by Anton Stark
THE STRINGS OF ITZ’MUCAN
Copyright 2014 Anton Stark
The Strings of Itz’mucan
His stomach twisted into a knot. He knew what was going to happen. There was nothing he could hold on to, nothing he could do.
“I am sorry”. A pale hand pushed him.
For a fraction of a second he felt free of all constraint, floating in Space and Time.
Gravity exerted its pull and he plummeted, howling, towards the ground.
Then the darkness.
Toltep awoke with his heart trying to escape from his chest.
He struggled to control his breathing. Just a dream. He exhaled, panic receding from his mind. Just a dream. A hand reached out for his. Hara’can’s, his grandfather’s hand. The same hand that had pushed him to his death mere seconds before.
“You were dreaming.” It was an assertion, not a question.
“I dreamt that… I was on a cliff.” He could still feel the wind’s caress on his skin, rough dirt beneath his sandals. “And that you pushed me…”
Hara’can nodded sadly, moist eyes glistening in the pre-dawn’s gloom. The elder leant to embrace him.
“I know.” He kissed Toltep on the forehead. “I know.”
Just a dream.
His grandfather left him soon afterwards, as he always did ever since Toltep had come to live with him. He hadn’t yet come to find out whether Hara’can was equipped with the ability to sleep. He suspected against it, which might explain his obsession with his grandson’s dreams.
Toltep remained in bed until the sun had risen in the horizon, until the warmth playing on his skin forced him to get up and conduct his morning ablutions in the small pool in the middle of Hara’can’s apartments. Cold water ran down the green and blue bands crisscrossing his body while he murmured his morning prayers to the Great-Fire.
“Be quick.” His grandfather laid a clean tunic and Toltep’s academician’s headdress by the pool, before holding out the hemometric needle. Toltep forced his finger on the apparatus’ point. The display screen connected to the needle lit up with a number: 83%. He sighed, relieved. His blood remained stable. He left the bath and prepared for another day listening to his grandfather’s lectures. For that day he knew only their topic, not their content, but it seemed to have been handpicked: Hara’can would present to his students his theory on vivid dreams.
After two years in the Academy of the Seven-Suns he still failed to understand why only his grandfather insisted in giving his lectures outside in the amphitheatre and not in the lecture halls or inside the pyramid, like the other masters did. But it was more pleasant out there, at least when the gray dust of the Desert wasn’t lifted by the wind to rain down on their classes. Two triangular awnings floated above the heads of the students, raised between thick pillars whose bas-reliefs had been all but obliterated during the Purge. The class came down the stairs, advancing through the seats by order of blood purity. Toltep was one of the few in the second row. That of the Impures, at the top, had nobody. It never did. The Academy’s last Impure, one Yuxaak, had succumbed to the corruption three years before Toltep’s arrival. After that the masters had forbidden entry to all whose impurity level was above a quarter per blood unit.
He took the old pergacogitator from his bag and unfolded it on his knees. The alchemical runes that powered the instrument whizzed when he activated them with an absent-minded tap of the stylus. At the bottom of the auditorium Hara’can waited patiently for everyone to prepare their writing material. Toltep tapped twice the dark surface that the alchemical parchment had adopted, and a new writing box opened clean before his eyes. He traced a pair of glyphs and glowing runes on it, the Salutation to the Knowing-Bird, and waited for the lesson to begin.
“There are three kinds of dream”, his grandfather began. “As death, they happen to everyone, regardless of tribe, race, sex, or purity of blood”. The amphitheatre hummed with mentions of blasphemy coming from the purebloods in the front row. “They are: the processing dreams, during which the brain digests the information overload absorbed in day-to-day life. Sexual dreams, in which our consciousness projects our most intimate carnal desires. And, finally, vivid dreams. Can someone tell me what vivid dreams are?”
Toltep raised his arm. His grandfather tried ignoring him at first, but was forced to recognise his right to speak after no-one else volunteered an answer.
“They are very short dream sequences, characterized by a high degree of realism and physical sensation. As if we were, er, living another life, the life in the dream.”
Hara’can nodded his agreement. “Everyone here is familiar with the Strings of Itz'mucan, are you not?” Behind him, the screens of the amphiteatre blinked with a picture of the great naturalist, Itz’mucan himself. An old portrait, from before the Purge. The pixels were clearly distorted from where the badge of the Kopak Technocracy had been manipulated out of the image. “All in existence is made up of an endless number of other cosmos, other realities, interconnected by the Flux. These realities, which exist separate from ours in their own Spaces and Times, represent all possibilities not realised in our universe, in the same way that our universe is made up of the unfulfilled possibilities of such other universes. This implies the existence of universes whose reality has nothing whatsoever to do with ours, and others where it is exactly the same, differing only in the subtlest of ways. In one universe we’ll be here, as we are now, but instead of raising my right arm”, leather and bronze bracelets shook on Hara’can’s lean wrists, “my other version will raise the left.” Toltep didn’t bother to take notes. He’d listen to this lecture for days to come, and had plenty of time to ask questions in the long evenings. Perks of living with a master. He doodled equations whilst Hara’can went on. “Another version, in another reality, will raise nothing. According to Itz’mucan, since everything is made up of Flux and it is theoretically the only constant element between all realities, there ought to exist inter-reality connections, the Strings, between organisms which share the same basic atomic configuration from universe to universe. Links in the same chain, Flux links. This String connection is, according to my own theory, the origin of vivid dreams.”
A hand signaled in the front row, and didn’t wait for the master’s order to proceed. “In what way?”
“A sufficiently traumatic event in the life of one of our versions would cause an echo to reach us through the Strings, much like electrical current traveling down a cable. The more similar the version, the more substantial, more palpable the sensory experience during sleep will be.”
“And what kind of an experience would trigger an echo?”
“Witnessing an accident, suffering an injury or... dying.” His grandfather’s eyes darted towards him. Fragments of his dream flashed through his mind, but the memory had begun crumbling hours before. “But, given that energy is invariably lost when traveling between two points, even if those points lie in different spaces and times, our brains tend to capture only the last moments of this transmission, this echo.”
Another of the pure-bloods asked to speak, waving jade-covered fingers. He had at least the patience to wait for Hara'can to look in his direction before firing the question.
“How can your theory be proven, o master?” he challenged. Toltep examined the reaction of his grandfather. Hara’can’s unreadable expression transmuted into a laconic smile.
“That explanation, I fear, will have to wait for another time. Now, if you have no more queries, we will move on to the next topic...”
Toltep accompanied his grandfather in the Academy’s laboratories every day after his classes. To observe a master at work was an honor granted to few, and blood ties meant nothing in the Academy, only scholar
ly merit. The boy helped where he could and when his help was required. The rest of the time he remained quiet, merely watching, taking notes. At the moment he observed the old man trying to isolate one atom of Flux from a shard of Essence contained in a steel bell-jar.
That day, while he meditated on the teachings of the lecture and his dream, staying focused on the isolation process was becoming increasingly difficult.
He had to ask.
“Master.”
“Yes?”
He measured his words carefully. “If your theory is correct, that would mean that a version of me died in another universe.”
“Yes.”
“Which means...”
Hara'can looked up from his notes and nodded sadly. “Which means that in one of several infinities of universes, I, or one of my many versions, pushed you, or one of your versions, off a cliff.”
Toltep considered that for a moment. His grandfather approached the bell jar, mounted on a pedestal in the centre of the lab. A single round eyelet shone bright blue from the captured crystal inside.
“Come closer, Toltep.”
The boy obeyed. Hara’can activated a pair of levers in a panel next to the jar. Over their heads dozens of lenses descended from the ceiling on mechanical arms, positioning themselves in a straight line before an