The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘I’m sorry, Danlo.’

  ‘Do not speak. Not … yet.’

  Tamara looked at the blazing candles and wiped the sweat from her face. Softly she said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Shhh, be quiet. There might still be a way for us … to return.’

  ‘But I don’t want to return. I can’t.’

  ‘But we were so close,’ he said.

  ‘No, no – please.’

  From Danlo’s first night of drinking kalla, he knew that there are always things that a person will not willingly remember. Tamara, he thought, in her plunge into the dangerous waters of remembrance, had finally entered the fleeing stage where she couldn’t help fleeing herself. All men and women will find in remembrance, somewhere in themselves, some dark and dreadful thing that they must flee from or die – or so it seems. But Tamara was still liminal, still on the threshold of remembrance, though he didn’t think that she had achieved full recurrence, as had he. Danlo could see this in her dark, disturbed eyes. A simple word from him or a few moments of silence might move her back into herself, gently back into the current of memories that flowed beneath her surface fears. He could not, however, take her or force her where she would not go. This is the first and last rule for anyone who would guide another into remembrance. Not even Thomas Rane would dare force anyone through the shadows and the writhing worms of memory down to that place of blackness and unknown possibilities where the truly terrible things dwelled.

  ‘It is all right,’ he said. He moved over across the floor so that he sat behind her, holding her. ‘It is all … all right.’

  She was quiet for a while as she leaned back into his arms, back against his chest as it rose and fell. Her head was pressed back against his lips, and he smelled the lovely thick fragrance of her hair as well as the bitter sweat that ran down her neck. Then she broke away from him. She stood up and went over to the candles. One by one she snuffed them out. Thirty-three times Danlo heard the hiss of water vaporizing, and there came the sickening smell of incompletely burnt wax. Soon the room was full of darkness; its only illumination the starlight streaming in through the windows. In this faint, cold light, Danlo watched Tamara move over to the vase of rhododendrons. She grasped the stem of the smallest flower, which she quickly broke off. She took his hand and pressed this beautiful flower against his fingers. And then she said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry – we were very close, you know.’

  Later that night, as they were sleeping on the soft furs of the fireroom, Tamara’s dreams began. Danlo came awake to the restless turning of Tamara’s body next to him; he lay in the darkness stroking her silky hair and listening to her heavy, uneven breathing. And then she began to whimper and murmur strange words that he could not understand. As she cried out in her nightmare, he held his fingers lightly over her lips lest her spirit escape into the room and wander the world in darkness and confusion and thus become so hopelessly lost it might never return. He felt her hot breath against his fingertips, and he bent over her to kiss her fevered head. And then he whispered, ‘Shhh, mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih. Go to sleep now, my woman, go to sleep.’

  But she did not go to sleep, or rather, she did not descend into the cool, deep, healing embrace of dreamless sleep, which according to the Alaloi way of thinking (and that of the cetics, too), is the one and only true sleep that a human being can know. She dreamed vivid, shaking, sweat-streaked dreams; sometime toward morning she came awake screaming out of one of her dreams, screaming and gasping and clutching at Danlo as she held her head against his chest and sobbed. When she could talk, in a quavering voice, she told him of her dream, of how she had fought a murderous, slashing knife-fight with a man who had no eyes. She had killed this man, she said. Beneath a sky with three red moons as full and round as drops of blood, she had stabbed her killing knife into this terrible eyeless man, and then she had cut his heart out of his chest.

  ‘It was so real,’ she said. They were sitting up on the furs, now, and Danlo was holding her hands. Her eyes were full of tears, and she said, ‘I’ve never had a dream that was so real.’

  Danlo listened to her talk about her dream, paying particular attention as she described her feelings of terror and exaltation at having to fight beneath these three ominous moons. From her description of the moons’ configuration – they loomed low in the sky and their centres formed an equilateral triangle – he surmised that she had dreamed of the infamous red moons of Qallar. And this was strange, because, as she admitted when he told her of this, she had never seen a foto of Qallar nor had she known that this deadly planet was even graced with moons.

  ‘It was as if I wasn’t really dreaming at all,’ she said. ‘Just after I … after I’d killed this man, I looked up at the moons. I could almost feel them pulling at me, the gravity. I could feel the blood on the knife. The wetness. The heat of it – it was really quite horrible, you know. Oh, the whole dream. It was as if I was awake inside my dream, as if I was living this horrible murder moment by moment as it happened and I couldn’t wake up because I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t dreaming at all. In a way, it was as if I was reliving it all again, over and over. I’m not really sure how that’s possible. But it was so real, too real – too real not to be real, and that’s what frightens me because when I squeeze my hands together, I can still feel the heart there all bloody and slippery. And alive – it was still beating when I held his heart in my hands, and I can’t forget that Danlo, I’ll never forget.’

  For a long time she stared into Danlo’s eyes, all the while squeezing his hands between her hands as if to reassure herself that she was now truly awake and that he was as real as the hard wooden tiles beside the furs on which they sat. And then Danlo said, ‘You know about the sixtieth attitude, yes?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘The remembrancers call it dreaming recurrence. It is one of the recurrence attitudes. Like the sixty-first attitude, it is reliving one’s memories – only while dreaming instead of being awake. It is possible that you have only descended from waking recurrence into this attitude.’

  ‘But if I was only dreaming,’ she said, ‘then what I dreamed wasn’t real.’

  She looked at him hopefully, searching in his eyes the way someone lost at sea might search the sky for a familiar star. When he saw how full of fear she was, he was almost afraid, too.

  ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No, sometimes dreams are real. Sometimes we dream our memories. And in the attitude of dreaming recurrence, our memories are so real that it seems we are living them again. In a way, we are living again. Ourselves. Our … lives. There is no time. Truly, no time – what was real is real. It always will be.’

  Tamara thought about this, then said, ‘But I’ve never been to Qallar. I’ve never killed anyone – I know I haven’t. I know. How could this be anything more than a dream? How could this be a real memory?’

  ‘I … do not know.’

  ‘Oh, Danlo – it can’t be a memory, can it? Whose memory? Not mine, please, say you don’t think it could possibly be mine?’

  But Danlo couldn’t say that because it would be untrue. Neither, however, could he quite understand how she had remembered such a thing. For the count of a hundred of his heartbeats he sat holding her hand and stroking her hair. He listened to the ever-present sound of the ocean beating against the beach outside. And then, for the ten thousandth time, he thought: She is not she. Over many days he had repeated this phrase in his mind almost as he would a mantra. She is not she, she is not she – the sound of these words rose and fell inside him like waves beating through his consciousness. He knew that in these four simple words there was a deep truth. He had known this from the moment that he had first thought them. Only now, watching her as she sat weeping over her terrible dream, he sensed that this terrible thought might be literally true, that she was really not she in a way beyond mere metaphor, beyond even the metaphysics of selfness and identity. She is not Tamara – this thought was like lightning in his brain, a
nd the pain of it was all the greater for his knowing that he had known this all along. For too long his eyes had known this, and his hands, and even the rhythms of his heart. He touched her hair, then. He touched the tears running down her face. He sensed that her flesh was not Tamara’s, and neither were her memories or her soul. But if this was true, then who was she? Where had she come from? What was the soul of this strange woman who sat grasping at his arm and looking to him for an answer to the mystery of her life?

  She is who she is, he thought. But she is not a human being, not truly.

  In truth, she was something other than human, something less, perhaps something more – and although this conclusion was hateful to him (and astonishing) logic had led him to believe this as surely as the track of blood upon the snow might lead a hunter to a wounded animal. Danlo had been born with a keenly logical mind, and he loved logic even when he loathed the ways that others sometimes misused this dangerous tool. ‘You use a razor to shave with,’ his Fravashi teacher had once said. ‘But to smell the essence of a fireflower, it is better that you should use your nose.’ Logic was the keenest of the mind’s razors, but it could cut at only what the intuition and senses knew to be true. And what did he really know? This Tamara was not the same woman he had loved on Neverness, and therefore she was something other. What was she? He was not sure. He did not think that she could be a slel-mime, for if someone such as a warrior-poet had used programmed viruses to destroy and replace her brain cells with neurologic circuitry, then surely her memories and sense of herself would be very different from the real Tamara’s. If her brain had been truly carked this way, then surely she would have betrayed the robot-like behaviour that is the hallmark of this hideous transformation of human being into computer. Similarly, he thought it impossible that she could be a slel-clone. If someone had slelled her DNA in secret and used this sacred matter to grow a clone resembling the real Tamara, then surely her mind would have been programmed for some hideous purpose, as the minds of slel-clones always are. In all his time with her, he had sensed no such purpose or programming. Then, too, a slelled clone would bear the same DNA as did Tamara. The cells of her body would be the same. And they were not the same – whenever he touched her, the cells of his body sensed a subtle but vital difference between this woman and the real Tamara, and he trusted the truth of this intuition. For an otherwise rational being such as Danlo to make such an affirmation was quite bold, but it was the time in his life when he was coming into his truth sense, that marvellous faculty of knowing which lies latent inside all women and men much as a shih tree waits to break open from an acorn.

  She has been slelled, but not from matter – not from DNA. She has been slelled from my mind.

  It was possible that in the forty days that Danlo had waited for his last test to begin, the Entity had created a woman who looked like Tamara. It was surely within Her powers to imprint this Tamara’s brain with the various emotions, habits, motor functions and bits of knowledge that would enable her to function as a mime of human being. Even the warrior-poets and other modern engineers could make this kind of human being – if one considers such soulless creatures human. But the Entity had done something much more than this. She had done something that no modern engineer (nor even the god-men of Agathange) could do. From almost nothing She had created a mind that was almost human. To accomplish this feat of godly carking, She must have imprinted the Tamara’s brain, not according to some information hologram or computer map of the real Tamara’s brain, but almost solely from Danlo’s memories. Danlo had a marvellous memory of Tamara’s experiences, sensibilities, mannerisms, dreams, and a billion other things about her life – even her pronunciation of certain favourite words, the way she drew out the vowels as if she delighted in prolonging the utterance of these words as long as possible. And the Entity must have known all this.

  She is almost she, Danlo thought. And I have almost remembered her.

  Some time toward morning, after Tamara had finally fallen into a true sleep, Danlo lay awake next to her watching her breasts rise and fall like swelling waves upon the sea. He counted her breaths while he wondered at this beautiful woman whom the Entity had made. It occurred to him that the mind of a woman (or a man) was infinitely more complex than the dark world that spun silently beneath him, pulling at him with such crushing gravity. The human brain-mind, with its shimmering webwork of a hundred billion neurons and trillions of interconnecting synaptic pathways, was among the most complex creations in the universe – in some ways more complex than even the neurologic components that make up the brains of the galaxy’s gods. He did not think it was possible, even for a goddess, to duplicate perfectly such a blessed creation. Certainly any attempt to mime Tamara as the Entity must have done was doomed to fail. In the harsh light of the new day he could see this, as clearly as he could see salty tear-tracks marking Tamara’s cheeks. The problem was with his memory. No matter how exactly he called to mind every aspect of Tamara’s selfness and soul, the real Tamara, the one and only true Tamara, was much more than he remembered – possibly more than he could remember. Once a time, after Hanuman had destroyed (or stolen) Tamara’s memories of their life together, Danlo had offered to imprint her brain from his own memories. He had hoped to heal her memory, thus healing her mind. Out of love and despair he had made this hopeless proposal, never realizing what a terrible thing he was doing. But now, watching Tamara’s breath ruffle the shagshay fur pulled up beneath her chin, he knew. Even supposing that Tamara was a perfect incarnation of his memory of her (and she was not), he realized that his memory was far from perfect. From their first moment together, he had seen her not through the flawless lens of deep reality, but rather as through a million broken bits of glass stained with all the colours of his consciousness. As he looked at Tamara and brushed the golden hair away from her face, he thought of a saying of Thomas Rane’s: We do not remember things as they were; we remember them as we were. This Tamara remembered their life together in too much the same way as he did – he had been blind not to see this earlier. What was wrong with this lovely woman who lay sleeping beside him was that she was too much a reflection of himself, of his own mind. And what he had truly loved about the real Tamara was her otherness, that unknowable essence of her soul that he had sometimes glimpsed but had never quite managed to capture in his memory. Ironically, he had remembered almost everything about her except the only true and important thing, and he realized that he could never quite grasp this mystery any more than he could keep a beautiful bird trapped in his hands without destroying it.

  ‘Oh, Tamara, Tamara,’ he whispered as he touched her warm, red lips, ‘where are you? What are you, truly?’

  Over the next set of days and nights, Tamara’s dreams grew ever more terrifying and strange. There were cosmic dreams unlike anything she had ever experienced before. Once, she dreamed that her body was nothing more than a ball of molten nickel-iron, spinning in space, pulsing in red waves through utter emptiness like an abandoned heart; once she dreamed that her brain was so full of fiery images and agony that it exploded in an expanding sphere of light and death, thus becoming the first of the Vild’s supernovas. And there were the more personal (and disturbing) dreams where she relived the eating of unfamiliar meats and foods and heard again alien blood musics that she was certain she had never heard before. She dreamed of men whom she had never seen before, hard and beautiful men with violet eyes and quick, sensitive muscles that jumped like electric eels at the slightest stimulation or touch. These murderous men were thought to be smooth between the legs, but she knew that they were not, for once, on a night of strange hot winds and firewine, she had seduced a young man named Leander and lay with him beneath the three red moons hanging low in the sky. It had been her first time with a man, and nearly the last, for when three of Leander’s cell brothers found them together on the grass, they cursed him for breaking his vows and cut him to pieces with their long, killing knives. They would have killed her too, but she was good with
her knife, so good that she blinded one of the brothers with a lightning slash to the eyes and disabled the other two before escaping through the towering black thorn trees that surrounded her and tore open her flesh. There was blood streaming from her breasts like red milk, and blood in her eyes, and blood burning its way up between her legs into her womb. In all her dreams there was blood, especially in her worst dream, which occurred again and again, sometimes as often as thrice in one night. In this dream, a terrible orange energy ran through her body and brain and twisted her sinews, her nerves, her bones, carking her into the form of a beautiful tiger; dreaming this flaming image of herself, she could always feel her fingernails growing out as long, killing claws; the trembling of her muscles along her belly, the burning hunger to kill that was all torment and desire and was concentrated into a gnawing pain between her shoulder blades. Once, she woke up out of this dream with blood in her mouth and on her lips; she came into consciousness writhing and screaming and biting at her tongue – and clawing at Danlo’s face when he came up close and tried to hold her. And then, when she saw that she had scratched open a bloody red gash on his cheek, she wept for a long time, pressing her forehead against Danlo’s forehead with such desperation that he wanted to weep, too. After she had stopped weeping – with her tears stinging like sea salt in the little wound that she had made on his face – he looked at her and said, ‘It will be all right.’