Galfar shuffled along beside her.
Jess was curious at these comments, certain they were just descriptions hatched by the ignorant for things that had a much more explicable reality.
Or maybe the threats were as fiercely dangerous as they sounded. This world was, after all, mostly unknown to her. So far it appeared little more than a backward, no-tech planet, with simple people and not much threatening about it. Yet, there were elements of the fantastic. Telepathy. Telekinesis.
What else?
Could there really be monsters? Denizens of the Waste? Poisoned Ones?
She looked past the fire, out to sea, imagining things. Scary things. And for a moment she was a teenager again, fearing the darkness, the things she couldn’t see. Glad for a giant, burning fire, laughing good company and the safety of a mighty ship all around her.
She studied Galfar’s profile cast in the light of the fire, shadows flickering across the crags of his old skin.
And Galfar, as he’d done before, gave the unmistakable sign he was done with the topic.
Jess let it go.
Music played from somewhere round the fire. As they closed the final distance, the entire deck at that end bathed in warm orange light, crackling invitingly, she noticed it was Haz. He had his guitar and sat atop a barrel, several other travelers gathered before him in rapt attention, enjoying the rousing chords. It was an upbeat song he strummed.
Jess went over and talked politely with them, still taken with the ability to do so, helping herself to some grub. She brought a plate back to Galfar. He took it and began eating.
Galfar had started speaking telepathically as he met her on deck and continued to do so, so she followed his lead. She had no idea if anyone else around there other than Haz could speak in the mind. Right then everyone was quite loud and boisterous, Haz included as he entertained.
Part of her wanted to join in the revelry; to make conversation with the locals using her remarkably improbable new mastery of the language. It was, perhaps, even more remarkable than the telepathy or the telekinesis. The people certainly seemed friendly enough. All were of African or Mediterranean influence, as was everyone she’d seen so far. Not direct from those places, of course, as these people were on another planet, but the people from Earth and the people of here were exactly the same. Identical humans, as much a mystery now as ever. Maybe they came from the same source? Humans on three worlds: Earth, Anitra and here. As mind-boggling as that was it no longer confounded her.
She chewed a tough but tasty piece of meat.
Her features were just a little too Anglo to really fit in, if anyone decided to scrutinize her, but over the course of the journey her skin had browned such that she now matched many of them in richness of color. By the firelight, in the full-body tunic, she easily looked one of the crowd. If she drew any attention at all it was with her eyes, when they flashed in the orange of the licking flames, as she imagined they must, and as she noticed the occasional stare she tried her best to keep them averted. From the looks on others’ faces she became acutely aware of their aspect.
Cat’s eyes.
Mostly, though, no one gave her much notice. Except maybe Haz. She kept catching him staring in her direction. So far she’d caught him, but the mere fact that she was looking at all implicated her as well. In each case she could as easily have glanced a fraction of a second too soon and he would’ve caught her. As it was she was starting to feel her luck might run out.
She resolved to stop looking his way. Didn’t want to reinforce his expectations. Absently she touched the flower necklace and continued eating. At length Galfar was done with what she brought him and beckoned her follow.
“Come,” he spoke aloud. He put his empty plate on a nearby table, began picking his teeth with his free hand and used his other to lean on his staff and start walking. Jess put down her own plate and went with him.
He led her away from the fire, out to the edge of the deck and up along it toward the bow, all the way to the farthest corner. When they stopped there was no one near, it was dark and the sky shone brilliant with the beauty Jess had grown so used to night after night on the open road. The blue giant was aft, beyond the masts and the fire, and if she looked in the direction the ship headed the curtain of stars went right to the black edge of the ocean. There they reflected their exact pattern into the depths, like ghosts in the slowly undulating waves. Overhead the multi-colored nebula, the Heart of the World, shone like something out of a painting, absolutely gorgeous, and she couldn’t shake the strange sense of nostalgia. Of belonging there despite not belonging there at all.
Far below the sea lapped against the hull, the sound of its distant force reaching all the way through the breeze to the upper deck. If she concentrated she could feel the surge of each wave, pushing against the mass of the ship as it, in turn, pushed back.
“I don’t come often enough,” Galfar said wistfully. “The salt and the sea are therapeutic. I used to make trips to swim several times a year.” He looked down at his old, bent body. “I’m sure I’d be doing a bit better if I’d kept it up.” Jess continued to marvel at how well she caught the nuances of his spoken words; how well she knew the language that, by all rights, she should not know at all. Haunting flashes of insight plagued her still; the idea that, despite any explanations involving absorption through telepathy or anything else she’d known the ancient Kel language all along.
“What are we?” she asked, more timidly than she intended. Voice almost too quiet to hear.
But Galfar heard her, loud and clear. Her words may have been soft but the question boomed in her mind. “I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. “All I know is we’re not this.” He patted himself. “We’re not bodies. Something else, it would seem. Something timeless.”
Jess looked up at the vast nebula overhead. So many stars. Such vast distances between each, crowded so close from that point of view they looked to be touching.
Galfar shrugged. “We may have had an origin. A beginning. I suspect that we did. Will we have an ending?
“That I don’t know.”
She pulled her gaze from the stars. Galfar’s eyes reflected a tiny slice of their majesty. Again he shrugged. “Time may not be the thing we imagine.”
“So what are we doing?” she asked. “Why …” and she touched herself, “this? Why bodies at all?” It was a weird question to ask, but there on that giant wooden ship, on an extraterrestrial sea beneath constellations that could’ve been clear across the universe for all she knew, dressed in a simple tunic with the mastery of telepathy, telekinesis and an entirely alien language under her belt, a massive, blue Saturn filling the night sky behind her … at that moment and in that place it was exactly the question to ask. She wanted to run down this rabbit hole, either until it became too absurd to continue without laughing, or it actually started to make sense.
The second possibility worried her as much as the first.
Galfar’s gaze flickered in the low light. “As near as I’ve been able to understand it, bodies are a convenient contact with the world. Identities. Faces we present for each other. Without them … ” As his voice trailed off it seemed he didn’t have a good answer for where that was leading, and so went back to his original line of thought. “These identities are tem
porary. Very temporary. Bodies get old and die. They get killed. We’ve been doing this a great, long time. We become them, quite fully, but they are not our identity. Bodies are not who we are.
“And so we are not only timeless, but powerful. I cannot tell you why we play this game. Sometimes I imagine we’re puppeteers. Puppeteers who will only use the puppet. See? Crazy, eh? But this is us. Imagine a puppeteer who wants to move a stick. But he won’t move the stick. He must—must, by his own design, according to his own rules—which he must not violate—use the puppet. See? With that self-imposed limitation he might never move the stick, especially a large one, when in fact all he would need do is reach with his own hand. And if he did want to do something bigger, well … he simply can’t with the puppet, and so he doesn’t. The puppet becomes everything. And this is us.
“The problem, and what the priestess sought to solve, is that we are so far gone we don’t even know we’re playing with puppets. Let alone that we can move the stick ourselves. The puppets don’t last. When one is gone we pick up another. We move on. Puppets talking to puppets, puppets fighting with puppets, puppets and more puppets—all when giants with staggering power hover at their strings. Choosing not to act.”
Jess swallowed. Bizarre as that was … right then it had an eerie ring of truth. So far she wasn’t laughing.
“So why keep doing it?” she pressed. “Why hold ourselves back? Why keep playing with puppets?” She wanted to ask, If bodies are puppets then what are we? Who were the giants? But Galfar already said he didn’t know. Only that she, he—everyone—was not this. Not the flesh. Perhaps he knew why they chose such limitations?
He didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If I did, maybe I wouldn’t be old and lame.” Then, with a quiet sort of introspection that made her heart go out to him:
“I need a new puppet.”
His whole body seemed to sigh.
But it passed quickly. He regained enthusiasm. “The body is temporal,” he said. “You,” and he pointed to some vague point between her eyes, or off into space or somewhere that seemed to be pointing at her and not her actual face, “are not. You have had uncounted identities. As have we all. Each time, though, it has been you. We become each identity and believe we are capable only of what the body is capable of. Aware only of what the body is aware of. And yet, and yet … despite this … there is a fine line. It would seem the solution would be to abandon these puppets, right? But I’m not so sure. We started this game for a reason. All I know is that, too loose of a connection and one loses one’s bond with the world. Powerful, yes, but a disconnected force. Therefore ultimate power, ultimate effectiveness, it would seem, depends upon the perfect union of body and self. The physical and the being. Action is key. Great mystics in our past have made this mistake. They have achieved great heights, isolated themselves from all contact, only to fade from this world. That is not the way.” He drifted in thought and she remained quiet, listening to the power of the lapping waves far below.
When Galfar continued his voice was soft.
“I am old. You are young. These are body concepts. We are each, however, ancient beyond measure. Perhaps, in ways that matter, you are older than me.” His gaze searched hers. “It could be true. But here we are, passing through these points in the present, in these forms. They have come to dictate our action. But they need not. All of this, everything, is nothing more than agreement.”
That hooked her attention in a different direction.
“So we could just agree to something different? To be young and never die?”
He thought on it a moment. “I suppose, yes.”
“Then,” and she paused before asking, considering against it but going on with the question anyway, “if that’s true, why be old? And, in your case, why be lame?”
Galfar looked at her in the shadows, eyes dark in the starlight. The distant, flickering bonfire barely reached them at that angle, making it hard to read any subtleties of expression, and she began to worry she’d offended him.
Then he laughed. A hearty laugh, too hearty for his frail constitution and it degenerated to a fit of coughing. When the coughing passed the laughing continued, leading to more coughing, back to laughter and, finally, he was catching his breath and trying to speak.
“That would be the question, wouldn’t it?” He held his ribs with one hand as he breathed deeply, leaning on the staff with the other. “I wish I knew the answer. Though what you say is true. I, sadly, know nothing of how to change that agreement. Certainly not enough. Bodies get old, bodies die. We continue. How to alter the cycle of that? Of life and death? Perhaps even the Amkradus doesn’t speak of it.
“Besides,” and a sly grin turned the corners of his mouth, “where would be the fun in that?”
He gave her a moment to consider the idea, then said: “After a thousand years, being Galfar The Young would probably get boring.” His breathing returned to normal. “We share this universe. And that may be the bigger part of the question. This universe is our collective creation. Our game board, if you will. Our playground. Agreement maintains it. I suspect the cycle of life and death is part of those original agreements. Something we all committed to in the beginning. It makes the game interesting. Ultimately we are here because we choose to be, and we play the game by the rules we chose at its inception and, I suspect, that is the bigger thing to unravel.”
Her mind buzzed.
“This universe knows only force,” he said. “The funny thing is, this universe—any universe—was, is, created by us, and we are creatures of thought. Force obeys thought. Force is as nothing to the thought that creates it. Therefore, our ability to change our mind is perhaps the greatest power there is.”
Jess stared at Galfar, sensing what he was about to say.
His arm raised and he pointed to her. “The Codes are the way to restoring that freedom. The freedom to change our minds. The power of thought.”
This only brought more questions. So many questions.
Jess looked out to sea. “If the Codes promise so much, then what happened to the ancients? The ones who recorded them in the first place? Why are they gone, and why did they leave them behind?” She understood if the most recent godmakers had misused that knowledge and done themselves in, but what of the ones before that? The ancients who discovered the Way in the first place?
Galfar thought on it. “I have wondered this myself,” he said. “My belief is that they moved on. To a bigger game. That the Codes were left for the next who would find them. Perhaps even handed down. The godmakers perverted that knowledge. Later Aesha was unable to bring it into the light.”
Jess considered that, considered the vast significance of this serene conversation, there on the bow of that mighty sailing ship; thinking on everything she’d learned so far.
Said: “So anyone can do this. This … moving things with the mind. Speaking in the mind. We’re all …” She wasn’t sure how exactly to phrase it.
But Galfar understood. “Of course. We are all the same. These things you do, these things I do—they are native to all of us. The great and the small. The fact that we think we can’t, or know nothing of our ability, that is the strange thing. Moving something with a decision is not strange. Thinking you can’t, that is what’s strange. Not only strange but sad. And these are sad times, Jessica. We have descended so low. You, me, the few like us—we have only just begun. We must bring the rest back to awareness. The Codes will show the way.
“You’re here,” and he looked so hopeful in that moment, in that celestial light, “you have arrived. And now there is possibility once more. You will find the Amkradus, and you will bring its knowledge to the world.”
Somehow the vast impossibility of what that promised impinged, crazy as it was, and as Jess experienced the idea of that reality flush up against her tiny self, standing there with an old man on the deck of a wooden sailing ship, an expectation of change that would span worlds if it actually happened, that wo
uld bring self-determined power to billions—the very thing that would unlock potential that had been buried for … God knew how long …
That any of that, even a fraction of it, could depend on her, felt as if it was crushing her right out of existence. There was just no way any of it could ever come to pass. Certainly not driven by her.
But Galfar was watching. Sensed her doubt. He shook his head, almost like a tsk, tsk. Like he could see the degree of resistance in her eyes and she should know she was wrong to harbor it.
“Do not restrain yourself, Jessica,” he again pointed a crooked finger, this time admonishingly, and the sound of her own name spoken among the Kel words jolted her. “This is your destiny. In the fulfillment of what must come you are your only enemy.
“The worst thing you can do is hold yourself back.”
CHAPTER 31: THE DOMINION RESPONDS
Yamoto had been introduced to the Venatres team, most notably the young scientist, Nani, who seemed to be in possession of the most knowledge where this gathering was concerned. Along with her was another, even younger girl—from Earth, it was claimed—and, with them both, Horus. Yamoto could not stop glancing at the tall, wide-shouldered Kazerai. Last of that great caste, the Defector, only Kazerai to switch allegiance in their history, to cross over to the side of the then-enemy. Horuses’ background was rich, perhaps the richest of all the Kazerai, and to see him among their new allies was quite surreal. Somehow Horus was involved in all this, and stood to the side watching like some kind of indestructible guard. He looked crisp, as sharp and alert as ever, a dark beard coming in. With that he looked wiser somehow, beyond his youthful nineteen or so years. More world-weary, if that were possible for one of the esteemed Kazerai. You are past your time, my friend. Horus should’ve been retired by now.
Yamoto and a group of his delegates and loyal generals had come at the urgent summons, hot on the heels of the successful summit with the Venatres—all those same people, their former enemies, top leaders, present at this meeting as well. His own Daimyo, Kazukhan, the one who brokered that summit, was with this group, as curious at this rapid summons as was he. Kazukhan had seemed the wise one during negotiations with the Venatres, the one in the know, the key mastermind of those events, now just as lost, just as impatient as everyone to learn what this was all about. Something to do with the return of the starship, the first test of their accord, a threat they could face only as a world united, something that demanded the entirety of Anitra and all her might. It was too soon following the successful summit to be a trap, the promise of those agreements far too strong in their inception. Yamoto was convinced this was real, but what threat could possibly have arisen?
Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4) Page 34
