At that moment, the door opened.
“Right, you, sling your hook. You lot love the final frontier, right? Well, boldly bugger off back to it.”
“You must be Mee,” said Fypp. She flicked the yo-yo back up her sleeve and held out her hand. Mee looked at it, slightly thrown by the polite gesture. Then, after a brief, but obvious, internal struggle between her feelings and her upbringing, her upbringing won. She shook the tiny hand, scowling.
“I’m Joni.” Fypp repeated the handshaking procedure. Seb had never seen Fypp act in such a polite, normal manner. It was perplexing.
Fypp stared at Joni for a few seconds. Seb was aware of Fypp’s Manna flowing around his daughter, probing, looking for information, but getting very little.
“Oh,” said Fypp, “this is what I felt when you were getting close a few minutes ago. Now, that’s very interesting. Maybe that starts to explain how Seb got back here.”
Mee stepped forward.
“Right, here’s your sodding Egg. Show us what you want to show us. But don’t take all day about it, we’ve got some more catching up to do.”
Seb knew Mee’s attitude was mostly bluster to cover how profoundly unsettled she was by meeting Fypp. It was one thing to be told about an alien older than your solar system, but it was quite another to actually meet her and feel the truth of it.
Fypp continued her unusual display of politeness and consideration.
“If I could have the Gyeuk Egg, please?”
Mee handed over the backpack, and they watched as Fypp took out its contents and slowly unwrapped the object, placing it carefully on the table.
“Wait,” she said. She closed her eyes briefly. Seb felt a burst of incredibly intricate Manna flow from Fypp to the Egg and return. The process lasted a few seconds before she opened her eyes again.
“Okay,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“Do we all have to join hands and chant?” said Mee.
“No.” Fypp showed absolutely no sign of rising to the bait. “Although you might want to sit down. It can be a little discombobulating.”
Joni and Seb sat on the sofa while Fypp reassumed the lotus position. Mee remained standing and rolled her eyes.
“Discombollocks. I think I’ll stand, thank you very much. I’m perfectly capable of SH—”
“—IT!”
They stood on the edge of the meeting circle. Seb guessed it was very early morning, as only one one the moons was still partially visible, sinking slowly behind Hell’s Teeth. Seb turned to see Fypp, Mee, and Joni alongside him, looking utterly out of place. He felt unexpectedly upset, as if they were intruding disrespectfully where they did not belong. He looked down at himself. Seeing his customary T-shirt and jeans, he winced.
The fire pit was cold, the ash old. There had been no meeting the previous night. Looking toward the settlement, Seb could see little difference from when he had left.
He turned to Fypp. “How long since I left?”
His voice sounded odd, but the musician in him recognized why immediately. Out of doors, in an open area, natural speech sounds a certain way - inside, the dimensions of the room subtly colors the sound, as reflections of the speaker’s voice come back in waves. A sound engineer would have spotted it immediately, and Seb only took a couple of seconds to figure out what was happening. His voice sounded exactly as it would sound back in the cottage. He was hearing himself back there.
As if reading his mind, Fypp winked at him.
“We’re not really here. Not like you were.”
The Elders’ meeting place, a slightly larger dwelling than those used for sleeping, was—unusually for this time of day—occupied. The animal skin across the opening had been secured from inside. Normally, the dwelling would only be used for meetings. The only time tradition dictated that a Leader might sleep there was when she was approaching death. As Seb watched, the skin was pulled aside, and two figures emerged, walking slowly, straight toward them. Seb did not recognize either one, although the strips of shuk skin on their belts marked them as Elders. They stopped and spoke in low voices.
Joni was looking around her excitedly, staring at the fire pit, then at the meeting circle and the forest to the west.
“This is it! They look just like the creatures I saw - the ones I thought were demons. This is where I saw you in my vision, my dream. This is where you were figh—” She stopped suddenly, clapping a hand over her mouth when she realized how loudly she was speaking. When she saw that the Elders had paid no attention to her, she slowly lowered her hand.
“They can’t hear, or see, you,” said Fypp. “Fortunately.”
Seb moved closer to the Elders to try to listen on their conversation. As he got close enough to hear, he marveled at how much taller he was. They were perhaps four and a half feet tall, bald, wiry, with tough, gray skin. Tightly muscled bodies and lined faces with eyes that looked like they belonged to a predatory cat.
No wonder Joni thought they were demons. They look like something out of Tolkien.
They spoke to each other in low, hushed tones and Seb could only make out a few words. Of those few, there was only one he recognized: “Sopharndi.”
Joni had followed Seb and now moved in front of the Elders, blocking their path. She closed her eyes.
“Joni, what are you doin—”
Seb watched as the Elders walked through Joni as if she wasn’t there. She opened her eyes again and smiled at Seb.
“I had to try it.” She nodded toward Fypp. “She’s like one of the Ghosts in A Christmas Carol.”
Fypp looked over at them. Seb doubted she’d understand the reference, but he’d misjudged her again.
“Exactly. They can’t see us, or hear us. We are looking at this scene, but we are not part of it.”
“So which ghost are you? Past, present, or future?”
“That’s actually a better question than I’d expect from such a primitive brain. Although you do appear to be a special case.”
Joni wasn’t sure if she’d just been complimented or insulted, so she didn’t respond. Fypp started to walk toward the dwelling as she spoke. They followed her.
“We are all ghosts of Christmas past. More than three thousand years have passed in this world since Seb was here, but this moment is only about twenty years after his time here.”
Seb put a hand up and stopped Fypp just as they reached the dwelling.
“Three thousand years? So you know the outcome.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” said Fypp, simply, and stepped through the solid wall of the dwelling. The three of them looked at each other for a moment, then Mee shrugged and followed, only flinching slightly. Seb and Joni walked through together.
It was dark inside, but not pitch black, as a small fire glowed in the middle of the dwelling. By its light, Seb could make out some details. The ceremonial Leader’s robe hanging on the wall, a small pot containing some sort of broth uneaten near the fire. A pile of sleeping skins with an emaciated body propped up on top, the face lost in the shadows.
When the figure spoke, they all jumped, even Fypp.
“I knew you would come back.”
Seb took a step toward the shadowy figure. Even cracked with age, the voice sounded familiar, but he wanted to be sure.
“I keep the fire burning so that the Elders can see,” the voice continued. “It’s been a long time since I was able to see anything.” The thin voice stopped and gave way to a wheezing cough, followed by a few rough, shallow breaths. The next sentence was no louder than a whisper.
“I know you’re here, Cley.”
Seb was close enough to see the old, lined face now, the familiar strong jaw, a thin scar running along the underside of the chin. Where the eyes should have been there were only sockets, long since healed over with dense, fibrous connective tissue.
“Sopharndi?” His voice still sounded like it was back in the crofter’s cottage.
“She can’t hear you.” Fypp was playing with the yo
-yo again, looking at the old female with frank curiosity. “Then again, there’s no way she can possibly be aware of us. So who knows?”
Sopharndi, didn’t respond, and when Seb moved closer, her head didn’t turn toward him, her sightless eye sockets still looking straight ahead.
“I have learned much in the years since you left us, Cley. I have also unlearned much. Dying will teach me a little more, I think. There will always be mysteries. You, for instance. You are Cley, and yet you are not Cley. This is one secret I have kept from the People. Whatever you were, whatever you are, you helped show me that what I thought to be real may not be so. You were with us, but not of us. Of course, the same may apply to what you think to be real.”
“Smart cookie,” said Fypp, although her casual manner seemed a little forced.
“Cochta called you a demon. She left us believing you to be an angel. Can you believe that?”
A dry rattling sound came from the dying female. She was laughing.
“That was when the People finally chose to become Listeners. When Cochta saw past her anger and bitterness for one moment and became free of them. It was not I, nor even you, who changed the course of the People. It was Cochta. When she lost her firstborn, she sought me out in the mountains, secretly. By then, a few hundred of the People had joined me in exile, learning to Listen, as you had taught them.
“She sought me out because I had turned away from my own anger and she could not understand how that was possible. She had blinded me, killed my only child. She expected madness, hatred, fury. I came close to that, but the path you had spoken of called me. It called so softly that I barely heard it, such was my pain. But hear it I did. It promised no relief, no easy comfort. It offered no answers. What it did offer was an encounter with what was real, and when I finally began to Listen, to let go of that inside me which imprisoned me, I found joy. Not happiness. I found that acceptance was not something passive, but was a channel through which life could begin to flow, unblocked, joyful, full of power.
“For me, the process was slow. Like a rock in the river being worn smooth by the water. For Cochta, it happened in an instant. As if she was trying to fight an enemy, only to suddenly discover it was her own reflection in a pool of water.”
Sopharndi fell silent for a few minutes. Seb could see the barely discernible rise and fall of her chest.
“She led us back to the settlement. A year later she made me Leader. She died at the hand of one of her former supporters. Death is one of those mysteries I shall know more of soon. You died and yet you did not die. You are Cley, and yet you are not Cley. Perhaps I am not Sopharndi. Soon, I shall know.”
She leaned forward a little, turning her head as if looking at the dwelling and its three invisible visitors.
“It’s strange, Cley. Even as you taught the People how to listen to the Singer, even as you led us to a new path, I always felt you were still looking for your own answers. I hope you find them, along with some new questions. Remember this: when you were with us, it was as if you belonged elsewhere. To you, we were a story you helped tell. How can you be sure someone else is not telling your own story? Now. The sun is dawning on my last day. I knew you would come. Now I want to prepare. As if anyone can.”
She laughed again and sank back, exhausted, whispering the last words.
“Go, son. Whatever you are, you are still my child.”
She went quiet then, her head turned back to stare sightlessly upward.
Unchapter 39
The fire in the center of the dwelling flared up and became the fire in the crofter’s cottage on Innisfarne.
They sat in silence for a while. Mee, the only one standing, steadied herself against the table before finally breaking the silence.
“Well,” she said, “if that was your mum, you must get your good looks from your dad.”
Seb looked at Fypp but found it hard to find the right words. He had been shocked to find Sopharndi still alive, even more shocked to discover she had become Leader. The fact that she had been aware of him was, as Fypp had suggested, supposed to be impossible. And the force of her wisdom had been almost physical in its power. It was not only that she had been totally unsurprised by his return, but that she had seemed to be waiting for him. So that she could tell him what he wanted to know.
Fypp was doing tricks with two yo-yos now, using her feet.
“Can a simulated being become aware of the fact that she exists in a simulation? Or, as she put it, a story? Yes, it happens a lot, although it is only speculation as it cannot be proved. Is it interesting? No. Here’s what’s interesting.”
Joni, Mee, Seb, and Fypp stood on a grassy plain, dotted with trees.
“What’s this?” said Mee. “Where are we now?”
Seb slowly turned in a full circle, looking at the forest nearby, and the distant mountains. When he began walking, the others followed. After a few minutes, they arrived at the banks of a fast-flowing river. He turned and looked back.
“It’s the settlement.”
Fypp nodded.
“When?” he asked.
“Over two and a half thousand years since we were last here.”
There wasn’t much anyone could say after that revelation. Mee and Joni looked at the landscape and pieced together the missing details, imagining where the dwelling they had just visited must have stood. Judging from the lack of physical evidence, it had been many hundreds of years since any kind of civilization had last left its mark.
Eventually, Seb spoke.
“Was it war? Disease? Famine?” He could hear a pair of lekstralls calling to each other in the forest, and, looking back across the river to Canyon Plains beyond, herds of ha’zek kicked up clouds of dust as they moved. Animal life was thriving, but where were the People?
“None of the above.” Fypp had an odd expression on her face. If Seb hadn’t known her better, he would have guessed that Fypp was confused.
“I checked the Egg in the cottage,” she said. “I’ve been reviewing the data. The People did the opposite of what almost every species does as it grows and matures. They became nomadic. They went to the other tribes. After a few hundred years of population increase, numbers leveled off. Technologically, they advanced to the equivalent of the Iron Age on Earth, no further.”
“So where are they?” said Mee.
Fypp shrugged. “I don’t know.” She started to giggle, then stopped abruptly. “Been a while since I’ve said that. I have my suspicions, of course, but…”
“But what?” said Seb.
“But I can’t prove anything. There’s a missing period I couldn’t access, then, suddenly, this. Along with what happened to you, it all points to something. But I could be wrong. I must be wrong. It wouldn’t. Not after all this time. Not when it still fears us.”
“Who?” “What?” “Stop talking in fucking riddles, Grasshopper.” Seb, Joni, and Mee spoke simultaneously.
Fypp blinked, and they were back in the cottage. She knelt, her back to the fire. Seb paced the small room. Mee flopped onto the sofa next to Joni.
“The Gyeuk,” said Fypp. She turned to Seb. “Tell me again what happened at the end of your time in there. When you lost yourself.”
Seb told her what he remembered of that time. The way he had kept his sense of identity in a version of Richmond Park, and how that had become corrupted, leaving him with no anchor, no way to remember who he was.
Fypp was uncharacteristically silent. No yo-yos.
“It’s almost as if…” She stopped talking.
“For fuck’s sake,” said Mee. “Spit it out, will you?”
Fypp looked at her as if she couldn’t see her at all.
“Almost as if the Egg wasn’t fully constructed. As if it was designed to only go so far before it had fulfilled its purpose.”
Seb realized he had never really thought of the world inside the Gyeuk Egg as a simulation. They were as real to him as anyone else he had ever met, and the disappearance of their entire species
filled him with horror.
“The People? What about them?”
Fypp continued staring into nothingness.
“What happened in the environment you selected as Home, the corruption of the scene there…it could only have been possible if there was a flaw in the programming. If there was a mistake. But the Gyeuk doesn’t make mistakes.”
“What are you saying?” Seb thought of the eerie atmosphere of the landscape they had just left. “That the Gyeuk did it deliberately?”
“If so,” said Fypp, slowly, “it was to ensure you failed. Your failure would see Baiyaan exiled and the Rozzers given the freedom to continue their manipulation of intelligent species.”
“I thought the Gyeuk was above getting its hands dirty.”
Fypp still had that distant look in her eye. Finally, she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “No, it’s not possible. The Gyeuk would never move so openly against us. Even if it secretly planned to take on the T’hn’uuth, it would know there was too great a risk. We are as powerful, perhaps more so. It doesn’t make any sense. The Gyeuk is ruthlessly logical if nothing else. And yet…”
The ensuing silence stretched to a few minutes before Mee opened her mouth. Seb glanced at her, and she grudgingly closed it again.
“Your Walk here, your escape from the Egg could not have been foreseen by the Gyeuk. It is possible that we are on the brink of open conflict.”
“The People!” Seb did not want to accept what Fypp was saying. He clenched his fists reflexively. “And don’t tell me they’re not real, that they’re just a simulation.”
Fypp snapped out of her reverie and looked at him with an expression that equally mixed surprise and sorrow.
“Don’t misunderstand me. All instances of life within a simulation are accorded the same rights as every other sentient being in the universe. Every species that reaches the technological stage of being able to build sophisticated simulations agrees to abide by this rule. After all, it is extremely likely that we exist in an Egg—or its equivalent—ourselves. The very existence of T’hn’uuth certainly points to that conclusion.”
The Unnamed Way (The World Walker Series Book 4) Page 23