But how? Why?
Could the answer be: for no reason at all? Could the answer be: that the universe simply occurred, like a bubble containing whole aeons? Yet eventually it was nothing? Just a bubble?
There was only one of me. If I were many, would I see better? For a moment—or an age—I felt that I was on the brink of . . . some transformation, which would allow me to see.
Then I felt a tug on my line. Faint, feeble, insistent. I started to move through A’tf-space. And as I moved, I lost touch with my source of inspiration.
I was soon aware of something else: namely that my Worm wasn't a particularly good angler! (How could you expect it of a worm? That's like expecting a sheep to herd dogs.) I speeded up crazily. Soon I was lurching and bumping along, fit to snap the line. This made me slip off my proper course. I started sliding sideways. And here's where things started to go wrong.
Think of a ball on the end of a long string. Imagine this ball being hauled at breakneck speed, quite without finesse, through an obstacle course consisting of, say, a number of logs. They're all just floating nowhere in particular; in a fluid with eddies in it.
The ball bumps and bounces. The string gets bent against one log. When the ball gets there, it doesn't zoom past the log. It wraps around it, clings a while—before unwrapping and flying free. And now though the final goal is still the same the ball is even further off course. Another log gets in the way. The ball wraps and clings; unwraps. And so on.
The ball was me. The string was my link to the Ka-store of the Worm. Those logs were: other worlds, full of Kas.
It was only after the second such collision that I worked this out. And you'll have to bear in mind that this is simply a picture of what happened. I think I saw it this way because of my nightmare flight through the Californian redwoods. Of which I'd had dreams which were similar in style! Dreams of the trees reduced to stumps, of myself as a ball that the boys intended to kick about.
To begin with I was pretty confused. I thought everything had messed up.
Suddenly I was in a body.
When I say I was in a body, I don't mean this was like being reborn into a new body in Eeden. I'd been the body, then; the body had been me. Now was different. I was only along for the ride.
And that ride was through the air.
It was through gusting air high over blue and bile-green swamp bristly with tufted weeds and wafting sedges. Denser brakes of tangled podvines sprawled across sand-bars and isles of silt. My eyes were intent for signs of movement. Whenever these eyes of mine fastened upon something interesting, the whole central portion of my vision magnified it.
Down below, a dank pool suddenly erupted with a squirming melee of furry bodies, red eyes, teeth and claws. Strings of blood coiled in the water like purple toadspawn or thin sausages, so quickly did it coagulate. It was as if I were holding a lens over the landscape.
This wasn't what I wanted. I glanced briefly behind me—and in that glance I discovered great broad-feathered wings, which were silver-blue, barred with ochre and gold. Skimpy arms were tucked up tight under these. A bony claw of a hand clutched the corpse of some finned snake-creature. I also caught a glimpse—a foggy one since I wasn't focusing there—of distant castellated cliffs soaring upward in tiers and towers. The sky above was streaked with high hairy dazzling clouds. My eyes wouldn't look at the sun.
And I knew where I was.
Why, it's Marl's World! I exclaimed to me.
In surprise my hand dropped the snake. Immediately my body veered, plummeted—and I had caught my prey again.
What are you? What are you doing in me?
Oops, pardon the intrusion. I'm just a Ka on my way to another star. I'm trying to get back home.
A Ka? The dead do not return.
No, but I tend to. Listen: I was good friends with one of you birdmen, back in Eeden. Name of Marl. He can't have died more than three or four years ago. If he and I got on, so can you and I.
Marl?
I rose a few octaves in pitch in my thoughts, to repeat the name.
My bird-host caught on. Ah, Maaayyrrl! No, I never knew such a person. If you've really been to Eeden, stray spirit, sing me a song of Eeden! Sing it in my bones.
A song? Well, I'll give it a go. .. .
I was just about to—after which we might have got down to business, such as how to live together—when I was rudely tom away. Back to the blue void.
In the next world I collided with I was back on my own two feet again. Or rather I was on someone else's feet. Those feet were toiling up a steep stony track between tumbles of boulders and wiry bushes tipped with saffron fluff. It was hot. Mostly I stared down my bare, duskily-tanned legs at my ropy sandals. I seemed to be a woman. Black beetles with horns scuttled over the pebbles of the path; I trod indifferently on a few.
When exhaustion overcame me and I started staggering, I offloaded the burden I'd been toiling under. This was a huge block of yellow wood, slung in a cradle of rope. I subsided beside it, to rest.
Dully my eyes noted the distance I'd come—up amidst savage slopes of scree and scrub. Finding some sprigs of bitter herb in a pocket, I chewed, and stared at my toes. The nails were coarse and homy. Maybe they were meant to be. My hand strayed aside to the wood, which resembled a chumful of very stiff butter, and stroked it idly.
Excuse me, I thought, but what’s the wood for?
My body jerked to a crouch. In my hand a bone-handled knife with short bronze blade had suddenly appeared. I stared about wildly, spying only harsh slopes, angles of stone, mauve sky. Drooling herb-spittle, my mouth cried out, "Who speaks? Does the dead tree speak? Is that what a lurker wants me to think? To confuse me and steal?"
She surely believed in voicing her thoughts aloud! (Yes, I was sure I was a woman.)
"Aiieee!" cried my host. "Aiieee! Aiieee!" I cocked my head to listen to the echoes. "Aiieee!"
Was this to summon help from further up the track? Or to deafen the "lurker" which didn't like loud noises? (But which could throw its voice in whispers?) It had been so very silent before. When the echoes faded it was still totally silent.
Please calm down, I thought. I'm inside your head, sharing it. If you ’ll just listen, I’ll explain—
"The dead tree has entered me!" she howled. 'Through my backbone it has bored a hole!"
No it hasn't. Don't be hysterical
"I only port heartwood to the Sculptor! The tree is bled dead! No offence!" (No offence to whom? To the tree? To the Sculptor? To the lurker amongst the rocks?)
No need to get upset! I don't think I'm going to stay here too long.
Never a truer word. Before I could work out what was going on, I was wrenched on my way.
Only to collide, next off, with a farming wench. She was wading knee-deep in a paddy field, with her skirts hitched bunchily up around her waist. Several large snails with opal shells were crawling on her thighs. In the distance a tall lizard-thing stood bolt upright. Her pet? Her guard? The creature looked totally dull and in a stupor. Two suns shone in the sky, one of them tiny but blinding bright.
Presently the wench that was me paused in my work. I plucked one of the snails from my wet flesh, cracked its shell and munched the contents. . . .
Next I was gutting long black fish on a white marble worktop. I was an old crone blind in one eye. The fish-shed was lit by flaring torchlight. I spilled the guts into drums. I slid the flesh along to another crone, for her to chop into slices with a hatchet. I chanted over and over to myself an idiot ditty:
"Eelfish,
"Peel fish,
"Make a wish!”
These brief encounters were quite confusing. Not to mention the vertigo of plunging in and out of them. Even so I was almost beginning to relish these dips into other lives. Quite like being in the Ka- store of the Worm, it was! I might already be at journey's end, bouncing from one dead life to another . . . except that back home we had never lived such lives as these.
I was starting to fe
el like a child swopping seats on a wheeling carousel. Maybe I would carry on around the whole sphere of star colonies in similar style, bopping back into the void between whiles!
But then, en route from my eel-wife, the void bubbled up more bubbly than ever.
Ever?
Ever-never? Aa-is said sharply otherwise, otherways. How can I put it? No words come close!
What happened now was to a moon as is the colour of blood in a pitch-dark room by night. It was to a fish as is the smell of a rosebush in space. To a diamond as is the timelost instant of orgasm.
You see? No you don't.
All those things I've just mentioned connect, if you try hard enough. A diamond is an eternal kernel of light, outside of time. So also is ecstasy, the bright inner light. They can be related and make sense. Poetic sense. Ultimately in a poem almost anything can be related to anything else.
But if this happened ordinarily we would be drowning in a sea of chaos.
What was happening to me was a relating—a relating and a reordering along an unfamiliar axis: the name of which, for me, was "never-ever".
It was ever, and always. Yet also it was never because no happenings are unalterable. Nothing that happens in the universe is locked like an insect in amber. All is a shifting fluid—and this is as true of the past as of the future! What-had-been and what-might-be were both "never-ever". I felt very strongly that this was so.
Here was an answer to that old riddle which occurs in the Alice fragments supposedly written ages ago by the Artful Dodger's Son. I'd seen this discussed at length by savants in an Ajelobo newspaper.
The riddle: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"
(For those who don't read Ajelobo newspapers, a raven is an ancient flying creature with feathers, a sort of black chicken that likes to steal bright objects such as rings.)
I knew the answer now. And the right answer was: "Why shouldn’t it be?"
Please bear with me. Words divide things from other things. They box things into categories and classes. And so words make the world. They build reality. But words are also gluey, melty things. They leak. (If you say the same word a hundred times over, it leaks all over the place.) So eventually any word can stick to any other word; and I guess poetry is all about the glueyness of words rather than their usual role as solid boxes.
In exceptional circumstances, reality can be leaky too. It can get glued together in a different way.
Or maybe I should say that there isn't just one single reality. There are many possible realities, out of which only one exists. Whilst it does so, it excludes the others.
Okay Call one reality "the raven". Call the other "the writing desk". They're as far apart as any two things can be. Thus good old familiar reality exists. A raven is. A writing desk also is. Has been, and will be.
But glue can join them together. And when this happens in Ka- space, where the keel of the universe sails, things can change.
I was sure now that the void "imagines" the shape of the universe which is sailing upon it. Yet the void is unaware of what it dreams. Awareness only exists inside the universe dreamt by the void.
Admittedly people possess imagination too, in a weaker form. But people keep ravens well clear of writing desks, because words say that ravens and writing desks are far apart. Only poets, madmen and riddlers ever say otherwise, and they're in a minority of one, besides being stuck in a universe where one individual can't alter things.
I sensed two forces at work upon the universe. There was a dividing force, which was strong, which kept all classes and categories of things neatly organized. There was also a glueing force, which was weak and which could alter the way things were arranged in their various boxes. In the never-ever of Ka-space, where an aeon could be a moment, the weak force could beat the strong.
You might suppose that my own "reality" was weird enough to start with! Here was I, zipping through Ka-space and bouncing off alien lives on other worlds. That was nothing compared with when the void bubbled; when I dived into ever-neverland, when I lost all familiar connexions.
One connexion which I lost right away was my deathline. The fibres parted; it snapped. Perhaps it was the snapping of my deathline which caused the bubbling of the never-ever? So thoroughly did the order of events collapse that I couldn't say for sure. Now and then, before and after: all melted.
And in this moment it seemed to me as if the void was bubbling out of itself a private time and private place for me alone, a tiny universe of mine own which would shrink back again into the void, with me contained inside it.
I wasn't having that.
That's when I cried out to my mother-world. I cried out to my home; to Pecawar; to the house where I was bom and raised and murdered. And to my mother too. Oh yes, even though a mother can do nothing you still cry out to her!
That was when the never-ever twisted.
That was when the raven became the writing desk. When I cried.
Cried and cried.
I stopped crying.
I was feeble. I was tiny.
I knew what I was, and no mistake. It wasn't all that long since I'd been a baby back in Eeden. This was altogether a wetter, stickier, messier experience. My hips hurt like a wash-leather wrung out by strong hands. My face felt squashed out of shape, clogged-up and mucky. Someone else's upside-down face swam before my eyes. Presently this other face flipped upright and stabilized. Hands held me firmly but gently. Arms cradled my body. My eyes were dabbed clean, my nostrils too.
And because I'd been in this selfsame predicament within recent memory I had the wit to shut up and not scream out in my baby voice . . .
. . . the name of Chataly, my mother's cousin who choked on some food in her sleep and died, yet who was now tending at my delivery into the world . . .
. . . from out of a woman who lay on a bed, sweaty, hairslicked and weary, her legs still wide apart, leaking some blood and the long white cord which was my birth-string.
I didn't recognize my mother immediately; not looking like that.
When I did, I didn't want to. This may seem ungrateful in the circumstances, since she had just given birth to me, but the mother I knew wasn't this drenched exhausted naked suffering animal lying on the bed, Mother was cooler and neater.
Chataly set me down for a while, to cope with the cord sprouting from the midst of me.
That was what the string connecting me to the A^-store of the Worm had become, when connexions changed! And the blue void had changed into the waters of the womb! Way back home, where I'd cried to be.
But I wasn't a baby Yaleen. I wasn't back at the time of my own original birth two decades earlier. I didn't make the mistake of supposing that! Mother was so bedraggled by the effort of giving birth that I couldn't have said what age she was. But I remembered full well what Chataly had looked like in her later years; and these definitely were Chataly's later years.
Taking me up, she laid me under my mother's breast. Mother's hands held me. Her heart thumped under me. She crooned. My lips tasted sweet milk bubbling. I squirmed my floppy head aside but then thought twice about refusal and suckled a bit. Obviously I would have to feed.
Chataly must have been tidying the afterbirth away into a pan, meanwhile; rearranging sheets and so forth. Next I heard her call to my father. A door opened. I heard Dad's voice, close by:
"She's lovely! Oh isn't she wonderful! Our own little Narya—oh doesn't she suit the name!" (Do I, Dad?)
I kept quiet while he fussed in my vicinity. Truth to tell, quite soon I fell asleep. That little body of mine was tired.
As you can perhaps appreciate, this was a difficult period in my lives!
Unlike in Eeden, here at home I wouldn't be growing up at high speed. I would be advancing at the same slow pace as any other baby bom of woman. I would be suckling and pissing myself for ages. I'd be unable to walk, unable to do most anything till my body decided it was the right time to perform. I'd be a floppy doll. The prospect frustrated the hell out of me.
I think I could have managed to talk within a few days. It was entirely up to me what sort of noises I set my vocal chords to work on. But I didn't dare talk. I didn't dare be anything other than a baby. (Crying was a total waste of time; why bother?) I had to think, think, think. Ahead. Behind me, and all around.
I'd done what the Godmind couldn't do. Or couldn't yet do. I'd gone back in time. Right now, at this very moment, Yaleen—that's to say, me—was somewhere off along the river, up to her adventures. Those adventures were only about to happen, or in process of happening. And they must. Happen.
I'd lost any link with the Worm, of course. How could I be its bosom-buddy when I hadn't yet died into the Ka-store? Let alone boarded the Worm at Tambimatu, with diamond ring held high? Let alone dived headlong into the black current for the first time?
But why "must" my adventures happen as before?
What if I spoke to Mum and Dad instead (shocking them silly)? What if they spoke to the Guild? What if the Guild knew in advance that there would be a war, and chaos, if Yaleen crossed the river? The Guild would surely believe me once one or two things started coming true.
Lying first in my crib, and latterly in a cot, I played endless variations upon the theme of "What If?" Yet all variations seemed to come up with the same answer.
If I spilled the beans, then I wouldn't be murdered by Doctor Edrick. I wouldn't zoom off through Ka-space. I wouldn't return home again, reborn as the new baby me. In other words I wouldn't, couldn't, be here.
I remembered what Prof had said in Venezia (far away, but not yet) about how something might vanish from the present if the past was altered. I called to mind what I'd sensed in Ka-space about reality. And I nursed a dire suspicion that if I was indiscreet, then something might indeed vanish from the present. Namely me—plus chunks of history which were yet to happen. Yaleen's life would surely change as a consequence, and couldn't lead to me now.
Watson, Ian - Black Current 02 Page 16