by Pinlighter
Here is a jewel, grown in the darkness.
************************
There are five shapes that are perfect. One
perfection is
of the twelve-sided dodecahedron, which some Authorities claim mirrors
the true form of the Universe: and the same Authors state that the Land
is a hollow cave with the dead Sun at its centre; that for our
salvation the Redoubt must be rebuilt with a fifth side to justly
mirror the five Watchers, a labour of five millions of years; and that
every family should properly be founded by five suitors, not
one.
Yet other ancient writers say that the Pyramid must be
refashioned into
a tetrahedron, for that shape also is perfect and only by such
perfection can our salvation be attained and a refuge from the Land
achieved. They believe the Lesser Redoubt, that was so
formed, was an attempt to escape by this route, and we must repeat and
perfect the escape.
Truth, is a jewel hard to find.
************************
It is dim and quiet here. The borders of the vast
echoing space
are lost in shadow. Travelling cranes cling to rails that cross
the roof, and everywhere on the floor there are mechanisms scattered
between walls of interlocking adamantine blocks that look, somehow,
like
the forgotten toys of a gigantic child. Most of the
apparatus that lie discarded here are thousands of years
old. My own recent additions make a little island of
metal and plastic among many other machines whose purpose has been long
forgotten.
In the centre of it all is the Bottle,
twelve-sided like a jewel
and blacker than black. It is raised a little from the floor and
surrounded by the white line of the proximity barrier. The aether
around it vibrates with an intense and perpetual flux of the
Earth-current, for each pentagonal segment of its rind is alive with
screaming energy, and within the cyst of metal they make is a second
core of force locally buffered so that if power is lost the
discontinuity will make it shrink to nothing and wipe out all life it
contains. I say "Life" after a certain meaning of the word,
for it holds an Eater, a thing from the uttermost
Outside. The essence of the Night is captured here
within double and triple flasks of incandescence, at the centre of a
secret Redoubt within the Redoubt, turned inside out, blacker than the
Land, nigredo.
This prison has been sealed for two
hundred thousand years and more.
The watching guards are of untiring earth-lightning and
keener-sighted
even than their captive. There are armoured men to
supplement their alertness, standing at the fringes of the room where
it is safe, and they eye me and my party jealously; even after
these months I can sense the curiosity in their minds as clear as if
they were speaking aloud. And the great daemons darting through
the
cybernetic nets and touchpoints within the barrier watch us too, and
radiate their own codes of alert and wariness through the aether.
Man and machine want to know what my purpose is and why I have been
allowed here, but there is little chance of man or machine
discovering, because in truth I am hardly sure myself.
I am hardly sure myself, but I remember this
place. I realised as
soon as I came here again that this was the place. It was much
more than a century ago that I came here first, I was a
child then, and I did not know where I was or what was going to happen,
and I had been blindfolded and my ears stopped up and the nerves of my
dermis numbed by drugs, and I was faint with fasting. But
when I came to this place again, after so long, I immediately
remembered everything.
And now I have returned and I have been
working here for months, planning and dreaming and
building. Sometimes I believe I am an utter
fool. Sometimes I am sure I have the key. It
will be impossible to know until it is put to the test.
Hugin and the overChief talk and arrange small matters
concerning our
absence. I walk closer to the Bottle, passing the barrier
and ignoring the alert it triggers, and mount to the observation locus
one last time, climbing the grillwork stair slowly on stiff legs.
A multiple-screen maps the contained pneumavore in three
dimensions. It is a beautiful thing, complexity within
complexity of skeins and filaments and pulsing nodes of light yielding
to laminations and arrays and at the very lowest level to
mechanism. Our bodies are machines whose single cogs are atoms,
and this thing is not less finely structured and not less a machine in
its deepest substrate of being, though it is not made of our type of
matter. Overall it is most like a tree, but a tree whose branches
are black darting filaments of lightning, whose size is infinitely
variable, and whose mass is perhaps a few thousandths of an uncia . .
. but that is one of those things it is very hard to measure, I
understand: it can co-opt ordinary matter very swiftly and
efficiently. If it was free and it could escape from this black
cyst of fire perhaps it would expand through the Redoubt like an
invisible mist of horror and destruction, or perhaps it would merely
die. The Earth-current is healthy and salubrious for men
but not good for the dark breed.
A host of instruments probe the captive, some mapping
its
pneumahydrodynamic structure, some tasting its radiations, some feeding
it with streams of energy and computer-generated chaotic patterns and
thin tenuous gas, and by these Operations upon it a treasure house of
results have been obtained. We have nightsuits that will act like
little Circles, shielding their wearers' souls as well as their
bodies, patterns of photons that affect the Eaters as poison or
heat affects a human, dyskoi that will shear spirit as readily as
flesh, and other more subtle things. It is as valuable as any
jewel, unique, irreplaceable, its origin lost behind the ancient
horizon of record. No clear explanation of its capture remains
with us but only contradictory and incomplete legends.
I see it darting back and forth from wall to wall -
dilating like an
explosion, iterating its being like a mathematical equation and
writhing like a whip within its trap, and then collapsing to a thin nub
of being. And now it holds still. The field of the
Bottle is driven hard and cuts off all possible telepathic
communication. What does it think in there? Does it
think? Does it suffer? Does it feel? Our human
consciousness resides in our pneumasome which is in some ways
structured not unlike the Eaters, though it is of the most divergent
evolution imaginable. We are all flesh, with only the
tiniest admixture of spirit arising from the flesh.
This thing is all spirit, with only the tiniest wisps of matter
harvested once from the wastes between the dead and forgotten stars . .
. and now its brothers hold us here all captive, in a
pyramidal prison not unlike the Bottle itself except for the trivial
matters of shape and size. They imprison us in the Redoubt
and the rest of the universe is theirs, whether shaped like a
dodecahedral gem or a cave or an edgeless waste of emptiness or the
skull of a dead God . . . and we are trapped in here.
The Monstruwacans have power but not the power to freely
possess the
treasures of the other Guilds. I have been allowed into
some of the Black Libraries and I have seen many strange things but
none so dangerous as this. Barrier within barrier of metal and fire and
vacuum, of law and taboo and custom, seclude this hall, and yet the
search which took me to so many strange places finally brought me back
here before a thing whose existence, at least, has always been know to
our Order. We have all come before it. Long
long ago, I stood here, and now I remember that time as if from another
life. But to return here and to prepare my experiments I
had to request, bargain, persuade, and pay.
I have analyzed what I must do and I know the equipment
I will require,
and it has been granted me, up to a certain limit. The machines
are ready, and the men who will order them will soon be at my
command. Now I must leave. In a few more days I will
return, and my experiment, when I perform it, if I can perform it, will
be very simple.
************************
Turn the jewel.
Look again
************************
The stacks of the Black Library are very
quiet. One matross
stands guard with weapon at ease. His eye falls on us
occasionally but his boredom tones the aether around
him. And good Hugin stands beside my desk, alert to
my need. His worry for me is touching, poor honest fool.
The desk sits in the middle of a shelving-pattern called
the Infinite
Sun. Such things are important, the Librarians say. There
are vast ranks of stacks around us, and from time to time Hugin fetches
me books or plaquettes of information from them, but it is the virtual
pattern at the centre of which the desk is suspended that is the true
Library. The cybernetic servants that search and return and
search and return for me are sophisticated enough to know tedium and be
deceived by it so the Library in information space is also shaped as a
subtly aperiodic array, though of higher dimension than two. All
is ordered yet the order conceals nothing in blind repetition, for it
never repeats.
The books, virtual or real, are very old and their
number is nearly
infinite. Some of them refuse to interface with the desk and send
it parsing through its collection of ancient formats, talking to other
magazines until it can find some match, which it presents to me with a
gentle chime, translating as best it can.
For example this, from the most ancient times:
" Respect for
you, the Sun! King of two zones, samoproizvodja the
Founder, Father and Mother, Father and the Son, the God and the
Goddess, the Goddess and the God! " And their voices have been lost in
flash of the tools seeming simultaneously to heat shouts of victims.
Octachord sheminits, kajnnors which had ten chains, and nebals which
had twelve, ter, whistled, and rattled. Huge <????> bags,
oshchetinivajushchiesja with pipes, made shrill colliding noise;
taboerines which beat with energy of all players, it was filled with
heavy fast impacts; and, despite of fury of pipes, salsalim snapped as
wings of grasshoppers.
Or this, from scarce a million years past:
At first she did not
understand why periods of exploration of the Land,
when the Heroes went Out, alternated with periods of near-total
isolation. It was only when she thought to trace the plagues that
periodically swept through the Dead cities, and coordinate it with the
gene flows within the Redoubt, that she understood this rhythm. Every
heroic era of exploration was bought to end by a time of plague. Folk
deadly sick were exiled to the Dead cities, constrained by Honour, far
more ruthless and effective than any mere physical force. The Dead
cities blazed with fever. After long quarantine, the survivors would be
rescued and adopted among the folk of the Bright cities, who praised
themselves and each other for their pity and virtue. The broad
reproductive success of these survivors in their new environment was
high, and in subsequent eras the histocompatibility complexes on their
cell surfaces would become the majority norm within the Bright cities,
while the slow fall of the dishonoured rebuilt the Dead city
populations.
Thus, plague
never devastated the heartland of the Redoubt. The Heroes
served as tasters, sensors, inserted into the Land to bring back
enough, just enough, to innoculate Her flesh against what might have
devastated it completely. This collective evolutionary
strategy did not exist in any human mind and was not planned: it
had sprung into being out of nothing, one result of the eternal mutual
blind darwinnowing
Idle browsing. I told myself there would be
something else
to discover but I am wasting my time. My real research is
over unless I am utterly deceived. It will soon find
its fruition not far from here in the great hall that holds the
Bottle. Yet still I cannot cease from wondering. A
man might spend a million lifetimes here and be unable to unpick truth
from lie. But truth is some where.
************************
By the rolling roads and traversers, up the lifts and
stairs, with many
a stop to breath deep and acclimatize, I return home: to debate
how much we can spare to fill up a grandniece's dowry and whether we
should dismiss that maid whom Mar so dislikes, to count the cost
of paper for the household karrezinm
and the replacement of battered
furniture, to dispense fees for tutors and requests from relatives for
help in this or that project, and to sigh with a weariness of little
things. My family have their problems. Perus wants to
be a writer, Nenne is trying the viol this month, and for our
anniversary Mar requests a new and more beautiful panel for the House
lamp, the finest product of the Voyact stonegrower pans.
She had selected one, of course. I overruled her as gently as
possible and picked something with taste: an austere filtered calcite
with a wonderful deep branched pattern etched into it, a pattern only
just visible with the brightest light behind it. She argued
pointlessly, but at last she agreed.
At least I could be home for the display. We made
the proper
ceremony. Late in the sleep-time we doused the Lamp completely
and gathered round it, all our family and the servants together, in the
dark. When I had fitted the new panel to a petal, Mar stepped
forward, touched the Lamp, prayed to it, unveiled her face, and then
kissed it; and as it kindled the new light spread across her face and
the House compound. We watched the light in the darkness,
shining on her old face. It grew stronger as the delicately
balanced translucences wavered and rotated round the central core of
radiance, combining and overlaying each other at random, and the new
panel and the old ones together were truly beautiful.
Dear Nenne and three more from her girl-band sung,
the maids
served and then joined us as we all ate and drank, my man Hugin and his
woman toasting us from the foot of the table, all my household
together. It became a not unhappy time and for once Mar smiled.
She had forgiven me by then for overriding her choice of the pretty
thing. Though the love between us frayed away to nothing decades
ago we are sometimes friends. Many men of my age and rank
seek diversion in younger women or in the malthakoi: I have only
occasionally done so.
************************
That night, I was visited by the mara for the first time.
I
was
far underground, far beneath the Land, as deep as the deepest
Field. I had gone down by passageways and cracks and ancient
yellow corridors and found the place. There was a Giant, naked on
his back with his
limbs gripped by the rock, and above him crouched another, a
giant-woman. And there was a Beast, something whose presence I
felt but whose shape I could not see, bent above us all. From its
mouth dripped poison, and the giant-woman gathered it in her cupped
hands to prevent it from falling on the face of the bound one. I
could see how hard she pressed her fingers together and how she tried
to stop even one drop falling through her fingers, the muscles of her
arms trembling. The jaws in her terrible face yawned wide and the
fangs showed as she cried grief and rage, like metal grinding and
tearing: and I knew it was not the pain in her hands that made her
scream but the fact that when she emptied her handsfull into the lake
of poison on whose shore we knelt some of the stream that issued from
the Beast must have time to drip into the eyes of her mate.
She turned in savage despair and saw me, and suddenly,
as
things happen
in dreams, we were alone. She cried something and half-opened her
arms to me, and though her face and limbs were hideous and dark she had
a woman's breasts, the budding breasts of a girl. And she reached
for me with hands vaster than the walls of the Redoubt. And I was
tiny, tiny, among caverns and great echoing spaces far underground,
utterly helpless in the grasp of something greater than human.
And I awoke, crying.
The breathing of Mar my wife beside me was gentle and
easy. I was
in my own bed.
I rose. I went to the ceno and paced, in the
half-dark, naked,
thinking.
************************
Look again
************************
"Tell me the dream again"
The gothi casts an eye on me. He is a hard strong
man, though
even older than I and half a head shorter. Honest Hugin bought me here,
to his hearth where they worship.
It is hard to tell. I begin in a stumbling
manner, then
before his unblinking eyes the words suddenly seem to be no longer
absurd, and they come forth in a rush: the dark, the under-land, the
glowing green sea, and the savage Ones who dwell there forever in
torment. I straighten my back. "You know these
giants? This place? Ser, this is but a dream."
"What do you fear worst?"
"The giant prisoned under the Land. Or what it
symbolises in my
mind. It is not dead, and the mara
are surely its sendings and
its daughters."
"Nothing from the Land can send dreams here"
"Then from whence?"
"Hel rules the Land." He paces the room,
bare adamantine
marked with the ancient holy signs and slashed across with the black of
sundeath. "You are of the Purple. You studied
this as a man studies a childrens' game, while the mara Ate
others. Now, you fear. But if this was a
sending from the Land, how could it pass the Circle and come
here? This is from places you cannot spy from your
Tower".
"Do you dream?"
"I am visited by dreams". He whisper-breaths
"Raidô"
and under his voice his mind is quite crystalline and simply
unafraid. There is no doubt, it is true.
I told him all. But when I had finished he only
repeated: More
dreams will come. He did not ask me to return.
************************
After the first visit, they come again and again and
again.
I was in the Land. I was in the midst of a great
rout, a stampede
of .... metal beasts. Mansonyaggers, the daughters of the
daughters of the machines that had been sent Out to tame the Land in
the era of Ion Glass. They surrounded me in the dark.
I thought they would rend me, but they seized me in their iron
hooks, and I was held, bound, until one raised me up upon its
carapace. They ran through the Night, holding me high,
towards one that waited. The cold froze my blood, flashes
of fire sprang from their feet, yet they ran on and on . . . . I
knew something would be demanded of me.
And at last I was there and they set me down on a wide
open bare place,
and I looked up to see far before me the slumped and bulging face of
some great dead Thing. It loomed above us in ancient
ruin. It lifted a great dark limb, hovering above me, and I
knew it would speak, and I tried terribly hard to wake. I knew I
must wake, for I could not bear to see it move, shifting its vast bulk
as it tried to compose its ruined body to utter judgment, and I knew
what would follow when it had cried its sentence upon me. I
strove and strove to wake and I woke, gasping weak cries.
I could not move. My limbs were gripped in
stone, clasped
by iron claws, though I was in my bed: Mar was holding me close and
trying to wake me. She prayed against the mara and she held
me and at last the paralysis went leaving me deadly tired and
sick. I flung her off angrily.
************************
I am making ready to go back to the Barbican and the
Libraries. Tired, and short of sleep. I am writing
something, when Nenne comes in. She waits politely till I notice
her, shuffling her feet and wondering if grandfather is ignoring her
deliberately. After only a little time I turn to her.
"Opa". A
sweet smile. "I need... "
"A big tub of chocolate and honey"
"No, grandpa, I..."
"Another speilter"
"No!" She knows I am teasing. "You know what
I want, opa!
You know what everyone is thinking." Daring, she
comes up to me and touches my cheek gently and briefly. But I
don't
know what everyone is thinking, only their vague emotional state,
unless I concentrate very hard or have a mechanical amplifier.
When I was young I believed I was just unusually sensitive to people's
expressions and the tones of their voice: it was not until my semarch
that I realised I needed neither to hear nor see people to know what
they felt. But not unless I really strain hard. Or unless
they touch me, like this. One thing I can do is make people
touch me, touch my face: they think it is by their own will, but I make
them do it, and when they do it I can see all their mind, for a
while.
She is frightened. She is hiding something behind
a facade of
childish innocence, and she has dressed herself and she moves like a
young child. She wishes to tell me now on the last night before I
leave to force my hand. Clumsy. But I am proud of my
granddaughter. However imperfectly, she has learned to lie to a
Monstruwacan.
"Opa, a man comes to speak to me".
What? No. .. impossible. "You are too
young".
"Grandfather, he has Rank, and wishes to make his
address to me!"
Pride, and anger, and scorn for the complacent old fool who can never
have felt anything like this; and cousin
Beurre is affianced
already!! None of it reaches her face. And
then
contact fades and her pneumasome becomes opaque as only the mind of one
in love and focused on its loved one can close. She is no
longer a child. Yet that was only a short time ago.
"Who?"
"His name is Bal". A private smile. "He is
the master of a
Current Cannon. He is a Matross of the Seventy-third
city". And such smug satisfaction, which I do not need to
read her mind to see, the little madam. But it is not
unjustified. Even for the granddaughter of a Monstruwacan this is
a catch.
A minute while she says nothing, then she smiles again,
sure of her
managing of me with this great news.
"When you return to the lower Cities, you will talk to
him, respected
grandfather?"
************************
Now, look again. It
glitters.
************************
I lie awake in the near darkness of sleep-time,
remembering
For the most part the Eaters are invisible to fleshly
eyes, though the
pneumasome can detect them. So those who would be Seers are taken
there, to that Hall, blindfolded. It is the simplest test
and the first test for them. Do you see it? Do you
fear
it? Do you feel pain?
The eternally reliable test.
I was a maybe-Seer once. I was bought before
the imprisoned
One, to find out if I had the deeper sight and hearing. It
was so long ago the full memory was lost until I came to the place
again, but as a very young child I stood there, not knowing where I was
or how I had been bought to that place. With the unclosing eyes
of my soul, though the eyes of my flesh were covered, I saw
It.
I was found acceptable and taken to the brotherhood of
the
Monstruwacans. I served my apprenticeship and I
survived. But I remember now what it was like to be a child
and to listen to the Night at the bidding of my wise, good,
elders. Like the very early childhood I had been ripped from it
was a different life, with each day as long as a week is now, and in my
old mind the memories of my apprenticeship are confused with the memory
of earlier and truly childish things: of the pale faces I saw in
my dreams peeping from behind the tables and chairs; of the way the
shadows leapt so frighteningly in the sleep-time; and of the little
whispers that seemed always, always, behind me. The dreadful fear
I felt, together with my sister, when we played and made a little
Redoubt with blankets and chairs under the kitchen table, is mixed with
the times only a little later, when my soul was held in the very teeth
of the Night and let go. Surely, the games of childhood are
a good preparation for our adult tasks.
I am old, I have had a long life, but nothing was ever
that hard
again. We throw our children as sacrifices to the darkness and we
say it is because we must: but the truth is we do it because we pray it
will devour them, not us. As a child I faced horror, only aware
that I must do this or suffer what would be even worse than being
mouthed by the Night - the utter rejection of my peers and
parents. Only a child is weak enough to be so compelled and
so only a child is strong enough to so perform.
I thought I had forgotten it all but I remember now, and
I know that if
I had to go back I would perish, I would die, I would not have the
strength to endure it again, because I would know the pain that was
coming, as I did not know then. Youth can only be endured
once.
But the mara
have come to take me back.
There is an ancient legend that once a great traitor was
given to It to sorb and that
his
mind still dwells inside It, partly alive still and
remembering being human. Surely this is untrue.
And I must go to visit my future grandson-in-law,
tomorrow, as I
descend the Pyramid again to return to the Barbican. Curse
it. I can not put it off.
************************
We have had the greeting, the gifts, now we dance our
way through the
little dance of courtesies.
Respected Sir. The great honour of this
meeting.
I first saw your granddaughter when. Without
warning. Her
honourable and fine bearing. Her face, as glorious as the dead
Sun. Foremost among her peers. Chance conversation leading
me to great hopes. Ancient lineage and wealth
eclipsed by her beauty. Her modesty and purity. Her wit and
noble strength. Beyond my dreams of such a union, yet I hope, as
men may only hope.
For six months I have sought her acquaintance.
With anxiety, have
I sought the approval of the white-robed ones, and received it with
joy. That scroll I tender to you now.
The approval of her mother and father given. Your
approval of
this betrothal as the head of the Family now very humbly
requested. The last link in this chain. My happiness,
her happiness, dependent on your word. I appeal to
your hope of descendants and the strength of our united houses.
Union and wealth.
And so it proceeds.
But what a handsome young man! Glorious
in the full dress of a matross, the Wotanseye shining on his breast,
tall for one of the lower Cities! All the little
defensiveness of ordinary life seems to have passed him by, all the
everyday defeats, the little spites and cautions. Happiness
and pleasure radiate from him. He is aware I can see his
thoughts but he does not really care. He knows this
is a mummery, but he plays the game happily. Another man would be
frightened, but he is confident, yet not arrogant: he has the manner of
a man who has never been hurt by any thing, he is generous, and he is
even a little offbalance now I am visiting him here, in his Captain's
official hall, with every thing turned upside down for my sole
convenience. But he does not mind that. He presumes
goodwill. There is no meanness in him.
But even so a Monstruwacan's granddaughter is a very fit
match for the
Smiting Eye. He must doubt and be humbled a little.
"How did you meet? You are not of our City."
This requires a real answer, and his gaze drops a
span.
Apparently Nenne and her sept met him when they visited the Cannon with
their tutors. Ah. Well, these "educational" visits
are little more than disguised marriage markets, meant to
introduce suitable mates under a mask of decorum and strict
prohibition. Keep young women away from young men except as
a dream, so they will adore the first they are allowed to speak
to: make sure that first one is a stranger from at least the
broad class the Eugenicists have passed as suitable; and let them think
they rebel, and so they fall into each others' arms. Sometimes,
it works wonderfully. So who sent Nenne's sept there? Some
wise arrangement, no doubt, an open secret like every thing else in the
Redoubt. I must have words with her mother. I have
been busy. But I am not too displeased. The
white-robed ones have given me their approval and reinforced that
ceremonial certificate with some real details, and if this man is a
fool he does not seem malignant or brutal. If I am any judge he
is genuinely in love, the idiot.
So let it happen. I can not be
troubled to care much at this time. Only the forms of reluctance
and bargaining remain, which we plunge into again now, but at a
measured pace, and not unfriendly. I begin to like him, and
at the end I permit myself a little frivolity.
"The Cannon? I have spent many years in the
Tower. I
have visited the Barbican. But do you know that I have never yet
been in the hangar of a Cannon?"
And he explains, and with some touch of interest and
real pride.
Let a man talk about his work if you would be his friend.
"So. When I am returned, you shall show
me". If I
live.
************************
Look here. Here
it is black.
************************
I was underground, far beneath the Land.
We fled endlessly down great yellow corridors, flooded
with
water. Filthy white things splashed and floundered away from us,
and from behind us came the fall and drag of great hooves on wet stone
as something vast overhauled us, and the sound of grunting.
We crowded and huddled into a hollow in the wall to
escape, pressing
and fighting to be the one furthest in. I looked into the
rock before me and it was as if I looked at the solid wall and saw it
crammed full of dying things that, every one, were calling out for
healing. As if you spent a day digging one of the wounded
things out, to find it broken beyond help, and have it whisper to
you ....there... and
point with some shattered limb
to the sacs and hollows where the others lay, each more deeply wounded,
their flesh mixed with filthy rock and wires and things like dead bone
. .. mechanisms, hybrids of beast and metal but perhaps not only
beast, compressed more and more tightly, one behind the other, one
below the other, in and in and down and down.
Behind us, the Presence stopped. It moved to
make its
selection, which it would take.
This time I woke struggling and crying. The
bedclothes choked me,
and I flung them off. But I was not trammelled in Mar's
arms. I lay alone within the barracks of the Black
Librarians. My heart beat; I gasped with fear; but
there was only the simple room, and the memory of the visit of the mara, sinking into
my soul.
Slowly my body became calm. Again I
lay thinking.
************************
The Circle shields the people of the Pyramid but not us
who peer from
the Tower.
Truth. A secret of the Monstruwacans I whisper to
myself here in
the half-dark of sleep-time. There
are places in the Land where
we dare not look. We could look but we dare not. Nothing is
known about them except that attempts to investigate them from afar
have led to madness and death. So we turn our eyes
away.
Thus it was in the days of the Little War, one hundred
years past
now. An area of the Land was telepathically probed and that which
was found, heard, whispered from the Night, compelled many people to go
Out. They could not be stopped. They failed, but more
and more went Out, going either in mind or body, each in turn trying to
rescue the previous ones. This continued until the Censors
stepped in and forbade the investigation, wiped the machine
records, and fought the Little War with the Monstruwacans and the
Tower guards. Those who held the knowledge were all slain,
slain by men in full battle helms with their ears stopped up and their
eyes masked against the siren-knowledge that could kill, striking at
mechanical simulations of the men they fought in the burning corridors
so that nothing spoken, nothing written, no infection of information,
could be transmitted to them.
That part of the Tower was sealed until machines could
burn it
clean. Whatever knowledge was gained has been expunged from the
records and from the memory of men.
So it has been, many times before. The Tower
is gashed and
scarred with the ancient Forbidden places where knowledge too true for
the human mind has been so freely given to us by the Night. I
have seen the strange rooms where no one goes, their walls warped like
wax, moving and speaking walls. And the depths of the
Libraries are also cut with such places, named veto, where no daemon or
desk may probe: whole categories of knowledge that may be true but that
terrible experience has found too dangerous to know.
Every thing that is has been known. Every
thing is known
somewhere, by some thing. The problem lies in knowing
certain things and still remaining human. A balance between the
mist of ignorance and the horror of transforming knowledge.
You cannot argue with such knowledge. You cannot defeat
it. You can only wipe it blank with a cybernetic command, consign
it to nullity, close your eyes, stop up your ears, or if that fails don
the Helm of battle that guards the mind; and if even that fails, gouge
out your eye, or burn up your ears, or slay yourself. This has
been so for millions of years.
But when we dream these dreams from the mara we are not in the
Tower. And more and more catch the infection of
dream.
In the morning I will learn some thing real at
last.
I wish I dared to sleep.
************************
Turn the
jewel.
Small figures dance and move
round a swirl of darkness.
************************
Hugin comes to me early. He is both fearful and
proud. I clean my body, go to ease the animal nature,
perhaps for the last time, dress.
The matrosses that escort us the long walk to the Bottle
gaze in
wonder, half-rumours flitting in and out of their minds. There
has been some leakage of information, but nothing serious. I
stare hard at them each in turn and they blanch inwardly, each consumed
by doubts: can he really read my thoughts? But this game is not proper,
and in any case I cannot spare the effort. I can spare very
little energy or initiative now. All has been set in order, and
there is nothing for me to do now except obey my own commands.
I have eaten nothing. I feel very weak, too
weak to
fear. I have spent a long life looking Out to the Land, and
now for the first time in my life I will look In, I will search within,
for the answers to our questions. It is good that I fast.
I am here again, where I was long ago as a
maybe-Seer.
Where I gazed enthraled by rediscovery. Where I
worked and planned and studied. The search of seven years
and the work of seven months is coming to fruition. I am
not afraid. I walk calmly.
Here is the overChief, scarred, written upon, as hard as
metal. He has
been Out, and therefore I cannot read his mind in even the smallest
detail, but we share something for those who will go Out must go before
the hidden one as well, though it is only one trial among many
for them. One truly Prepared must be as near as possible
invisible to the Eaters, with his mind burned blank of any hint of the
night-hearing, and to test them the Bottle is powered down to minimum
and the aspirant left nightlong in an unshielded nexus near the darting
fractal flower and the Proctors watch to see if it can sense
them. If it ignores them they may go. In the Land its
greater cousins may perhaps share this blindness.
So he knows It too. I take some comfort from
having him
near.
The stairs have been moved, and the second Bottle is now
attached to
the first, fixed like a hand cupping the side of a head, suspended from
the traveling crane. It is large enough to hold me
and a few instruments and a pattern array, which will be used to
sterilise the entire volume if the Eater penetrates it.
I mount by a ladder and enter the lock. A
last word from
the overChief is mere noise. I enter the chamber. There
is faint smell of ozone and oil, but there is very little
contained within: audio/video recorders, telepathic monitors
tuned to my mind, and the array, as beautiful and vicious as a
scorpion's sting. And a place between the machines where I can
just stand upright. And in front of me the curved wall of
the Bottle.
I speak, and we begin to check the instruments and
recorders. It
is as it was when I was a Seer, gazing Out, in the Tower.
But there is no ceremony and no ritual here. I am
alone.
What comes now is very simple. Before
me is the
transparent section of the Bottle, shuttered now with an iris valve,
and when it opens I will behold the Eater directly, with the eyes of my
body and the eyes of my soul, through a thin pane of glass and a
double layer of pneumadynamic tension. I will
look and listen and hier as
the barrier between us is weakened, and
weakened, and weakened, and the pinsets and touchpoints will transfer
the information from my mind directly to the mechanical
recorders.
I peer at the overlapping spirals locking the
portal. A
minute to wait.
Checks, and double checks, then a pause.
The slow count by twelves.
Now.
All light is doused. It is utterly dark, darker
than the
Land. There is no light here: but there is, as it were, darkness
shed by a radiant of darkness, seen with the inward eye, burning
through the portal before me. And as Darkness replaces the
last memory of the very faint light that is every where within the
Redoubt, and my physical eyes become utterly useless, I at last see
clearly with the eyes of my soul only.
The iris opens.
The instruments clot on the rush of data entering them,
relayed from my
mind.
As a Seer looks Out to the Land, I look in to the
Bottle.
Night, a universe of night, utter night. But it is
not vast and
empty. It is cramped, crowded, hot, full.
Whatever is here is compressed intolerably, screaming with pain, every
fibre of its being crushed in terrible compression, in a sac of dark
fire.
Before me is the Eater. It
resembles a molten
network of flowing blood, a writhing of fibres, but most of all a tree,
a dark tree with a flickering semistable stalk and whipping
limbs. It it not darting from place to place. It
stands still. It is just opposite me within the Bottle, in
the terrible pinch of its prison. It is not an arm's length away.
It remembers me.
It moves towards me.
It reaches out, through the weakened and attenuated
barrier, through
the thin armourglass, and, Oh eternal Mother, it touches my face.
© Pinlighter
10 May
2004
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