The Ordinary

by Jim Grimsley

  She was surprised to find that he knew so much, that he could speak of these concepts. He was teaching her a vocabulary at the same time he was conversing with her. Her face may have betrayed some of this, for he stopped. “I’m listening,” she said.

  “It surprises you that I’ve learned anything about your science.” He smiled. “Never mind. Imagine what little you might have achieved if the world yielded no pattern to your study save those you felt by instinct.”

  “You think your magic comes from that?”

  “I think we were shaped to develop the talents that we have developed.”

  “Your god, this great Mother, did this?”

  “Yes.”

  Jedda shook her head. “Then what do you think she is?”

  “Something very ancient. But the universe, I have learned, is far more ancient than she. Does this shock you?” He had a peculiar light in his eyes, partly reflected from the fire, but the rest from himself, the fierceness of his being; behind him, the backdrop of windows danced in colored light. “It shocks me sometimes. I’ve loved her so.”

  “I’ve never been a devotee of any particular religion. I suppose I don’t understand.”

  “I’m telling you more than I meant to, but it seems right to me.” He reached for the wine, which actually seemed to affect him. “What I’ve learned from your world teaches me she might be anything, this god of ours. She might be a being in possession of a science so far beyond your own that it seems like magic to you, and to us.”

  She laughed softly.

  He blushed. “Tell me what’s funny?”

  “You want an explanation, too.”

  “I suppose there is irony in that. Yes, I want an explanation.” His eyes glazed for a moment. “Because, you see, I’m the thing she wanted. All this time. And I want to know why.”

  “You’re the thing she wanted?”

  “She made this place to shape a consciousness that could use a certain kind of language, a certain kind of thought. The consciousness is already the frame of reference by which you and I each move forward through time, there is already a certain level of binding of time into matter in the natural order. What I do is a step beyond that, a binding of events into the present moment, events that I will to happen. There is one language for this which the Prin learn to focus their consciousness; I use another.”

  “Your magic is based on a language?”

  “Yes. Not a language based entirely on sound, any more than your own is, but one that makes use of it. The Mother provided us with the teaching, through her intermediaries. We had only to learn the language and use it, and we did. Not great numbers of us; we were never allowed to teach this language to one another. I’m oversimplifying a bit, which you’ll learn if you study.”

  Her heart was pounding. “Go on.”

  “Magicians developed, reached a certain level of attainment, contested with one another for power, destabilized the world, and were killed or died. To reach my level involves the use of forces that are lethal if they’re mishandled in even the slightest degree. All but one of the others who reached this level before me were killed by first use of this power. But only a magician of my level of attainment can organize the magicians of lower levels into any kind of discipline. Only a society with a magician of my level can become stable and organize.”

  “So she made this world to make you. Or someone like you.”

  She was echoing his own words. He looked at her. “To one from your world this sounds like megalomania. In my world, the prophecies related to my own choosing were planted centuries before my birth. So I know the fear you’re feeling, well enough. But it did me no good to fear it then and does me no good to resent it now.”

  “Why?”

  “Why does she want someone like me?” He paced again, pouring more wine. “Are you hungry? Shall we go in? The food will keep warm as long as we like.”

  “I can wait awhile. Go on.”

  “Perhaps it will be more obvious if you understand that such a device as the gate that links our worlds is not possible for the lower levels of magic. It is possible only for mine.”

  “She wanted you to make the gate.”

  “To find you. And your people. Or simply to escape from here.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “I’m not completely certain.”

  “Why couldn’t she make the gate herself?”

  “For us to make the gate was a kind of test, I suppose. To do it herself would require her presence in the world to a degree that she would not enjoy. She is not a creature who finds linear time to be a pleasant experience. Our world is very uncomfortable for her. I’m guessing this, of course. But it’s a good guess.”

  “She wants your world to have a connection with the outside? With us? Why?”

  He studied her face for a while. “To carry what we can do, what my Prin can do, into your world.”

  14

  The meal was a bit of paradise, food that soothed her, mostly vegetables, along with more of the wine, one of the dark vintages, as her host termed them. By now they were well beyond the cup of friendship, though Jedda was careful to drink slowly, since she had no stat to help her system regulate the alcohol. Jessex paced himself as well, though she wondered if he were doing this for effect. The room, small and intimate, contained some of the few paintings she had ever seen here, what looked like oil on canvas; most of the Erejhen art to which she had been exposed was woven. These were paintings in the abstract, a style with which she was familiar from her own world but that surprised her to see here, hanging against the warm cream-colored stone of the walls.

  “These paintings are very old, from an era in which this kind of———” and again he used a word she made nothing of, “was very popular. There have been two or three periods of art in this style, maybe more. Even I’m not old enough to know all our history.”

  “What was the word you used? The name of the style of art?”

  He spelled it. “Thorombulan.” He added, “That is the configuration of the word in your era. The older sound is slightly more elaborate.” He pronounced it and spelled it, to show the difference. “Thorombaryean.” He sighed after he said the older word, the sound full and deep-timbred. “The words grow shorter as time passes. I wonder why, sometimes.”

  “Words don’t always grow shorter. But they always change.”

  He watched her. “Does this mean you’re thinking about what I’ve told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So will you make me draw this from you by questions?” He gave her a sly smile.

  She laughed, softly. “I’ve studied many languages, including your own. If there’s a language that I can learn that will teach me what you do, I want to learn it. Or at least to find out whether I can or not.”

  His face grew impassive; for a moment he seemed altogether remote, and she wondered whether she had said the wrong thing. “What bad timing,” he said, and came back to the room. “What you have said is wonderful. We’ll talk more, but I must withdraw for a moment.”

  The lights from outside grew suddenly bright, and when she walked to the windows, leaving him seated at the table, silent and motionless, the lights outside were brighter, moving in an almost inky way through a mist that had settled over the house and hill, obscuring all but the two blurred moons in the sky and the haze of lights of the immense house in that volume of space below. A sound caused Jedda to look back. A woman opened the door from the serving area of the apartments, saw Jessex sitting frozen in his chair, and quickly drew out her head again.

  Wind pressed against the glass panes of the windows, strong and vocal, a long low scouring. Jedda was rapt, looking at the high slender bar of color that was the tower, the place from which the light originated. The sky had been cloudless when they sat down to dinner but now rain began to spatter the glass.

  When she felt him behind her she turned, and he was smiling. She asked, “Your work, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

&n
bsp; “Can you tell me about it?”

  “Someone is trying to find me,” he said. “Someone who can do what I do, but from very far away.”

  “Someone?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  “What does this person want?”

  Strain showed on his face now, along with a flatness of expression that made her afraid. It was as if he were a hologram slightly out of sync, rippling in front of her as from some special effect. “To find out what I’m doing in making the gate, and how I’m doing it.”

  “Why?”

  “To take this work and use it.”

  She remembered her conversation with Opit, with Himmer, from what seemed like days ago in her mind, a conversation that would take place several centuries from now. “To make more gates.”

  “They would be quite valuable, in your universe, where nothing can move faster than light.” He stepped to the window, looked up at the tower, and touched the glass with his fingertips. “Unfortunately, there must be one of me for each gate. To build it is one thing, to move objects through it another.”

  “You move every ship, every person, yourself?”

  “Through an assigned process, yes,” he said. “I control a number of devices. The process does not require that I consciously supervise the gate, but I must be here for the process to run. And strong as I am, I can only handle one gate.”

  He faded out for a moment, again. When he returned, he seemed weaker, though not hurt in any way.

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  He smiled, speaking through his haze. “It makes no difference, sitting or standing. But we may as well sit and continue to talk.”

  “Are you certain?”

  He laughed. “This enemy of mine is part of the reason you’re here.”

  “Enemy?”

  “Whatever this is, it means me no good,” he said. “I’ve rarely felt a power like this one. It was exhilarating at first, I hadn’t been matched in so long. But I am worried. And that’s the reason for all the changes I’ve put in motion, including the one that brought you here.”

  She went for her wine from the dinner table and brought his glass as well. He thanked her for it.

  “Have we reached the cup of laughter, do you think?” Jedda asked. “I lost count.”

  “We were not strict enough in the count to tell,” he said, smiling, leaning his head against the back of his chair. He gazed at the fire through slitted lids, like a cat. “We should have emptied each glass.” He basked in the fire, and she watched his face enjoy the moment, even with the wind sending up a shriek through the towers of the house. “You would like to study the malei. What you most likely know as akana, the chant. The way of the Prin.”

  “Is that possible? Could I learn it?”

  “The Anin do. And either they’re descended from you or you from them. A choir of Anin Prin is not the strongest of our configurations, but it can be quite potent. Anin chanters mixed into the ordinary choirs are as good as any.” He paused. “The learning is a struggle for them, and only a few reach the highest levels of the chant. There is a certain amount of transformation necessary, to change the Anin consciousness to one that can move power through the words.”

  “Transformation? You adapt them?”

  He shook his head. “The chant itself makes the change. As the words bind themselves into your neural tissues, they change the chemistry of your tissue slightly, over time, including enough of the DNA to adjust your hearing more to our range.” After a moment, he added, “The same process occurs in an Erejhen, to a degree, in terms of the adjustment of the neural tissues to suit the words. But in us it’s much less marked.”

  “What will I feel?”

  “The change takes a long time, and years of study. There will be some discomfort, some times of fever, some times in which your dreams go on for days. In the end you will have a consciousness that spans several moments, not simply the one moment you’re used to. To think in this way is hard to describe, to see the consequences of your actions some distance into the future, with the ability still to change them. We call this state ‘kei.’”

  She nodded to show that she picked up the new word. She spelled it for him and he indicated she was correct. She asked, “Is that the choice you brought me here to make?”

  A film of light formed over his body, in appearance so liquid she thought it would be wet to the touch. Her heart was pounding. Eyes closed, he said, “That’s part of it.”

  She listened to the fire crackle, watched a red-hot log crack and slide from the irons supporting it, ashes hissing onto the bed of embers. The notion of burning wood still struck her oddly; what an extravagance. His voice brought her back, but since his eyes remained closed, she stared at the fire.

  “My counterpart in Cunevadrim in your day is part of me, the part whom I will send there to study another of the magic languages, in libraries that exist only there.”

  “Eldrune,” she said.

  He nodded, still without opening his eyes. “We’ll be successful in learning the language, he and I, but the result will be a kind of independence of the self of that one from me. Only a few people in your time are aware of his existence. Of my existence, in two parts.”

  “What does he want with me?”

  “If I answer that, I’ll have told you too much.”

  She was silent, facing the fire, but she could feel him watching her now.

  “Can you accept that?” he asked.

  She looked him in the eye. A chill passed through her but she held his gaze. “What if my choice is never to go back?”

  “To stay here?”

  “Yes. To learn the akana here. To live in this world.” She felt a tautness easing from her midsection as she spoke.

  He sighed. “That choice is possible, I admit.”

  “You never answered my question earlier. How can you know all this? If it’s true that you’ve brought me so far into the past, how can you know what will happen centuries from now?”

  “Do you find me to be deceiving you?”

  She had drained her glass this time, and set it on a stone-topped table near her chair. “It would help to have some milestone to use as proof,” she said. “For my own comfort.”

  He said, in the most silken tone, “That I can provide.”

  “Yes?”

  “On your return journey,” he said. “If you can be patient.”

  “But what if I don’t return?”

  “Then what does it matter? You live here for the rest of your life and the future is no longer your problem.”

  She laughed, a feeling that came partly from her fear but partly from delight at having the freedom of so much choice. “So tell me how you know the future, then. Tell me how that happens.”

  “I already have,” he said.

  She had to think about it for a while, but she picked through the last minutes of conversation, determined to find some clue. She had a feeling this was a kind of test. He sat quietly with his head laid back again, eyes closed, that river of light on his skin like something live, viscous. She remembered the change that would take place in her mind when her tissues began to bind the words of the chant, that she would think across a span of moments. “How far ahead do you see?”

  “A very long way. From now to the moment in which I took you. It’s not seeing so much as thinking across that whole span. It’s hard to describe. Though if you study, you’ll understand a part of it.”

  “What about someone like Malin?”

  “I imagine she would prefer that you learn about her from her.” He paused. “It’s possible she won’t like at all that I’ve told you any of this. But it’s been a long time since I talked to anyone so freely.”

  “What a person will say to a stranger,” she said. “That’s part of a saying we have. The rest can’t be translated easily, something like, a person will sometimes say to a stranger what she won’t even say to herself. In the original it has more pith.”

  “Say it,�
� he asked, so she spoke the words in Alenke, in her home dialect. He murmured the words behind her, and said, in flawless Alenke, “Your language is quite beautiful, very simple in construction but very supple in use.”

  She continued in Alenke, “Your own language has layers of complication that are unheard of in any language we know.”

  He switched back to Erejhen as people in the next room arrived to clear away dinner. “Better not to disturb the now too much, by speaking your language where my people can hear. But I did want you to know I understand your tongue.”

  “Should I be surprised?”

  “From what I’ve gathered of you, Jedda Martele, I doubt you’re often surprised.”

  She felt charmed and touched, as she was supposed to; she asked for a glass of water and took it to the window. The lights had gentled, though the wind still gusted; some of the cloud overhead had lifted and the rain fell only in splatters against the glass. The feeling of a long journey began to creep over her, a tiredness that took all her limbs at once. “Have you told me what you wanted to tell me?” she asked.

  “You’d like to find your bed, I expect.”

  “Yes. Soon.”

  “We’re nearly done.”

  “Why don’t you simply tell me what you see? What do I decide?”

  He smiled. “That’s not the way this night unfolds.”

  She spoke after a silence that felt almost like music. “I’d like to stay a few days, at least. I’d like to work with someone to learn more about the chant.”

  “I can show you the beginnings myself,” he said. “And I’ll assign you a guide for the library. You may find the archaic spellings to be a problem, at first.”

  “I’ll piece it out,” she said.