This was what some called the musica universalis, a sonatina where the rotation, orbit and tremor in the planet itself converted to audible sound; where motion became hertz and hertz became musical notes grouped in octaves, pitches and tempo, a literal chromatic scale where the rise and fall of the planet’s movements were rendered both audible and visible as adjoining frequencies of sound and color.
The spherical Conclave filled with tones and lights that washed over those gathered, a semibreve in the bass followed by a minim in the tenor then a crotchet in the alto, with each successive note an octave higher, building to a vast interweaving choral that wrapped all present in a sweet harmony that hinted of warm wheat fields undulating in the wind, then fern glens trickling with dew and waterfalls; great oceans teeming with life, and alpine winds gusting across frigid plains. This was the Earth singing to them, a tune of mathematics and shabda geometry, sometimes joyful and spirited, sometimes tentative and tremulous.
Played in this dimension with the volume of a madrigal between twenty and two thousand hertz, portions of the planet’s tonal harmony could sometimes be discerned in the narrower band audible on Earth Prime by humans in meditation or in the quiescence of mind that came just before sleep, when rhythms of breathing and mental sine aligned with the energy below.
Such unions had instructed many through the Ages. Even here, in the Fourth Age, thinkers like Anaxagoras, Kepler, Heindel, Pythagoras, Boethius and Nunn had uncovered the link between orbital motion and music, and musicians like Pérotin, Mozart, Wagner, Sumner, Amos and Kitaro had even transposed it into notes.
Tubules retracted, shrinking again to form the modest podium, and the glorious polyphonic receded to an echo, its trance-like effect still whisking in circles around the inside of the crystal bulb, cleansing the inside of every mind and heart.
Her audience appropriately sedated, Clansfrau Vail Telemor of the Nabiyã Siancay shuffled to grasp the pulpit with fingers more bone than flesh, as two of the queen’s Chakanni-khi held the seerwitch’s voluminous train with reverence.
Twin unblinking pricks of retinal light were the only hint of a face deep inside the dark hood that was the habit of her Order, and when she spoke the chamber filled with a crackling voice, resonant as it was deep. The crone had been ancient before the Fall, the subsequent immortality of this deathlife making her eternally so.
All bowed their heads as she invoked a blessing upon the proceedings, calling to the Builders above and to the Earth below for wisdom and balance to underwrite their words and actions, in each wafer of time, to each dawning day. All present intoned their commitment: “As Above, so Below.”
The rites now observed, Brace Hurcan Aragenti bowed to the old woman as she was led back to her seat, then cast a knowing glance at Queen Fae’Elayen as he took to the stand. With tensions so high between the Houses, this meeting could easily get out of control. He traced his fingers across his thummin disc and flicked the images through the air where they displayed a checklist and agenda to be followed across the concave ceiling.
Clever fox, thought the queen. As above, so below indeed. And it keeps them from looking at each other, all the better to avoid their rivalries.
Matters of community were reported by each House, various challenges and advances in the arts and sciences discussed and applauded. Then the meatier subjects that all had really come to debate were opened, and the volume in the chamber rose in proportion to how little was known on each topic. It was a simple truth that people were always loudest when talking on that which they did not fully understand, that which would identify them as the personification of a populist view, and that which they did not want to be challenged on.
Ah, politics, what would we do without it?, the Queen pondered wryly. She would like to have found out. Would that she held the Scepter of Rule and not one of Balance. But that lance of greatest significance had long been lost, along with its fallen wielder.
Yet surely old Anu had held the right idea: rule by might alone, not by consensus. The people had loved him for it. God-king. First king. Master of the Builders’ own Words. His rule represented six thousand years of unimpeded progress; an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove.
The people of the First Age had almost made it, almost passed the Builders’ test. Until the end. And look how that final dissent had ended for the usurpers: wicked Tiamet now lay shattered, its only reminder the three thousand asteroids snared on one of the Lagrangian Points that were their Coreworld’s wings. That remnant of Tiamet was known by another name to the Fae’er. They called it Anu’s Bracelet, a reminder that one is irrevocably tied to the consequences of action; that reaction follows action as effect follows cause.
She absently fingered the tiny notches of gold filaments that joined her monarch’s wrist to her scepter, the bracelet rich in metaphor and pathos.
But hers was a benevolent monarchy where democracy granted all House Families the right of self-rule and determination. The same right they granted the other dimensions. Even the role of monarch was passed between the Houses every few centuries, a passage presided over by the runes and prophecies of the Nabiyã Siancay who alone determined which of the Chakanni-khi were fated to ascend the throne as best suited to face the challenges ahead. As she herself had done seven hundred years ago.
Yet in the gleaming eyes of those old seerwitches, eyes that held the secrets of the ages better than any vault, even she sometimes spied a growing desperation. The final Line of Judgment was approaching, and their offspring on Earth Prime were so far from healing as a people.
Were the Builders to examine the Prime world today they would find a race at war with itself and at odds with the very harmony of nature. Sides were drawn and battles fought daily over their pots of gold, their acres of land, their moments of glory, their so-called philosophies, or the color of their skin.
Greed and pride had ever been the stumbling blocks of all four Ages, yet it seemed in the nearly seven thousand years of the current Age, humanity had not only repeated the errors of the past but magnified them beyond healing.
Would that she could appear and shake them from their slumber! Did they not know the fate of all rested with them? Perhaps Bøsexiéède was right, perhaps she should edict that it was time to—
She caught herself as the gold bit into her wrist, a physical warning against thoughts less than pure. Her mind had been wandering again, something she seemed to do more and more these days.
What were they debating now?
The shining strands uncoiled their grip.
Brace Kalomir Volaran of the Fae’rest Nation had the floor, resplendent in the greens and brown of his office. He was addressing the crowd, in which one of their scientists was standing as the counterpoint; always two stood when Conclave was in session, always multiple points explored, always a game to see whose words could bind the other.
“Yes, yes, I know, but the parallax drives of the Second Age were a lesser risk than this. Listen to me—” He had to shout to be heard above the din of opinions clamoring for the floor, though the scientist held his place. “—Listen to me! Just four hundred and sixty five leagues south of here in the Prime dimension—I tell you they are digging quantum tunnels. Across in their Americas they are doing the same. I bow to the science of Bath Gavul and the Institute,” Volaran made a slight nod at the scientist standing across the way, “and I understand that measurements in microns are but a scratch. But, at the quantum level such scratches are as canyons—canyons that are meant to stay closed.”
The chatter of competing voices rose again.
“The Fae’rest Nation has respect for your findings, but as custodians of the Land, I tell all within the sound of my voice that this world is in peril. Holes are being drilled, matter is sliding. It is only a matter of time before—”
“Before what? Before calamity? Before the dimensions come crashing into each other? Builders Above, give me strength to explain the physics you cannot see.” Lord Bath Gavul was a bellicose man who
used his girth and drumming voice to intimidate those who opposed. In mortality his genius made him opinionated. Two hundred centuries later, many considered him infallible, he being the loudest voice to attest the fact.
Bath continued: “We know our world is made of tetrahedrons spinning in a polyhedron, a perfect sphere of geometry prone to torque, and an excess of physical, chemical and electrical discharge. Like any living body it cracks, it heals, it gives off steam.” He raised a finger in Aragenti’s direction. “I think our esteemed Hurcan is no stranger to hot air!”
Laughter rang around the chamber walls, but Aragenti was quick to hold his ground:
“The better to speak your own language, gracious Bath.”
“Exactly so,” spat the fat man, not missing a beat as the murmurs stilled, “In this perfect order there are intersecting nodes that serve to relieve energies. Call them chakras, vortices or whatever you like, they are the same in any living body, no matter it be large as a planet or small as yourself, noble Brace. What we are seeing is nothing more than the natural process of these exchanges.” He pointed at a man in the opposite gallery, who stood as Gavul sat, the line of argument neatly passed to one whose location in the room served to twist the line of debate around the Brace’s right flank.
“Lord Gavul is correct as I can attest as chief Reader in Sciences. These are natural processes, following a natural rhythm, nothing more.”
The man was slight, unassuming, and carried sheaves of papers that lent weight to his scholarly credentials even though ovalurns and thummin discs were the established devices of record.
This is an old stagecraft, observed Queen Fae’Elayen as she leaned forward to better see how this trap would be sprung.
Debate in Conclave was an art form of point and counter-point, argument and counter-argument which combatants won by an intricate dance mixed with logic, rhetoric and geometric entrapment using lines of questioning with audience partners designed to literally corral the opponent. The Brace was one hand-off away from Gavul’s supporters wrapping him in a triangle.
Who would this Reader pass to next?
It had to be someone behind Gavul in the opposite gallery for the points to neatly align. Scanning the far-side crowd, she saw him immediately, a man too composed, not caught up like the rest of the crowd, as one biding his time until called on.
Then a different man sprang up to the left of the Reader, crying: “If these are natural processes then why are seismic shifts increasing at a faster than average rate?”
To the right of the Reader, another stood: “We have an exponential increase in dimensional breaches, which our agents on Earth Prime are ill-equipped to patrol, let alone control. Brace, what do you say is the cause?”
The Reader had been surrounded and nullified, the argument thrown back to Brace Hurcan Aragenti’s control. He moved quickly, turning on his charm.
“I don’t suggest we doubt the findings of those we trust to read the patterns of the past. However the winter solstice several years hence is a known point in time for us. All that we have been working to is towards this point, where two galaxies meet, where the Line of Judgment will weigh the hearts of all. Into that place, none of us have gone before, no matter the Ages we have seen come and go since it was our race occupying the Prime world. A place we have not before walked is a place we cannot claim certain knowledge of.”
The crowd mumbled its assent, and the Brace took to the floor, taking up position behind Lord Bath Gavul, forming his own set of angles.
“Members of Conclave, there is technology in the other world that the children of our children’s children are employing. Do we want children peering into the places between places where even adults do not look? They are not prepared for what they will find there. And no matter the opinion of my esteemed colleagues, the Fae’rest Nation has immutable evidence that incidents are increasing, and not at a natural rate.”
He spaced three fingers across his thummin and threw the images into the air where they imprinted above the heads of all gathered. As eyes turned to the great glass lens above, he continued to circle Gavul, silently closing the triangle on his own, victor in this round of political jibing.
Well played, my Brace, thought Queen Fae’Elayen silently.
“What you see here are visual images captured from the logs of agents in service to our Cassandra Foundation. They show the beings that have stepped into the Prime dimension, which these agents are enlisted to return to where they belong. Here, you will recognize the faces of our own people who have been drawn to the Fourth Age, and I hasten to stress they appeared there beyond the protection of our embassies and away from the typical geometry Lord Gavul so ably explained. It should not be happening this way.
“See these other images: creatures from our First Age that have no corollary on the current Earth Prime. And so with these,” More images appeared. “People and beasts from the Second and Third dimensions, none of which belong, their species never having seeded there. They are leaking through without control. This planet’s natural order is failing.”
Gavul waved hands high above his head to draw the crowd’s attention, but Aragenti drew thumb and forefinger apart to zoom the next image so broad there could be no mistaking it. The crowd fell immediately silent, and even Gavul staggered backwards as it filled the sky.
“Our scientists are right, most of the flux we see is a natural effect, and for this cause we have recently capped all sixty-two vortices where we didn’t already have measures in place. So if all the portals that connect the four worlds are under our control, where then did this come from?”
It is said that when people experience the same trauma, they sometimes share the same nightmares, bound to each other by a link that goes deeper than what science and psychology might explain as a race memory or hive mind. Take a nation at the peak of its powers, confident in its own destiny and strengthened by the victories of its past. Then destroy everything they know of themselves overnight, burying their cities beneath tons of rock and ash, drowning their lands with water, and burning their globe with fire.
Stripped of everything they knew, faced with total devastation and scratching in the mud for survival, the remnant of that people shared a uniform psychosis, the same terrors. In the months that followed the fall of the Fae’er world in the First Age, the survivors had a dream in common, and the more they fed it, the more persistent it became.
An image of a smoking giant. Its massive arms and legs billowing with soot, its face that of churning rock with deep pits where danced white-hot coals for eyes. A furnace of lava spilled out through black jagged teeth, soundlessly melting the people who milled at its ponderous feet, burned alive by fire, or crushed by its stride.
Onward it always came, the dreamer frantic to escape, almost believing they were just far enough in front to outrun it. Then their passage filled with a flood of waist-high water, making their escape futile as each booming step shot mountains of steam into the air, closer and closer, until its wicked face filled their field of vision and the glowing pit opened wide!
This was the apparition now filling the screen. Brace Aragenti allowed a moment of silence for the memory of it to sink in. Then he muted the vision and spoke evenly in a tone of unmistakable control.
“You know what this is. A creature that never walked in nature, and so has no place in the four dimensions we patrol. It is a figment of the id, and yet it is made corporeal on Earth Prime not two days ago on the grasslands of their African continent. I submit that whatever holes their technology is punching through the quantum membranes, it is reaching darker places than thought possible. Places where the very stuff of nightmares find form and power, a dimension possibly made of psychic energy. Who knows what lurks there?
“I say it is time to remain hidden no longer. Respectfully, and in deference to what we know as the will of the Builders, the time for half measures is over. We need to intervene and stop the use of the machines that are causing these imbalances.”
/> “The sacrilege of a Dae’mon!” cried some.
“He’s right! Listen to the man,” cried others.
The chamber exploded with voices jostling to be heard, eyes darting from the Brace of the Fae’rest Nation to the reaction of the Fae’ro and Fae’qua representatives, then on to the Queen herself who sat expressionless, inscrutable.
Above them all was heard the slow clap, clap, clap of two hands. The Nabiyã Siancay who had invoked the session was standing, and a dozen others of the Clansfrau sisterhood rose from seats all around the globular Conclave chamber, motionless, waiting as the tumult fell silent, expectant.
When they spoke, all mouths made one grating voice, a blend of haggish voices beating each consonant like a drum.
“Thus say the Nabiyã Siancay: time is upon us but soon time shall be no more. As Endworld approaches, the hearts of all shall be tested. Who will walk enlightened, who will walk benighted? Already have fallen three from above, yet the children of prophecy shall not walk alone: even now two from below are rising. Others still are called, if they have ears to hear. Judge ye this day the Builders’ will. So much will be required, of so few, so soon. As the books are opened, what shall ye read? What will ye write? It is given unto you to choose until all choices are made and judgment come.”
With no further word, the seerwitches bowed their heads and filed from the chamber. What followed their departure was chaos as all Houses spoke at once, a cacophony of opinion and unanswered questions.
There were no absolute answers, and even four hours later Queen Fae’Elayen and the governing Braces had only wrangled her constituents to three interim resolutions, much still to be agreed: In their custodial role, but without direct intervention, the Fae’er would play a more active but judicious role on Earth Prime, using the Cassandra Foundation that served as inter-dimensional embassy, controlled portal, and connection to the mortal governments.
Training would be stepped up for the Three From Above, so fortuitously delivered to them a few short years ago. A search would commence for the Two From Below.
Echoes of Worlds Past Page 14