The Light of Our Yesterdays

by Ken Hansen

  Yohanan gritted his teeth. “You came thousands of milia passuum across the Atlantic to condemn me and my people?”

  “No, my friend. I am sorry if I have offended you. I spoke only of world opinion, not my own. I do not wish to condemn you. I wish only to help you.”

  “Help? How? Do you have an army hiding in your robes?” Yohanan asked.

  “Violence will never solve your problems.”

  Yohanan snorted. “What are you, a diplomat from the First Consul, lobbying for the peace accord? You do not feel our despair.”

  “I know despair plenty, though not your own. But that is of no matter. Please understand, I agree with much of your speech. The Tetepians should not sign the accord.”

  “Then we must wage war,” said Yohanan.

  Tomadus spread his hands, palms up. “What war? You speak of war, yet you have no armies. You are a pathetic little insurrection against the might of the Three Empires, who you correctly point out are behind Skjöldr. War means death, to you and to your ideals. You must not wage war. You must wage peace.”

  Yohanan stiffened. “You speak in circles. How can we wage peace but not sign the peace accord.”

  “Peace is a state of mind, not a piece of paper. Sign no accord, continue to live throughout as much of Tonquizalixco Tetepe as you would like. But live together. Continue your democracy together. And give the Jutes no justification for further destruction because of your Demosep shaitaanism. World opinion will turn back in your favor. With some luck, I may be able to help you get your message out and convince the world of the injustice being done here. Eventually, a real and lasting peace could be possible.”

  Yohanan looked at Decima and then stared hard into Tomadus’s eyes. “You are a dreamer. We will be slaves. They banish us from the coasts to these hinterlands. They ignore our elected representatives. They respect nothing of our democracy. The peace of which you speak is not possible.”

  “Have not the Demoseps already been fighting the Juteslams for 50 years? What has it gained you except more death and despair?”

  Yohanan looked down at his beer but said nothing.

  “So why do you believe more of your desperate tactics will change the outcome? Can you not see that this constant militant insurgency failed years ago? Fight not with your bullets but with your words. Fight not with your bombs but with your hearts. With my help, the world will notice and come to your aid.”

  “What, lay down our weapons and open our throats to our enemies? Are you insane?”

  “If they attack you, then defend yourselves. But stop terrorizing the Juteslam people. End your shaitaanist ways. You must accept reality for what it is. Despite your greatest hopes, the Juteslams will not simply dissolve into the ocean. They are here to stay. Accept that they are part of the answer, rather than simply your mortal enemy, and find a real and lasting solution.”

  “Peace with invaders?” Yohanan asked.

  Tomadus raised his eyebrows. “I would hardly call them invaders. They came to Tetepe nearly seven centuries before your people came to this land.”

  “But they abandoned it for nearly three centuries before my people arrived. I don’t think they really have any claim to this land other than nostalgia.”

  “Nostalgia? Do you think they all wanted to be forcibly marched west by the Aztec Empire? Do you think they look back with longing at their cities being utterly destroyed and their culture stripped bare?”

  “They were nothing but raiders,” Yohanan said, “Vikings with a little religion. They killed and maimed for glory, honor and loot and called it a Jihad. You cannot blame the Aztecs.”

  Tomadus leaned in. “Do not belittle this culture because it is not your own. They are a proud people with proud traditions. They took on an empire that was far stronger than they knew. They were too proud to quit. Their Nordic traditions viewed that as surrender. They refused to quit even when they were moved to a strange land and were subjected to second-class status over the centuries, treated almost as slaves by the Latisilolals.”

  “And now they treat us as slaves,” Yohanan said acerbically.

  “This is all in the past, and I do not wish to take their side here. I merely ask that you and your people try to see the world from their eyes. It can be enlightening.”

  “Their mortars light us up plenty. You can call them by another name if you wish, but we shall always know them as invaders.”

  Tomadus drew back. “For now, let us agree to disagree on this point, my friend. Regardless of whether they have any rights, they have certainly overstepped those bounds with the help of a few interested governments. Though I believe it can ultimately be set right, you must understand there is no solution where the Juteslams simply disappear, even at your able hands.”

  Yohanan smiled. “How about they move back west?”

  “You know that will not happen. Move on. Keep your democracy. Defend yourselves, but do not attack the innocents. Eventually, the tide will turn.”

  Yohanan replied slowly, “We have fought them for fifty years.”

  Tomadus emphatically shook his head. “They have beaten you down for fifty years. There has been no real fight for forty-eight of those years. There must be another way. We must find that.”

  “Well, when you find the magic answer, I’ll still be here, trying to survive with the rest of my people. If you can help, I welcome it, but I hope you do not expect us to obey you.”

  Tomadus grinned. “Obey? I had thought that word was not even in your lexicon. But I must rest now. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Let us continue this discussion another time. I hope you find a solution that brings a lasting peace.” Tomadus stood up, bowed slightly and left the tavern.

  Yohanan thumbed his beer glass for a moment, then looked up and spoke softly to Decima, “What do you think of him?”

  “Well, he is no spy,” she said. “My father would know that. Quintillus told me he came to trust Tomadus after he spent a week at his home in New Åarhus.”

  “I trust your father’s read. He is careful.”

  “Yes. Tomadus believes what he preaches, but the man has no experience here. He cannot truly understand our predicament. He thinks like many Romani. His simple solutions are cowardly and worthless to us. But according to my father, he already has money and some powerful ties to the Romanus government. He may prove useful to our cause at some point.”

  Yohanan looked up, rubbed his hands slowly over his face and sighed. “In the end, I wonder if he’s right.”

  “About what?” Decima slammed her hand on the table. “Have you forgotten your own words from a few minutes ago?”

  “My words are necessary for our people to remain strong, but I have always wondered if there is another way. I already have so much blood on my hands that they reek of death and decay. Can they ever be clean? Can we ever truly live again?”

  “Only if we fight for what we believe in, Yohanan. Only then.”

  Tomadus finished splashing water on his face as his searching eyes stared back at him from the mirror. Who am I? Was Yohanan right? Am I insane? What is real and what is imaginary?

  Surely, he was a now-famous Romanus technologist and merchant who stood in front of a cracked sink in a bathroom in the Shenandoah Inn deep in the Tetepian backwater. That is real, is it not? Just as surely, for those few moments when the light had flashed, he was no technologist—he was not even a Romanus. He had found himself in a dream world where rows upon rows of buildings reached to the sky, towering over millions of people scurrying through and between them like rats in a giant maze. This image had dissolved and reformed into a white marble dome rising above a circle of Corinthian columns. The building was set on a hill above a grass plaza that extended for many stadia, guarded on either side by various official-looking buildings. Dwarfing even the Forum Romanum, the plaza seemed to reach toward an enormous stone phallic structure rising in the distance.

  Again the image had dissolved, this time reforming into another reality, b
ut a reality no longer vague and indistinct like a dream. He had been in an enormous basement or cave with an altar before him. He was searching for answers to perplexing words—words that he believed could help him uncover something evil. But the words had drenched him in black emotion and sent his mind scrambling through his past, through the heartache of love lost, through the superficial solace of blame, through the consequential abandonment and even greater heartache of another dear to him—his mother, lost. Not lost, forsaken. She was forsaken. Somehow Tomadus knew this as if he had been in the cave himself, as if the visions were part of his own past and the emotions still played upon his raw nerves. Somehow, he had become somebody else. He had lived, he had hoped, he had despaired—all in the mind of another man in another place, another world. But it wasn’t another man. It was him. Yet it wasn’t. No, during those few moments, it was as real as the water dripping from this sink and the scratches disrupting the patterns of wood on this floor. So which is real and which is the dream?

  He knew he had to return to Roma to discover the cause of these strange visions that had nearly debilitated him. The vision had sprung on him just as he met Yohanan. Perhaps it was connected with the creature somehow. Though his North Aztalan business tour had found such great success, the creature continued to scrape away, reminding him of his one huge failure. Tomadus had been trying to find some way to assuage the creature and help the innocents here, but Yohanan would not, could not, listen to him. How could this embittered man, who had suffered so much, change his ways? It seemed impossible. Still, he respected the young man’s passion for his people. He realized he must return again and find a way. The creature finally fell asleep.

  Chapter 21

  “Please do not laugh at me.”

  Tomadus’s old friend Batu slapped him on the back. “I am not laughing at you, amicus meus, but at your rather absurd characterization of your dreams.”

  Tomadus had asked Batu to meet him at Angulus Taberna, their favorite hang out in Roma. “A few drinks—it’s been awhile,” Tomadus had said. He had failed to mention he would be seeking some insight from the brain technologist regarding his troubling visions. Now, he wondered if he had made a mistake.

  “What is so absurd? You’re a dream specialist. Do none of your many other patients dream of worlds they have never seen?”

  Batu pulled the tobacco pipe out of his mouth and blew a perfect ring of smoke toward Tomadus. “It is exceedingly rare. Stories, yes. They are as fluid and subtle as the mind that dreams them. They consist of small slices of experience and images well known to us. Our minds, freed from the restrictions of conscious reason, reorganize those thoughts into semi-rational stories based on our hopes, our desires and our fears. But, at bottom, they are all based on our own experience. Our dreaming brains cannot truly create new faces, new places or new things. They are taken from our past. You must have seen thousands of images similar to these, and your mind has borrowed them to create a new world order for you. But you have seen nothing truly new. Yet you claim this world is completely foreign to you.”

  “The visions I see don’t coincide with anything in my memory. Have you ever seen buildings so tall that we appear as but ants crawling in their shadows? And what do you make of the blinding light and the bizarre daydreams that seem to extend my night dreams?”

  “The flashes of light concern me, but I suspect the dreams come because you have been overworking yourself,” Batu said. “Do the flashes occur separately from the dreams?”

  “No, they always come just before the vision begins—even when I am sleeping.”

  “I suspect they are part of the dreams themselves. We can hook you up to a monitor when you sleep just to be sure. Do not worry, Tomadus. It is not uncommon for those with physical and mental exhaustion to essentially fall asleep while apparently functioning. Their brains shut down for everything except movement. They become like sleep walkers and see in the daytime what they would dream during a normal sleep.”

  Tomadus set down his glass and sat back from the bar, shaking his head. “I have always worked long hours. And parts of these visions are not like dreams. They are real. Yes, they feel as if someone has implanted a visi-scan monitor in my eyes and ears, so I can see nothing but these images and hear nothing but these sounds. Yet there is one important difference: I feel like I remember them as if they happened to me. In fact, I seem to instantly recall days at a time even though the light flashes for only a few seconds. Explain that, amicus meus.”

  “Sounds like a vivid hallucination. You haven’t been smoking that peyote from Aztalan, have you? You know that is illegal here.” Batu laughed, but Tomadus just stared back at him. “I tell you what, Tomadus, let me test you during one of your dreams. Although we cannot tell from our probes what you are dreaming, we can categorize them into several types of brain activity and thought. That will help us understand their nature better. Normally we do this solely for research, but in your case I think we can make an exception. I’ll have to charge you a bit to cover costs. What do you say?”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  Batu shook his head. “The probes are just below the scalp. We don’t drill into your skull or anything.”

  “When can we do it? Tonight?”

  “Sometime when we haven’t shared a bottle of arak. Perhaps tomorrow?”

  “I dream the same even after I’ve had a few drinks,” Tomadus said.

  “Amicus meus, I need sleep and sobriety before digging into your brain. Tomorrow.” With that, Batu stood up and walked out of Angulus Taberna in Roma.

  Tomadus looked down at his shot glass. Sleep? No, for then he would surely dream. Those dreams scared him almost as much as the creature within unsettled him: though he knew both all too well now, he knew not why they came. And both filled him simultaneously with two nearly opposing emotions: curiosity and dread. He had thought the creature would take a vacation when he tried to help Yohanan and the Tetepians, for he had tried to accomplish what he thought was right and that had always seemed to help in the past. But the infernal thing and the constant dreams came back for more. Perhaps insanity was a good word for his condition. He ordered another shot of arak.

  “I guess we’ll have to try again tomorrow.” Batu, the brain technologist, stood over Tomadus, the lights in the room just flickering on while an assistant was removing the apparatus from his scalp.

  “Why? Because you are glowing like the sun?”

  “What? No. Wake up, Tomadus.”

  “I am awake, yet your aura remains.” Tomadus sat up and reached toward Batu. “Are you an angel?”

  “You are funny. You don’t even believe in Allah and now you speak of angels? No, we will need to try tomorrow because your special dream did not come.”

  “But it did.” Tomadus said.

  “Not possible,” replied Batu, shaking his head. He walked over to his desk and picked up his pipe. “You mind?” Not waiting for Tomadus’s response, he struck a match and lit up. “Look, Tomadus, we have learned to distinguish between contemporary-reflective dreams and fantasy-projection dreams. The brain gives off very different signals for each.”

  “Contemporary-reflective dreams?”

  “Yes, a dream where your mind reflects on events of the past few days, weeks or months and flashes through various critical images at hyper-speed. Our brains do that all of the time to select, refresh and reinforce key memories in our bio-chemical neuron structures. More than half of your dreams are like this. Oh, sometimes there are dreams of this sort that vary from your actual experience, but that is just the brain’s way of suggesting subconsciously that you consider other alternatives in the future. Not the sort of new world order that you have described.”

  Tomadus frowned. “I tell you my memory of the dream is clear— and this world I see is not our own, not even close. I dreamed this man was in a huge basilica—like the Basilica Maxentius. But this was bigger, different, with a dome like the Pantheon, but just at its center. They called the building Sancti
Petri, or something like that. Most of the men wore clothing that covered each leg separately and tunics that covered only their upper halves. I tell you it was no contemporary-reflective dream. This man—me I think—marveled at a beautiful marble statute of a woman dressed as if from our own world holding a half-clad man in her lap. The man appeared lifeless, yet he looked so familiar.”

  Batu took a deep pull from his pipe, leaned back and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Precisely. He looked familiar to you. You are just recombining different things you have seen recently in a slightly different way—the Maxentius, the Pantheon, the statue, perhaps of the Emperor’s wife, and a man half clothed that you have seen before. It was no fantasy, no other world. No, I think you are just confused because of the procedure. Waking up in the middle of a dream can disorient you. You will be fine in a few minutes, but trust me, you could not have experienced an other-worldly dream. There are limits to our science, of course, but this is not one of them. The divide between these two main dream paradigms and the signals they provide have been established without exception for over a decade. Let us try again tomorrow.”

  “And what do your studies say about the flashes of light remaining even after I awake from a dream? Something else is happening here. And it is accelerating. If you were not my friend, I wouldn’t tell you this, but I sometimes struggle to know what is real and what is fantasy.”

  Batu chortled. “As long as you can pay me from either world, please feel free to pick the one you like the best.”

  “And to think your mother said you had no sense of humor.”

  “Perhaps it would make sense for you to speak to my colleague, Ratan. He is a psyche-technologist who may be able to get to the bottom of this.”

  Tomadus grimaced but then nodded slowly. “At this point I’ll try anything.”

  A week later, Tomadus sat in a comfy chair feeling none too comfortable. He felt the dull pain coursing through every neuron of his brain, each cell trying to dispel the intense emotions of hope and despair filtering in from the other world. Another day, another step into the quagmire of lunacy.