“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said. “If I did, I might be able to help.”
Once again, there was a long pause. At last, Anath-Not said impatiently, “Leave off thy craft, Songta. We have to ask Thora of the riffles. We have been sore plagued of late.”
They seemed to be waiting for me to say something, so I stammered, “We can cure many diseases.”
“Nay, riffles,” Anath said, as if repeating the word more loudly would make me understand. “The forerunner of the fold rain.”
I shook my head, then remembered they couldn’t see me. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“We seek to know if thy people are wise enough to dispel the conundrum,” Songta said.
No, I wanted to say. If you only knew us you wouldn’t ask. But I had no idea what she really meant. “Whatever your problem is, we will be glad to help, once we understand.”
“Thou art very close,” Songta said.
“Nay, Songta,” Rinka said gently, “perhaps she is but ignorant. Her people may know naught.”
They were on the verge of dismissing me as useless, leaving me with no bargaining power to effect my escape. I decided to change strategy. “Elders,” I said, as if they were forcing it out of me, “I am not our expert in these matters, but on the Escher we have an eminent riffleologist who is famous for dispelling conundrums. I just don’t know if you have any knowledge valuable enough to trade for.” Forgive me for the lie, whoever listens to this, and understand that I was desperate.
“Can thy people tie knots anew?” Songta asked.
“Yes. We do it all the time.”
“Then why dost thou need our aid to journey home?”
Improvising madly, I said, “The paradoxes here are too thick for my objectifier to work.”
Hanna spoke up for the first time. “Perhaps she is testing us.”
Even better; that idea would give them incentive to prove what they could do. I said nothing, either to confirm or deny.
“An artful bargainer,” Songta said.
“Prove to me what you can do, and we will open trade negotiations,” I said with just a trace of hauteur.
The old women whispered to one another. I waited till they reached a conclusion. Then Songta said, “There are no wenders here at present. Dagget-Min will return anon, and he will answer thy needs.”
So at the end I was back where I began, waiting for a wender to come.
I think Hanna could tell I was frustrated as she led me home through the lightless paths of Torobe. “The Three used up a long time,” she observed.
“Yes.”
“They had all heard each other’s testimonies before, of course, but were waiting to hear yours. And then…”
I said, “Was I supposed to tell my life story?”
“That was what they thought. Did you not mark how suspicious they became? They thought you were trying to hide something.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.” I tried to imagine what I might have said. My life would have been incomprehensible to these people. “It would have bored you,” I said.
She laughed. “Then a good thing it was you did not tell it. I was quite bored enough.”
Hesitantly, I said, “What did you mean at the beginning, about the aromatics?”
“They had boiled unguents to put thee off guard. It is very like Songta. She would be the only one tying knots in all Torobe. She wanted to get thee well tangled, so she could pull thy cord.” From her tone, I could tell there was no love lost between her and Songta.
When we reached Hanna’s home it was empty. “Where is Moth?” I asked.
“Oh, off on her own. I cannot keep her still anymore.”
There was something I had been wondering about, but wasn’t sure how to ask politely. “Pardon me if I am being ignorant, Hanna, but where is the father of your baby?”
A tone of deep sadness came to Hanna’s voice. “He is wending. He would have given it up to bide with me, but he is Songta’s son and she would not hear of it.”
So Songta is Hanna’s mother-in-law. That explains the tension. “Is wending something young men are expected to do?” I asked.
“Aye,” she said regretfully. “It is the manly thing. They are supposed to provide for us.”
I realized I had met no young men so far in Torobe. It is a village of old people, women, and children. “It is hard on you to have to raise a child alone,” I said.
“Aye,” she said, and now her voice was a little bitter. “But it is the ancient way. We like not change in Torobe.”
* * *
I have no idea how much time has passed. In Torobe there are only two intervals of duration, shorttime and longtime. A longtime is any interval that exceeds expectation—the years since a house was built, or the hours since a person was supposed to have returned home. Absolute intervals like hours, days, and years have completely disappeared from their language. Not a person in Torobe knows how old he or she is in any but a relative sense. I have never heard of a culture so lacking a sense of time. I suppose it is because the rest of us live inside celestial clocks, where cycles of sun and stars make time seem natural. At first I tried to keep track of my sleep cycles, but it became pointless when I realized the perpetual night has disturbed my circadian rhythms. I feel like a prisoner unable even to mark the days of my sentence on the wall. The people around me can’t understand why I care. Time passes differently for them, not as a stream but as a lake in which they float. It does not flow with purpose, but extends all around them, undifferentiated.
My sense of space has also changed. The world now exists in concentric spheres around me. Closest—and most real—is the circle of touch. Outside that is the circle of hearing. I find I am mentally mapping this place not as a floor plan, but as a dome with pie-shaped sectors, each containing textures, smells, and echoes. A sharp echo morphs into a hard texture up close. An air movement is an open space or passage. I can even sense something large and nearby as a stillness on my face.
I make it sound like I am adjusting. That isn’t true. I crave light with a deep hunger. I want to feast my eyes on the sky, or a grassy lawn, or human faces. I want to stoke my mind with so much beauty that it will fill me up and last as long as darkness does. Sometimes I think I see light—a floating blob of incandescence, or a spray of twinkles. But then I turn to look, and it disappears. Photisms, I suppose—my brain, starved for stimulation, producing illusory light from within.
Always before, my mind was a refuge. Now it is a prison—a black box of consciousness. I want to claw through the barrier, and let in the world outside me. I want someone to laugh and admit it has all been a practical joke. I am not really trapped here.
At times, I am oppressed by a sense of the unreality of everything around me. I cannot trust that anything is truly there, unless I can touch it. It is particularly disturbing when I am with people; their disembodied voices surround me, floating here and there, now before, now behind. I imagine them as flies dancing around my head. Then someone touches me, and their body materializes as if from nowhere, an abrupt transition from abstract to concrete.
Even my own solidity seems to be dissolving sometimes, as if I were becoming no more than a free-floating consciousness without an edge. Several times, when Hanna or her friends have fallen into storytelling, they have related tales of people who become disembodied spirits. These stories of body-loss make me more anxious than ever. I wonder if the Torobes are also troubled by a sense of their own unreality.
One sleeptime, I had a dream. I was in a questship, traveling through space. There was a cockpit, like an antique aircar, and I could look out the windows in all directions. The pilot told me we were traveling at a tremendous speed, but when I looked out, it seemed as if we had come to a dead halt out in the middle of space. There were no stars around us, no galaxies, just blackness. Then I looked out the back window and saw behind us a ball of dim light. It was our universe, all the galaxies clustered there in a delicate little dustball sphere
. As I watched, it grew smaller and smaller behind us. I said, “Why are we leaving? We’ve got to turn back! We’re going too far—too far away!”
When I woke, I groped for a lamp, then felt panic. There was no longer any light to reassure me that I was awake. I was trapped with my nightmare, unable to break free. I slapped my hands hard against the floor till the pain assured me that I was really here. Then, to quiet myself, I tried to imagine my body bathed in light until I could relax a little.
The next waketime I was plagued by a tension headache. Hanna’s baby was also restless and wailing. Finally, at her wits’ end, she thrust him into my hands and said, “You mind him.” The sudden sensation of holding that wriggling little being was so vivid that I was shocked out of my self-pity. He was so alive, so loud, so unexpectedly heavy. After that, I volunteered willingly to care for him because he seemed so much more real than I am. Still, I have come to feel a sharp pity for him, just learning to explore a world that is only half a world.
There is very little else to occupy my mind in the monotonous rhythms of life in Torobe. To stave off depression, I have been trying to think of the teachings of Sensualism and how they might apply to my situation. The core principle is that our senses receive a far broader spectrum of messages than the narrow range we are taught to pay attention to. Our brains still receive many of those messages, but they are shunted into the subliminal and subconscious, and surface only as intuitions, emotions, premonitions, dreams, and visions. If we study those experiences not as illusions but as cues to other modes of apprehension, it might give us access to layers of reality we barely suspect, since the evidence for them is drowned out by the noise of ordinary perception.
Here, I have had a sense subtracted from my life—sight, the sense we rely on most, that occupies the greatest area of our brains. Could I see this as an opportunity to discover what lies beneath? Could I study the perceptions that vision normally hides from us? Easy to say, hard to do. I have to think about this.
* * *
The event I have been waiting for finally arrived: Dagget-Min returned from wending.
There was great excitement all through Torobe. It was an event, like a stone thrown into the still pool of their existence. I went visiting with Hanna, and listened to endless speculation about Dagget’s news, the goods he brought, his effect on power relations in Torobe. He is Songta’s husband, but in contrast to Songta, people speak of him with reverence, loyalty, and love.
When I finally met the man, he defied all my expectations. I had pictured him as worldly and well traveled, bargaining his way from village to village, crafty enough to outwit me. What I found instead was a gentle, enigmatic man of few words. He is a thinker rather than a doer, and his role in Torobe is more that of priest than peddler. Where I had expected practical help from him, I soon realized his people were expecting spiritual guidance. My first conversation with him completely altered my idea of what this “wending” is. He spoke as if he had been off on a vision quest.
The people present were the same as during my previous interview—Hanna and the Three, with the addition of Dagget. We met in the same place, but Dagget was smoking what smelled like a pipe, so the air was filled with the sweet tobacco. The darkness, the smoke, and Dagget’s quiet voice coming from somewhere in front of me created a mood of reverie in my mind. He spoke of what he had encountered in his wending, but it was not a conventional traveler’s tale. Much of it was incomprehensible.
“When I entered the Ground, I could hear a new chord at once, all dissonant and jangling. Some power is playing the strings, but not as we do—it is reckless, unharmonic, full of undertones that gave me unease. I followed a cord to a great vibrant knot. Within the knot lies a place that feels like boxes within boxes, complex and secret. Beings dwell there; I could feel the wind of their passing to and fro, but they knew me not, so they could not bemind me or fill my bag. I was sore troubled, so I went on to Gorachin to think of what it meant. Then I went to Stoll to seek counsel of the wise. They could give me none.”
Everyone was silent after this, and there seemed to be an air of dread in the room. At last Anath-Not said, “Thora Lassiter, is this knot thy people’s doing?”
I had no idea what to answer. I have studied many descriptions of mystical experiences, and Dagget’s tale reminded me of those, if you subtract the visual component of a vision. It is a topic of vital interest to any Sensualist, because true mystics and adepts are skilled at perceiving what the rest of us cannot, the information from subconscious sensory input, but they are often unable or unwilling to share their experiences. I wanted to probe further. So I said, “It is possible. I would need to know more.”
No one volunteered any information, so I said, “Dagget-Min, you said you entered the ground. We must use different words. Do you mean you went into the cave?”
For several heartbeats he drew on his pipe, and I feared that I had revealed some monumental ignorance. But at last he said, “Aye, I went to the still place.”
“Why did you do that?”
He was slow answering again, and I feared I had put him off. But he finally said, “Because the Ground is closer there than in other places.”
This time I heard the way he said “Ground,” and remembered that Hanna had also used the word in a specialized way. I said, “We use a different word than ‘Ground.’ Can you describe it so I will know what it is?”
He shifted on his pillow and tapped his pipe against something. When he answered, his words had the ring of some ancient religious teaching. “The Ground is the place of creation. All things await existence there, yet it is empty. The source of all is nothing.”
“And it is a place you can sense?”
“It is around us now, at all times. It is everywhere. But it is easier to ken at the still place.”
I thought of the holy spots that exist on all planets, places where oracles dwell and prophets go to sit vigil in hopes of revelation. Some Sensualists have theorized they represent a natural phenomenon accessible only to the senses of those attuned—a thin spot, perhaps, in the fabric of reality, through which information leaks. “Could you show me the still place?” I asked.
“I could,” he said slowly, “but it would be better if thou could find it thyself.”
This answer made me doubt it was a physical place, and not a state of mind. “How do you get there?” I asked.
“Tell her not,” Songta interrupted sharply. “It is hidden, and we know not why she seeks it.”
“I don’t disrespect your wisdom,” I said. “I am asking because…”
I had spent months hiding what I really wanted to understand—hiding it from the Magisterium and from my colleagues on the questship, out of fear I would be sedated and sent back to the curatory. But I had an instinct that Dagget would understand. I said, “For a long time I have dimly sensed something beyond the surface of our reality. I think I came in contact with it recently—in fact, I am sure. But it was a terrible, frightening experience. There was no one to guide me, and my people thought I had gone mad. Since then, I have been cut off, as if I had gone deaf.”
He considered my words a long time, and when he spoke his voice was thoughtful. “Wending is a perilous thing. Many a cordwender suffers harm, or never returns. It is best to seek instruction only from the wise.”
“Do you think I am too old and too … damaged to learn?”
“You may have come farther than you know,” he said quietly. “It sometimes creeps up on a person unawares. It soaks into thee instead of showering down. For some it is trumpets; for others, just a sigh.”
“I want to believe that,” I said. I wanted to touch him, because I felt in the presence of a profound wisdom—but not a remote or fearsome wisdom; rather, a caring and human one. As if reading my mind, he laid both his hands on the top of my head. The warmth on my hair was vivid, like a rain of light I could not see.
Anath’s voice penetrated my benediction. “If Dagget helps thee, will thou stop the disson
ance?” Somehow, the question sounded irrelevant, and I smiled.
“I don’t know what is causing your problem,” I said, “but if my people are doing something wrong, I will make them stop.”
“I thought thou was eager to be off home,” Songta said.
“Perhaps,” said Dagget, “this is her way home.”
His words resonated with me. Perhaps he offered me the way to my real home, the one I have been seeking all along.
* * *
I have just had the strangest experience of my life. I am baffled how to describe it; there is no language that suffices. Language is too sequential, too limited. But I will have to try, because I need to document this. It will be mostly metaphor, I am afraid.
A shorttime after my interview with Dagget, word spread through Torobe that there was to be a concert. The news was greeted with quiet anticipation. Hanna was busy preparing, because in Torobe scents are an important component of a concert. “They draw the cordwork close,” she explained.
Concerts are held in a place called the Echo Sculpture, but Hanna could not tell me much about it. “It is a place of surpassing beauty,” was all she could say. Since my ideas of beauty are entirely visual, this left me none the wiser.
When the time came, we left the baby with a minder, and I helped Hanna carry a pack of bottled philtres and distillations to the gathering place. Concertgoers were already waiting at the entrance, so Hanna left me in the care of her friends while she passed inside to prepare the space. I have noticed that a group of Torobes is more quiet than a comparable group of Capellans. There was no hubbub of multiple conversations going on simultaneously; they passed the time speaking sequentially with everyone listening. I suppose it is to avoid an auditory overload.
A bell sounded, and the crowd fell silent. A woman took my hand and we all started moving toward the passage leading to the Echo Sculpture. As we entered, my first impression was of overpowering fragrance, making it almost difficult to breathe. My second impression was how the walls whispered and resonated around us. Even though the barefoot audience moved quite silently, every swish of cloth, every susurration of movement was amplified by the echoing chamber.
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