“Are you thinking of escape?” she asks with a sideways glance.
“No. I wish to remain hidden. If I stay in the streets, my hunter will eventually find me.”
Ninsuni takes something else out from her sack and lights the sconce. The powerful incense I smelled earlier fills my alcove.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It is an herb we use to keep you all calm. Really, it is of no use anymore.” She smiles. “Only new guests in the Chambers of Veneration are affected by it. All the others are used to it by now. It was just something the priests advised we should use many years ago. That and the medicine they put in the water. I don’t know what that is.”
She places her things back in the sack and sits down cross-legged before me, suddenly looking concerned. “But I am more interested in this hunter of yours. Who is he? Why does he hunt you?”
The incense fills my nose, and I can understand why they use it. My heartbeat slows and my head feels as though a warm cloud has filled it.
“It is too difficult to explain,” I tell her. “He is not like anyone else. He is from . . . another place.”
“What do you mean? Is he a Syrian or a Mizraimite? Perhaps he is—”
“No, no, he is not from this world. He is . . .” I should not have spoken.
Ninsuni leans forward, places the tips of her fingers on my chin, and gently lifts my face to regain eye contact. The unexpected touch sends a cold thrill through me. “Not from this world?” Her eyes are intense and wide, full of questions and wonder. “Then from where? Is he a demon? A god?”
I choose not to answer. There is a thirst in the dark wells of her eyes, an infectious keenness of mind and eagerness to understand, but the task is too great. The synapses of the human mind are vast, creating opportunity for lofty concepts to be perceived and wondrous new paradigms to be imagined, but even in this small region of the cosmos there are more laws and variables than there are synapses in Ninsuni’s brain. No, revelation is impossible. This is simultaneously the terrible curse and beautiful blessing of humanity—that their hunger for enlightenment is greater than their capacity to digest it.
“I am tired from my change,” I tell her, “and if understanding is a journey, I fear I would not have the stamina to travel its path, and that you would never reach the destination; the distance is too great.”
Ninsuni’s shoulders slump, and my stomach sinks when I see the disappointment in her eyes.
“Are there pretty, pretty trees?” The whispered question is not from Ninsuni but from a tentative listener who has crept up behind her. It is Moss who asked the question. Copying Ninsuni, he sits down with legs crossed like a student waiting for a lesson. He licks his lips and scratches nervously at a lichen-like growth on the sole of his left foot.
“Pretty trees?” Ninsuni blinks at Moss in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“On the journey.” Moss speaks louder but flinches, as if ducking an imaginary blow. “There might be pretty, pretty trees.” He pulls out his silver trinket box from a fold in his robes, then stares at it intently, fidgeting with it; a convenient distraction to avoid our gaze. Ninsuni opens her mouth to speak to him and I imagine she is about to send him gently on his way, but I stop her.
“Wait,” I say, and Moss looks up.
Moss’s words have reminded me of a simple truth. Sometimes the journey is just as important as the destination. Even if they could never get to a point of understanding the deep and hidden things of the universe, the revelations they receive along the way would not be wasted.
“Perhaps Moss has a point. You may never reach the destination, but you might see some pretty trees along the way.”
“So you will tell us?” Ninsuni’s smile shifts into an amused pout, presuming she has guessed correctly that I have changed my mind, and I gaze into her eyes. Perhaps it is the effect of the incense, but for a moment, all my pain is forgotten. Her enthusiasm is infectious, but it would soon be dampened were I to explain who Keitus Vieta truly is. If I am going to explain anything at all, I must start with something simpler but something wondrous.
“Tell us what?” The question comes from someone else and I instinctively twist my distorted neck to see who asked it, but I recognize the strangled inflection. The charcoal visage of Nitocris appears from the smog. Her expression is difficult to read beneath the charred skin, but her tone tells me she is suspicious, perhaps even mocking. Kaliki comes too and settles beside Moss. His left hand rests a little too close to Moss’s insect trinket box, and I wonder if he wants to steal it so that he can melt it down and add yet more bizarre jewelry to his already overcrowded skin. With another nervous flinch, Moss glances at Kaliki, who slowly withdraws his hand from Moss’s box without looking down, as if the proximity was pure accident, and Moss snatches his prized possession away, returning Kaliki’s flat expression—which I imagine would be a playful smile if he had one—with a reproving frown.
Inseparable from Kaliki, Phalana comes to stand behind them both, arms crossed where her breasts might have been, her head cocked in a pose of interest. Even Jabari looks like he is listening, though he is trying to appear uninterested.
“Well?” Nitocris paces behind the others like a jackal waiting for a carcass. Jabari watches her with a sly smile, as if expecting her to put on a show. “Are you going to teach us about the chthonian depths, Diabolis?” Nitocris continues. “Are you going to woo us with your knowledge of demons and angels?”
“Pay no attention to her,” Ninsuni whispers.
“I will not, but perhaps it would be a mistake to—”
“No! Please do enlighten us.” Nitocris stops pacing. Despite the damage to her throat, her voice is remarkably loud and full of spite. “Jabari here tells me that the chief priest believes you are a true seer and prophet, so . . . why don’t you tell us everything from the beginning. Tell us all about the great battle between Apsu and Tiamat, because obviously, you must have been there. You must have seen it all. Perhaps you even saw the birth of the gods. Do you think you can woo Ninsuni with such stories? Do you think she will believe you?”
Ninsuni closes her eyes and purses her lips. I do not know where Nitocris’s venom has come from, but I am not willing to receive it, and a flush of anger forces the next words from my mouth.
“You will hear no such stories from me, because none of that happened,” I tell her. “There was no beginning.”
It is Phalana who speaks next. “But everything has a beginning.”
Nitocris tries to hide a smile as if proud that I took her bait to make myself look foolish. She says nothing else but takes a step back toward the smog of her own alcove, exchanging a satisfied gaze with Jabari. I can tell she is still listening.
I shuffle sideways on my mattress so that I can free an arm and, raising the multi-jointed limb, motion to Phalana’s lover. “Will you come here, Kaliki?”
Kaliki glances at Phalana, then back at me. He presses his palm against his chest, and if his face could express, I think it would show questioning surprise. Something I did not expect from him.
“I only want to show everyone something you are wearing.”
He shuffles forward, jangling as he moves, and I take one of his pale hands. I feel him twitch as if he is frightened and wants to snatch his hand away, but after another glance at Phalana, who nods, he looks me in the eye, then relaxes his hand. Each of his fingers has a row of gold rings, all different in design and symbolism, but one stands out from the others, and I press one of my fingers against it.
“Do you know what this means?” I ask him.
Kaliki shakes his head. Behind him I notice both Jabari and Nitocris glance in our direction as if curious about what it is I am drawing attention to, but not wanting to admit it.
“It is the Ouroboros,” I tell him. “The great snake of legend that is perpetually eating its own tail. Can this ring on your finger tell you where it begins and where it ends?” I pause to let the example sink in. “Some things have
no beginning.”
Kaliki observes the ring, then looks at Phalana again. She unfolds her arms and reaches to stroke Kaliki’s cheek while addressing me. “Are you saying that this world did not have a beginning? Because if you are—”
“Surely Kaliki’s ring does have a beginning,” Nitocris cuts in. “The head.”
“But when did it start eating its own tail?” I ask her. “It is an eternal cycle. The head is forever eating its body. In the same way, this world and everything in the heavens once exploded into existence: the head”—I place a fingertip on the serpent’s head—“and one day it will grow cold and die: the tail.” I trace a second fingertip around the body of the serpent. “But one day it will explode into birth again in exactly the same way. The cycle will continue as it always has. So while it is true to say there is a beginning and an end, that same beginning and end have repeated themselves for all eternity, and the cycle itself has no beginning or end. The world you live in is the Ouroboros, the eternal wheel of creation, never changing, never ceasing. At the end of things, you will find the beginning of things. It is the way of things.”
I do not know if they understand, but it is at least a start, and it has silenced Nitocris for now.
“You said everything will grow cold at the end,” Ninsuni says. “But other seers say the end will come in fire. Are they all wrong?”
“The end of the world will come in fire, that is true,” I tell her. “The Sun—your god Shamash—will grow fat with greed and swallow the Earth, but one day, many ages after that, Shamash and the other gods, the other suns in the heavens, will grow tired. They will grow cold and die.”
“When? When will that happen? When?” Moss scuttles forward into a crouch, even closer to me than Ninsuni.
“Not for eons of time,” I say. “Not in your lifetime. Not in many, many thousands of lifetimes.”
“What do you mean by other suns?” Phalana asks.
I gaze upward toward the beige roof above our heads, wishing I could see the night sky. “Do you ever wonder what the stars are in the sky at night?”
Ninsuni laughs. “I used to believe that a big black cloak had been placed over the world and behind it was the light of heaven. The stars are little pinpricks in the cloth where the angels want to peep through at us.”
“The stars are gods, aren’t they?” Phalana says.
Nitocris huffs loudly, proving again that she is still listening even though her back is turned to us. “They are not gods. If they were, they would do more than twinkle at us and allow us to live like this. Even so, I like that idea more than Diabolis’s idiocy. There is only one sun, and the stars are nothing like it. He talks nonsense.”
“You are right,” I say. “The stars in the sky are very different from the sun. Most of them are much bigger.”
“Bigger?” she scoffs. “Now you want us to deny the evidence of our eyes.”
“Very, very far away.” Moss nods frantically. “Yes?”
Moss’s enthusiasm is heartwarming, and once again, I am humbled into admitting that these people are able to understand more than I gave them credit for. “Moss is right,” I tell them. “The sun is just another star like all the others you see at night. It is just that we are in very close orbit to it.”
Ninsuni nudges her head forward. “Orbit?”
“Yes, the Earth travels around it.”
“This is ridiculous,” Nitocris says, turning to face me. “Yet again we are asked to ignore our senses. Any fool can see that the sun rises and sets. It moves while the world is still. Why are you listening to this madman?”
“Please,” I say to Phalana, “will you pass me an apple and take one for yourself?”
Phalana reaches behind her into a bowl to oblige. It is an easy thing to demonstrate. I shuffle off my mattress to maneuver into the open, and the others rearrange themselves in a circle around me. It is then that I notice more Blessed Ones from Nitocris’s group have joined us. Neither she nor Jabari object, but they both continue to watch with suspicion. I hold my apple in the air and ask Phalana to circle me with hers, and although some of my new would-be students scoff when I ask them to imagine what a fly on Phalana’s apple would think if it were watching mine, their mocking begins to dry up when I suggest that the Earth, moon, and stars are also round like the apples and that there may even be other worlds circling the sun, too. Their ridicule is altogether silenced when Ninsuni reminds them about similar ideas shared by the Mizraimites long ago, paving the way for me to tell them that if my apple were the sun and Phalana’s apple were the world, the distance to the next sun with orbiting worlds would be somewhere near Assyria, and that is why the other suns appear as mere twinkling specks in the sky.
Two hours pass as I become engrossed with the opportunity to share this otherworldly knowledge blossoming inside me. I am driven, and their attention is rapt. Though I am sure the ability to understand or retain the information is fading for my unlikely students, the effects of the incense is not, and I cannot help but continue. I am compelled to share it with them, for there is so much more to tell. There are so many more wonders in the heavens, more stars than they can count, all of them clustered in a vast whirlpool shape that will one day be called a galaxy and, at the core of the galaxy, a violent and ravenous vortex so powerful that nothing can escape its appetite.
But the galaxy is a fraction within an infinite universe. I watch mouths drop as I tell them that there are even more galaxies than there are stars and that these galaxies are also clumped in vast clusters, which in turn are grouped within almost immeasurable superclusters. The universe is larger and more complex than anything they could ever imagine.
I do not know if it is wonder or lack of comprehension, but it is only when I describe what will one day be defined as the Phoradian Gulf Formulation that they go completely silent. I use the pool to demonstrate Phorad’s Theorem by dropping several pebbles into the water, the second immediately after the first, the third a second later, the fourth two seconds after that, and then doubling each time, replicating the Castorian mystic’s own lecture. The gap between each splash ring is twice as wide as the one that follows, and I explain to them that each gap represents a unique Phoradian Gulf: the gap between the first and second ripple represents the void between star systems. The gap between the second and third ripple represents the void between galaxies, the gap between the third and fourth is superclusters, and so on, except that Phorad used expanding hologramatic spheres instead of splash rings.
There is wave upon wave upon wave of concentric spheres. Each sphere a comparatively thin membrane of galaxies and clusters followed by an enormous Phoradian Gulf. Stars, galaxies, clusters, superclusters, exploding outward from a beating black heart, the terrible maelstrom at the center of the cosmos known as the Promethean Singularity, and one day, having expanded beyond the capacity to sustain itself, it will whimper into cold death, flattening out into an inert disc of primordial energy.
Some deeply buried part of me has seen all of this. I saw, somewhere in that endless plane, the black heart pumping its next beat, bursting outward to repeat the cycle, re-creating the exact same stars, galaxies, clusters, and superclusters, every life that ever lived, reborn, living again, dying again, with no memory of its previous existence.
I stop at that point, sensing that I have reached the limit of their awe; they cannot grasp anything beyond this, and I could be content in concluding with Ninsuni that my hunter has originated from somewhere beyond all of this, but these Blessed Ones are not my only audience.
In the far distant future, in the far distant past, for they are both the same in the eternal heartbeat of the cosmos—it is here, at this level of understanding, that mankind stops looking. It is here, in their complacency and arrogance, that they simply cease to reach farther. They forget the true nature of the universe discovered in the youth of their existence. They name the Promethean Singularity and its exploding cycles as the sum total of all that was, all that is, and all that will
be. They forget that this cosmos, with the Singularity at its heart, is just an infinitesimal fraction of an endless and eternal universe, born of another repeating explosion that lit the heavens everywhere at once, the newly formed matter expanding to separate out into another paradigm of clusters—each spawning from their own individual Promethean Singularities. The distance between the Singularity Clusters are so enormous that humans will never witness their light. They will believe their own supercluster to be the sum total of their universe. A limited sphere of existence. A limited understanding. But such sublime awe.
Salem, you forgot. Or you were never told. Or you were lied to.
FIVE
Eventually, as the effects of the incense diminish, I grow tired. The lingering exhaustion of my transformation reminds me that it has not been properly acknowledged. Beer, wine, and fruit satisfy us for a while longer as I share the deep truths of the cosmos with the Blessed Ones, but food and drink alone do nothing for the droning ache deep in my bones, and pain is not a forgiving companion. It can be ignored for a time, but if left unchecked, it drains the will and sours one’s enthusiasm. It never compromises, always wins.
But I am no stranger to pain. Even when I am the dreamer and my human self—or demon, as Ninsuni would have me believe—is dominant, I suffer its weight as though I am carrying a corpse on my back, and this is not far from the truth when I consider the nature of the mutations running riot through my hybrid cells. With its lidless eyes and twisted muscles, the face emerging from the back of my head is as expressionless as Kaliki’s, yet it gently moans and slavers when I speak, like a dull beast mesmerized by the lullaby of its conjoined twin. Sleep is the only remedy for the pain, but I never know which one of me will rise on the other side of my slumber.
My waking moments following this immense session of cosmological revelations are all too brief. For me, time passes in hours, but for my new companions it is weeks, perhaps even months. Each time, the same pattern emerges. I wake with the pain of transformation, sprouting a new organ or appendage—something my body creates in response to an unconscious need—but strangely, there seems to be nothing stimulating my awakening and accompanying change; nobody in the chamber is dead when sentience returns. Almost always, the first person I see is Ninsuni. She has grown accustomed—even eager—to wait with the Blessed Ones to hear my next words. It is a well-established ritual now. A sacred time for them. They have even raised me on a cushioned platform in a special alcove above them, surrounded by wine, food, and perfumed offerings to keep the human part of me contented. They huddle around me, hungry to learn more about the universe in which they live.
The Soul Continuum Page 11
