by John Grant
She was in her cottage, where the walls shone whitely as if they loathed her. The sunshine coming in through the windows seemed to her like an intrusion as it washed across the cork tiles someone else had put down.
Six years had gone. Six years of her life. Her father had died. The world wasn't the same one she'd left: the first thing she'd noticed, when they'd taken her out of the hospital, was the way the cars had changed.
She still heard the chord, but now it was hurting her.
On the bed, staring at the ceiling with her hands behind her head, watching the shifting pattern of the sunlight filtered through the wind-wafted branches of the tree outside. Reaching one hand up into the air, clawing at the emptiness, feeling the subtle touch of the chord lapping at her fingertips.
They didn't want to know her any more, those far-too-kind people at the hospital. She was out. She was no longer their concern.
Her arm seemed to extend itself so that now she was touching the ceiling: it was cold and white and sent a shiver through her. Her frosty feet seemed to be a long way away, despite the warmth of her pajamas. She pulled the quilt over her shoulders and turned onto her left side, snuggling down under the coarse cotton, hoping for sleep and for a return to the world she'd left.
~
There was a single string, you see, and I touched it. As soon as I touched it the string started to vibrate, which wasn't what I'd intended it to do, because all I'd meant was to find out what it felt like. (If you really want to know, it felt like a length of badly knotted wire.) But the damned thing twitched under my finger-touch, and before even I could know it there was a chord sounding throughout all of the emptinesses I'd created. The string wasn't a part of me, not a part of Qinmeartha, not a part of Qinme the Maker: someone who came before me must have left it behind.
~
This time she woke naturally and giggled at the whiteness of her pillow. It was late in the day, and so she switched on her bedside lamp, even though she didn't need the extra light. She pulled on clothes she'd never worn before and stumbled to the bathroom for a pee and a cleaning-of-the-teeth. Her face in the mirror was a face in the mirror: she washed it thoroughly and went back to bed.
She couldn't sleep, now.
The pattern of light on the ceiling was just another way the chord she'd heard for six years could be expressed. It was as if someone had taken a single breve and cut it up into an infinite number of parts, each of them shining in a different shade, then projected the result as a flowing movement of sparkling yellow colors.
For six years she'd heard the chord, but now she couldn't conjure up even its remotest trace in her mind. All she could do was see a pale representation of it on the ceiling.
The district nurse arrived, was admitted, and examined her. She was a little underweight, she was told, for her height, and the level of cholesterol in her blood was not as good as it could have been.
The district nurse left, and bed still seemed the best place to be. She rolled over onto her back and felt the comfort of the mattress pushing at her shoulderblades. With the departure of the nurse the ceiling had become a light gray. She wanted to go back to sleep again, but found she still couldn't. She tilted her legs over the edge of the bed and, blindly, found her slippers with her feet. A moment or so later she was upright, groping through the gloomy room.
All she had was a tenor recorder. It had been bought by her father for her to play at school, but somehow or other she'd never got round to it.
She felt the brown plastic and blew a shaky note. The sound was hideous – like a valkyrie's shriek.
Then she put her fingers over the holes and blew more gently, producing a low sound that pleased her as it resonated through the empty rooms of her cottage. She grinned to herself in the darkness and blew the same note again. There was a whale in the distance, trying to speak with her in its sad monotone. The echoes of its chant filled her ears until she could hear nothing else.
She threw the recorder away from her as hard as she could, so that it broke against the wall, the mouthpiece sintering away into the wine-like darkness of the shadows by the door.
The note would have been a pleasure, a delight, an object of desire before.
Now it was somehow ... inadequate. She'd heard the chord that represented the universe, and her body had acknowledged its purity. She could still feel the maze of the intertwined notes as a concrete structure that had built itself within her while she had been away ... wherever she'd been. That was it. It had been a feeling, almost like the sensation of pain, rather than something merely heard. The chord had become a part of her and she a part of it; for the rest of her life she would be a dual entity, made up of not only the her that had existed before the car had hit her but also the solid thing the universe had decided to construct within her.
In bed again, she found she was sucking her thumb. For a moment she tried to pull it out of her mouth, thinking bitter thoughts about her childishness. Then she left it where it was and crossed a warm and tranquil sea into sleep.
~
People call me a creator – or even The Creator – but that isn't really the truth of it. Somebody – something – created me long after she/he/it had created the universe. A universe of galaxies and stars and planets, all working together in an infinite and infinitely elaborate pirouette. But it was a dance without music. The one who/which came before me had been able to generate nothing but a great ocean of sterility.
She/he/it left a string behind for me to touch.
Then she/he/it created me so that I could touch that string.
I speak in metaphors, of course. The string is not just a vastly long piece of catgut or steel encircling the universe. In a way, it is the universe: it is the universe's soul. And it wasn't a finger I touched to the string-that-isn't-a-string: it was my self. Only once I had set the string-that-isn't-a-string into vibration did the universe become what it is now.
The galaxies and stars and planets that I inherited aren't important any longer. How can I explain this? Let's use another metaphor. Here's a question for you: which would you prefer to own, a cow or a byre? The answer's easy: both. But if you had to choose between one and the other, you'd go for the cow, because the byre's no use on its own whereas the cow could probably struggle along without the byre. When I was put into the universe it was nothing more than a byre, you see, but then I touched the string-that-isn't-a-string and it started to vibrate.
Then I was the proud owner of not just a byre but also a cow to put in it.
I had what you'd have wished for: both.
So in that sense I guess it's OK for you to describe me as The Creator.
But only in that sense.
The woman you see down there, half-tucked into her bed – she knows all of this, but she's keeping the knowledge well hidden away from herself: it's a piece of understanding which she doesn't want to belong to. She's heard the sound I created when I touched the string-that-isn't-a-string, and forever she'll know what that chord is without being able to pull it into the front of her mind.
Or, at least, I think so.
~
The dark eyes open and the ceiling is pinkish green in the reluctant light of the dawn. She stretches herself on the bed, so that it feels as if her body is a million miles long. She spreads her legs until they're a million miles apart, and then does the same with her arms, so that her hands and her feet are exposed to the chilliness of the morning while the she that is herself is still warmed by the cocoon of her quilt.
The cocoon of her guilt.
A silly word-play – yes, she realizes this, but at the same time she recognizes its accuracy. She does feel guilt – guilt that somehow she's managed to cheat everybody else by traveling six years into the future without having paid for her ticket. She's fifteen, except for the fact that she's twenty-one. She has a family – well, at least a father who loves her – except for the fact that she doesn't. Right now, if she hadn't been hit by that car, she would have a parent comforting he
r rather than just the district nurse being professionally sympathetic twice a day. She never wanted to incur this guilt, but it seems to her that somehow she's done so.
A moment later she's on her hands and knees, smelling the comforting staleness of the carpet. If the bloody district bloody nurse could see her now she'd be in a place of misery politely titled by polite people an Institution.
She touches her tongue against a tuft, feeling its unpleasantness.
Enough.
Coffee?
Tea?
She doesn't relish either, but she feels she ought to be doing something constructive, like making herself hot drinks she doesn't want and drinking them even though she doesn't wish to.
She lurches through to the kitchen, wondering if there's a music shop in the area that might be able to sell her a harpsichord.
~
She lets her fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages and over the buttons of her telephone. (Buttons! Telephones usually had dials when she fell asleep.) At last she finds a place in Chagton that doesn't have a harpsichord but can at least offer her an autoharp, which is a lot cheaper and could be persuaded to produce the same sort of effect. She explains why she needs the instrument and the man on the telephone tells her it would be good if she could pay in cash, rather than by cheque.
She remembers to dress before she goes to the bank.
The cheapest of the autoharps is £39.99, so that is the one she buys. Her return fare on the bus has cost her £6.30 and she is stuck in Chagton for four hours with very little to do and very little money to do it with. She has an early lunch at a bad and unlicensed café called – incredibly – Ye Olde Tea Shoppe: a leathery omelette with a side-serving of ambiguous-looking mushrooms, which latter she wisely decides to leave. Then, with her heavy and uncomfortably shaped brown-paper parcel under her arm, she visits the local church because there's nothing else to do.
The place is tiny – Chagton is only a village, after all – and it smells of a mixture of must and children's urine. It is almost unbelievably silent, as if someone had deliberately shut off the noise of the traffic outside. On the walls are bad portraits of medieval saints, their faces turned bilious by the polychromatic light scattered across them by the stained-glass windows.
She smiles at the portraits.
She smiles as she kneels before the altar, placing the packaged autoharp in front of her, so that it's no longer clear to whom she's praying.
Hours pass.
She catches the bus home and endures an hour and a half of a visiting Spanish student shouting at full bellow into her left ear, but she doesn't mind because at last she's beginning to understand the right notes, and their intensities, that can be put together to create the chord she remembers. A harpsichord would have been better, she reflects, but an autoharp will do just what I want it to. A piano would have been wrong, as would a clavichord. No, I can put picks on my fingers and pluck the strings of the harp until it produces the sound I demand of it.
The stop is close to her cottage. She gives the driver a polite "thank you" as she clambers down onto the pavement, smiling at him as he drives away.
She's fifteen.
No, she's not. She's twenty-one.
The driver carries the memory of her dark-eyed smile for precisely seventeen minutes and forty-six seconds, because that's when he has to stop next, and the woman who buys a ticket from him wipes away everything.
She's twenty-one and the fucking sticky tape won't break. In the end she gets the sharp knife from the kitchen and attacks the tape like a thuggee, cutting it into little pieces with a gleeful malevolence. She tears away the brown paper, feeling its rough edges cutting her fingers, to expose the false ebony of the autoharp. She runs her right hand over the strings, and finds that they're massively out of tune.
Off to the garage to fetch the pliers.
Off to the bedroom to fetch the tuning-fork.
It takes a while, but now she has an autoharp that's properly tuned.
She puts the picks on her fingers, so that it looks as if her hand has become an offensive weapon: she can pluck at the strings of an autoharp or she can pluck at the strings of someone's throat. The instrument lies in her lap, quiescent, a box at her mercy. It regards her blackly.
She holds up her armored hand.
~
Despite what the priests say, I'm not really a pretentious person. (Of course, I'm not a person at all, but that's by the by. It's very difficult learning how to be an individual rather than a person, but over the billennia you get used to it.) I'd prefer to be loved rather than worshiped by the multitudes of creatures that were brought into existence, on their different worlds or drifting through space in the warm gas clouds, when I touched the string-that-isn't-a-string. In fact, if I were given the choice again, I'd leave the string-that-isn't-a-string alone. It was a trap left for me by the she/he/it that was here before me. She/he/it must have giggled at my anticipated predicament, before she/he/it brought about my omnipresence.
Can you remember your own birth? Almost certainly not: very few people retain anything more than recurring dreams of struggling through claustrophobic damp passages. But I can remember my birth quite clearly – that's one of the advantages of not being a person. First I was not. Then, an instant later, I was. It was as simple as that. I was everywhere and I knew everything, and I could feel the sound of the stars as they went sadly and emptily in their courses. It was their sorrow which moved me to touch the string-that-isn't-a-string, so that I gave them purpose.
Who was the she/he/it that went before me? On the world where the woman sits with the autoharp, they describe the she/he/it as a fallen angel, but that cannot be right: there are no angels, because I decided I had no need for them. The humans have created angels in their own minds. I have often wondered if, after all this time, it might be fun to create some angels to surround me, but the effort seems hardly worth it.
I can do a lot, but not everything at once.
It would be nice if I could discover who she/he/it was.
It would be nice if I'd never brushed the string-that-isn't-a-string, because then I wouldn't have to worry about the creatures that send their prayers to me.
Prayers I can't respond to, however much I'd like to.
All I hear is the agony of suffering people, and there's nothing I can do to ameliorate their pain.
To tell you the truth, it doesn't keep me awake at nights. They create their own pain – it's nothing to do with me. I'd like to help, of course, but in all honesty it's none of my business. All I did was touch the string-that-isn't-a-string, and listen to the sound it made. I just unwittingly started life off on its course. Sentience was an accident I couldn't have predicted – if I'd known that such a thing could exist outside myself I'd have stayed well clear of the string-that-isn't-a-string. Although I've come to the point where I can revel in the pain of a sentient creature, my pleasure hurts me.
Soon I will die.
It is a comfort to be aware of that.
~
She will plunge her hand down and create a chord. That first time it will make a sound so disagreeable her lips will curl in distaste. The second time it will be little better.
The third time it will be different. The chord won't be quite right, but there'll be something about it that she finds reminiscent of the one she heard during the years she was away from herself. Maybe it would be better if she amended the C# to a straight C, or ...
She'll experiment for a while, you know, until she gets it right.
Mouse
All of the doors in the complex suddenly plunged to the ground, like the blades of an array of guillotines. Makreed, the botanist, had been just about to step through one of them, and he watched with astonishment in the split second before the light failed as the front of his foot was pulverized. He staggered back, wondered briefly why it was he felt no pain, then fainted.
A while later he swam back to consciousness – experiencing as he always did a
fter fainting the sensation that somebody was scrubbing his face both inside and out with lukewarm carbonated water. He lay on his back for a few seconds, seeing nothing but a swirling pattern of light that seemed to have no purpose to it, speculating about where in the universe he might be.
The pain from his foot brought the memory back and he screamed.
His entire right leg was an edifice of pain. Intellect told him that the source of the agony was the wreckage at the leg's end, but he was unable to distinguish it from the rest. Quite separate from the sensation of pain he could sense that somebody – who? – was manipulating in some way what was left of his foot. In the depths of his struggling mind he knew he'd been maimed for life – although at the same time there was a cooler voice inside him telling him his foot could be restored, if only he could get himself to a chirurgeon in time.
A new sensation, one he could tell apart from the rest: a throbbingly tight pressure at the back of his knee. In a way it hurt worse than the pain.
"Hi there, Makreed," said a soft voice.
He didn't recognize it, and so as a matter of principle he screamed again. If this was the afterlife the succeeding Incarnate Ones so often and so solemnly promised their people, he, Makreed, had just decided he wanted nothing to do with it. Too much pain. Perhaps he was doomed to spend all the rest of eternity suffering from the anguish of the blow that had definitely killed him.
He noticed that the effort of screaming temporarily took his mind off the pain, so he did it again.
"Shut up, please," said the voice. "This place echoes, you know. You're deafening me. I'm having enough difficulty bandaging up your goddam foot without having to cope with punctured eardrums."
Makreed controlled himself. It wasn't as easy as he'd thought it would be. His shoulders twisted, the muscles around the base of his neck tightening, as he pulled the new scream back into himself.
Think of something else. Distract yourself. At least now you know you're not dead.
He tried to recall which member of the team had been immediately behind him just before the doors had closed. That person must have been fairly close to him, because the chambers down here were quite small. His recollections were muzzy; his visual memory had never been up to much, and at the moment all the pictures in his mind kept crumpling out of existence before they'd properly formed. But he knew it must have been a woman behind him – he could tell as much from the sound of her voice as she worked on his foot. Bandaging it, as she'd said. She must have applied a tourniquet around his knee, or perhaps she was just pressing down on the blood-vessel with her thumb.