the labyrinth, he had permitted himself a moment of rest, his sleep had turned into the most perverse of nightmares. The House of Silence tucked itself into the cracks of his dreams, using primitive emotions as a lever to try to open his mind. A thick sugary syrup tried to dilute his fear, his anger and his sadness, and his dreams were only an attempt to wash it with acid and fire and blows.

The House of Silence accepted the facts: the remaining man was behaving in a very strange way… even trying deliberately to go in the opposite direction it indicated him.

All its attempts to guide him, even using contradictory instructions, had been in vain. The only thing it could do was to wait until he fell unconscious. And that it did. Showing an amazing stamina, the man didn’t collapse and fall into a comma until six daytimes later.

The House of Silence had to prepare carefully the hibernation on the same spot he had fallen, although it wasn’t the most appropriate place. His physical condition was too critical. It connected with his mind as soon as it could, in case it couldn’t stabilise him. It didn’t want to miss the information that had made him behave so strangely.

When it entered his mind, it got a surprise. It had never perceived so much pain in a human mind.

The House of Silence had no direct experience of pain. It was a mysterious sensation perceived by fragile beings, that it had never dared to study in too much detail to avoid destroying them.

Now it knew that human minds weren’t as fragile as it had thought.

It decided to devote the next few centuries to the study of pain. It would start by the subject that had proved to be so suitable for such a study.