The New Voices of Fantasy

by Peter S. Beagle

  Sharif had learned how to weave the fabric of light itself.

  Now he could return to his hometown, seek out the shadow of the eucalyptus tree, and prepare the device for imprisoning the cup.

  First, he designed a kilim with the holy names of reality woven into it. Carefully, with a diamond-tipped glasscutter, he took the Jaam-e-Jam apart into four pieces and set them into the kilim. Next, he snared waves of light that fell in through the workshop window. He looped the peaks and troughs and braided them into a net. He stretched the net over the glass shards and warped them into place. He constructed a brass trunk and etched binding symbols on its lid, then rolled up the kilim and placed it inside.

  Last, a special key was prepared. This part took some sorting out—he had to fetch certain particles farther along in time—but he succeeded; and finally he had the key. It was designed to talk to the blood-light in one person only, one descended from Sharif ’s line and the Mughal princess’s.

  Me.

  Incredulous, I gazed at my dead grandfather as he told me his last story.

  His cheeks glowed with youth, his eyes sharp and filled with truth. His hair was black, parted on the left. Maybe the glass shone, or his eyes, but the effect was the same: an incredible halo of light, near holy in its alienness, surrounded him. When he shook his head, the halo wobbled. When he spoke, the carpet’s fringe threads stirred as if a breeze moved them, but the voice was sourceless and everywhere.

  “Today is the sixteenth of November, 2013,” he had said before launching into narration like a machine. “You’re twenty-eight. The woman you love will be twenty-five in three months. As for me”—he smiled—“I’m dead.”

  He was telling me the future. Prescience, it seemed, had been his forte.

  And now I knew how. The Cup of Heaven.

  “Is it really you?” I said when he was done, my voice full of awe.

  Gramps nodded. “More a portion of my punishment than me.”

  “What does that mean? What other secrets were in the cup? Tell me everything, Gramps,” I said, “before I go crazy.”

  “All good stories leave questions. Isn’t that what I will say?” He watched me, serious. “You should understand that I’m sorry. For bringing you here. For passing this on to you. I wish I’d never dug under that tree. But it is the way it is. I was handed a responsibility. I suppose we all get our burdens.”

  The air in the room was thick and musty. Our eyes were locked together. He lured me here, I thought. My hands were shaking and this time it was with anger. Rage at being manipulated. All those stories of princesses and paupers, those lies he told for years while all the time he knew exactly what he was doing and how he was preparing me for this burden, whatever it was.

  Gramps’s spirit, or whoever he was in this current state, watched me with eyes that had no room for empathy or guilt. Didn’t he care at all?

  “I do, son,” he said gently. He was reading my mind or already knew it—I wasn’t clear which—and that angered me more. “I haven’t gotten to the most important part of the story.”

  “I don’t care,” I said in a low voice. “Just tell me what was in the cup.”

  “You need to know this.” His tone was mechanical, not my gramps’s voice. The person I knew and loved was not here. “The Jaam gave me much. Visions, power, perfect knowledge, but it cost me too. Quite a bit. You can’t stare into the heart of the Unseen and not have it stare back at you.”

  He swept a hand around himself. For the first time I noticed the halo wasn’t just hovering behind his head; it was a luminescent ring blooming from his shoulders, encircling his neck, wrapping around his body.

  “It wasn’t for me to decide the cup’s fate, so I hid it away. But because the Unseen’s presence ran like a torrent from it I paid more than a man should ever have to pay for a mistake. I was told to dig up the secret and hide it, not to gaze at its wonders or partake of its mysteries. My punishment hence was remembering the future and being powerless to prevent it. I would lose everything I remembered about the love of my life. Starting from the moment I dug under the eucalyptus, I would forget ever having been with your grandmother. My lovely, luckless Zeenat.

  “Once the task was complete and I handed over the trunk to Bashir, my memories began to go. With time, my mind confabulated details to fill in the gaps and I told myself and everyone who’d ask that I had married a woman who died during childbirth. By the time we moved to America, all I remembered was this nostalgia and longing to discover a secret I thought I’d never pursued: the pauper princess and her magical jinn.”

  When he stopped, the outline of his face wavered. It was the halo blazing. “What you see before you”—with a manicured finger Gramps made a circle around his face—“is an impression of those lost years. My love’s memory wrenched from me.”

  He closed his eyes, letting me study the absence of age on his face. If he were telling the truth, he was a figment of his own imagination, and I . . . I was crazy to believe any of this. This room was a delusion and I was complicit in it, solidifying it.

  Maybe that was why he forgot. Maybe the human mind couldn’t marry such unrealities and live with them.

  “What about the journal? If you forgot everything, how could you draw? How could you write down details of your life?”

  Gramps, his apparition, opened his eyes. “Senility. When my organic memory dissolved, fragments of my other life came seeping back in dreams.”

  So he wrote the journal entries like someone else’s story. He had visions and dreams, but didn’t know whose life was flooding his head, filling it with devastating images, maybe even ushering in his death earlier than it otherwise might have come.

  I leaned back and watched the threads of the carpet twist. The woven tower shot into the sky with hundreds of creatures gathered around it, looking at its top disappear into the heavens.

  “I want to see the cup.” My voice rose like a razor in the dark, cutting through the awkwardness between us. “I want to see the contents.”

  “I know.” He nodded. “Even such a warning as you see before you wouldn’t deter you.”

  “If the cup’s real, I will take it with me to the States, where historians and mythologists will validate its authenticity and. . . .”

  And what? Truly believe it was a magical cup and place it in the Smithsonian? The cup’s secret isn’t for human eyes, Gramps had said. But what else are secrets for if not discovery? That is their nature. Only time stands between a mystery and its rightful master.

  Gramps’s fingers played with the halo, twisting strands of luminosity like hair between his fingers. “You will have the secret, but before you drink from it, I want you to do something for me.”

  He snapped his fingers and threads of light sprang from the halo, brightening as they came apart. Quickly he noosed them until he had a complicated knot with a glowing center and a string dangling at the end.

  He offered it to me. “Pull.”

  Warily, I looked at the phosphorescent string. “Why?”

  “Before you gaze inside the cup, you will have a taste of my memories. After that you decide your own demons.”

  I reached out a hand to the glass shard, withdrew, extended it again. When my fingers touched it, I flinched. It was warm. Slowly, I pushed my hand into the glass. It was like forcing it through tangles of leaves hot from the sun.

  The string reddened. Its end whipped back and forth. I pinched it, pulled, and the light string rocketed toward me, the brilliant corpuscle at its center thrashing and unraveling into reality.

  I gasped. A fat worm of peacock colors was climbing my hand, wrapping itself around my wrist.

  “Gramps! What is this?” I shouted, twisting my arm, but the creature was already squirming its way up my arm, its grooves hot against my flesh, leaving shadows of crimson, mauve, azure, muddy green, and yellow on my skin. I could smell its colors. Farm odors. Damp foliage. Herbal teas. Baba’s truck with its ancient vomit-stained upholstery and greasy whee
l covers. My mother’s hair. Sara’s embrace.

  I shuddered. The worm’s body was taut across the bridge of my nose, its two ends poised like metal filings in front of my eyes.

  “These,” Gramps said, “are the stingers of memory.”

  The worm’s barbs were like boulders in my vision. As I watched them, terrified, they vibrated once.

  Then plunged into my eyes.

  In the cup was everything, Gramps said. He meant it.

  What the teenage boy saw went back all the way until he was destroyed and remade from the complete memory of the universe. From the moment of its birth until the end. Free of space, time, and their building blocks, the boy experienced all at once: a mausoleum of reality that wrapped around him, plunged into which he floated through the Unseen.

  And I, a blinking, tumbling speck, followed.

  Gramps watched the concussion of first particles reverberate through infinity. He watched instantaneous being bloom from one edge of existence to the other; watched the triumph of fire and ejective forces that shook creation in their fists. He observed these phenomena and knew all the realms of the hidden by heart.

  Matter has always been conscious. That was the secret. Sentience is as much its property as gravity and it is always striving toward a new form with better accommodation.

  From the needs of sentient matter rose the invention that humans are.

  Gramps gripped the darkness of prebeing and billowed inside the cracks of matter. When I tried to go after him, an awful black defied me. To me belonged just a fraction of his immersion.

  I sat on a molten petal of creation as it solidified, and watched serpentine fractals of revelation slither toward me. Jinns are carrier particles of sentience, they murmured. Of the universe’s memory of the Great Migration.

  My prehuman flesh sang on hearing these words. Truths it had once known made music in my body, even if I didn’t quite remember them.

  The Great Migration?

  The first fires and winds created many primordials, the fractals said.

  You mean jinns?

  Beings unfettered by the young principles of matter and energy. As the world began to cool, new rules kicked in. The primordials became obsolete. Now the selfish sentience needed resistant clay-and-water creatures to thrive upon. For humans to exist, the primordials had to migrate.

  They complied?

  They dug tunnels into space-time and left our corner of existence so it could evolve on its own. Before they departed, however, they caged the memory of their being here, for if such a memory were unleashed upon the world, matter would rescind its newest form and return to the essence. Things as we know them would cease to exist.

  So they made the cup, I said. To imprison the memories of a bygone age.

  Before they passed into shadow, whispered the fractals, they made sure the old ways would be available. In case the new ones proved fleeting.

  An image came to me then: a dazzling array of fantastical creatures—made of light, shadow, earth, inferno, metal, space, and time—traveling across a brimming gray land, their plethora of heads bowed. As they plodded, revolved, and flew, the dimensions of the universe changed around them to accommodate this pilgrimage of the phantastique. Matter erupted into iridescent light. Flames and flagella bloomed and dissolved. Their chiaroscuric anatomies shuttered as the primordials made their way into the breath of the unknown.

  The flimsy speck that was I trembled. I was witnessing a colossal sacrifice. A mother of migrations. What should a vehicle of sentience do except bow before its ageless saviors?

  In the distance, over the cusp of the planets, a primordial paused, its mammoth body shimmering itself into perception. As I watched it, a dreadful certainty gripped me: this was how Gramps was trapped. If I didn’t look away immediately, I would be punished too, for when have human eyes glimpsed divinity without forsaking every sight they hold dear?

  But I was rooted, stilled by the primordial’s composition. Strange minerals gleamed in its haunches. From head to tail, it was decorated with black-and-white orbs like eyes. They twitched like muscles and revolved around its flesh until their center, a gush of flame riding bony gears, was visible to me. Mirages and reveries danced in it, constellations of knowledge ripe for the taking. Twisted ropes of fire shot outward, probing for surface, oscillating up and down.

  My gaze went to a peculiar vision bubbling inside the fiery center. I watched it churn inside the primordial, and in the briefest of instants I knew what I knew.

  As if sensing my study, the creature began to turn. Fear whipped me forward, a reverential awe goading me closer to these wonders undiluted by human genes, unpolluted by flesh, unmade by sentience.

  Sentience is everything, sentience the mystery and the master, I sighed as I drifted closer.

  But then came a shock wave that pulsed in my ears like a million crickets chirping. I rode the blast force, grief stricken by this separation, spinning and flickering through string-shaped fractures in reality, like gigantic cracks in the surface of a frozen lake. Somewhere matter bellowed like a swamp gator and the wave rushed at the sound. Tassels of light stirred in the emptiness, sputtering and branching like gargantuan towers—

  Lightning trees, I thought.

  —and suddenly I was veering toward them, pitched up, tossed down, slung across them until there was a whipping sound like the breaking of a sound barrier, and I was slipping, sliding, and falling through.

  My eyes felt raw and swollen. I was choking. I gagged and squirmed up from the carpet as the light worm crawled up my throat and out my left nostril. It rushed out, its segments instantly melting and fading to roseate vapors. The vapors wafted in the darkness like Chinese lanterns, lighting up discarded looms and moth-eaten rug rolls before dissipating into nothing.

  I stared around, fell back, and lay spread-eagled on the carpet. The nostril through which the worm had exited was bleeding. A heavy weight had settled on my chest.

  A memory came to me. Of being young and very small, standing at the classroom door, nose pressed against the glass, waiting for Mama. She was running late and the terror in me was so powerful, so huge, that all I could do was cry. Only it wasn’t just terror, it was feeling abandoned, feeling insignificant, and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  Footsteps. I forced myself through the lethargy to turn on my side. Bashir the rug merchant stood outlined against the rectangle of light beyond the doorway. His face was in shadow. The blue of his eyes glinted.

  “You all right, son?”

  My heart pounded so violently I could feel it in every inch of my body. As if I were a leather-taut drum with a kid hammering inside and screaming.

  “I don’t know.” I tottered upright, breathed, and glanced at the carpet. The light was gone and it was ordinary. Gramps was gone too. The cup’s pieces in the corners were dull and empty.

  Just glass.

  I looked at Bashir. “I saw my grandfather.”

  “Yes.” The rug merchant’s shadow was long and alien on the carpet. “What will you do now that he’s gone?”

  I stared at him. His bright sapphire eyes, not old but ancient, watched me. He was so still. Not a hair stirred on his head. I wiped my mouth and finally understood.

  “You’re not the boy who fell,” I said quietly. “The eucalyptus jinn. That’s you.”

  He said nothing but his gaze followed me as I stepped away from the carpet, from this magical rectangle woven a half century ago. How long had he guarded the secret? Not the carpet, but the cup? How long since Bashir the rug merchant had died and the eucalyptus jinn had taken his form?

  “A very long time,” Bashir said in a voice that gave away nothing.

  Our eyes met and at last I knew burden. Left behind by the primordial titans, here was a messenger of times past, the last of his kind, who had kept this unwanted vigil for millennia. Carrying the responsibility of the cup, silently waiting for the end of days. Was there place in this new world for him or that d
amned chalice? Could there be a fate worse than death?

  I stood before the caged shards of the Jaam. Gramps might have traversed the seven layers of heaven, but during my brief visit into the Unseen I’d seen enough to understand the pricelessness of this vehicle. Whatever magic the cup was, it transcended human logic. Were it destroyed, the last vestige of cosmic memory would vanish from our world.

  “Whatever you decide,” the jinn said, “remember what you saw in the ideograms of the Eternum.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand, then the vision returned to me. The mammoth primordial with its flaming core and the glimpse of what churned between its bonelike gears. My heartbeat quickened.

  If what I saw was true, I’d do anything to protect it, even if it meant destroying the most glorious artifact the world would ever know.

  The jinn’s face was kind. He knew what I was thinking.

  “What about the shop?” I asked, my eyes on the damaged looms, the dead insects, the obsolete designs no one needed.

  “Will go to my assistant,” he said. “Bashir’s nephew.”

  I looked at him. In his eyes, blue as the deepest ocean’s memory, was a lifetime of waiting. No, several lifetimes.

  Oblivion. The eucalyptus jinn courted oblivion. And I would give it to him.

  “Thank you,” he said, smiling, and his voice was so full of warmth I wanted to cry.

  “You miss the princess. You protected their family?”

  “I protected only the cup. The Mughal lineage just happened to be the secret’s bearer,” said the eucalyptus jinn, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  Which was why he couldn’t follow them when they left, until Gramps went after them with the cup. Which was also why he couldn’t save them from the fire that killed them. Gramps knew it too, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to change the future.

  Was Gramps’s then the worst burden of all? It made my heart ache to think of it.

  We looked at each other. I stepped toward the brass trunk and retrieved the key with the gold stud from the padlock. Without looking at the jinn, I nodded.