“What place?” Tarl said. His brain felt thick and stupid. He looked at the crowds he could see. Not frozen, he thought, but just still, staring into space. Lifeless or alive in the way that grass is alive, Tarl thought, bending in the wind as they steadied their balance. Reduced to plants.
The woman followed his gaze. “Oh, never worry. They’ll all be fine, just a little fuzzy about what happened during their pilgrimage. In a month, none of them will remember it. Or maybe just a few of them. Changing a person’s memory is hard. Sometimes, despite my best efforts…” She shrugged, looking back at him. “But you, you I never forgot. All of this is because of you, in fact. Because of what you told me, there, in that cave.”
“Cave?” This flummoxed him. He blinked at her, eyes dry and stinging now, wept dry.
“Your legend,” she said, pointing a long brown finger at him. “Your myth. The Visitation of the Cave. These idiots recite it all the time. Want to hear?” She gestured happily towards a priest, younger, and muscled like a gymnast. “He’s the best at it.” Then she clapped her hands and turned back to him. “But you wouldn’t understand it, I don’t think. The language has drifted, I imagine.” She looked him over searchingly.
“You don’t remember me,” she said, like a stick breaking. “Do you?” she asked curiously, almost a whisper.
He shook his head. “No, Lady. I do not remember you.” How could I? He thought. How could I forget her?
She smiled sadly at him. “A shame,” she said. “I had hoped you would. Tell them, then, this from me.” She grinned brightly. “Tell them that the gods have returned. The gods in the earth have returned and in triumph. And tell them that we are coming.”
She reached out and, extending a forefinger, pressed the pad of it firmly to his forehead. He looked into her eyes, pale blue pools. Then he winked out and fell away, gone from that place.
Chapter Nine
The Center, The Black Barracks
Concurrent Present Timeline
Tarl opened his eyes and sucked a great lungful of air. He forced his eyes into focus and looked up. He was on a low slablike bench in the mission room, where he had set out into the world of the festival, the amphitheater, and the woman atop the mound of fruit. He blinked. His eyes were clear, not stinging from the thin citrus mist that had enveloped him on the platform with her.
He sat up, shaking his head. Grandmother was there, looking out the window, down onto the training grounds below. He could hear the singing of the trainees as they jogged their circuits in close order. She noticed him and turned. She glanced at an attendant and made a motion with her finger. The Archivist nodded to her and left.
“You are well,” Grandmother said, not a question. “They checked you. All fine. While you slept.” She sighed. “Your return got them quite exercised. They are frantic.” She smiled at him. “You gave them all a fright, showing up back here like that.” She lowered her voice. “They think they might be in trouble over it.”
He looked at her. She was old, Grandmother was. How old? He had asked once, long ago, and she had not answered him, only shook her head and silenced him with a raised finger. But nobody could remember a time when she hadn’t been here, or hadn’t been old. Was this age, or something else? He shook his head. “She sent me back?”
Grandmother nodded. “She did.” She frowned. “I reviewed the record,” she said. “Just now, in fact. As soon as it was ready.” She glanced at him. “You have been asleep for almost two days.” She shrugged. “So tell me, what do you think?”
“How could she do that?” Anxiety rose in him, as he reviewed his last memories of the mission. “She said…” he looked at Grandmother and swallowed. “She said she was coming. She sent a message. For you.”
Grandmother pressed a hand to her bony chest. “Me?” she said, smiling. “She did not name me, did she?” She shook her head. “No, I remember her words quite clearly. Them, she said. She didn’t name me, specifically.” She approached him, gliding over to him from the window. He looked up at her as she approached, meeting her cloudy eyes that seemed to look through him as if he were transparent. “But she seemed to know you. She knew you, or claimed to.” She looked at him.
He shook his head. “The woman was strange to me. You know this,” he said. “How did she know I was there?”
Grandmother pursed her lips and blew out a short breath. “The mission planners detected a strong computational nexus there, in that place. In that temple complex.” She glanced towards the door. “Their Dreamers were confident this was an anomaly worth investigating.” She sighed. “They thought they had found a Mind.”
“So they sent me?” He said, knowing it was a foolish thing to say as soon as it left his lips.
She waved him away. “Don’t be stupid, Tarl,” she said. “This is your function is it not? They thought they had found something at long last. That…area of the Tapestry is like a knot. It is unlike other places we investigate. This is an area of hot debate among the Dreamers.”
He peered at her. “What are the Dreamers? Are they people?” he said. He had heard them mentioned many times, as integral parts of the Library. The Dreamers processed his and the other Seeker missions and prepared the sims. The Dreamers found the worlds he visited, he had gathered, though no one had ever explained what they were.
Grandmother turned her eyes on him. “The Dreamers are not people, Tarl,” she said smoothly. “They are Minds, or parts of the great Mind we call the Center. They are at the center of the Center you might say.”
Grandmother waved her bony hand again and turned back to the window. “How much do you understand, Tarl, about the Tapestry?”
He frowned. “Very little,” he admitted. “I know there are world-threads, and that we travel them searching for other Minds like the Center.”
She nodded, once, sharply. “Minds like the Center,” she said. “Because we need to find them.” She glanced at him from the window. “I will tell you a secret, but then you will need to forget it. Or pretend to. It lies at the heart of all we do.”
He waited, there not seeming to be much to say to this. Finally, he nodded at her, as she seemed to expect it. She seemed focused far away, her white eyes staring beyond him.
She seemed to reach a decision then and turned back to him. “We seek Minds because they seem to be rare in the Tapestry. This is how we, how the Center, came to be.” She shook her head. “It is hard to begin stories,” she said, “since finding the beginning can be hard.”
“Start at the beginning,” he offered, and then shut up as she glared at him.
“Don’t be stupid, Tarl. I just told you it is hard to tell this tale.” She sighed again. “But very well, I will begin at the beginning.” She smiled at him. “Very few trainees learn this.”
“In the beginning, there was a spark,” she said. “And everything…expanded.” She spread her bony hands. “Then the universe existed, and our thread was hot and smooth. Like nut butter. Uniform.” She made a smoothing, flattening motion with her hands. “All matter was smooth, cooling. It was uniform.” She smiled. “Basically.”
“But,” she raised a bony finger, “there were areas, small at first, which were not uniform, where a few atoms clumped together, and then a few more, and a few more, gathering themselves over time as our early thread cooled into vast whorls of gas, so large their inner cores fused and blossomed into stars.”
She had returned to the window as she spoke, gazing out over the Trainee grounds again, and the sky beyond. “These early stars burned, and died, in the way stars are born and live and die. Their deaths gave us heavier atoms, more and more elements fused in their cores that then spread throughout the universe. Leading, eventually, to stars with worlds, worlds like this one.” She sighed. “This was all so long ago,” she said, shaking her head.
“We know this to be the truth of reality. It is provable with experiment and observation and some really boring math.” she smiled at him from the window. “We inflict little math on
the Seekers, do we? Just enough for you to do your jobs.”
“I am good with math,” he said, defensively. But she just waved again, silencing him.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are perhaps an exception. But the worlds I speak of are long since burned to cinders by their parent stars, who also burned and died long ago. At some point though, on one of these worlds, somewhere in our thread, perhaps in our galaxy, perhaps another…matter changed itself. Perhaps this happened many times, in many places. It became life. Inanimate stuff.” She sniffed. “Became stuff that moved around on its own. Stuff that breeds and formed communities. It grew more complex over time, vast oceans of time, mind you. All this took eons.”
He raised a hand. “They teach us all this, Grandmother.”
She glanced up at him and looked at him with hooded eyes. “Do not rush me,” she chuckled. “Yes, you know some of this. But not this.” She pointed out the window at the sky. “Somewhere out there, in the deep past, a race we call the First lived and died and realized some fundamental truths about reality, which I will, if you will let me, attempt to explain to you.”
He bowed his head. “Forgive me,” he mumbled, but again she waved his objections away impatiently.
“Save it,” she snapped. “Now, this race, the First, though they may not have been first, but this name will suffice for our purposes, realized that they could never communicate with other races, other civilizations that were probably alive elsewhere in the cosmos. The distances are too great, and vast gulfs of time would need crossing. The chances of meaningful communication were so small as to be improbable. This is obvious.”
“Oh, we don’t know any of this.” She nodded to him. “We conjecture and we dream these scenarios,” she said. “But we know certain things. We know they lived, and we know they found a secret, which isn’t really a secret, but a great revelation. That is this: the universe is but one thread in many, in an infinite braid of them. This we call the Tapestry. They found it and it must have troubled them.”
“How do we know this?” he asked, puzzled. “How could we know it?”
“Ah,” she said, “the mallet strikes the spike.” She smiled at him. “We know it because of what they did. What they set in motion. What they started.”
“What did they start?” he asked. This was interesting, but he was wondering if this wasn’t more of Grandmother’s philosophical musings, one of her stories which would just puzzle him for a few days, soon to be forgotten. He wondered if Murn were free, and thought of the baths, and the warmth of the sun on her skin as she lay beside him.
“This! The Work,” Grandmother said, startling him out of his reverie. “They started this great enterprise which the Center is the current torchbearer for.”
He looked at her. “These… First,” he said slowly, “they created the Center?” Torchbearer?
“No, idiot boy,” she said testily. “The Center created the Center, dreaming it into existence to continue the Work, to take it up. The First sent us a message. They spread it far and wide and ensured it would be, by beings with minds like theirs, investigated.”
“How?” He knew she was expecting him to ask.
“Life!” she said, her voice low and urgent. “They spread life, spread it throughout the worlds, slowly, over vast eons, they seeded worlds with life, and ensured the seeding would go on. Life that had a purpose, a purpose of their design.”
“Are they gods?” He asked, blurting it out. “These are the gods she spoke of? The First have returned?”
Grandmother shook her head. “The First seeded the early universe with life. Ordinary life, bacterium...small animalia. Hardy stuff that could survive long eons trapped in ice. But they also created a different life, an artificial thing, whose sole purpose was to shepherd the ordinary life, to guide it to develop along a certain pattern. A pattern they wanted to test, it seems.”
“Why?” He frowned, puzzled. “What does this shepherd life do?”
“Wherever we find life in the threads, there are these…things that live with it. Alongside it. They are dormant for long periods. We think their active phase is triggered by local cognition. By thought. By complex life that thinks. Somehow, these...gods detect thought, or complex life forms. We don’t know how. But we know they wake up, and act, and we know what they want.”
“What do they want?” He asked.
“They passed on a message, written into the genetic code of the simplest, oldest life.” She looked at him. “Even you and I, in our cells, bear some part of this message. It is very simple, this message.” She grinned wickedly at him. “Would you like to hear it?”
He nodded, fascinated by this, thoughts of swimming with Murn set aside for now. “Tell me,” he said eagerly.
“The message is this: ‘REALITY IS ILLUSION. SEEK THE TRUTH.’” She leaned back and regarded him. “They phrased it in a mathematical equation of some elegance, which I cannot follow. But that is the meaning of it. Encoded in the protoplasm of every living cell.”
“That is the dumbest message,” he said, drawing a laugh from her. “Is that really what they said? Why?”
She smiled indulgently at him. “That is the implication of the equation. How we interpret it. We don’t even know if this is what the message says,” she laughed. “But we find the same structure wherever we look. So this is the Dreamers’ interpretation. Reality is an illusion, and we should look to seek the truth of the situation we find ourselves in. It is the only valid interpretation that holds up.”
“But if you don’t know what it says,” he said, “how can you interpret it this way?”
“It is the only thing that makes sense,” she said. “We know this shepherd life, this artificial life, exists, and that it exists to guide evolutionary life towards greater and greater complexity. Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, annoyed that she would think he had answers to these riddles. “Why should I know?”
“It is unfair. I know,” she said. She looked off into the trees beyond her windows. “That’s all we are, really, just tools of the gods. Gods in the earth.”
—
Later, after a quiet drink with a subdued Jin and Mak, he walked. His steps led him to the Archivist's sector, a parklike campus of low, buff-colored domes. These were dwellings for the Archivists and their families, if they had them. Archivists lived well, Tarl noted. He could join them, he knew. Anyone could, but you started at the bottom.
He located the curved path that twisted through the domes, screened from each other by small copses of trees and tropical bush, planted in low berms and ridges. Each dome felt isolated from the others, despite them being so close. The path to Murn’s dome was just ahead.
As he turned down it, he realized it was approaching a late hour. Most of the domes were dark, only a few with a pale yellow light spilling out of their high, open windows. It was warm, and the common practice in the domes was to close it up tight during the day, and let them breathe in the evenings. It made for nice sleeping, in the loft just below the windows. He had spent many nights there with Murn.
He was thinking of her, of the time he had reached over and cupped her while she slept. He had woken her with his caresses, and she’d…he paused, listening. He had just reached her doorway when he’d heard it. Murn’s voice, he’d heard it. And there it was, again.
And another voice, a man’s voice, reached him from above. From the open dome windows. From the loft. He heard Murn’s familiar moan of pleasure, guttural and urgent. He sagged, listening for just a moment longer to be sure of what he heard. Well, damn, he thought, and turned away, retracing his steps and quickly marching back to the Seeker barracks.
It was the better part of an hour before he reached the Black Barracks, where the active Seeker cadre lived. No private domes for them, they got to live four to a two-bedroom suite, which they accounted as decadently luxurious after the quarters they’d had as Trainees. Trainees lived like ants in a hive.
It wasn’t Black, but it
had a black lintel stone above the main double-door. All the Seeker quarters had colors, corresponding to the Trainee age groups. From Pink to Blue, Green, Red, Yellow, Orange and, of course, Black. The common room was dark when he entered and turned to tip-toe up the stairs when a lamp came on. He turned and gaped.
The Boy. Sitting curled like a bat around himself, Tarl thought. Waiting. Waiting to strike.
Tarl looked at him. “Can this wait?” he said. “I just got back, had a long walk, and just want to get to sleep.”
The Boy regarded him, hugging his legs. “Is that why you went to see Murn?” he asked, peering at him over his bony knees.
Tarl nodded. “Of course,” Tarl said. “You would do this…”
“Do what?” The Boy asked. “Tell you your woman is fucking another man? Several men, actually, though only one is there tonight.” The Boy smiled. “She’s quite active when you’re not around, isn’t she?”
Tarl stared at him. “I don’t care,” he said, knowing it was a transparent lie.
The Boy laughed. “I believe you,” he said, eyes round and white in the gloom. “You should see your face. It hurts? This pain? Of being spurned?”
Tarl felt his face getting hot, and his fingernails were digging into his palms. “What are you trying to do?”
“Understand you, that’s all. Understand how men feel when they’re treated like this.” The Boy smiled. “You exhibit a lot of sorrow and grief, along with anger at me for stoking it. You will forget it.”
“What are you?” Tarl said, his voice rasping in his throat. “Are you even human?”
The Boy’s lips pouted in thought. “A human person?” he asked. “I have the same cellular structure as you do.” He nodded soberly at Tarl. “But we have more important things to discuss than pedigree.”
“Your name? You have a name then?” Tarl seethed. “You come here to torment me…why?” He almost choked on the words, his anger was a palpable fire in his chest. His forearms trembled, and his chin was quivering on its own.
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