Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Half empty.” The herbalist glanced back. “Is that supposed to tell you something about me? That I only see the negative, the void, the failing, the disappointments in life?”

  The nun nodded. “When we ask that question of children, yes. But I already know that you are a pessimist. I asked the question for a different reason. I wanted to point out to you the great deception of the mind, the deception of western philosophy.”

  “And what deception is that?”

  “The illusion of duality,” Priya said. “It’s a natural error, but the rise of the Ahura Mazdan Temple in the west has spread it far and wide, as far as my temple in Kolkata and probably your family’s home in Kathmandu. The Mazdans see the world in terms of opposites. Creator and destroyer, light and darkness, good and evil. They’ve been teaching this philosophy since I was young, and now it is common for people everywhere to see the world in such terms. Large and small, hot and cold, young and old. Everything must be labeled such, everything must choose a side, as though the entire universe were preparing for a great war.”

  “Your point?” Asha continued down the path, deeper into the forest, deeper into the shadows. The air grew steadily cooler.

  “My point is that there is another way to see the world. A better way.”

  “Then how do you answer the question? If the glass is not half empty or half full, then what is it?”

  Priya smiled. “The glass is larger than amount of water it holds.”

  Asha sighed. “It’s the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t. When you say that the glass is half empty, as you did, you are focusing on the half without water and ignoring the half that is full. But if you say the glass is half full, you make the same error, ignoring the half that is empty. If you are to see the world as it truly is, then you must see both halves of the glass at the same time, both empty and full. Thus, to describe the glass properly, you must describe all of it at once, which is to say that the glass is larger than its contents. Do you see the difference?”

  Asha ducked under a tree branch. “Is that really better? I mean, who cares about the glass? The whole point of the glass is the water. Without any water, the glass is useless.”

  Priya stopped abruptly, frowning. Then she ducked under the tree branch and continued on. “I’m just offering you another way to look at the world. A way that isn’t tied to your own feelings, a way of thinking outside the self. Dispassionate. Open-minded. I worry about you. If you spend your life only seeing the darkness, you may come to believe that darkness is all that exists.”

  Asha pushed through a curtain of leaves hanging across the trail and saw two small houses in the distance, two little mud and wood shacks leaning into the shadows by the side of the path.

  “Houses,” she said softly.

  The left shack’s window and door gaped dark and vacant. One wall had lost several planks and the thatching on the roof was perilously thin, revealing the timbers. The right one stood in better repair, though still crumbling from neglect, and it had a tattered cloth hanging across the window and the doorway as well.

  “Can you describe these houses?” the nun asked.

  Asha heard a dry cough inside the house on the right. She heard nothing from the house on the left. She shrugged and said, “Half empty.”

  * * *

  Asha approached the curtained doorway slowly, calling out, “Hello? Is there someone here?” No one answered. She looked around the path and the empty house across the way, but there was no sign of anyone else around. Priya shook her head. “I don’t hear anything.”

  Asha cocked her head and closed her eyes. She listened with her right ear, listening to the soft music of all living things, the harmonies of plant and animal and human souls. She heard the shushing and sighing of the trees and the frenetic buzzing of the forest’s ants and beetles, and even a few birds and snakes, some of them far away. And from inside the house she heard the beating of human hearts, the gentle tides of warm blood flowing through aged bodies, the faint humming of human souls only barely alive and barely aware.

  “Someone’s here.” Asha drew back the curtain in the doorway and leaned inside. She saw six bodies lying on the floor, all resting peacefully on their backs or sides, eyes closed, chests rising and falling with an almost invisible rhythm.

  “How many?” Priya asked.

  “Six. All alive, but…” Asha stepped inside and knelt beside the first person, an old man with skin so dry and shriveled it felt like tree bark. He was cool to the touch. Moving on, she found them all the same. All elderly, frail, rough, and cool.

  “Are they dying? Is it a disease?” the nun asked.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Asha said as she inspected the last body. “They don’t seem ill, just very old. Close to death, really.” She set her bag on the floor and rummaged through it for her tools. She pulled out a small mirror and held it over a woman’s mouth and watched the tiny plume of fog form on the glass. “Barely breathing, but the lungs are dry. Weak pulses, but steady. They may not be able to wake up. Too weak to move, no way to feed themselves. They’ll die soon.”

  “How strange. Is there no one caring for them?”

  Asha looked around the shadowed room. She saw six bodies in tattered clothes, each one covered by a moth-eaten blanket, each of their heads near the center of the room where a cracked and stained wooden bowl sat. The bowl was empty. “I don’t know. Maybe someone else lives here, someone younger who takes care of them. A nurse or a monk or a child. Maybe they’ve gone out for food.”

  “What should we do?”

  Asha glanced out the window. “It’s late. We’ll stay the night here and look after these people. Hopefully their caretaker will come back soon and then we can ask about their condition. Maybe I can help. Maybe not.”

  They shared an apple for supper and then the two women and their little mongoose curled up in the corner of the room and fell asleep.

  From a dreamless oblivion, Asha awoke. She lay very still, peering into the darkness. There had been a sound, but she was not sure if it had been a true sound in her left ear or something stranger in her right ear. The dragon scales itched but she did not touch them. She sat up and looked around the room. Priya lay snoring on her back with the little mongoose Jagdish curled up in her hair. The six elderly sleepers appeared unchanged, all lying at different angles to fill the floor space according to their heights with their heads all clustered in the center of the room and their legs spiraling crookedly out to the walls.

  A soft thump drew Asha’s gaze to the center of the room where the bowl made a black circle in the shadows. Beside the bowl a small black shape rested on the floor. Round but lumpy, the thing teetered and rocked for a moment before coming to a stop. She looked up and saw several holes in the roof thatching all large enough that she might put her whole arm through them. Outside a light breeze troubled the trees and the leaves shushed and sighed like a wave crashing over a beach and a second thump sounded in the center of the room. Asha peered into the shadows and saw another little black shape rolling inside the bowl with a third one next to it.

  She crept to the bowl and picked up one of the little black objects and found it was a fruit, though not one she recognized. It had a rough, wrinkled, leathery skin covered in prickly little hairs. Asha held the fruit to her ear, listening for the telltale thrum of life, the sound of the seed’s tiny, unborn plant soul. After a moment she heard it. The fruit rang like a silver coin flung into the air to spin on the wind.

  “No.”

  Asha stumbled away from the bowl and tripped over someone’s legs, falling back hard on her rear with the fruit clutched in her fist. “Who? Who’s there?”

  Silence. Asha stared around the room. Priya was still sleeping soundly in the corner. And when Asha turned her right ear from side to side, she heard only the aetheric hums and whines and booms of the forest, the insects, the birds, and the six old people lying on the floor. Souls everywhere, but none of them new.


  “Please.”

  Asha looked down and saw a wrinkled face with yellowing eyes staring up at her. The old woman was drawn and thin, weathered and withered like an old tree desiccated by the sun and the wind in some dry and thirsty land.

  “You’re awake.” Asha knelt beside the woman and cradled her fragile head in her hands. “Why are you all alone here? Who is taking care of you?”

  “Fruit.” The woman shook her clawing fingers at the morsel in Asha’s hand.

  Asha gave the rough little fruit to the woman, who gently pressed it whole between her lips. After a moment of awkward jawing and grunting, she swallowed it. The woman smiled. “Thank you.”

  Asha leaned down close to the woman’s face, trying to inspect her eyes and mouth in the darkness. “Is there someone coming to care for you?”

  “No,” the woman whispered. “We’re alone.”

  “But you’re dying.”

  “No. Not dying.”

  Asha frowned. “Go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  The woman closed her eyes.

  * * *

  When the sun’s first pale pinks and yellows streaked the sky, Asha was still awake. She sat in the corner with her back against the wall, staring out across the room. Priya yawned and sat up. Jagdish rolled out of her hair, shook himself from whiskers to tail, and then squeaked for his breakfast. Priya nudged the little mongoose away and he scampered out the door in search of his own food.

  “Did you sleep well?” the nun asked.

  “I spoke to that woman.” Asha pointed at one of the motionless figures. Then she pressed one of the rough fruits into her friend’s hand. “I heard these falling through the roof. Eight of them fell into the room during the night.”

  Priya rolled the tiny fruit in her palm. “What is it?”

  “It looks like a gurbir, almost like a strawberry. But different. Darker and rougher.” Asha took the fruit back. “Don’t eat them.”

  “Are they poisonous?”

  “I don’t know. But during the night, I watched each of our friends here wake up just long enough to eat one or two of them and then fall back asleep. They swallowed them whole.”

  Priya sat very still with her hands resting in her lap and her face pointed out across the room as though she could see the people on the floor. “Then are these people starving to death? They must be if they’re only eating a single berry each day.”

  “Maybe.” Asha frowned. “But why would six people all lie down to die in this house, which just happens to be providing enough food to keep them alive? There’s something wrong with these fruits.”

  “No,” whispered the woman on the floor. It was same woman Asha had spoken to during the night, and though her eyes were not open, her lips were moving slightly.

  Asha crept forward and leaned her left ear down to the woman’s mouth. “My name is Asha. I’m an herbalist. What’s your name?”

  “Hasika.”

  “Hasika, how did you come to be here like this? Are you sick? Where are you from? And who are these other people?”

  “My family,” Hasika whispered. “Father, mother, sisters, brother.”

  “Is this house your home?” Priya asked.

  “Yes.”

  Asha held up one of the dark fruits. “What are these? I’ve never seen them before.”

  “I don’t know.” Hasika’s voice sounded like dry leaves on the wind. “We never noticed them either, until one day when we found one had fallen through a hole in the roof. We didn’t have much food, so we started eating those berries.”

  “How do they taste?” Asha sniffed the one in her hand.

  “Terrible. They sting and burn your throat and nostrils, but only if you bite into them.”

  Asha nodded. “So that’s why you swallow them whole. You know, bad tastes are nature’s way of telling you not to eat something, right? How long have you been eating these things?”

  “I don’t know. It must have been soon after the little prince was born. Prince Pratap.”

  Asha glanced back at Priya before remembering that the nun knew nothing of recent politics and the name meant nothing to her. “Prince Pratap is now Lord Pratap Singh. He was born over thirty years ago.”

  The shriveled old woman blinked. “Oh my.”

  “I don’t understand,” Asha said. “There’s no way that you could all live so long just eating these little fruits.”

  Hasika smiled. “Well, we don’t move about much.”

  Asha looked around sharply. “Then who cleans up after you?”

  “No one. No need.”

  Asha frowned. “That doesn’t seem healthy.”

  “It’s healthy. Unless you stop eating them.”

  Asha quickly set the fruit down in the bowl and wiped her hand on her sari. “What happens if you stop eating them?”

  * * *

  “When I was old enough, I married a young man named Niraj from the village at the bottom of the road,” Hasika said. “He was a very good tracker and trapper, and he was very good at building and fixing things. So when we married, he came to live here with my family instead of having me live with him in the village. Here, he could build his own house and help my father, and be closer to the game trails. And by living away from the village, he said he could keep the smells of people off his clothing, which made it easier for him to go hunting.

  “The first year was very nice. We built this house and he was able to catch more than enough food for our table and to sell in the village. But then we had a very dry summer, and there were fires, and Niraj would come home empty-handed more often than not. We were all very worried. We asked everyone for advice, even travelers on the road. There was talk about moving on over the mountains to another village closer to the sea. But one little old man said we should wait a bit longer, so we did. It was easier to wait than to go. And then one night the first of these strange fruits fell through the roof. They tasted terrible, as I said, but we were worried about starving, so we tried boiling them and baking them, and eventually we just swallowed them whole.

  “Days went by and Niraj was still unable to find any food in the forest and soon we were all living only on the fruits.” Hasika sighed. “We grew weaker, of course. We knew we were starving, so one night we discussed the matter and decided to leave the next morning for the villages beyond the mountains.

  “But that night, something strange happened. We dreamed. We all dreamed about this house and this forest. But the house was huge and beautiful, with rooms for each of us, and more food than we could eat, and the forest was warm and every branch and vine was drooping with bright flowers and delicious berries.” Hasika swallowed. “In the morning we talked and found we had all dreamed the same dream. My parents thought the dream might be a vision of the future, a message from Vishnu, a promise of wealth and happiness if we stayed in this house. So we stayed a little longer. Every day we ate the little fruits that fell through the roof and every night we dreamed of living in another world, a better world. And day by day, we all wasted away until we were too weak to move.”

  Priya reached out to touch Asha’s knee. The nun said, “Could this fruit be cursed? Could the tree that drops it be possessed by some restless ghost? What sort of spirit would want to trap these poor people in a living death like this?”

  Asha shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She brushed her long black hair behind her right ear, tugging free the few strands that snagged on the rough dragon scales on her skin. “We’ve been here half a day and I haven’t heard anything like that nearby.”

  “Heard?” Hasika frowned.

  Asha tilted her head down to show her scaled ear. “I can hear things, living and otherwise. I can hear you and your family, the forest, the animals, even the tree leaning over your house. But I don’t hear any spirits.”

  “What happened to Niraj?” Priya asked. “You said the other people here now were your parents and siblings, but not your husband. Where is he?”

  Hasika nodde
d. “After many months of living like this, lying on the floor, drifting in and out of our blissful dreams, Niraj said he couldn’t go on. He was ashamed of what had become of us. He said he would rather die outside than lie on the floor like a corpse, so he stopped eating the fruit.”

  Asha glanced around the room. “What happened to his body?”

  Hasika shook her head. “Niraj didn’t die. After two days without the fruit, he found he could sit up. He was still very weak, of course, but his skin was soft and he could breathe easy. He crawled outside and drank from the stream at the bottom of the hill. The next day he crawled back inside with half a mango he found on the ground. Day by day, he grew stronger eating the mangos and drinking from the stream until soon he could stand and walk, and he looked like his old self again. With only one mouth to feed instead of seven, it was easy for him live off the land here.”

  “And then he left you,” Asha said.

  “No. He stayed. He repaired the house, all but the roof so we could have our fruits,” Hasika said. “Niraj begged us all to stop eating the fruits. He still wanted to cross the mountains and find a new home. And I remember he wanted children.”

  “But?” Priya petted her little mongoose.

  “But I couldn’t give up the fruits. None of us could. The dreams are so vivid, so real. Sometimes I wonder if the dreams are the real world and this dark, dirty room is just a nightmare I sometimes fall into.” Hasika closed her eyes.

  “If Niraj didn’t starve and he didn’t leave, then where is he?” Asha touched the woman’s cheek. “Where is your husband?”

  Hasika sighed. “He stayed a year. For a whole year, he stayed here, watching over us, talking to us. I would wake to eat my fruit and hear him whispering to us in the dark, and then I would go back to my dreams. I didn’t even listen to him. But one night, I woke and saw him sitting in the doorway, silhouetted against the starlight. He was gasping for breath. The next night, he was lying on the floor by the door, as though he’d just fallen over the night before. And the night after that he was dead. His flesh shriveled and hardened, just like ours, just like before. He lay there for days, and then one night I awoke and his body was gone. Just gone.”