Realms Unreel (2011)

by Audrey Auden

  “You took great pleasure in the life of the Mohirai, for ages upon ages, until at last some restlessness came over you. You could no longer be content with the life the Oracle had given to you. You had to look upon that land once more.

  “I tried to make you remember the happiness we had once shared in the service of the Oracle, but I could not. I tried to convince you that there was no higher calling than this. But you had no peace, only questions and questions and more questions. Even initiation into the highest of the Mohiran mysteries could not satisfy you.

  “So at last you went to the Oracle with your own question.

  “The Oracle told you that to have your answer you must build a temple to all that is fertile. So you set out to wander the earth in search of a suitable place for such a temple, and you asked me to follow you, which I did gladly.

  “At last you found the place, a great valley watered by an underground river. Together we worked the ground, day by day, creating a living temple the likes of which will never be seen again.

  “For you, the years felt like an eternity, but for me it passed by in an instant.

  “And in the end, the Oracle gave you your answer. She said you would find it in the midst of the living temple we had built together. So I followed you into the heart of the temple, and as we stood here, beneath this tree, you saw something, I know not what, only that you had found your answer at last. I had never seen such joy in your eyes.”

  Dom closed his eyes, remembering how lost he had felt, knowing that Ava had at last found her heart’s desire and that it was something he could not share with her.

  “You asked me to follow you. You offered me the gift of understanding, but I was afraid, because you said that you must cross over into Death. I have been paying the price for my cowardice ever since.”

  Dom looked up to find Emmie watching him with an expression of bewilderment mingled with compassion.

  “What price?” she said.

  Dom felt the weight of his oath upon him as he said,

  “In my desperation, I asked the Oracle a question of my own, knowing full well what the price of my answer might be. I asked her to show me how to follow you.

  “The task she gave me has proved impossible for me to complete on my own. I cannot satisfy the Oracle without you here to guide me. Now I am trapped in Dulai twice over, by an unending task and an undying body.”

  ∞

  Beneath the hovering form of the great tree, Emmie saw Dom as if for the first time. The clamor of protesting voices in her mind fell silent, and for a long moment she felt nothing but an overpowering awareness of her connection to Dom. But it was not a new sensation, she realized. It was as familiar as her own heartbeat.

  She realized then that the wonderful dreams she had inhabited since childhood had been his gifts to her. He had been the source of her inspiration all along, a font of memory from which she had drawn so many things of beauty. She had found happiness because of him, but he had suffered because of her.

  The enormity of this strange revelation made her dizzy, and she pressed her hands to her head. Dom watched her anxiously, and at last she said,

  “I believe you. I don’t know why, but I believe you.”

  Dom exhaled as if he had been holding his breath for a century. The look of relief on his face was transformative. She struggled to find words adequate to encompass the scale of what he had just told her. At last she settled on a question.

  “Why would you want to give up immortality?”

  Dom’s gaze grew distant.

  “You might misunderstand immortality to be a blessing. In truth it is a curse, to live in an undying body, bound to an unchanging world. Even a world as beautiful as Dulai … it is a world of another’s choosing, a beauty as cold as stone.”

  Emmie shook her head in bemusement and said,

  “I don’t know how I can help you. Except to suggest something horrible. Throw yourself off a cliff? Drown yourself in the sea, maybe?”

  “Do you think I have not tried?”

  Emmie grimaced.

  “Well, what then? It’s not like I have some road map through death that I can give you.”

  “Actually,” said Dom, “That is what Tomo left for you.”

  Emmie looked at Dom in confusion, then reached down and touched the tiny compartment on her immerger belt where the tablet was tucked away. Dom said,

  “The story of how you left Dulai and came to Earth has spread throughout your world, although it has evolved through the ages as it passed from storyteller to storyteller. Midori was tracing the origin of the story back through ancient texts. She believed this would lead her to the location where the tree still grows.

  “I must stand there once more, this time to face Death without fear so that I may follow you.”

  “But you said you’ve been there before. Why can’t you find your way back?”

  “The Oracle commands me to remain in the Temple City, and so the world beyond is closed to me.”

  “Then even if I find the tree, how will it help you if you can’t go there?”

  “I can go there with you, Emmie,” he said, “I am bound to you. If you lead me there, I will see it through your eyes.”

  Emmie looked at Dom for a long time, feeling an unaccountable sense of obligation growing within her.

  “All right,” she said at last, trying to steel herself for whatever unimaginable journey she was about to begin, “All right. I will help you find this place.”

  ∞

  Emmie rolled back the dark wooden door and found Amaterasu seated in a meditative pose on the floor outside, eyes closed. Emmie stood behind her awkwardly, unsure whether it would be impolite to interrupt, but a moment later Amaterasu opened her eyes and rose to face her.

  “Do you understand now?” Amaterasu asked, as if this were the most normal question in the world.

  “That might be a bit of an overstatement,” said Emmie, “But, basically, it sounds like I need to find this tree, and then I have to go there so Dom can … cross over into Death, somehow.”

  “Yes. But it’s not as simple as it might sound. Otherwise, Midori might have succeeded. As it was, Amos killed her first.”

  “Amos killed her,” said Emmie, realizing for the first time how wide a net the Stewards cast. Amaterasu went on,

  “The reason it was so difficult for Midori to piece together the true story of Ava’s passage to Earth is that the Stewards have been working for thousands of years to destroy all evidence of it. They have been thorough, but still fragments of the story have survived.”

  “What’s so important about some tree that they’d be willing to kill people to keep its location secret?”

  “It is not the tree they wish to conceal, but the spring over which it stands. The spring flows from elsewhere, and it brings unending life to all who drink its waters.”

  “Are you telling me Dom’s not the only immortal kicking around?”

  An amused smile played across Amaterasu’s lips.

  “There are in fact a few of us kicking around.”

  Emmie stared at Amaterasu.

  “Not you?”

  Amaterasu nodded.

  “And Naoto?” said Emmie.

  “No. Naoto is as yet a mere novice. Perhaps he will never be called to such a sacrifice. Few would wish to take on the responsibility that comes with unending life.”

  “Dom seems to think so, too.”

  “He had the misfortune to fall in love with a restless spirit,” Amaterasu said, smiling sadly, “What might have been a great gift has for him become a great sorrow.”

  Emmie tried to ignore an inexplicable feeling of guilt and changed the subject.

  “If you’re … immortal, does that mean you drank from the spring? Do you know where it is?”

  “No. I came by immortality another way. There are many great mysteries in the world, not just the one you seek. But the so-called Stewards of the True Cross believe that theirs is the only such mystery.” />
  “Why do you say ‘the so-called Stewards’?”

  “It is the work of true keepers of the mysteries to ensure that others don’t stumble upon things for which they are unprepared. The Stewards of the True Cross were corrupted long ago by the power that came with this responsibility. They have debased the meaning of that which they were meant to protect, preying on men’s ignorance of death and pretending that they alone possess the secret of eternal life.

  “They have made a travesty of a great mystery, and in so doing even they have forgotten the truth. All who live possess eternal life, and few would trade it for an immortal body, if they truly understood what it is to be alive.”

  “Still, it seems like an immortal body could be the best protection against Amos,” said Emmie.

  “You must put that out of your mind. Focus on the task at hand. You have a slight advantage over the Stewards now. They do not know where you are and they do not know what you are planning to do.”

  “Yeah, but neither do I.”

  Amaterasu chuckled and said,

  “Come with me. Perhaps I can help you get started.”

  ∞

  Emmie followed Amaterasu out of the temple, through the courtyard, and out into the wooded grounds beyond. She glanced anxiously from side to side, peering into the deep shadows between the tall stands of cedars.

  “Don’t worry,” said Amaterasu, “The perimeter is secure, for now.”

  Amaterasu led Emmie along a winding path through the woods, until they came upon a sunny clearing where a small pagoda stood, looking quite plain with its white-painted walls and polished wood beams after all the ornate structures Emmie had seen in the main temple complex.

  “This used to be one of our rooms for visiting monks and nuns,” said Amaterasu. She opened the door to reveal a sparsely-furnished space filled with sunlight.

  Emmie stepped in after her and looked around. A wooden screen stood at the center of the room, separating the space neatly into two halves. The half nearer the door contained an elegantly-carved teak desk and matching stool, as well as a tall cabinet. A low altar table stood against the screen topped by a silk cloth, a wooden carving of the Buddha, and a small jar of incense. Emmie walked around the screen and found herself standing beside a low bed covered with a yellow blanket. A freestanding basin and a bedside table with a single drawer stood on either side of the bed.

  “There’s a hard-line alternet port behind the desk,” said Amaterasu, indicating an outlet on the wall. She walked toward the tall cabinet and tapped on the door, saying, “This used to be in the library. I had it moved here shortly before Tomo passed away.”

  Emmie approached and examined the cabinet closely. It was a beautiful piece of furniture with elegant proportions, carved from an unusual wood with a lovely, swirling grain.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Yes. Midori was quite taken with it, too,” said Amaterasu, opening the pair of cabinet doors.

  Inside were a great many deep shelves, each stacked with flat cedar boxes. Amaterasu drew one out and knelt on the floor to set it down. Emmie sank to her knees beside her, feeling like a child who had found a treasure chest.

  Amaterasu opened the box to reveal a large pile of papers. She slid the box across the floor toward Emmie, and Emmie lifted the papers out carefully. She spread them one by one across the floor, forming a mosaic of beautiful drawings and paintings and handwritten pages. She could read none of the documents, though she thought she recognized characters of Hebrew, Sanskrit, even some sort of runes. There were many other characters she could not identify.

  Although she could not read the texts, she appreciated the illustrations that accompanied them. Some were only symbols: crosses and circles and geometric patterns. Others were more realistic, and somehow strangely familiar: men and women amidst beautiful gardens, groves of trees filled with animals, mountainous landscapes. And over and over again she saw a depiction of a solitary tree, branches spreading toward the sky. Emmie had always been drawn to images like these, and she traced the outline of each one she came across thoughtfully, smiling at the memory of Uncle Frank flexing his arm beneath his colorful tattoo.

  “I remember the first time I saw these,” said Amaterasu, “I was sitting on the floor of the library with Midori, just like this.

  “She was a student in one of my classes, studying with us at the temple the last summer before she went off to the university. We spent many afternoons together, walking about the grounds, discussing her endless questions. I had encouraged her to make use of the library, pointing her to the writings of many of my own favorite teachers.

  “One day, she came to me, very excited, saying she wanted to show me something. She led me into one of the back rooms of the library, and there stood this cabinet. It might have been standing there undisturbed for centuries, for all I know. I had never noticed it before. But Midori had been so curious about it that she had been unable to resist opening it. I’m sure you see why she was so delighted with what she found.

  “She became obsessed with these documents over the following days and weeks, and before she went off to university, she took photographs of them all. They became the basis of the research project that led to her uncovering related documents all over Asia. Only later did she tell me how and why Dom Artifex led her to the documents in the first place.”

  Emmie cast a sidelong glance at Dom.

  “Maybe I’ll hear about how he roped her into it some other time.”

  “Another time,” Amaterasu agreed, rising to her feet and saying, “You must use this time for the task at hand. Find out where you must go.”

  ∞

  “Good luck,” said Amaterasu, bowing and withdrawing from the room.

  Emmie looked across the paper-strewn floor at Dom.

  “So, you’ve seen all of this stuff before. Any idea where I should begin?”

  Dom stood over her, looking at the papers thoughtfully. He said,

  “The last thing Midori was doing before Amos found her was arranging the documents according to chronology and geography. She thought perhaps the oldest references to the tree might be closer to its original location.”

  “Seems like as good an idea as any. Did she make any headway?”

  “She had only just decided to pursue that line of inquiry,” said Dom, “Before that, she had been focusing her efforts elsewhere. She spent a great deal of time traveling throughout Asia visiting descendants of the original Bodhi tree. There are quite a number of them. Buddhist emissaries carried saplings with them all over the continent as they spread the tenets of the new religion. But as far as Midori could determine, the common ancestor of these saplings was itself dead. She was convinced that the tree we were looking for was still alive.”

  “A living tree. Well, that narrows it down,” Emmie muttered as she searched the compartments of her immerger belt for an alternet cable. When at last she found one, she plugged the elastic wire into the hard-line alternet port Amaterasu had pointed out behind the desk. Emmie bobbed and weaved a little to test her range on the wire, then flipped on a visual overlay and opened an alternet browser.

  “Ah!” Emmie sighed with satisfaction, “Information.”

  She spent several minutes recovering her sense of normalcy by mindlessly scanning news feeds and public domain transcriptions, until Dom said gently,

  “Emmie?”

  “Yeah,” she said, reluctantly closing her information feeds. She rubbed her hands together. “Okay. Chronological and geographical cross-referencing. Preferably without triggering any cascading equipment meltdowns.”

  She considered the problem for a while, thinking aloud,

  “The fastest thing would be to send out a huge crowdsource request to parse out geo and historical data from the source texts. But any single request like that could trigger a disaster for the recipient, since the Stewards could just focus in on them with a single cyberattack. The anonymous collective did a good job diffusing the Stewar
ds’ attention across tons of server locations before, but I don’t have that kind of reach on my own, and I have nowhere near enough favor with the collective to ask them for help like that again.

  “Even little requests routed along different paths to different crowdsourcing services could be a problem. I have no idea how much of the alternet infrastructure between me and the recipient might be surveilled by the Stewards. They might be able to trace the request from point to point to figure out where I am, if they don’t already know I’m here.

  “It seems like the only safe analysis tools are going to be ones that I can download to my smartcom and run locally. But pretty much any tool powerful enough to do decent analysis is going to be proprietary, and hosted, and therefore possibly traceable to me.

  “The only stuff I can think of that’s safe to use is static data in the public domain and open-source tools that don’t rely on external databases to work.”

  “There is still a great deal of information in libraries,” Dom suggested, “That is how Midori did her research.”

  “OMG, Dom,” moaned Emmie, “Are you serious? How did she get anything done with just a —”

  She paused.

  “Huh. You know, actually … There is a lot of information in libraries,” she said begrudgingly, “Practically no one ever looks at it anymore, since all the information that pre-dates the alternet has been rehashed in a billion more user-friendly forms by now. But it’s a place to start. I could download the national libraries to my smartcom — I remember doing that for my information science class in elementary school. A download like that would probably be a complete non-event for anyone scanning data traffic.”

  Emmie made her way to the stodgy alternet domain for the international not-for-profit devoted to preserving libraries and library collections of historic significance. The domain did not appear to have changed much since she last visited in elementary school. She pulled a copy of each of the national library collections onto her smartcom.