by Nick Gevers
“Yes.” Brodie began to weep again, but not from despair.
“You see ahead of you your life, all the moments that led up to this moment.”
“I see it.”
“The carpet is flying you back to this room, this chair, where you are safe and relaxed and nothing can harm you.”
“Yes.”
“In a few moments, you will wake. You will be calm and rested. You will remember what happened. You will remember the tatuksha, but it will not frighten you. Because you escaped from it. And now you are here and safe.”
She played him the tape recording of their session. Brodie listened. He winced when he heard the agony in his voice.
“Does it mean anything to you?” she said. “That word, tatuksha, does it call up any memory?”
He shook his head. “In a way,” he said. “It’s like something I’ve heard before and forgotten. Or maybe something I’ve heard in a dream.”
That week, whenever Brodie lay down to sleep, the whispers were in his ears and the shadows flickered at the corners of his vision, even when his eyes were closed. It seemed to him that they were more insistent, and when he dreamed, the whispers were louder, clearer. He heard “tatuksha,” and it seemed that he heard other words, too; the shadows became faces, strange faces, not human. And yet familiar. But when he awoke he could remember none of it.
“I have to tell you,” said the hypnotist, when he came to her again, “I had never done a past- life regression before. To be honest, I’d never quite believed in it. Now I’m not sure what to do.”
“I want to try again,” Brodie said.
“First, let me tell you this: a friend of my sister’s is married to a philologist.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“He studies the development of languages through time. I asked him what language the word ‘tatuksha’ might have come from. He checked his references and found nothing.”
“What does that mean?”
She leaned across the space between their chairs and touched his hand. “It may mean it’s just a word your mind made up.”
“Not from a past life?”
“Under hypnosis, the mind wants to cooperate. Ask it for something that isn’t there, and sometimes it manufactures an answer. It’s called confabulation.”
“No,” said Brodie.
“No?”
“No. Something happened. I’m hearing other words in dreams now.”
“Tell me about them.”
“I can’t remember them when I wake up. I want to try under hypnosis.”
She frowned. “I’m worried that I might be leading you up a false trail.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’m not.”
She didn’t take him back to the tatuksha. She took him into his dreams. The shadows came and the whispers. He tried to make them clearer, struggled to hold the images in his mind’s eye, the sounds in his mind’s ear.
“Relax,” she said, “let yourself float, as if you were on a warm river, drifting slowly.”
He relaxed.
“You let the images come to you. You make no effort to focus. They just pass before your eyes. The sounds wash over you.”
“Yes.”
“What do you hear?”
“Tatuksha.”
“What else?”
“Kekkethet. Estittit.”
“What else?”
He made other sounds. She wrote them down on a pad.
“What do you see?”
“The sort-of faces. But they won’t stay still. They keep changing, flickering, dissolving.”
“In your hand is a remote control, like for a DVD player. When you click it the images pause. You can examine them.”
“Yes.”
“Do you recognize anyone?”
“Some of them are movie stars. Jimmy Carter. The Dalai Lama.”
“What do you think of Jimmy Carter?”
“A good man, kind.”
“What about the Dalai Lama?”
“The same.”
“How do you feel about the faces in your dream?”
“Good. They’re kind people. They want to help me.”
She brought him out of the trance. “I don’t know if this is helping you,” she said.
“I think it is. I feel . . . better.”
The woman looked worried. “For me, this has gone way off the map. I’m thinking I should refer you to another practitioner. Someone who does past-life regression.”
“But you don’t really believe in that,” Brodie said.
“I didn’t. Now I’m starting to.”
“Tatuksha,” the hypnotist said. “Kekkethet. Estittit.” She spoke three more words that Brodie had heard in dreams, words that they had recovered together when she had led him to revisit those dreams under hypnosis. “What do they mean to you?”
“Nothing.”
She put him under again, took him to the high place and the carpet, then flew him back beyond his mother’s womb. It was a smooth and easy ride.
“Where are you?” she said.
“I . . . I can’t describe it. A familiar place. But I can’t make it hold still. It all flows. In different directions, all at once.”
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at something.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Tatuksha.”
“What is tatuksha?”
“The place you don’t go.”
“Why don’t you go there?”
“Can’t get out.”
“Kekkethet,” she said. “Estittit.” She said the other words.
He nodded as she said them, like a man remembering.
“What do they mean?” she said.
His face brightened. “I have to die.”
She didn’t want to see him again, recommended another hypnotist. He refused to go away. He found out where she lived and came there.
“I’m frightened,” she said. She would only open the door a little and spoke through the crack.
“Of me?”
“For you.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “You have helped me. I need you to help me just a little more.”
“Help you how?”
“To get out of the hole.”
Her living room was messy but the chair was comfortable. He closed his eyes and her voice came to him through the darkness. He knew she was worried, frightened even, but she strove to keep her tone calm and assured. “You look up and see the white dot.”
“Yes.” It hung above him, very far, unreachable, but he was confident now, the sadness fading.
“It’s the way out of tatuksha.”
“Yes.”
“Look down at your feet, see the flying carpet.”
“I see it.”
“It is a good carpet, a strong carpet. You have faith in it.”
He felt it, soft beneath his stocking feet. It was worn in places, yet strong. “Yes.”
“Now it lifts you up, toward the white dot.”
“Yes.” It pressed against his soles. He began to ascend.
“The dot grows larger.”
It grew to the size of a winter’s full moon, then became gibbous as in autumn. “Yes.”
“It is the way out of tatuksha.”
“Yes.” The light from the glowing circle grew brighter and now it was warm on his head and shoulders. He raised his hand and felt its gentle heat on his upturned palms. It was nearer now, wider than he was.
Her voice dwindled in his hearing. “Almost free now. Then the carpet will fly you back to this room, back to where you are safe.”
“No,” Brodie said. “Not here. Here is tatuksha.”
“Safety,” she said. He heard her trying to keep her voice calm, trying to bring him back. “Here is safety.”
“No,” he said. His eyes opened. He was looking at her, across the small space between their chairs, a space that was now growing immense; at the same time he was looking up into the warm
glow. The woman, the chairs, the room were all trapped now in a dwindling circle of fading light, falling into the surrounding shadows, becoming shadows. He saw her tiny shadow- head jerk back, and he supposed she must have been startled by what she was seeing in his eyes, seeing the reflected glow of his destination. Perhaps she even felt its warmth, radiating from him, spilling into lonely, cold tatuksha.
“What is happening?” He heard the alarm in her voice, though now it came to him as barely more than a whisper.
“It is all right,” he said, closing his eyes again. He felt sad for her, left behind in the shadows. But it could not be helped. “I must go now.”
“Where? Where are you going?”
“To Estittit,” he said. The light bathed him, warm as cream. It flowed over him, through him. The voices that had been whispers in his dreams were clearer now, stronger, full of surprise and joy, familiar. The shadow motions were forming into fluid patterns, flowing in ways he now remembered.
“Where is Estittit?” came the hypnotist’s fading whisper from below.
“Home,” he breathed.
There was a coroner’s inquest. The past- life regression aspect of the story caused a brief sensation in the media and a longer one in the blogosphere. But the verdict of death by natural causes eventually tamped down the tumult.
The tabloids and cable news services spread the hypnotist’s name widely. Notoriety was no longer fame’s ugly stepsister; now they were twins. Celebrities consulted her. Her practice grew. She learned to live with it.
The entity that had been Brodie became itself again. It was a long process, shedding the gray ash of tatuksha, but there was infinite time to rediscover the subtleties of the eight thousand effulgences, each with its five thousand tints and tones. One by one, or in clusters, it regained its one hundred and eight senses, until it could be invited once more into the great sympathic dance.
The entity roiled and insinuated itself among the multiforms, now cohering to the richness of the center, now arabesquing out to the filigreed edges. It embraced and was embraced by the Host, penetrating even as it was penetrated, swallowing that which swallowed it. It sang the endless song, the grand harmony ever dissolving, ever reforming, only to dissolve and reform again.
It reposed in bliss. But always it kept, in a pocket that was not really a pocket, a small fragment of the poor, tiny thing it had been when it had become Brodie. And sometimes, when it passed by—or through, or around, or overunder—a newly forming node, it would reveal the cold, sad cinder and then it would make the terrified new entity promise never, ever, to go near tatuksha.
A Waterfall of Lights
Ian Watson
Two summers earlier, of a Friday evening, Roderick and Nancy and Nick and I had a beer- fueled discussion in one of the snug rooms in the Eagle and Child, where Tolkien used to meet up with his Oxford author chums. A chinwag about the possible existence of alien civilizations.
The Bird and Baby, as it’s known to the locals, was serving a green guest ale, something I’d never encountered before. By “green” I don’t mean that it was an ecologically worthy beer produced not too far distantly from organic ingredients, but that it was almost grass-green in hue. This brew turned out to be made from young unroasted hops, hence the color. Surprisingly tasty and refreshing it was too. Green beer led to the notion of little green men visiting Earth to sup it, although of course our ale might make them sick due to their alien biology.
Nick dearly wished that fellow astronomers would stop wasting time on the search for extraterrestrial life.
“Microbial life’s fairly likely elsewhere in our galaxy, but as for anything more complex: forget it!”
Because, you see, complex intelligent life on planet Earth was the result of a long series of lucky accidents . . .
“If the sun were in a more crowded part of the sky, supernovas or gamma bursts would have sterilized the world repeatedly—”
If there’d been “bad Jupiters” orbiting nearer to the sun or more eccentrically, forget any planet Earth at all. Early random collisions gave us our spin axis and our length of day—yet without a moon the hefty size of our Earth’s tilt angle would wander, hopelessly destabilizing climate.
“What’s more, our sun’s a quarter richer in heavy metals than other nearby stars, hence Earth’s iron core—”
—which caused our vital strong magnetic field.
Earth could so easily have become a hell of heat like Venus, or alternatively a permanent iceball—although without massive glaciations, higher plants and animals might never have evolved.
If there hadn’t been the right proportion of land to water! If there hadn’t been continental drift! If this had not happened thus. If that had not chanced to occur. A list as long as your arm. Every single condition needed to be fulfilled.
“Including a mighty impact wiping out the dinosaurs?” prompted my Nancy.
Nick shook his half-bald head. “No, some dinos might have evolved intelligence, so we could have had Saurus sapiens instead of Homo sapiens.”
“But not speaking Latin,” she teased. “I suppose Saurus sapiens would have drunk green beer. Them being mainly green in pictures.”
“Nobody knows what color—” He broke off, well aware of her sense of mischief. “I’ll grant you,” he resumed, “that the same long lucky streak might have happened in some other galaxy far away. But as for our own there’s unlikely to be anything as complicated as a crab out there.” Nick was partial to eating soft-shelled crabs for starters at the Vietnamese restaurant. “The real question isn’t where are the aliens, because they simply aren’t—but where are the A.I.s? Where are the artificial intelligences, eh?”
“But we haven’t made any yet,” said Roderick, whose own field was ophthalmology. “Surely we haven’t? Ah, are you meaning A.I.s created by actual aliens many galaxies away from us? Yet a few billion years ago, so that by now they’ve had ample time to replicate over vast distances?”
Roderick liked to keep up with a whole range of popular science beyond his specialty, practiced at the Nuffield lab within the John Radcliffe Hospital up in Headington where he was a consultant. We all did so. My Nancy wasn’t just a pretty face gracing admin at the Botanic Garden; she had her degree in plant sciences. And I directed the School of Geography and the Environment, though never let it be said that geographers play second fiddle in the science orchestra! We’d all been close since we were undergraduates a couple of decades earlier, obviously Nancy and I the more so. Maybe Nick was the purest scientist, in a sense.
“What I mean,” said Nick, “is where are the A.I.s from the parent cosmos of ours—presuming that we budded off from a previous cosmos.”
And Nick treated us to the explanation that an artificial intelligence would by definition be immortal—as well as able to redesign and enhance itself in due course into something godlike; and the A.I. would have one goal for sure, namely survival, which must include surviving the death of the universe it arose in . . .
“Consequently A.I.s from previous cycles of existence must have passed through into our own universe, and after fourteen billions years they’ve had plenty of time to spread everywhere and manipulate on a grand scale if they care to.”
“Maybe they don’t care to?” said Nancy. “If intelligent life’s so rare, maybe our galaxy’s a nature reserve set aside for us?”
Nick snorted. “Along with all of observable space? True, there seems to be something very big indeed that’s tugging from beyond the observable boundary—”
“A.I. HQ?” I quipped.
“Tom, how would they know anything about us unless they already visited? In which case they’d surely leave at least one clone A.I. hereabouts to observe developments. Anyway, nothing can have visited us from beyond the observable boundary. That’s the whole point of a boundary—even light hasn’t time to visit.”
“Maybe they use short cuts, Nick,” said Roderick slyly.
“It’s ridiculous to imagine an entire
universe being cordoned off for the sake of one inhabited world, which might be snuffed out any old time by a big asteroid hitting us! Or whatever disaster. Why bother to do so, in any case? Your trouble, Rod, is that you always extend things to absurdity. Or reduce them.”
“An extending rod or a reducing rod,” Roderick mused.
“I believe there are rods in the eyes,” I said.
“Rods gobble up light, thus we see at night,” Roderick rhymed. “We can spot a single candle seventeen miles away.”
“Surely not,” I said. “I don’t believe that.”
“We could carry out an experiment,” Roderick said merrily. “How about if we all take a holiday somewhere without any light pollution, say in tents in the middle of the Sahara desert?”
“Why would anyone want to see a candle seventeen miles away?” asked Nancy. “And how about all the Saharan starlight? Isn’t that brighter than candles?”
“And where,” said Nick, “are the A.I.s from the grandparent of our present universe, and from its grandparent? Given an infinite succession of universes, A.I.s that tunneled through from one universe to a successor universe ought to be here.”
I wondered what Tolkien would have made of this discussion in his snug. Maybe he’d have begun trying to invent an alien language . . . And would he have approved of green beer for Hobbits?
“Maybe the tunneling bit is too difficult?” suggested Nancy, twirling a golden lock.
“For biological life, yeah. But for immortal information—?”
Nick’s mobile rang, tootling a theme from Holst’s Jupiter.
“There’s been a gamma ray burst in—well, the galaxy only has a catalogue number,” he apologized, draining his glass speedily.
“When would that have been?” asked Nancy. “A billion years ago?”
“More like four. Um, billion.”
“Ah, the urgencies of astrophysics.”
His mobile tootled again, and now he was apologizing to his wife Lucy. He would just take a quick squint at the data, then be home for dinner. No, he hadn’t forgotten that Lucy’s mother was visiting. Shrugging, Nick departed into the leafy avenue of plane trees that was St. Giles.