The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘on this world, after I wake up in the morning and listen to the ocean … it is as if I am still sleeping. Sometimes I look at you, breathing, lying so peacefully next to me, and you seem so far away. And then I feel so strange. So … alone. I wonder if I could ever truly understand you.’

  ‘I just want you to be happy – is that so hard to understand?’

  ‘But I am … almost happy.’

  ‘And sometimes when we’re together, you’re almost sad, too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that why you want to practice remembrancing together?’

  ‘There was a moment,’ he said. ‘The moment when we first saw each other. That is where everything began. Your eyes, the light, the love, in that moment – it was as brilliant as the sun. Do you remember? I would recapture that moment, if I could.’

  Beneath their wool blanket, in front of the smoky fire, Tamara turned to face him. She looked at him for a moment and then she said, simply, ‘I’ve always loved you. I always will.’

  ‘Tamara, love is–’

  ‘Love is like the sun,’ she said quickly. ‘Like the sun, at first – it’s all fire and brilliance.’

  Danlo looked up into the blue-black sky a moment before asking, ‘And then?’

  ‘The sun that burns too brilliantly does not burn long. It explodes, you know. Or it consumes itself and dies.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said softly, ‘love can never–’

  ‘A love that lasts is more like the sunset,’ she said. ‘Even as the brilliance fades, the colours deepen.’

  ‘But there must be a way to keep the brilliance,’ he said. ‘If you look deeply enough, inside the deepness, there is always fire, always light.’

  ‘Oh, Danlo, Danlo – if only that were true.’

  ‘It is true,’ he said. ‘Shall I show you?’

  ‘You would take me into one of the remembrancing attitudes?’

  He nodded his head as he looked at her face all warm and lovely in the light of the fire. ‘I would take us into recurrence – we could relive the moment that we first saw each other.’

  ‘Isn’t it enough that we remember this moment?’

  ‘But … to see each other, as we were. To be ourselves again, as we truly are – this is everything, yes? If we relive our first moment together, then we can begin truly to live again, to love again, all the moments of our lives.’

  ‘I’d love that, but …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  Yes, he thought as he caressed her fingers, she was afraid, he could see the dread (or awe) of some terrible thing flickering like fire across her face. He thought he understood the nature of her fear. Once before, out of a vain desire to preserve her memories, she had lost him – and lost as well everything most sacred to her. He thought he understood her secret, then. She, this beautiful woman who sat before him with love pouring out of her eyes like water, had an immense gift for love. But her attachment and identification with this primeval emotion was so great that she was always afraid of losing it. This was the secret of her soul, that despite the ecstasies and little affirmations of her life, it would all be meaningless without love.

  ‘But there is nothing to fear,’ he said at last. ‘Truly, in remembrance, nothing is lost.’

  ‘Then why do I dread it so?’

  ‘I … do not know,’ he said. He turned to gaze at the fire, and in the flash of the leaping flames a startling thought came to him: She is afraid because she is not quite herself yet. Because there is always fear inside fear.

  ‘I dread it,’ she repeated. ‘And yet I think I long for remembrance, too. And that’s so strange. Because if I already remember everything about us, what more is there to know?’

  ‘But there is always more to memory,’ he said. ‘There are always memories inside memories.’

  She considered this for a while, and Danlo thought that she might be afraid of where her memories would lead her. She was afraid of something that he could not quite see, perhaps something dark and disturbing out of her past that was invisible to her as well.

  ‘I used to love the remembrancing ceremonies, didn’t I?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘Do you think we could make a ceremony together, by ourselves?’

  ‘I had hoped that we could.’

  ‘But we’ve no kalla, have we?’

  Danlo smiled at her and said, ‘Kalla is just a drug. A key that opens the memories. But there are other keys, other ways.’

  ‘The ways that Thomas Rane taught you, the secret ways of the remembrancers that you always said you’d show me?’

  ‘And I would have – but there was so little time.’

  ‘But now we’ve all the time in the world.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Time. Time is one of the keys, dissolving time. I would like to take us back to the time we first met eyes. The moment. It was the moment when I fell into love with you.’

  She removed her hand from the blanket and touched his face. She touched his lips, his eyes, the scar cut into his forehead. She looked at him for a long time. And then she said, ‘If we remembrance together, if we actually relive this moment of falling, it might be different to what you’d hoped. I might be different, you know. You might see me as I really was – or as I really am.’

  ‘And how are you, truly, then?’

  ‘How could I know? How could anyone ever know?’

  ‘But you will always be yourself, yes? You will always just be you.’

  ‘Perhaps, but–’

  ‘And I will always love you,’ he said. ‘I always have.’

  ‘Oh, Danlo, Danlo – I hope that’s true.’

  The following morning they began their preparations for a private remembrancing ceremony. Of course, they might have tried entering the attitudes immediately and without much formality, but they decided that this would be unwise. Tamara was none too eager to relive her life, and she knew that in remembrancing there was always danger. She knew that the remembrancers, over the millennia, had established many techniques and rules of order to minimize the dangers of delving deeply into the mind; since she was a great respecter of rules, she was quite willing to follow the remembrancing guidelines precisely and with great attention to detail. As for Danlo, although wildness was his wont and he was always ready for extreme states of consciousness and being, he understood that there was always a time for planning and taking exquisite pains with one’s work. In truth, he loved the work of readying himself for remembrance. And he loved rites and ceremonies of all sorts, especially those employing the time-honoured technologies of the mind which over the millennia had lost none of their vitality and were often effective in guiding one straight toward the mystical heart of the universe. And so he willingly joined Tamara in the purification of their house. With damp rags he wiped the dust from the stones along her windowsill in the tearoom, and from the lacquered black tea table and from every other object or surface in each of the rooms. He helped Tamara scrub and polish the wooden floors so that they smelled of lemon wax and shone like mirrors. While Tamara went into the forest to gather wildflowers for the blue vase that stood in the meditation room, he set out the candelabra and burned incense, the marvellously pungent buddhi sticks that cleansed the air of positive ions, dirt, noxious chemicals, or any sort of gaseous pollution.

  The cleansing of their minds began soon after this. With meditation they purged themselves of anger, fear, hatred and sorrow – all the doubts and distractions that might keep them from remembrance. For most of three days they tried to hold this deep, quiet, clear, meditative consciousness, and they did little other than stare at the burning candle that Tamara set out on the floor of her fireroom. They took little food or drink, they slept little, and they engaged in sexual passion not at all.

  With Thomas Rane, on many snowy winter nights, Danlo had studied the more fundamental techniques for entering the remembrancing attitudes. There are sixty-four attitudes, f
rom imaging to eidetics to syntaxis. Over five thousand years, the master remembrancers have devised many formulae for the sequencing of the exercises which prepare the mind for the attitudes. These ancient formulae can be hideously complex. Depending on the initial attitude to be entered and the final attitude desired, according to one’s age, sex, personality type and a hundred other variables, the remembrancer will work out a formula and strictly follow this preparatory programme, changing exercises and initiating new ones as often as ten times in a single hour. This, the formalists say, is the soul of the remembrancers’ art. However, a second school of remembrancers, known as the constructivists, were always trying to refine the traditional formulae and create (or construct) new ones. And then, of course, there were the radical remembrancers and revolutionaries who wanted to junk the whole arcane and cumbersome system.

  Only a few maverick remembrancers, such as the great Thomas Rane, had ever managed to break free from the ideologies of these schools. It was Thomas Rane’s genius to respect the formalists and give them their due, even as he took the best of the constructivists’ discoveries and used them with power and insight to go places that the radical remembrancers only dreamed of. It was Thomas Rane who had begun to articulate the mysterious sixty-fourth remembrancing attitude, or ‘the One Memory’, the final attitude that would somehow complete all the others. Thomas Rane conjectured that the remembrance of the Elder Eddas and the sixty-fourth attitude were really one and the same and had devoted his life to the exploration of this theory. He had sought the entrance to it wherever and however he could and it was he who had taught Danlo the use of kalla and the more difficult remembrancing attitudes such as recurrence. Thomas Rane, while honouring the ancient formulae as keen insights into the workings of human memory, believed that each remembrancer must find for himself the ideal sequence of exercises to enter any particular attitude. This faith in the individual remembrancer’s self-wisdom was his pride and his passion.

  So it was that when Danlo prepared Tamara and himself to enter recurrence, he devised his own sequence of exercises. Over most of a day, he breathed with her, and he danced with her, and he played for her the long, deep notes of his shakuhachi – not rigidly according to some dry old formula, but rather moment by moment and paying close attention to the colours of her voice, the fire of her bottomless eyes, the rhythms of her brain and heart. He paid attention to himself. In this way, breathing and moving and inhaling the scent of each other’s soul, together they entered deep into the marvellous sixty-first attitude that the remembrancers know as recurrence.

  That is, they almost entered this attitude deeply. When their time came for remembrance, they sat on the meditation room’s beautifully polished floor, which was so warm and smooth that it was like sitting on silk. Before them, on the round table, was a large blue vase overflowing with lovely, pink rhododendrons. Before them, too, arranged in their stand in four concentric rings, almost floating above the floor, there were thirty-three long white candles tipped with red-orange flames. And so before them, as the remembrancers say, there were flowers and fire, but behind them there was only memory. As above so below, inside and out, and it would be their task that night to take that which was behind them and place it before their eyes that they might see a single moment of time as it truly was, as it always would be.

  After passing through the attitudes of sequencing and dereism, they entered into eidetics, where the shapes and colours of various remembered things are seen as clearly as a five-pointed eveningstar blossom held a foot in front of one’s face. Eidetics is like a key unlocking the door of recurrence, and it opened Danlo to a moment in false winter two years past when he had stood in a long room full of paintings, sulki grids, wine glasses, and bowls of steaming food. He saw himself eating from a plate piled high with golden kurmash grains while he regarded the beautifully-dressed people all around him. Even as he sat on the floor of Tamara’s meditation room with his eyes tightly closed, he stood at the far end of this glorious room so distant in space and time. And then he was no longer watching himself gulp down huge mouthfuls of kurmash. He sensed a break in space, a snapping of time, a vastening of consciousness almost like a light being turned on in a dark room. His sense of himself sitting by Tamara and listening to her slow breathing dissolved utterly, and when he opened his eyes he could no longer see himself because he was suddenly inside himself, as if he had mysteriously incarnated once again into that wonderfully infolded matter behind the deep blue eyes of his younger self. He no longer saw himself regarding fat, old Zohra Bey and the beautiful Nirvelli; he saw these famous people directly, standing before him across a few feet of cool, clear air. It was as if he were truly seeing them for the first time. The intensity of his vision took his breath away. It occurred to him that he was looking upon this room with a much greater clarity and sense of reality than he had possessed two years before. That is the miracle of memory, that even though we stumble through our lives as sleepwalkers lost in a trance, a part of us remembers deeply and perfectly all that we do.

  Once again he listened to Zohra Bey tell the young woman standing beside him of his famous journey to Scutarix (he was the first and only human ambassador to have survived a mission to that incomprehensible world), and Danlo saw him finger the hairy mole on his jowly old cheek. Danlo thought that he hadn’t paid any mind to this rather one-sided conversation, but apparently he had. He had sensed many things around him that he was sensing truly only now. Before him, a few steps away, the cool and elegant Nirvelli stood surreptitiously watching Danlo through the curved glass of the wine goblet from which she was drinking. The earrings that she wore were wrought of Gilada pearls, perfectly spherical and priceless, and their perfect whiteness made a stunning contrast against her shimmering black skin. There were sounds all around him: sizzling meats and clicking chopsticks and a waterfall of laughter and bright, bubbling human voices. He noticed that Zohra Bey, for all his ugliness, had a wonderfully mellifluous voice – though in truth, it was really much too sweet, like honey mulled in a fine old wine. And the kernels of kurmash that he crunched between his teeth were really much too hot, seasoned as they were with the flame peppers grown on Summerworld. He sensed other flavours in this marvellous dish, especially the faint zest of quelqueche, which was his first taste of this rare and expensive alien spice. At that moment, with his eyes watering and the tissues of his mouth on fire, he felt that he could sense everything about everyone in the room, perhaps everything in the universe. Next to him, almost behind him, a vacant-eyed wormrunner was grasping one of the room’s many sense-boxes. Danlo suddenly felt moist, hot lips pressing against his face, the coolness of silk in his hands. And this was strange because he knew that he held a plate of kurmash in his hands and his lips were touching only air. Once a time, this sensory pollution leaking out of the wormrunner’s little black box had been almost below his threshold of awareness, but now he was aware of it all too keenly.

  And then he looked across the room past all the brilliant men and women, past great pilots such as Radmilla Diaz and the Sonderval, and he knew what it was to be truly aware. A moment earlier he had almost heard the thunder of the dying stars out beyond Farfara and Perdido Luz, but now, for him, the entire universe had narrowed to a single woman standing tall and graceful in a sea of faceless people. He had seen Tamara Ten Ashtoreth ten thousand times, in meetings and memories and dreams; and yet he was all too aware that he had never truly seen her before. It was as if a flash of lightning had illuminated her hands, her dark eyes, her lovely face – perhaps even her very soul. She burned with an earthly beauty, and she was nothing but fire and light. Inside her where her heart beat, she was full of animajii, the wild joy of life which she could barely contain. He marvelled at her incredible strength and will to live. He felt this primeval hunger of hers like a fire burning in his own belly. Tamara, he sensed, would always hold onto life more fiercely than a tiger gripping a struggling lamb in its claws, and yet she inhabited life gently, deeply, as naturally as
a fern growing in the forest. And life inhabited her fully, consuming every part of her. She was overflowing with vital energies like a star bursting with light. It was this rare and splendid vitality of hers that pulled at his heart and fired all the nerve cells of his body. As with her so with him: He felt himself burning with animajii, too, burning as brightly as any star. It was the moment in his life when he first became aware of how limitless the possibilities of life might be. And for the first time, he became aware of how very aware other people were of him; he could see it in their faces, in the way they lifted their eyes toward him as if stealing cautious glances at the sun when they thought that his attention was elsewhere. They looked at Tamara this way as well. The two of them were like double stars whose radiance filled the room. Like stars they were full of terrible beauty and immense gravities, and it was inevitable that their souls should pull at each other and cause them to seek each other out. There was a moment when she began to look at him across a mere fifty feet of space. It was a moment of blazing awareness almost too brilliant to bear. Deep in remembrance, in the eternal light of recurrence, he saw something that he had once seen at the very beginning of his love for Tamara – but never allowed himself truly to see: in the moment that they had first touched eyes, he had known that their love for each other would cause them the greatest of suffering. There was torment and death deep inside Tamara’s eyes, perhaps inside his own. But in his sudden rushing sense of immortality, in the wild passion of his youth, even as he began to fall, he was ready to endure all the fires of hell for a single moment of love. Love is blind, not innocently and lightlessly blind like a babe floating inside his mother’s womb, but intentionally blind, wilfully, like a scryer who puts out his own eyes. All this Danlo saw at last, even as he foresaw that someday all their agony and suffering would be redeemed by love, by life. And seeing this he almost beheld the true Tamara, she of the terrible beauty, whose purpose was love and beauty, and something more: love inside love, beauty born of ever deeper beauty. But he could not behold her, not yet; he could not quite hold onto the beautiful memories that lived inside him. Now, in this long lovely room that existed only in remembrance, they were beginning to meet each other’s eyes again for the first time. This should have been a moment of love, of light, of secret understanding. As she turned her head to look at him, he could almost see the little black circle at the centre of her eye that would let in the light of his soul. Only now, as they began their endless and terrifying fall into love, a simple smell destroyed the moment. In truth, it was not a simple smell at all, but rather the hormones, esters, sweat, sweet amino acids, the essence of tangerines – the essence of Tamara’s scent that some part of him had been aware of before he had even seen her. These were the molecules of memory floating in the air, waiting, the hundred different fragrances that a deep part of his brain assembled into a kind of scent-mosaic of Tamara. He had always been keyed into the nuances and subtle colours of this extraordinary scent. And now one colour had grown much too strong, much too bright and he smelled the steely red acridness of sweat and fear. Now this smell was like a red-hot knife being driven up his nostril into his brain. For the ten thousandth time, he opened his eyes. But he was no longer in a faraway room on Neverness two years past, but rather in Tamara’s clean meditation room all warm and bright with the burning candles. He had finally fallen, yes, but not into love. He had fallen out of recurrence. In truth, he had fallen out of remembrance altogether, and so had Tamara. She sat across from him with her eyes wide open, looking at him. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, and her moist neck glistened in the candlelight. She looked long and deeply at him, not in love, but in failure and fear. It was as if she had almost seen some deep part of him that she desperately wanted to see, but, like a thallow chick unready to fly away from her nest high in the mountains, had turned away from this terrifying abyss at the last moment. As if she had turned away from herself.