By way of consolation he attempts to persuade himself that he is maligning the Eaters. He invents a culture for them. He gives himself a vision of the Eaters at prayer, inflamed with zeal and spiritual tenderness. He devises Eater poetry. He shows himself a pack of Eaters gathered at a wall on which paintings hang, and listens to their ideas of esthetics. He conjures up Eater mathematicians, scratching surds in the dust with their terrible claws. His soul floods with compassion for them. You are human, you are human, you are human, you are human, he insists, and he is ready to embrace them in brotherhood. A feeling of love overwhelms him. His consciousness swoons into the Eater world, dim, fantastic, uncertain, traversed by fiery passions, and, glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, he brings his message of love to the monsters, he delivers his Epistle to the Atrocious, and they crowd about him, thanking him for the gift of grace, clicking their fearsome teeth in gentle harmonies, blessing him for seeing the essential humanity within the nightmare flesh. In this rapture he moves serenely through the tangled tunnel-world, and at last he sees bright lights ahead, and steps leading upward, and hears a celestial chord, and a voice tells him, “Come, this is the way.” He goes up. Choirs of angels sing. He passes through an octagonal doorway and the sweetness of fresh air strikes his nostrils. Nor is this a dream, for he emerges into a meadow of plump golden grass, and his friends are all there, and Hanmer says, “You are in time to join us for the Tuning of the Darkness.”
14
The Skimmers surround him and welcome him back. All six wear the female form in his honor; they kiss him and caress him and wriggle against him. Hanmer, Ti, Bril, Serifice, Angelo, Ninameen. Serifice? Serifice. They give him no chance to ask explanations. Giggling, they bear him off to a shallow pool in the meadow’s midst, and cleanse him of the dust of the tunnel-world. Their hands are everywhere, like those of giddy harem girls. He cannot see for the splashing. Serifice? Legs twine about him. He is briefly and playfully encunted, but the union is broken before he makes a thrust. Someone explores his armpit. Someone enters his ear. “Enough!” he splutters, but they continue a while. Finally he arises, wearing an awkward erection, and clambers to shore, finding all six of them male and laughing. The spheroid is perched not far away.
“Serifice?” he blurts. “Are you Serifice?”
He pulls the slim form close. Serifice nods. There are new depths in the scarlet eyes.
Hanmer says, “Serifice, yes. Death bored him.”
“But—”
“The Tuning of the Darkness!” Ninameen cries, and they all take it up, prancing around Clay and shouting it. Even the spheroid joins the clamor. “You went too fast for me,” Clay says reproachfully. “You left me behind in that dreadful desert.” The spheroid, abashed, drops down-spectrum several phases and pivots uncomfortably on its wheel. But the gaiety of the others quickly makes such interchanges of accusation and guilt improper. Their wild dance seems to be a preparation for the coming rite, for he senses them drawing power from the earth, pulling it in clanging pulsations and wrapping their bodies with it. A roof of ionization, tingling and hissing, covers them. A succulent blue glow bleeds from the grass. As they weave their spell the Skimmers flicker from sex to sex, perhaps unable to hold their grasp while concentrating on these other things. He wanders through the group, ill at ease. The sky darkens; the sun topples as if pushed, and stars begin to burn through the cloud of buzzing electrons overhead as the day ebbs. He comes to Serifice, who is female. She moves back and forth, back and forth, treading an intricate step while never leaving a plot of ground some three feet square. Her arms describe a series of helical bends and twists. Pale sparks drip from her fingertips. “You were really dead,” he says to her. “Weren’t you?” She does not break her step. With a pretty little gasp she says, “I’ll tell you everything.” He falls into the rhythm of her movements. “Where did you go?” he demands. “What was it like? How did you find your way back?” She lifts her arms and showers him with sparks that hum and whistle against his skin. “Later,” she tells him. “I’ll offer good news of death. But now we must tune the darkness.”
“May I join the rite?”
“You have,” she says. “You have, you have, you have.”
Now comes a rush of energy from the heart of the world, a bright blue column of it rising like a Maypole in the meadow’s midst. Dazzling streamers of force hang from it; Serifice clutches one, Hanmer one, Ninameen, Ti, Bril, Angelon. The spheroid, seeming apprehensive, allows one gleaming strand to penetrate its cage. Clay hesitates a moment. Then he catches a streamer. He perceives a sensation he recognizes: that feeling of dissolving flesh that he experienced when Hanmer took him, long ago, soaring from planet to planet. But the texture of the sensation is closer and tighter now; it is altogether more intense. He is rising, he, Hanmer, Serifice, Angelon, all of them, becoming a single flame, spurting upward and funneling into the heavens, and almost instantly they are beyond Earth’s atmosphere. He sees the planet sleepily turning within him, wrapped in folds of blue fleece. A zone of daylight sweeps across it; tiny particles shimmer in that beam. The other worlds cling to the celestial spokes and swing creakingly through their duties. He longs to visit Jupiter again and surrender himself to its weighty blanket. He dreams of swimming through misty Neptune. But there are no local stops on this journey, he soon discovers. The planets zoom away and are lost in the distance, mere points in the night, then not even that. He weeps at this loss of worlds. His tears slide free and go gonging through the firmament, turning ever more rapidly, gaining in momentum, picking up kinetic grandeur, sucking energy from the roots of the galaxy as they roll across the night, and one by one they strike fire and burn with sudden brilliance. They assume the clear luminous self-sustaining blaze of suns. He has created a necklace of stars. “Yes,” Hanmer says, murmuring somewhere close. “We are here.”
They hang, the group of them, before the frozen face of the universe.
He wishes now that he had mastered astronomy. These stars bear no labels. How will he know what he visits? What is that terrible red orb, embedded in a huge expanding shell of tenuous gas? What is that fierce blue beacon, ripping space apart with its outflow of power? That clump of smoldering ash? That massy white dwarf? That throbbing orange eye? This triple sun? That cloud of speckled brilliance? “Their names,” he says. “Can you tell me?” And someone—Hanmer?—replies, “Egg, Leaf, Lip, Toad, Blood, Sea, and Stripe.” Clay says, “No. No. Their old names. Sirius, Canopus, Vega, Capella, Arcturus, Rigel, Procyon, Altair, Betelgeuse. Spica? Deneb? Aldebaran? Antares?” They give him other names, pointing excitedly with flares of energy: “Cauldron. Thin. First. Flat. Stone. Blind.” Again Clay refuses these names. He seethes with frustration. Where is he? Who are these stars? Beta Lyrae! Tau Ceti! Epsilon Aurigae! Gamma Leonis! He hangs suspended in space with the stars dangling from a dark wall before him. He can touch them; he can caress them; but he cannot name them. Here is one yellow as his own sun, but monstrous, engulfing greedy light-hours of space. Here is a planetless blue scorcher sending savage waves of siren energy into the blackness. Here is some red giant gently gathering a hundred charred worlds to its bosom. And here. And here. And here. Dead stars. Dwarf stars. Double stars. Exploding stars. Brazen stars. Timid stars. Dusty stars. Comets. Meteors. Nebulae. Motes. Moons. Here are stars that flocculate. Here are stars that do the fevered doppler-dance. Here are collapsing stars. Here are colliding stars. Where does the universe end? What is the color of the land that lies outside its walls? What language do they speak there? What wines do they drink?
The cosmos is full of discordant tones and he drifts, dazed, blown whole parsecs at a gust by the rude clangor of these jostling nameless stars. Each one sings to him in its own cluster of jangling keys. Each one creates a private set of scales. There is no harmony. There is no order. There is no reason. He is lost; he is helpless; he is stunned; he is dwarfed.
Hanmer, ever calm, says, “It is the Tuning of the Darkness now.”
Wh
ich begins. A supreme effort, difficult but necessary. Clay feels the others close about him, embracing him, mingling substances with him: this is not something that can be done by individual exertion. He lends his strength to theirs. They start to organize the stars. The clang and bang and hiss and swoosh and bong and smash of random energies broadcasting at will must be tamed. They work patiently to comb the tangled frequencies. They sort and arrange the clashing colors. They straighten the crooked vibrations and classify the clutter of sizzling radiations. The work is slow and arduous, but there is an ecstasy in it. Entropy is the enemy; we carry the war to his territory, and we prevail. There! Now the glistening rows take form! Now order comes out of chaos! It is not yet finished: fine adjustments are needed, a manipulation here, a transposition there. A few growling dissonances still creep forth. And there are backsliders; not all will hold their places, and some trickle into randomness almost as soon as they have been given their new assignments. But listen! Listen! The melodies are emerging, now! The tuning is supple and cunning; the scales are elusive but convincing, with many a plangent twang, many a slippery interval. The cosmic keyboard sings out. We are the mallets, they are the xylophone, and listen to the song! The tingling, the jingling, the trembling, the glistening: the universe moving serenely on its bearings, the cosmos in harmony.
Now he hangs enraptured before the ringing stars.
Their fire is cool. Their skins are soft. Their music is pure and clean.
And we are the sons of man, the tuners of the darkness.
He looks upon the stars and greets them. He hails Fomalhaut, Betelgeuse, Achernar, Capella, and Alphecca; Mirzan and Muliphen, Wezen and Adhara; Thuban, Pollux, Denebola, Bellatrix; Sheliak, Sulaphat, Aladfar, Markab; Muscida, Porrima, Polaris, Zaniah; Merak, Dubhe, Mizar, Alcaid. He greets El-rischa, Alnilam, Ascella, and Nunki; he strikes joy from Al-gjebha, Al-geiba, Mebsuta, Mekbuda; he sets pealing Mira, Mimosa, Mesarthim, Menkar. All the suns sing in splendid unison: Sadalmalik, Sadalsud, Sadachbia, Saq sakib alma; Regulus, Algol, Naos, Ankaa. He joins the song himself. Look, he tells them, I hover suspended here in space, I who am man born of woman, who came forth and crawled and learned to stand, I who wore gills in the womb, I who was allotted three score years and ten, I who suffered and knew pain and was alone. I stand before the stars. I coax melodies from them. I the wanderer from the sealed past, I the exile, I the victim: here I am. With my companions. With the sons of man. So am I that small? Am I that feeble? Sing! Fill the universe with thunders! Now, woodwinds, brasses, strings, percussion! Now and now and now and now!
He extends across the cosmos from wall to wall. He laughs. He roars. He fondles suns. He whistles. He sobs. He shouts his name. He exults.
And the tuned stars chime.
And Hanmer says quietly, when the moment comes, “It is done. Now we go back.”
15
“Death,” he reminds Serifice. “To tell me. You promised. All about it.”
“It was peace,” she says. “It was being empty. It was like a double sleep.”
They loll in a lake of dark honey, the seven of them. The spheroid alone is missing, having failed to return from the journey to the stars. The honey drips from great wrinkled trees whose crowns dip downward under the weight of their own elixir. It enters the Skimmers through their skins, enhancing their luminous gleam. Clay occasionally tastes a few drops; the honey makes his ears hum. All the Skimmers now are female except for Hanmer, who swims in virile circles round the borders of the lake.
Clay says, “Did you see anything there? Were you aware of anything around you?”
“Empty.”
“But you knew you existed somewhere.”
“I knew I did not exist.”
“What did you feel?”
“I felt non-feeling.”
“Can’t you be more concrete?” Clay asks, mildly exasperated. “I want to know what it was like.”
“Die and see,” Serifice suggests.
“Die and see,” Ninameen murmurs. “Die and see,” says Ti. “Die and see,” from Angelon, but from Bril, “See and die.” They all laugh. Hanmer says, “We all will die. We all will see.”
“And after a while you’ll all come back?”
“I think not,” Hanmer says lazily. “That would spoil it.”
“It is a shining kingdom,” says Serifice. “All things are there, united, as all colors unite to make white. It was a place outside all places. It was—itself. With bright walls. With whiteness. With sky that comes down past the horizon. And we were all nothing. And soon we forgot ourselves. And I was not Serifice, and they were not whoever they had been, and we glistened. And we glistened. And then I came back.”
“No,” Clay says, splashing the honey in his confusion. “I don’t believe it. Death is death, and afterward there’s nothing. The meaning of the word. The end of beingness. It isn’t a place. You weren’t anywhere.”
“Was.”
“You couldn’t have died, then,” he insists.
“Serifice died,” Hanmer tells him, floating with legs crossed.
“I died,” says Serifice. “And went. And was. And returned. And tell you of it. A place, a place, a place!”
“An illusion,” says Clay stubbornly. “Like your trips to the stars. Like your sliding into the core of the world. Like lifting the sea. You invented a death-place, and you went to it, and it pleased you. But it wasn’t death.”
“It was death,” says Serifice.
Ti and Ninameen swim closer. “You sour the honey with your quarrels,” Ti says. Ninameen says, “The solution is simple. When we go to die where Serifice died, come with us, and see it for yourself, and you’ll know the truth.”
“I’m no Skimmer,” he grumbles. “When I die, I’ll be dead, and no coming back.”
“You know this certainly?” Bril asks, with surprise.
“I believe it, is all.”
“How can you believe, when you have never been?” asks Angelon. “Serifice has been,” says Ti.
“We believe Serifice,” says Ninameen solemnly.
He is outnumbered. They debate like children. He can make no impact on their minds. This chatter of death and coming back from death leaves him tense and constricted.
“It was only a little death,” Serifice announces. “We must try the larger one eventually. He is right and I am also right: it was death, but not all of death, that I tasted. And perhaps it was not enough. To find out what death is, we must truly die. When the time comes.”
“Enough,” he says.
“Do we bore you?” Angelon asks.
“Death bored me,” says Serifice. “The little death that I had. It was beautiful, but it became boring.”
“We are beautiful,” Ninameen observes, “and perhaps we are becoming boring.”
“You don’t bore me,” he tells them. “You depress me. With talk of death. Of dying.”
“You asked,” Serifice reproaches.
“I wish I hadn’t.”
“Shall we unhave the conversation?” asks Hanmer.
Clay stares at him, bewildered. He shakes his head. He locates the source of his irritation: it is presumptuous, he decides, for these immortals to play games with death. When his own people lived always under the cruel sentence. For us it was no game. He does not like to think that the Skimmers would consider dying. Dying is incompatible with their nature; for them to die would be a breach of esthetics, a failure of natural law. Yet they toy with the idea. They dabble in mortality. They mock his transience with their offer to renounce their jeweled lives. And I love them, he realizes.
“Are you lonely among us?” Ninameen asks.
A lavender cloud slides over them. A sudden passionate rain fails, striking the surface of the honey like a deluge of bullets. Geysers of dark fluid rise and subside. During the storm no one speaks. Green lightning explodes. There is immediate thunder; and riding over its mighty sound comes what seems at first to be a cackle, but which he recognizes shortly as the weeping of Wrong
. Will I meet this troublesome deity at last? The sobbing can no longer be heard. The raindrops fall less vehemently. Puddles of shining water lie on the viscous surface of the honey-lake. The Skimmers have gathered close about him, almost protectively.
“Will you dream with us?” asks Angelon.
“What will you dream?”
“We will dream your world,” she says, smiling serenely. “Because you are lonely.”
16
He closes his eyes, and they take his hands, and they drift on the bosom of the lake, and they dream without sleeping, and he dreams with them, and they dream his world, for he is lonely.
They dream Egypt for him. They dream white-jacketed pyramids and snarling sphinxes, they dream scorpions on the hot red sand, they dream the pillars of Luxor and Karnak. They dream pharaohs. They dream Anubis and Set, Osiris, Horus, Re the falcon. They dream Lascaux and Altamira for him, the sputtering, stinking lamps of mammoth-fat, the left-handed artist rubbing his ochres on the cave wall, the herds of woolly rhinos, the sorcerer in his skins and paints. They dream him the gilded domes of Byzantium. They dream him Columbus tossing on the sea. They dream him Liberty with the sword held high in her hand. They dream him the moon, with footsteps on it, and motionless metal spiders. A grove of redwood trees; the Eiffel Tower; the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; the coral-crusted beach at St. Croix; the Bay Bridge at sunrise; the Riviera; the Bowery. They dream passenger pigeons and auks and dodos and quaggas, the aurochs and the heath hen, the moa and the mastodon. They dream lions and tigers, cats and dogs, gazelles, chipmunks, spiders, bats. They dream highways. They dream tunnels. They dream sewers. They dream subways. Benedictine and Chartreuse, cognac, bourbon, rye, and eggnog. Lincoln. Washington. Napoleon. Pontoppidan. He seizes the fragments as they float by, embraces them, releases them, reaches for the next. The flow is fertile. They dream his friends and his family, his house, his shoes. They dream Clay himself, and send him floating past himself. Stirring, tossing, purring, they hook vagrant images out of the pot and set loose many bygone things. They give him the Crusades, the movies, the New York Times, the testing grounds at Eniwetok, the Model A, the Ponte Vecchio, the Ninth Symphony, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the taste of tobacco, and the Albert Memorial. The pace intensifies. They smother him in memories. They crowd the sticky lake with pieces of the past. They are fascinated and delighted and appalled by each discovery, murmuring, what is this? and who was that? and how is this called? as they dredge. “Are you glad to see these things again?” someone whispers. “Did you think they were beyond recovery?” He moans. The dream has gone on too long.
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