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within; not even a self was clearly defined.
Everything blurred, became confused, as if he had been smudged by an enormous finger
and no outline remained. I am no where, no here, no name, moving, no future.
He twisted, convulsed, trying to find his center. The figures mounted on the ranges of
mountains to either side seemed interested in this effort. He could feel their attention and
did not welcome it. He fancied they moved, however slowly, advancing toward him across
astronomical time.
If this lump of conflicting order and chaos could define himself anew, perhaps these
incomprehensible monoliths, these unworshiped gods and unrealized mockeries, could
establish a presence as well.
The panic stopped. Signals stopped.
He had come to an end. That minimum condition he had wished for was now upon him.
He cared nothing for past or future, had lost nothing, gained nothing.
I am or was a part of a society really no part of any
This name is Olmy Ap Sennen
Lover of many loved and loving by few
Contact nothing without
Without contact nothing
Uprooted tree
The lesion's inflamed rim began to brighten. The suspended and aimless figure in its
gripping cilia of probabilities maintained enough structure and drive to be interested in this,
and noted that, compared to past memory, the lesion was much smaller, much darker, and
the flaring rim much broader. It resembled an immense solar eclipse with a bloody corona.
Loyalties and loves uprooted
Language itself faded until the aimless figure saw only images, the lushness of another
world out of reach, closed off, the faces of old humans, once loved, once reassuringly close,
now dead and without ghosts.
Can't even be haunted by a past uprooted
The figure's motion down the valley slowed. No time passed. Eternity, endless now.
Naked, skinless, fleshless, boneless. Consumed, integrated.
Experiences stillness.
Mark this in an endless column: experiences
Experiences stillness stillness stillness
No divisions. A tiny place no bigger than a fist, a womb. Tiny place of infinite peace at the
heart of a frozen geometry. All elaboration, variation, permutation, long since exhausted;
infinite access to unbounded energy contained in oneness.
You/I/We no difference. See?
See. Vidya. All seeing. Eye of Buddha. Nerveless kalpas of some body. Nerve vanity.
This oneness consumed. Many nows, peace past.
At peace in the past. Loved women, raised children, lived a long life on a world to which
there is no returning.
Nothing one at peace in no past all completed no returning.
Point.
One makes possible all.
I see. Buddha, do not leave your student bound.
The eye is shrinking, closing, its gorgeous bloody flare dimming. It is pierced by a white
needle visible behind the small dark center.
Small large no matter no time Do not go. Take us with Am your father/mother/food loved
raised living longing no return my own ghost
8
Ry Ornis, the tall insect-thin master, smiled down on him. Olmy saw many of the master
opener, like an avatar of an ancient god. All the different masters merged.
They were surrounded by a glassy tent and a slow breeze cooled his face. Ry Ornis had
wrapped him in a rescue field where he fell, carrying safe cool air to replenish what his
worksuit could no longer provide.
Olmy rediscovered scattered rivers of memory and bathed his ancient feet there. He
swallowed once. The eye, the lesion, had shut forever. "It's gone," he said.
Ry Ornis nodded. "It's done."
"I can never tell anybody," Olmy realized out loud.
"You can never tell anybody."
"We robbed and ate to live. To be born."
Ry Ornis held his fingers to his lips, his face spectral in a new light from the south. A huge
grin was spreading around half the Way, a gorgeous brilliant electric light. "The ring gate. A
cirque," the gate opener said, glancing over his shoulder. "Rasp and Karn, my students,
have done well. We've done what we came here to do, and we saved the Way, as well. Not
bad, eh, Ser Olmy?"
Olmy reached up to grab the gate opener, perhaps to strangle him. Ry Ornis had moved,
however.
Olmy turned away, swallowed a second time against a competing dryness. There had
been no need to complete the ring gate. The unfinished cirque had done its job and drained
the final wasted remnants of the lesion, forcing a closure.
As they watched, the cirque shrank. The grin became a smile, became an all-knowing
serene curve, then collapsed to a point, and the point dimmed on distant rippled sands.
"I think the twins are a little disappointed they can't finish the cirque. But it's wonderful,"
Ry Ornis enthused, and performed a small dance on the black obsidian of the valley floor.
"They are truly master now! When I am tried and convicted, they will take my place!"
The Way remained. Rolling his head to one side, Olmy could not see the Redoubt.
"Where's the pyramid?" he asked hoarsely.
"Enoch has her wish," Ry Ornis said, and shaded his eyes with one hand.
Plass, Enoch, the allthing.
Plass had seen her own ghost.
To east and west, the ruined mountains and their statues remained, rejected, discarded.
No dream, no hallucination.
He had been used again. No matter. For an endless instant, like any gate opener, only
more so, he had merged with the eye of the Buddha.
9
"The Infinite Hexamon Nexus does not approve of risky experiments that cannot
be documented or explained. How many were deceived, Master Ry Omis?"
"All, myself included."
"Yet you maintain this was done out of necessity?"
"All of it. The utmost necessity."
"Will this ever be necessary again? Answer honestly; the trust between us has
worn very thin!"
"Never again."
"How do you explain that one universe, one domain, must feed on another in
order to be born?"
"I don't. We were compelled. That is all I know."
"Could it have gone badly?"
"Of course. As it is, in our clumsiness and ignorance, we have condemned all our
ancestors to live with unexplainable presences, ghosts of past and future. A kind
of afterbirth."
"You are smiling, Master Gate Opener. This is intolerable!"
"It is all I can do, Sers."
"For your disobedience and arrogance, what punishment do you choose, Master
Ry Omis?"
"Sers of the Nexus. This I swear. I will put down my clavicle from this time
forward, and never know the grace again."
-- Sentencing Phase of Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite Hexamon
Nexus, "On the Advisability of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order"
Tracting through the weightless forest of the Wald in the rebuilt Axis Nader, reaching out
to the trees to push or grab roots and branches, half-flying and half-climbing, in his mind's
river-wide eye, Olmy Ap Sennen returned to Lamarckia, where he had once nearly died of
old age, and retrieved a package he had left there, tied in neat pieces of mat-paper. His
wives and children had kept it safe for him, and now they returned it. There was much
smiling and laughter, then saying of farewells, last of all a farewell to his sons, whom he had
left behind Occupants of a different land, another life. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]