Realms Unreel (2011)

by Audrey Auden

  When she opened the files on her smartcom, she grimaced.

  “I forgot that this stuff even pre-dates hyperlinks.”

  She massaged her eyeballs, willing herself to be patient. She opened the clunky scripting environment that had come by default with her smartcom operating system and dusted off some long-neglected programming skills to write a slow but serviceable semantic parsing tool. While the script churned through the library data, making it more amenable to keyword searches, she flipped off her visual overlay and lay down on her belly to further examine the papers on the floor.

  After a while, a question popped into Emmie’s head. She turned to Dom and said,

  “Why were you following Midori around? I mean, before she found the documents. What use could she have been to you if she wasn’t even looking for this tree of yours?”

  “What use was she to me?” Dom seemed stung by the words. “Do you think I have used you as a mere tool for my purposes? No. No. We are bound together, but you do not merely serve me, and I do not merely serve you. Can you not see this, after all the work we have done together?”

  Emmie bit her lip uncertainly, remembering the first clear vision that Dom had given her and all the gifts that had come since then.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “That’s not what I meant. I just — I don’t see why you would have bothered with her if you didn’t know she would find this stuff. It just seems like an accident.”

  Dom smiled.

  “I think there have been no accidents. There has been a common purpose across your lives, Emmie, although perhaps only I can see it. You seek the high mysteries, and as you have learned, so you have taught me.”

  “I don’t know, Dom,” said Emmie, shaking her head, “Maybe this life is different. I don’t know about any mysteries. I’d tell you if I did.”

  A small ping emanated from Emmie’s smartcom, announcing that her semantic parser had finished indexing the library content. She flipped on a visual overlay and typed in a few keyword searches to get a sense of how well the parser had worked. In deference to the name the alternet had given to the tablet information leak hoax, she decided to start her search with the phrase “world tree”.

  A long list of hits appeared on her visual overlay. She picked the top result, an article from the impressively-titled book A Cross-cultural Exploration of Myths and Legends, and read an excerpt.

  The Christian cross is one of the most widespread examples of the world tree symbol, a stylized version of the tree that has since ancient times stood as a symbol of life and resurrection. The origin of the cross in the pagan tradition of tree worship can be seen clearly in the traditional style of the Armenian eight-pointed cross, pictured left. Note the leaves and flowers worked into the forked crossbeams. This rendering of the world tree symbol emerged in the Oriental Orthodox Church near the end of the first millennium AD.

  From the sacred groves of the pagans to the Hebrew’s Tree of Knowledge, from the Buddhist’s Tree of Enlightenment to Native American cosmologies, the world tree —

  Emmie stopped to examine the black-and-white photograph of the Armenian cross pictured beside the text. The photo appeared to be of a weathered stone carving on a great slab standing in the middle of a field, like a headstone. It looked familiar. She drummed her fingers against her lips, but, unable to remember where she might have seen the image, she clipped it to the top corner of her visual overlay and moved on.

  She pulled open several image scans from Midori’s source documents and fanned them out across the air before her.

  “Well. I’m not going to be able to write a translation program for these. The best I can probably do is pick out the languages.”

  She found a few library books on ancient languages and began comparing writing systems. She quickly realized that she was out of her depth. Even the character sets she had at first thought she recognized proved difficult to identify for certain. What seemed at first to be Hebrew might in fact have been Aramaic or some related language. A collection of images that appeared at first to be Old Babylonian cuneiform might in fact have been Old Persian.

  She resigned herself to ever broader generalizations. This was probably some form of Egyptian. That looked like Mayan glyphs. Old Norse runes seemed fairly distinctive, but perhaps they were an Anglo-Saxon form. She swept an entire pile of obviously unrelated Asian character sets into a single pile.

  “Wow,” she said, lying down on the floor and staring up at a projection of a world map, where she had placed a counter on each region for the number of documents she thought could be traced to that area. Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas — there seemed to be no obvious geographical center to the distribution.

  “If this is how Midori thought she’d find the tree … I don’t know. She’d have to look everywhere. Maybe the chronology helps a little bit, knocks the Americas out of the running … but I’m not even sure of that.”

  She closed the map and swept away the sea of hovering documents. Interlacing her fingers behind her head, she stared up at the ceiling. A few minutes later, she re-opened the tablet and flicked through the documents again.

  “Words, words, words,” she said, “I wish someone could have just drawn a map, or written down some lat-long coordinates or something. How did people get around back in the day before GPS, anyway?”

  She ran a few keyword searches and finally found the word she was looking for: geodesy, the measurement and representation of Earth. Several books on the subject came up, and while she found the math a bit interesting, at last she closed those books as well.

  “If there are any trigonometric equations or latitude-longitude calculations hidden in those texts, there’s no way I’d be able to figure that out anyway, without being able to read the language.”

  She sighed and turned to Dom.

  “Sorry. I need a break,” she said, climbing to her feet and swaying a little, “Whoa. And suddenly I’m starving.”

  “Eat,” said Dom, “Rest.”

  “What about you? Do you eat? Rest?”

  “My need is not as great as yours. I will stay alert as long as there is a risk of Amos appearing.”

  Emmie felt her stomach twist a little at the reminder. She opened the door to go outside and jumped when she found Naoto standing there.

  “How long have you been there?” she said, pressing her hand to her racing heart.

  “Since Amaterasu left. I didn’t want to disturb you, but she said you need a constant watch. As long as we’re incommunicado with Falsens, I figured I’ll take orders from her.”

  “Thanks,” said Emmie, “Hey, is there some place to eat around here?”

  ∞

  Emmie followed Naoto back to the main temple complex. The grounds were full of tourists now, and they made their way through a crowd gathered before the main temple gallery. A babble of Japanese filled the air as people young and old attempted to narrate home videos of their Enryaku-ji tour over the sound of a hundred others attempting to do the same.

  Finally they reached a communal dining hall where monks and tourists mingled at long tables. Emmie joined a long line leading up to the serving station, staring hungrily at the trays of steaming rice and vegetables passing by in the hands of others.

  “Any luck with that tablet?” Naoto asked quietly.

  Emmie shook her head.

  “I’d love to say it’s all Greek to me. At least then I’d be able to call my grandparents about it. But unfortunately it looks like it’s going to be way more complicated than that.”

  When at last they had their trays in hand, Naoto led Emmie away from the noise of the communal dining hall, outside and down a path to a little clearing with a view of the mountains.

  “Do you mind sitting on the ground?” he said, “I thought it would be better to talk somewhere out of earshot.”

  “Honestly, I’d eat almost anywhere at this point,” said Emmie, collapsing into the grass, “If that line had moved any slower, I seriously think I might h
ave grabbed a fistful of rice off someone else’s tray.”

  Naoto chuckled and looked away politely as Emmie inhaled her food with indecent relish. Emmie leaned back on her hands and looked out over the mountains.

  “It’s really beautiful here,” she observed appreciatively, “It’s funny. I kind of feel like I’ve been here before. I think Tomo must have borrowed some of this for Kaisei.”

  “I wonder if there’s anything on the alternet that wasn’t stolen from somewhere else.”

  Emmie laughed.

  “My uncle once told me that stealing is just another word for inspiration. He was trying to make me feel better about stealing a photograph that my —”

  Emmie’s smile faded.

  “Emmie?” said Naoto, “What is it?”

  “I — I just remembered something. These photographs, in my mother’s office. Photos that her sister took at some … some church somewhere. Turkey, I think, on this island in a big lake.

  “I saw a photograph in a book I was reading, back there in the study. I just couldn’t remember where I had seen it before. But that’s it. There was a photograph of a big headstone with an Armenian cross carved into it, in my mother’s office, right next to another photograph of a tree that I drew for my uncle’s tattoo.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Naoto.

  “Well, there are all these images worked into Midori’s documents. Trees and crosses, sometimes whole landscape paintings filled with symbols. But what if they’re not just symbols? The people who made these texts, what if they were drawing pictures of things from the place we’re looking for? That would be sort of like a map.”

  “Those are really generic symbols, though, Emmie. And there must be — what? — millions, at least, of crosses — in churches and artwork and sculpture, all over the world. There might be thousands of Armenian crosses alone. The cross that your mother’s sister saw could have nothing to do with the documents on the tablet.”

  Emmie sighed.

  “I know it’s a long shot. But at least it’s a starting point.”

  ∞

  Back in the quiet room in the midst of the cedar forest, Emmie pulled open the image of the Armenian cross once more. Dom sat beside her looking at it.

  “It really is a long shot,” said Emmie.

  “But perhaps it is no accident that you remembered this photograph now,” said Dom.

  “I wish I could remember the name of that lake, though,” said Emmie.

  “Van,” Dom said promptly, “The island was called Akdamar.”

  Emmie looked at him wonderingly.

  “You were there, too, weren’t you? In Yosemite, the day my mother told me the story about how Nazanin died.”

  Dom nodded. Emmie looked away, remembering that day and the night that had followed, the expanse of stars that had taken her breath away, and Owen there beside her. But her voice quavered only the tiniest bit as she said,

  “All right. Akdamar. Let’s have a look.”

  She opened a map of the world and zoomed in until she found the tiny island in the midst of a great lake in the Anatolian mountains of eastern Turkey.

  She downloaded the public domain geo-rendering of Earth, which was for many alternet designers the default terrain template for new domain designs. She spun the globe until she arrived at Akdamar, then zoomed down to ground level.

  The rendering of the island was rough, unlike the more high-fidelity renderings that were available for the major cities and notable scenic preserves of the world. She assumed a point of view atop a small hill that looked down on a blocky approximation of a pink building. A floating marker above the building identified it as the historic Armenian Cathedral Church of the Holy Cross.

  She navigated smoothly in a circle around the building, but it was too low-fidelity for her to make out any detail. She panned out her point of view to look across the simulated waters of Lake Van, out toward the snow-capped mountains beyond.

  “Dom!” she gasped, “Dom, look at that!”

  Dom, standing at her side in the small room, followed her gaze.

  “Ah,” he breathed, his eyes locked on the profile of the mountain range.

  They turned toward each other, their faces mirroring each other’s surprise.

  “It’s Eden,” Emmie exclaimed, “Those mountains, I’m sure of it. I’ve spent a gazillion hours in this landscape.”

  She quickly switched views of the landscape, eliminating the surface of the lake to reveal the shape of the submerged terrain. Now they stood on great rock protruding from the floor of a deep valley. She turned to Dom, her excitement changing to bemusement.

  “But I didn’t take terrain from the public domain,” she said, “These were just the mountains that I saw when I imagined this place.”

  Dom nodded.

  “Yes. These are the mountains I showed you, mountains we saw together, once. These are the mountains surrounding the valley in Dulai where we spent so many centuries together. And this island — but it was no island, then — this was the place where you crossed from Dulai into Death.”

  “But it’s the same place, then? The same place in both worlds?”

  “I never understood before,” said Dom, “I saw the place you were going, that day we stood together beneath the tree. The place mirrored in the surface of the pool.”

  ∞

  Emmie could barely contain her excitement as she pulled up Falsens’ security concierge and said in a rush,

  “I have a consultation request.”

  “Please hold,” the security concierge replied.

  A projection of Falsens’ avatar appeared a moment later.

  “Miss Bridges,” he said, nodding, “I’m glad to see that you are well since Naoto last checked in. He’s been remiss in providing me with status updates.”

  “Yeah, I think he was busy before, patrolling or something, Amaterasu said.”

  “I was unaware that Naoto continues to be engaged by Amaterasu. I will have to have a word —”

  “Maybe you could sort that out with him later?” Emmie said hurriedly, “I have an urgent request.”

  “I apologize. Please proceed.”

  “I need you to get me to a place called Akdamar Island, in eastern Turkey.”

  “May I ask the reason why?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I of course respect my clients’ wishes to maintain privacy, even from me,” Falsens said curtly, his voice sounding strangely like Emmie’s mother’s for a moment, “Please be aware, however, that any information you choose to withhold from me may impair my ability to provide the highest quality of service.”

  “Don’t worry, Falsens. I’m not going to ding you in my review.”

  Falsens cleared his throat.

  “Very well. Before I make arrangements, I would recommend performing a preliminary investigation of the area to determine whether there are any indications of local activity by Amos Eckerd or his associates.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s a good idea.”

  “I will need your approval on —”

  Emmie swiped the prompt and said,

  “Sure. What else?”

  “I need to make you aware of several issues that could influence the comfort and safety of your travel.”

  “Okay …”

  “There are currently travel warnings in effect for Americans in Turkey due to widespread anti-American sentiment in the country. In addition, due to the low penetration of alternet technology outside the major metropolitan areas, I anticipate that we will be unable to —”

  “Okay, okay,” said Emmie, Falsens’ words already starting to run together in her mind, “I’ll read the terms later.”

  “Very well,” Falsens said coolly, “I anticipate that I can make the necessary arrangements within the next twenty-four hours.”

  A liability waiver prompt appeared before her. Emmie glanced at Dom, swallowed, and gave her approval.

  ∞

  Emmie spe
nt the rest of the afternoon sprawled out on the bed, poring over the library material she had found about the island of Akdamar. She read aloud the legend of the unlucky peasant boy who drowned attempting to swim to the island at night to meet his lover, a princess whose father extinguished the light his daughter had set out to guide the boy. She watched with interest a short documentary on the origin and historical significance of the bas-relief carvings that adorned the outer walls of the island’s centuries-old Armenian church. She flipped through hundreds of photographs of the island that she extracted from books and magazines. She scanned abstracts of scientific journal articles about the geology of Lake Van, which had formed after lava flows from a great volcanic eruption had blocked the outlet of the valley.

  She gradually drifted off to sleep, her immerger headset still on. Fourteen hours later, an insistent pinging roused her from a dreamless sleep.

  “What?” she groaned.

  “You have a status update,” said the imperturbable security concierge.

  “Ugh, Falsens,” she muttered, sitting up, yawning, and stretching, “What is it?”

  “Good morning, Miss Bridges,” said Falsens, “I have come to report the results of my ground sweep of the southern shore of Lake Van and the island of Akdamar.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “For the past year, all indications show that the only full-time residents of the island have been the two men responsible for the upkeep of the church museum. I performed extensive background checks on these men, as well as the government employees who operate the museum during the day. My scouts obtained biometric samples to confirm DNA matches between the caretakers and museum employees and the corresponding Turkish live births and school records databases. I have determined that it is unlikely that any of these men has connections to Amos Eckerd or the Stewards.”