The Children of the Voice were not, by and large, a cogitative people. Evolution had given them intelligence, a high degree of sentience, and the capacity for conscious, rational thought which is the road to self-change. But the use to which the Children of the Voice had put these gifts tended to be rather narrow. In the early days of their “rise” as a species they had been overimitative of the True Men and in the latter days they were overdependent upon the beings which they called their Gray Souls.
However, talents evolved to fill one purpose inevitably spill over into other areas, and the intelligence of the Children of the Voice did begin to express itself in other ways than the simple business of keeping them alive in a difficult environment and a tachytelic evolutionary régime.
Camlak’s predilection for doubt might be regarded as one of the painful steps in the evolution of a new perspective. It is one of the earliest steps, and in some ways it is one of the most difficult. A hundred doubters may die before one makes a beginning at the task of breaking down the barriers to doubt in his fellow men. Camlak was something of an enigma to his contemporaries, but the influence which he gained the power to exert when he became Old Man might have been crucial to their development as a community. Circumstance was eventually to rob him of that opportunity, but that does not detract from the fact that Camlak was a significant individual.
Yami was disappointed in Camlak. The elder man could have wished for a stronger, more successful son. Camlak did, it is true, win the right to adopt the Sun role in the Communion of Souls, and thus to replace his father as the man on the throne-stone, but Yami could still have wished for more fire and directness in his successor’s manner. Camlak was unusually fond of his father.
Camlak’s influence on his daughter, Nita, was considerable. If Camlak was an evolutionary step, Nita was an evolutionary adventure. She already had something of a new perspective relative to the rest of her people. She had the advantage of being female, and therefore less liable to fall prey to the hostile environment. The evolution of mind works, by necessity, more through the female line of descent than the male.
Nita loved her father in a fashion that was almost Heavenly. As a race, the Children of the Voice was far too confined to the fragile present in the living of their lives to project their emotions far into the unreal future, or to dredge up emotional jetsam from the dead past. The Shaira loved, but not in the same sense that the people of the Overworld loved. Their love was more momentary, less coherent, and discontinuous. Nita was different, at least in the instance of her relationship with her father.
Camlak was a strange man. Perhaps something of a tragic figure. Perhaps even something of a hero.
Chapter 47
The Communion of Souls waited for Camlak.
The injuries he had sustained during the fight with the harrowhound were not serious, but they were painful, and needed a little time. One of the readers set the broken arm and bound up his ribs. He had lost very little blood and he was not so weak that he had to take to his bed.
While he rested, Ayria attended to him, but he preferred the company of the aliens. A few whispers began to circulate concerning unnatural lust, but such rumors moved slowly and quietly. There were few enough who dared trespass on Camlak’s good nature at the present time.
Camlak was vaguely interested by Huldi, but he was absolutely fascinated by Joth. Initially, it had seemed to him to be a good idea to help Joth in order that the Children of the Voice might one day make use of him. Stalhelm had never had any direct supply of Heaven-sent goods, and it seemed obvious to Camlak that it never would have if Yami’s attitude to strangers had been allowed to rule forever. Many of the villagers were suspicious of the tools which came from the Overworld, and even more so of the books and the learning which could be taken from them. There was always a reservoir of opinion which held that such things ought not to be touched and that the Shaira should live entirely by their own efforts and their own ways. But the usefulness of the implements and the quality of the learning which could be obtained only from Overworld sources ensured that this opinion never came to dominate the intellectual climate. Even so, the art of reading was a minority pursuit, and many of those who were taught to read learned only to enhance their status, and not to make any use of that which was written in the books.
Camlak, as the son of an Old Man, had been forced to read at an early age, and had passed the point at which he still needed to be forced. He became an enthusiastic reader, and he absorbed what he read, although much of it he could not understand. While the elders regarded reading as something of a mystic art—the extraction of useful and/or meaningful details from a matrix which was largely cryptic and unfathomable—Camlak seemed to take it all more or less as it came. His attitude was one of pure inquiry, and he did not believe in the commonly held theory that books were constructed in order to conceal and protect knowledge by burying it in nonsense.
Joth confirmed Camlak’s opinions about the books, and he was ready enough to take Joth’s word, though many of the elders would have dismissed it out of hand. Among Huldi’s people the printed word was regarded even more superstitiously than among Camlak’s. The Men Without Souls had a separate sect of readers—and they most certainly did conceal and protect knowledge in order to maintain their monopoly in it. The readers of the True Men were fake magicians and false priests, and the fact that they were known by their more cynical brethren as charlatans did not alter the fact that they had possession and control of something real and valuable, and hence the power to maintain themselves as a mystic elite.
Joth wanted to inspect the books which were owned by the people of Stalhelm, but Camlak was reluctant. Eventually, Camlak brought him half a dozen, and let him touch them and inspect them. Joth found that they were real books, properly bound and printed on firm paper. He was more used to reading the disposable printouts from the cybernet. Bound books existed in the Overworld only as collector’s items, prized as objects rather than as information. No one maintained a library for research purposes or for recreation—there was no need when any work was available on demand anywhere and at any time. Joth came to the conclusion that the books were prepared specifically for export to the Underworld, and again his mind struggled with the mystery of Burstone, failing to find an answer.
“What do the books tell you?” Joth asked Camlak. The question seemed particularly pertinent because the books he was permitted to examine seemed like a random selection from the cybernet’s stores. They did not seem to have any relevance at all to the Underworld, nor any special significance of their own.
“A great deal,” said Camlak. “I think there is always much to learn from the simplest book, although it is not easy to understand. When we find out how to make books like this ourselves, perhaps we will understand more clearly what is put into them. Our writings are very different, and the materials we have do not last, so that the readers must forever be copying and recopying. The books are products and pictures of another life, and it is a life very unlike our own. So much we cannot find because we do not know. But there is still much to be learned, if you are content to listen to the words and remember. I think there are books which are pictures of meaning rather than pictures of life.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Joth.
“There are books which say what happens, and there are books which stay still, describing, thinking, looking. This is what the elders may think is put there only to clothe the truth and make it strange. I think it is truth itself, but truth of a different kind. It is a kind of teaching, because it is against the teaching we receive when we are shown how to read and what to read. There is more than one reality—this we know. There are two worlds, and perhaps more than two. But there is also more than one eye to look at reality, and the shape of a reality is in the eye as well as in the things the eye sees. This, it seems to me, is what is in the books. This is why it is so hard to see with the books, and so much easier to listen without understanding. If only we could s
ee....”
“See what?” asked Joth.
“Your world. The sky. The people. The things. I would not want to live in your world, nor to stay for more than a moment. But I think I would like to see. A glimpse. I could understand so much more.”
“Perhaps,” said Joth. “But the sun would blind you. At night...perhaps I can show you the world, by night. If I can find a way home—a doorway to my world.”
Camlak was silent for a while when Joth mentioned doorways. He knew of no way back for Joth, but he knew where to look for one.
Meanwhile, Joth wondered exactly how the Overworld did seem, in Camlak’s imagination. Could Camlak tell the difference between fact and fantasy in the books? Could he tell the difference between representation and interpretation, between analogy and reality? Probably not. A glimpse of the world beneath the distant stars might Well cause Camlak to reorder his ideas completely. Even a glimpse of the stars themselves...the sight of infinity and space...the Face of Heaven.
But Joth knew, as did Camlak, that a glimpse was all that was possible. The Children of the Voice had their own world and their own life and their own reality, in which the stars were electric bulbs and the sky was a solid roof over their heads. To the people of the Underworld a different Heaven showed a very different face, but it was nonetheless the Face of Heaven. Joth knew that his father’s crusade was meaningless and misled. One of the things which had come to worry him about the possibility of his return to the world above was the prospect of explaining to Carl Magner that his dreams had betrayed him.
Chapter 48
The man that Joth became when he awoke from his long illness into the real world of the realms of Tartarus was somewhat different from the Joth who had run away from Heaven in pursuit of his brother’s memory.
The new Joth dreamed, of course, and his dreams were plagued by the awakened images of instinct which had broken free of the i-minus effect now that Joth ate different food and drank different water. But the renaissance of instinct had come too late into Joth’s life to change him drastically. The nightmares hurt him, in his head, but they did little more than hurt. It was not the nightmares that turned him into a different man.
The new Joth had new and strange perspectives. He looked out into a different reality, and as time went by, he looked into that new reality with new eyes, because—as Camlak had said—reality is in the eye as much as the things it sees. Joth had lost time—or, rather, he had replaced one consciousness of time with another. The whole idea of change which he embraced was different. Days and nights had gone, and with them had gone the metrication of time. He could no longer count time, and because he could no longer count it he no longer saw it as a thing to be counted. His temporal sensitivity shrank as the past and future lost their outlines and closed in toward the infinitesimal moment of the present. Events no longer took “a long time” or “happened suddenly.” Things took the time they took. Things happened at their own speed.
Joth began to assess the contents of his temporal environment in their own temporal terms, not by comparison to the movement of the sun in the sky or the cycling hands of a clock which symbolize that movement.
Joth, awakened into the Underworld, wanted to go home. He wanted to go home very badly—it was his first priority. But the urgency of returning to the Overworld drained away from him because it could not hold tight to its meaning. From the moment he became conscious of his new reality, Joth was going home. But at the same time he lived in Camlak’s house and talked to the people who used it, and answered their questions, and he waited for Camlak to show him a way home. He was not in a hurry, because going home would take the time it took, and that was all there was to it.
Camlak questioned Joth on a wide variety of matters, most of which were fairly trivial. He asked about words, about meanings, and about a whole host of irrelevant facts. Many of his questions did not have answers, because the questions themselves were meaningless, but Joth did the best he could to help the Old Man of Stalhelm understand the alternative reality which existed on the far side of the sky-that-was-not.
Camlak learned a great deal—perhaps a great deal more than Joth thought he was teaching.
Huldi, meanwhile, had a very different interest in Joth. Because the Shaira tended to lump her and Joth into a single category, and because Joth himself obviously thought that she was more like him than were the Children of the Voice, Huldi too came to think that she and Joth were of like kind. When she had come to Stalhelm she had come simply to escape, with no plans, no ambitions, no idea what might eventually become of her, beyond a few simple notions which added up to little more than a determination to survive. But Joth offered a different range of possibilities. Joth was a straw to be clutched.
Huldi, of course, was not a reader, and had no concept at all of alternative realities. She was a creature of moderate intellectual powers trapped in a single frame of reference and caged by a fragile, unextended form of time. To her, Joth was a supernatural being, but a being with some affinities with herself. Like, and yet unlike. Huldi quickly came to love Joth, with a kind of love which was very unusual, if not unique.
Nita simply built the presence of Joth into the fabric of her growing up. He was present at a time when she was developing particularly quickly as a person, and her mind was alert, alive and adaptable. She was learning from books, from Camlak, and from her fellow-children. It was no strain to add Joth and Huldi to her sources of perspective. She loved to talk to the man with the metal face, and though most of the talk went by her like water in a fast stream, it had its effect on her, and in due course it would be revealed to her as something important in her life—something, perhaps, vital to the self she was to become.
Time—Tartaric time—bound together the people who shared Camlak’s house. It added a new facet to their collective identity. It made them kindred of a strange kind.
Chapter 49
The people of Stalhelm were gathered before the long house (all but ten warriors, who kept watch in the hills) making a great half-circle whose center was the throne-stone.
Camlak knew that the festival of the Communion of Souls, on this particular occasion, would bring him pain. He expected pain in the confrontation with his Gray Soul, because he was Old Man now, and the Gray Soul would be very much more a part of him henceforth. In addition, there would be pain in the ceremony—pain of a different kind but no easier to bear—because he was to be the Sun to Yami’s Star King.
The drums were beating in a slow, steady rhythm. The drummers crouched in the shadow of the long house. The beat was muted, and when the horns blew, as they did in turn, they gave forth long, low notes like the distant crying of nightbirds.
The firelight was also muted. The flames burned red and low, and the moths which danced in the smoke seemed to have purple wings. They seemed to the villagers to represent the ghosts of shadowed souls.
The circle was silent, though there were a thousand people, and nearly half of them were children, or at least unmated. The people were working at the pulp which each had taken into his or her mouth. Periodically they would add new leaves to the masticated fiber, and suck out new supplies of the bitter juice. They did not move with the rhythm of the drums, but took that rhythm into themselves, and united it with the tempo of their heartbeat. Deliberately, they slowed their own metabolism. Their eyes remained open, but took on a hard glaze, and though they saw still, it was not wholly with their eyes that they watched.
The elders, now in the role of priests, stood in a line behind the arc of the crowd. Their arms were raised so that their loose robes hung apart from their bodies in great voluminous folds. No breeze stirred the trailing cloth. The elders, as priests, needed no leaves to grind between their jaws. They reached for the inner sight using no more than the power of their minds.
Into the space which was clear around the base of the throne-stone came the Star King. He was covered by a vast robe of black which swirled about him as he moved, and his head was enclosed by a g
igantic mask, also painted jet black. Both the mask and the robe were sewn with tiny sequins which caught the light as he came close to the fire. As the folds of the cloak swayed and swung, the sequins flashed in turn, fugitive, evasive stars in a cloth of absolute darkness. Inside the Star King was Yami, but Yami transfigured. He was no longer Old Man, but merely an old man, and his body had completely lost its straightness. Yami staggered and shambled around the throne-stone, and the billows of the sky which draped his tired limbs flickered with uncertain strength.
The Star King moved, hopping and swaying, very slowly, consumed by the tempo of the drumbeat. Inside him, the pathetic figure of Yami could be seen now and again as the curve of a shoulder or the bulge of a hand.
Yami: a dancing corpse in a black shroud studded with little glass stars.
The Children of the Voice steadily extracted the juice from the leaves in their mouth, and reached for inner sight.
Up in the hills, the lookouts closed their ears to the hypnotic rhythm of the drums. They ran their tongues round in dry mouths, tasting the bitterness of the juice that was not there, feeling cold and alone despite the cloying warmness of the Underworld. Their heads ached.
In Camlak’s house, behind the trailing edge of the crowd to one side of the long house, the Sun waited. His head was aching too, and he felt slightly sick. Camlak was inside a costume which was colored brightly gold and silver. The mask which he wore was pure white and polished. It crouched on his shoulders like a great white eagle.
Time passed him by, flowing like molasses.
Beside him, waiting with him, were Joth and Huldi. They could see from the window slits, over the heads of the squatting people, what was happening in the circlet of bare ground. They watched Yami’s bobbing mask, like a big black fruit dancing on a wind-shaken branch.
The Face of Heaven: The Realms of Tartarus, Book One Page 13
