I nodded, and got past the woman’s amazing looks to digest some of what she’d told me. One piece hadn’t dissolved, stuck in my brain like a splinter of bone. “This Cult of the Other Gods...”
“Outer Gods.”
“Do they believe...do they believe there was a war between two races of gods? A race maybe called the Outsiders, or the Old Ones...and another race, who defeated them, called the Elder Gods, or the Elder Ones?”
“Yes, yeah, something like that. The Outer Gods did battle with a race of deities called the Nameless Ones, or the Shadow Gods, because there’s no image or idol or name for any given one of them. After they put Ugghiutu and his brothers down, buried them and put them into comas, apparently, the Nameless Ones left our universe without a trace.”
I nodded again.
“So, you’ve heard that story before?”
“I read something like it, in another book. Not a Kalian version, but very similar. Too similar...”
“A lot of religious themes are very recurrent. They often involve celestial power struggles. Battles between gods. Gods mastering the destiny of their subjects.” She shrugged.
I grunted in agreement, but I was less inclined to dismiss the similarities between this version of the Ugghiutu myth and what I had gleamed from the Necronomicon. Was it coincidence that had drawn me to Rabal, the Kalian Reading Room, Saleet, and now this information? Or was it destiny? I remembered the quote from John Muir that Saleet had just recited. Everything connected...some sort of pattern...
“One of my favorite stories from childhood was ‘Zul and the Black Temple’. It’s an example of the belief that Ugghiutu is still with us, even though he’s sleeping under the spell of the Shadow Gods. He can influence our lives, through his dreams...”
“What do those people believe who don’t subscribe to the war with the Shadow Gods bit?”
“That he’s awake and undefeated...but distant, behind the curtains, like your Christian god.”
“So how does this ‘Zul’ story go?”
Again, the flash of white teeth between dusky lips...
ZUL AND THE BLACK TEMPLE
ZUL TUBAL-ZU WAS a girl with a beauty greater than the two moons combined, but her tongue was as black as her hair. When Zul was ten, her hair was bound in her first tevik, but her tongue should have been bound or hidden away as well. For when her hair, which hung to her seat, was cut so as to better fit within the shimmering tevik, her mother by accident tugged on that ebony curtain, and Zul let out a curse. Her mother fainted dead away, but the servants seized upon the fiery-tongued child and dragged her to her room in the house of the farm where her father raised a fine herd of glebbi.
Three years passed, and Zul obeyed the law of silence that she had donned with her tevik, speaking only within her father’s house, never before company, and always in tones of respect, as befitted a child on the doorstep of adulthood. But when the time of staining came, and Zul woke one day to discover herself a woman, it was soon found that her black tongue had merely hibernated like a durbik these past years, waiting to again spew its venom.
For when Zul was given the Veins of Ugghiutu...
(“The what?” I asked.
“Our scars. They’re called the Veins of Ugghiutu. To indicate that his presence flows through us, and that we bear his mark. That he owns us.”
“Doesn’t he own the men, too?”
“Of course. But I guess...I guess they don’t like having their faces sliced up.”)
...when Zul was given the Veins of Ugghiutu, at the touch of the blade she let out a curse that might have made the strongest herdsman on her father’s farm faint dead away. But the priests held her steady, and despite her wails and sobbing they completed their task, ashamed that they should sully their blades with the blood of such a creature. One priest even offered to unburden Zul’s father of so horrid a child, by using his blade in another manner, but Zul’s father apologized and told them that he hoped Zul was not yet hopeless.
Still, now that she was of age to marry, Zul’s father grew greatly anxious, hoping that Zul would not disgrace a future husband’s family, and thus bring dishonor upon his own.
Zul returned to her silence as her scars healed, and attended her labors about the farm. One morning she rode on the back of one of the glebbi, guiding a group of twenty to the farthest reaches of her father’s land in search of fresh grazing. She had been forbidden to do this, for their farm was on the edge of the Outer Land, and only the most seasoned herdsmen were to venture to these fields. But it had not rained in many days, and the greens that the glebbi favored were dwindling, so Zul thought she was doing her father a favor by disobeying his commands. Still, she knew full well that there was never a good reason for disobeying the orders of one’s father.
The mountains of the Outer Land loomed dark purple against a pale gray sky, and silhouetted thus, put Zul in mind of some fantastic city of castles. She was sorely tempted to leave the herd to graze here, and ride her glebbi to the foot of those mountains where they thrust abruptly up from the soft earth. But she was able, at least, to resist that impulse. For she knew that in the Outer Lands, Ugghiutu’s dreams wound through the crags, and slithered along cliff faces, and wailed and howled, all in the guise of black winds.
Still, she pushed the herd nearly to the foot of the mountains of the Outer Lands. And in the deep, cold shadow of those soaring purple peaks, she found a building that she had never seen before, or heard her father speak of. It was too large to be one of his sheds or barns, and it did not look like a dwelling. As she drew nearer, Zul saw that the building, being black and eight-spired, was a temple to the demon/god Ugghiutu.
Zul marveled at its solemn beauty. She had seen temples in the village and in the city when accompanying her family to market, but being a female, she had never seen the interior of one of these glossy black houses of worship.
Zul dismounted, and left her glebbi to feed amongst the others. She cast her gaze around her, but saw that she had not been followed. Who, she thought, would know if she peeked inside the black temple? If she saw a priest inside, she would duck back. If he pursued her, she would claim to be lost, and weep for assistance. Her father would defend her. His love had proven that foolish and overly forgiving in the past.
And so, Zul crept up to the front portal of that edifice, which loomed taller and more majestic as she approached. The eight spires were slim and polished, jutting their spear-like points at the sky. There were few windows. The walls of the temple were not formed of block upon block, but were smooth, so that Zul imagined the entire temple had been carved out of a single great mound of volcanic glass.
There was no door at the front portal, just an oval opening through which Zul peered, craning her neck. She discerned little in that murky interior, though a faint light filtered through a few small windows. But she strained her ears, and heard no chants, no music. She smelled no incense. Was this temple now disused, long abandoned?
The girl stepped across the threshold.
The interior of the temple was as cold as one of her father’s barns in the winter. Zul hugged her arms tight to her young body. She shuffled timidly across a floor apparently formed from one unbroken sheet of obsidian blackness that looked like a pool of tar, looked like it might swallow her and drown her at any moment.
Off this main entrance hall with its high ceiling and odd supporting arches there branched several other hallways, round in shape and narrow. Zul gazed into each of them. Like the entrance hall, they bore no decorations. She chose the corridor in the center. At the end of this tunnel there was an ebony curtain hanging over the opening. She reached to it, and found it was leathery and heavy. She pushed it aside just enough to spy into a new chamber, but seeing no priests there, she entered it. There was a ramp here, winding in a spiral around and around to a high upper level. Several round windows let in misty rays of gray light.
Zul ascended the spiral ramp. At the top of this small tower there was a larger window,
and from this she looked out upon the pasture where her glebbi had been left to graze.
Where the plump, dull glebbi had been passively munching their greens, there were now scattered withered carcasses like animals dead of starvation or thirst. At first, Zul believed she was seeing the remains of a herd that had become lost out here and died perhaps months earlier. But as she stared, she saw that one live glebbi remained. And she saw a great black form lower from the sky toward it. A great black boneless limb with a point at its end, which speared the plump glebbi, and lifted it into the sky. Its fat legs paddled the air and it let out a small, forlorn moan. Though the animal was raised high out of her sight, Zul knew that it was being drained like a fruit squeezed of its juices. And she knew that the vast limb she had seen, glossy and black, was one of the eight spires of the temple.
Madly, Zul raced down the spiraling ramp, tears flowing over her scars. She tripped and fell, and in so doing her tevik became partly unraveled. She tore it from her head and her long hair fell free. She raised herself to run again. She burst through the slick, leathery curtain. She hurried through the narrow tunnel. She ran into the entrance hall.
The front portal was gone. But she saw, when she drew closer, that it had not vanished but instead closed to a tight pucker.
Crazed, she darted toward a small window at ground level. Yet even as she neared it, she could see it, too, beginning to grow smaller, to pucker closed.
Just before reaching it, through this window she saw one of the outermost of the eight spires. And it was writhing, fluid and alive, as she knew all eight spires must be doing. Ugghiutu was rejoicing in the sacrifice which Zul had unknowingly brought him.
The orifice sealed up, and shut out the last rays of light. Zul was plunged into a darkness as black as her hair.
And when Zul’s father set out with his men in search of her the next morning, he found a herd of twenty glebbi mummies, rotting at the foot of the forbidden purple mountains.
But there was no trace of Zul. Nor even of a temple there.
***
“VERY GOOD,” I told Saleet, grinning.
She tapped her temple. “Mnemosyne-998.”
“That was the most blatant morality tale I’ve ever heard.”
“Fairy tales often are meant to intimidate children.”
“It’s so anti-woman, why did you ever get so attached to it?”
“Because I related to Zul! I thought she was great. Rebellious. Brave. Curious.”
“Look where it got her.”
Saleet shrugged.
“Someone told me before that Ugghiutu can masquerade as a temple to lure people inside.”
“It’s one of his favorite forms, for some reason.”
“What’s his actual form?”
“Formlessness. Chaos. Chaos needs a form. So – although he initially made us – now he imitates the forms we make.”
“Do you want to go get something to eat?” I whispered without segue. My style with women was chaos.
Saleet glanced around her. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
“You’re a bit rebellious yourself. Untraditional, shall we say. So why do you come here?”
“Chris, just because I reject aspects of my culture doesn’t mean I reject my entire heritage. I wouldn’t want to color my skin like yours, or get rid of my scars. I don’t want to disown being Kalian. I just want to redefine being a Kalian.”
“Sounds good to me, Zul.”
Saleet stuck her tongue out at me. It was pink, not black.
***
I HAD NEVER been to the Café Quay – it was a small Morpha Street restaurant with a menu that aspired to represent a dish from every race that had settled in Punktown. The walls and ceiling were covered in brown wallpaper with a velvet feel, and unfocused black and white photographs of rusting machines and broken dolls hung in overwhelmingly ornate copper-colored frames. But the artsiness and over-lush opulence seemed more satirical than pretentious. The menu was shown in luminous white letters which scrolled, at my touch, across the black table surface. I could also, at a touch, find out what artist had recorded the jazz track currently playing over the sound system (Lech Jankowski). I played with the table and nursed a beer until Saleet joined me. Irrationally, I had feared she might not show up – that her sending me ahead of her might be a ruse to get rid of me.
Back at the Subtown Library, she’d told me, “We’d better leave separately...you go ahead. Do you know the Café Quay?”
“Been past it, never inside. What’s wrong?”
She had leaned forward, lowered her voice further. “My people will tolerate a degree of nonconformity...here on Oasis, at least – they’d have put me in line a long time ago, on Kali...but if we leave together it would be too scandalous. Complaints could be lodged with the Kalian Embassy. I knew a boy in college who was deported back to Kali – I hate to think what happened to him.”
“What’s the matter...he didn’t wear a tevik, either?” I joked bitterly.
“He was a homosexual.”
“Ugghiutu forbid.”
I savored watching her approach my table. She was barefoot again today. Her steps were short and rapid, bound as she was in that awkward gold skirt. Her entirely black eyes looked eerily like empty sockets, from across the room, but when she sat opposite me the lighting was such that they were filled with broken flecks of light like stars in space.
“Don’t be alarmed,” she told me, “the food in here isn’t as expensive as you might think. Just that the owners have artistic tastes. I went to school with them.”
“You ever have lunch with an Earth man before?” I asked nonchalantly, perusing the menu.
“Yeah.” Then she added, “Never on a date. Just friends from school, friends from work.”
“You only date Kalians?” I pretended to be reading the appetizers.
“So far.”
“It didn’t work out?”
“They didn’t approve of me, it would turn out, much as they thought they were untraditional Kalian men. What initially attracted them to me ended up repelling them. They didn’t like it when I argued with them.”
I looked up. “How does one break off with a Kalian man? Sounds like it could be messy.”
“One boyfriend cried and pleaded with me, actually. The other one grabbed me by my hair and dragged me out of his apartment and threw me down in the hallway. So I got up, went to his door, knocked on it, and when he opened the door I chopped him across the throat like this.” She made a knifing move with her right hand, and I flinched even though it stopped an inch from my Adam’s apple. “That took the wind out of him, so I could get him on his face and pin him. I had handcuffs in my purse.”
“Handcuffs?” She was more liberated than I’d dreamed.
The biggest grin I’d seen from her yet. “I arrested him for assault. I’m a police officer, Chris.”
“You’re a forcer?”
“Yeah. I graduated from the Law Enforcement program at PU at twenty-one, so I only had to take one year at the Academy. I got my badge this year. See?” She rummaged through her purse, and when I leaned toward her I saw a gun inside, in its own leather pocket. Matte black, like mine.
But it was a billfold that she withdrew, flipping it open so I could see her metallic blue shield, and her photo ID. In it, she wore her hair clenched back in a tight bun.
“Wow,” I stammered. “Officer Saleet Yekemma-Ur.”
“I’m not a patrol forcer, if that’s what you’re thinking...”
What I was thinking was that the other day, I had nearly asked her if she knew a man named Rabal. A seller of illegal firearms.
What I was thinking was that I was carrying my illegal Thor .86 in my waistband right now.
What I was thinking was that I’d shot my girlfriend dead. And dissolved her body.
Saleet was still talking: “My boyfriend was my first and only arrest to date!” She chuckled and leaned back as a waitress put a glass of wine in front of her. “I�
��m in the Sex Crimes unit in Precinct 9-B.” She grew more serious. “We investigate rapes, sexual child abuse, even work with Vice on prostitution, when a prosty seems to be in it against her will, or has been abused by a client...”
“So you’re a detective?”
“I’m an ‘investigator’...I can’t be a ‘detective’ until I put some more time behind me, move up in rank. Politics, you know. I have to work with a senior partner for several years before you can call me Detective Yekemma-Ur.”
“Wow...wow...jeesh, I’m really...impressed...wow.”
“I know two Kalian men who are forcers. They’re good men, liberal-minded. One wears a tevik, the other doesn’t. I had a crush on one of them until he got married.” Grin. “But I’m the only female Kalian police officer in Paxton, I’m told. There are a few in Miniosis, but they’re lab techs...don’t do field work...”
“Are you on duty now?”
“No. You think I could chase a rapist in this?” She swept a hand over her gold-sheathed legs. “My day off.”
“Have you chased any rapists yet?”
“In a vehicle. Not on foot. But my partner made the arrest. I haven’t had to draw my gun yet.”
I wagged my head. “No wonder your two boyfriends couldn’t handle you.”
Saleet’s expression turned more serious. A bit disappointed, maybe even on the verge of anger. “Does it intimidate you that I’m a forcer, Chris?”
“No...no...I mean, them. Them, being Kalians. No, I think it’s great. It’s just a surprise because you’re young. And, of course, because you’re a Kalian woman.”
She seemed to grow less defensive. “I think it was Zul that did this to me. Nosy, curious Zul, so eager to investigate that Black Temple.”
“She should have got a search warrant first,” I joked.
We both laughed. And I was proud of Saleet. And I liked her all the more...
...and I wondered if it would be safe to ever see her again.
***
AT HOME, I sat reading from the Necronomicon while slathering hair accelerator lotion across my prickly head. Shortly before we’d parted, over coffee, Saleet had told me, “You know, you’d be even cuter if you had some hair.”
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