Quibble, 20. Heretic
Honoring Exclamation's request to go Without, Meissa seals her own fate.
20. Heretic @Meissa
I brought Exclamation Without on a moonlit night. Calculating pops across the piedmont to the south of my hive, I took him steadily away from the night-door leading Within. We met no Zeros – to my great relief, since I couldn’t possibly have explained away the One’s behavior. After each pop, he wanted to look, to touch, to explore. I told him there would be time for it later, but he couldn’t help himself. At last, exasperated, I let him pick flowers in a meadow. I showed him why a thistle was not to be picked.
“Don’t grab it,” I said, pointing. “Just touch it, right here.”
“Aaah!” Exclamation exclaimed, putting his thumb in his mouth.
“It defends itself. Many creatures, plant or animal, defend themselves somehow. If you look closely, you can usually see how. Look first to be sure it’s safe, then touch.”
Food was plentiful in the piedmont, but Zeros roamed there. I took Exclamation farther south, into sand-bitten stretches of scrubland where Zeros never went. I taught him to forage, to hunt, to feed himself. Wolves having come down from the mountains in summer, I gave him a yellow glass and showed him how to pacify them. I taught him also how to espy Zeros with an amber glass and pop away from them. But I didn’t trust to that, so I dressed him in a cloak and cut his hair in Zero’s fashion. If Zeros espied him at a distance, perhaps he could pass for only a rogue despite his pale skin.
Doing all this was difficult. The spiral was at once in an uproar, as all the Zeros sought the missing One. I could seldom chance slipping away for long lest it be noticed. But Exclamation learned all I taught him quickly and well. He might have managed on his own Without if only he had been a bit more intuitive and much hardier. Without is a shock to One’s senses, but the real enemies are ignorance and evolutionary adaptation. One knows life Within. One is adapted to life Within.
Without, winter was fast approaching. I stole more clothes for Exclamation, but he grew ill as cold weather set in. I couldn’t nurse him without fleeing spiral and hive. Finally I did, giving up secrecy. In the mountains along the coast I found us refuge in an abandoned monastery. It was safe from wolves, and if Zeros knew of it, I’d never heard so. To my surprise, there were several ancient, well-preserved books there. As I nursed the One through the winter, we read. The books about religion or philosophy were dull for the most part but at times eye-opening, yielding epiphanies. We loved most to read the Ancient’s myths and folklore. We were partial to the Norse, Japanese, Egyptians.
The One took a new name: Claim. He was at times gravely ill. Then, I thought it best, wise, right to return him to his spiral. Or I might take him to my hive and plead with my lord Iklil to send him to an Egg for medical treatment. But Claim begged me not to give him up to the Zeros. In his frequent nightmares, Unity’s orbs controlled him, tortured him, told him to return Within. He fiercely refused. He had promised himself that he would never live Within as One again.
In perfect candor, I must admit there’s some truth in what Zeros later said of us. First I admired Claim, then I came to love him. As my attentions to him in illness drew us closer, at times – when he was strong enough – we shared a bed. It was only a pile of straw, but it became the abode of our delight. But this was long after he came Without. It had no part in my initial motives. Those Zeros, like Yed, who spread the rumor Claim had seduced me to come Without were liars. They didn’t understand kindness or love.
Every day, I ascended the stairs to the monastery’s garret and espied all the lands from there to the seaside cliffs. They lay under a hush of snow. Living creatures stirred, hunted each other – but no Zero came here hunting another Zero or a lost One.
Yet I knew we couldn’t hide here forever. It was a mild winter, but Claim barely survived it. His illness weakened him, and I doubted he would recover all his strength in the coming year. Also, very harsh winters tend to follow mild ones in that part of the world. He wouldn’t make it through the next. We needed help. But I was a fugitive – I must be, for surely, when I disappeared, the lord of the spiral Yed surmised my role in Claim’s disappearance. Also, I suspected that whether I was as much a heretic as Claim mattered little to Yed, a stern lord. So I could go nowhere I knew to get help.
I’d heard the Far tribe called Aht were good people who would take in strangers in need. They hated Zeros – Djer, all the Far call us. Rightly so. But I knew of no one else to whom I could appeal for aid. If I explained our desperate situation and foreswore my glasses, I imagined, the Aht-nah might take pity. In late spring, the Aht migrated across the Waste, north through the long valley the Far called Sen-an-dah. I proposed to Claim that we go there to seek them.
He asked whether survival would be easier there, and I admitted the Waste was a desert, a hard place to live even for Zeros, let alone One. Only the nomadic Far lived there. Even they never trekked into the vast ocean of sand between us and the Sen-an-dah – they call it Ayn-qesh, the Womb of Sandstorms, and Zeros call it the Great Waste. As the Sen-an-dah itself lay far east of us on the other side of the continent, I explained, we would have to cross the Great Waste in a series of many pops. I couldn’t risk going Within to seek a way by night-door – at any rate, a way I didn’t know.
Considering this, for the first time Claim looked afraid. “Can we not cross Qahn-dah instead?” he asked, referring to the temperate grasslands north of the Great Waste.
“It’s heavily populated,” I explained. “The Qehb, Sqoh, and Uhta live there.”
“Then will none of them help us?”
“Perhaps the Uhta would, if we ever reached them. I heard the Qehb and Sqoh are not so civilized. All the Far hate and mistrust Zeros. I can’t believe we’d be able to explain our plight to every Far we met. Anyway, we must go south to find a warm, dry climate, but not so far south that we cross the lands of the Qahlif. They’re warriors, very fierce too. They wouldn’t think twice about killing us at first sight. The Aht are our best bet, and that means the Sen-an-dah is our destination. I know it’s a great risk, crossing the desert, but I just can’t think what else to do.”
Claim saw how I feared for his health, as well as the wisdom in seeking a people with whom to live. So, in the end, my fears won out.
Throughout the spring, we readied ourselves for the journey, gathering stores of food. Water especially concerned me. Popping across the Great Waste, with a passenger and stores no less, would tremendously tax my strength. Pops over some distance were difficult to calculate, fatal if miscalculated, and neither of our ambers were adept at it – mine was a particularly weak popper when calculating long distances. If we traveled by day, we’d lose more water than we could carry. Though the desert night was bitter cold, traveling then would afford me the stars as a means of navigation. How many nights? I didn’t know. The journey would be a close thing, if we managed it at all.
But manage we did. When the water ran low, seeing how weak I’d become, the One refused to drink and urged his share on me. I only survived because, on the brink of death himself, he showed me kindness. He showed me what control could never do: bind people to each other. When the water ran out, there was nothing to do but make a desperate dash for the Sen-an-dah. No longer stopping to camp, we popped all through the last two nights and one day, during the first night detouring north out of the path of a sandstorm rising from the east. We froze by night and boiled alive by day. Though he always kept his head covered, Claim was horribly sunburned. Parched, once I grew so delirious that I was tempted to sink to my knees and try drinking the sand.
Our travail didn’t end once we reached the Sen-an-dah. Finding water was still a challenge. We explored the lower slopes of the valley’s westward mountains, striking at last on a rill flowing out of a box canyon. Over the next three days we journeyed south, going slowly and seeking out water to regain our strength, until we reached the valley’s southern end. There, we lived meagerly in a cave and waited for the Aht. I would rather have hidden farther from the Arc of the Unnamed, a meeting-place for Zeros in the Waste, but the Sen-an-dah was a wide valley and I feared missing the Aht as they came north. As it happened, though, this didn’t prove the ill-chosen chance.
One day, as I was out seeking food, water, and some sign of the Aht, Claim met a scorpion. He had no revulsion of bugs, curious if one was good to eat, and he had poor instincts for spotting dangers Without despite the lesson of the thistle. So he tried to eat the scorpion. Before he knew his error, it stung him on both hand and cheek. I returned that evening to find him lying at the cave mouth by a puddle of vomit. He was in great pain, convulsing and gasping for breath. Scouring the cave, I found the scorpion, dead. I had no medicine and no knowledge of how to treat its sting. Fear crazed me.
While away, though, I’d seen the Aht coming down out of the mountains into the valley. So, thoughtless of all save Claim’s life, I abandoned my plan of approaching on foot by day so they could discern we posed no threat. Weak as I still was, I carried him until we were within sight of their camp. Then, calculating as best I could, I popped us into the midst of the Far, who sat in a great circle around the fire in the camp’s center, as is their custom. We fell to the ground in a heap. I struggled to my feet. Lacking strength to lift Claim, I dragged him to a woman who had been sitting with a man closer to the fire than the others. I assumed she was nah, or chief, and he was the ri, her advisor.
All the Aht were on their feet now. I saw no friendly faces, except perhaps that of the woman at whose knees I fell and clutched. Speaking broken Far, for I knew little of the language, I begged her to heal him. I can’t remember all I said, for I was raving. The Aht probably thought me a madwoman. From the other side of the circle, opposite the fire, came a shout – it sounded like a challenge or an order. I looked over my shoulder. A woman stood there, sword in hand, with a retinue of men at her back clad in bronze and leather armor, who now all drew their swords.
I realized my mistake. Instead of appealing to the Aht-nah, I had appealed to a jah, one of her rivals, the woman before me at whose back stood no retinue of guards. I’d given offense, however unwittingly. Looking up into the jah’s face, I saw pity there, but I also saw that she couldn’t protect me, making me jahli, without also offending the nah, which she would not do. I tried to rise but only stumbled and went down again on my knees. The jah didn’t move. The man beside her offered me his hand and helped me up. Again the nah snapped a command, and the man let me go.
Claim twitched and moaned. As I clasped his ankle, my amber in that hand and pressed to his skin, I felt what was happening to him. Jolts of pain like electric shocks flared across his cheek, ran up and down the length of his arm. Stay with me! I intoned. Dragging him, I circled the fire to the nah, collapsed at her feet, and repeated my plea, more coherently this time, adding an apology for the offense I’d given her. But looking up, I saw in the nah’s face no such pity as the jah had. Sneering, she bent over me and with one word – “Djer!” – spat in my face. She lifted her sword high, all her sah lifted theirs too, and I knew a Zero had no hope in the Far.
The Aht-nah’s sword swooped whispering through the air. Without thinking, I popped, taking Claim with me – if I left him, the nah would have killed him. But in my panic, I popped wild, without destination or calculation. And so I learned an amazing power of my amber of which I was ignorant. It was, as I’ve said, incapable of calculated pops over great distances. But if the pop was aimless, if the Zero told the amber nothing at all about where she wanted to go, then it defaulted to the place the Zero most often asked for – and then there was no limit to how far it could travel. A fail-safe for such a situation as mine: a panicked pop took the Zero home. The amber still thought my hive was home. So it popped us into the midst of the Zeros I’d been evading for the best part of a year, bearing to them, near death, the One for whom I fled. They surrounded us.
At first, I was terrified. Then, considering the situation, I thought it was just as well. If the Zeros took Claim to an Egg, he might live. If only he lived, I cared little what happened to me now. One by one, I took out my glasses and, lighting none, I gave them to the lord Iklil, my amber last. Explaining the One’s dire condition, I took all blame for his disappearance and swore he was innocent of heresy. Iklil seemed to believe me. He ordered his adept Rasalgethi to bear the One to an Egg, and to make haste.
Thus Claim and I parted ways. Though later I would see him many times in my dreams, only once more before death would I look him in the eyes and know him.
Iklil arrayed eight Zeros to hear my case. He looked grim. “It’s clear you care for the One,” he said. “I believe your motives for kidnapping him were good, or at any rate not evil. But you committed the crime in a spiral, not in my hive. I can’t interfere. I can only see justice done.” The spiral’s lord, Yed, would direct the total array.
I told them my story, casting Exclamation – I was careful to use that name – in a favorable light, praising his courage Without, damning myself for taking him there. Iklil was interested in our journey across the Great Waste, which Zeros had never attempted by popping with amber glasses. When I spoke of how the One gave me water, saving my life, I lost my head a bit and said I’d learned kindness was more holy and powerful than control. Yed looked at me gravely. “Kindness?” he said.
In the end, the total array said only this: “There must be control.”
I was put in a lone Zero’s prison, a single chamber Within, and refused an amber by which to see, lest it help me escape.
Scriveners’ tales speak of prisoners living with rats and cockroaches, even birds flying to the grated window of their cells. I had no such companions. My chamber had no window. Somewhere there’s an ingress, I thought, for I didn’t suffocate from lack of air, but I never found it. Surrounded by rock, I was utterly alone. And night, night was all.
There I came to know suffering I had never believed possible, even in the journey across the Great Waste. Yed ordered me stripped to my shift. I slept on stone. I shat and pissed in a deep hole that was never cleaned. I was never bathed. The chamber became foul, horrible to live in; as I paced its circuit, I became foul myself. Darkness was eternal but for one instant each cycle when I was blinded by the pop of a Zero who brought my food and water. He put a bowl and a bucket on the floor, collected the empties, popped out. He never said a word, even when I begged him to speak.
Isolation was my greatest hell, greater than dark. I think I went mad of it in that chamber. The world had buried me and then, out of shame for a heretic Zero, forgotten me. Always, I remained anxious for Claim. No Zero brought me news of him.
One night as I lay wakeful, unexpectedly a Zero popped in. I couldn’t track time in the chamber, but I knew it hadn’t been a cycle since my last feeding. The Zero lit her amber, as the other never did. She spoke to me. Her name was Ankaa, meaning phoenix. She brought me food, much better food than what the mute Zero gave me. I wolfed it down as Ankaa watched me by amber-light, which she kept faint to spare me blindness. When I asked her to turn up the light and I looked down at myself, I saw an emaciated creature, a starved animal, hardly human.
Ankaa said she was unaware my prison was so squalid, or she would have dared to visit me sooner. She promised to return and bring water, a basin and brush, and soap to wash both me and the chamber. Trying to thank her, I could only sob. She let me cry. Once I composed myself, I asked if she could tell me of Exclamation, whom I last saw at death’s door. Did he live? Yes, she said, he lived. He was still in poor health and under suspicion. This news was such a relief that it brought on a new flood of tears.
“Meissa, you’re living in a hell on his account,” Ankaa said. “Why do you care if he lives or dies? Would it not have been better for you if he’d died in the Waste?”
“But I love him,” I answered between sobs.
“Love? Couldn’t you meet your carnal needs with a Zero, as edict directs?”
Regaining my control took a long while. I said, “I’m not talking about the carnal. By love, I mean a bond of kindness.”
“That word again!” Ankaa cried. “My lord Iklil said you spoke of kindness as if it were a god. When you told the array it was greater than control, he knew Yed wouldn’t grant you a swift death. What is this kindness you hold so dear?”
“Tell me, Ankaa, why did you come here? Why bring food? Why do you promise to bathe me, clean my chamber? You break edict by even speaking to me. Why?”
“Yed believes Iklil’s hive is a hotbed of heresy,” she replied. “He convened us all and told us of your prison: a single chamber, no light, no company, no words spoken to you, no hope of release. He meant to frighten us. I’m only a protégé, but I asked Iklil if it seemed right to him, and he said no. It doesn’t seem right to me, either. You may not be a Zero anymore, but you’re still a human being.”
“Ah, but what am I to you? Why do you care if I live or die?”
“Your suffering is inhuman, unnatural!” Ankaa said, offended by my turning her words back at her. “I can’t stand to do nothing about it!”
“Kindness.” I let the word sink in, then went on: “You’ve seen the Ones, Ankaa. You know how they live – in fear of Without. Is that human or natural?”
“It must be! There must be control. How else can they survive Within?”
“Take them Without,” I said.
“You took One Without. You saw how badly it ended.”
“But I acted alone, with no help. If we all take Ones Without – perhaps not all the Ones, not right away – we can provide for them. The Ones could act together, too, and provide for themselves. Exclamation provided for himself. He only needed my teaching and watching. I’m not saying it would be easy. They’d have to adapt.”
“Living Without requires arable land to grow food and textiles,” Ankaa argued. “Or do you imagine Ones are better off living like Far, like savages?”
“I’ve met Far. I don’t believe they’re savages, only fearful of us. Anyway, Ones needn’t be nomads. How do we provide for them now? There’s enough arable land. We could repurpose what the Infinite built. It’s not like long ago, when there were billions and billions of Ones and not nearly enough resources for them all. They’ve dwindled. There are less than ten million Ones now. There’s no more need for them to live Within. Now we only keep them there out of orthodoxy. Out of habit.”
Equating orthodoxy and habit shocked Ankaa. She shook her head in disbelief. Looking me up and down, seeing my rags and filth, she said, “You are a heretic!”
I chuckled mirthlessly. I’ve only had time to mull things over, I thought.
Ankaa pressed her last gambit: “What of rectification, the Ones’ transcendence? Can Zeros deny it to them? Do we have any such right?”
“Ankaa, all I can tell you is that I believe they live inhumanly, unnaturally, and I don’t believe a heavenly eternity among the stars justifies it. One is not Infinite.”
My arguments didn’t seem to persuade Ankaa, but I relished the memory of her visit and looked forward to the next, keen to be clean. It was good not to be neglected, forgotten. Several cycles passed, though, and she didn’t return.
Maybe she really hadn’t come out of kindness, I began to think, but to satisfy herself that I was indeed a heretic, that I deserved such a punishment. Maybe kindness was just my fantasy, something I’d invented because I was too weak to use control, because it was abhorrent to me. Maybe kindness was as bad for Ones as I thought control was. Maybe my heresy was just that: a heresy. An error, a delusion, a lie.
So my thoughts went, and many cycles passed – I don’t know how many. I sank into a slough of despair. My health declined. Fits of coughs often racked me, and some cycles I couldn’t even stand. I found it harder and harder to reach the hole in the corner, farthest from where I slept, so I befouled the chamber further with excrement and urine. At last, the Zero who brought my food spoke, only to tell me how disgusting he found me, a very picture of the scrivener’s “rough beast.” He said he wouldn’t come again. He couldn’t be bothered to care for a creature which refused to care for itself. I was by then too weak to answer him. He kept his word and never returned.
Now I knew I would die. I welcomed it. I didn’t try to rise. Lying on stone, I tried only to sleep. I hoped at least to die in my sleep. Often then, cloaked in that long night, it was hard to tell if I slept or woke. Either way, I dreamed, my dreams wakeful no less evil than what visited when I slept.
In every dream Claim appeared, but always the hood of the cloak I gave him was pulled over his head and hid his eyes. I saw him at the tarry-not where we first met. He shrieked in horror of the light and fled into the spiral’s darkness. From a long way off, I saw him in the scrubland, circled by Zeros and wolves. The Zeros used their glasses to whip the wolves into a ravenous frenzy. I searched for my amber to pop him out of the trap, but in vain, and the wolves tore him to pieces. I lay with him on our straw bed in the mountain monastery. He turned his face to the wall, and as his breath slipped away I heard a death rattle. Amid burning sands, he stood beside me. I asked for water and he said I couldn’t have any, then he popped away. I returned bearing good news to the cave in the Sen-an-dah. He sat in shadow waiting, scooping up yellow-brown scorpions with both hands and cramming them into his mouth. By a fire I lay sprawled, electric tremors flaring through my face and arm. Looking up, I saw him kneel at the feet of the Aht-nah. He told her that I stole him away from his people and tried to zero him. I was a wicked Djer, and he sought the nah’s justice for me. She raised her sword, but when it fell, the whispering blade bore down on his neck instead of mine.
Then those appalling dreams departed and I entered others, a damnation of orbs and glasses. Red and orange and yellow, control blazed before my eyes. But no images appeared – only, sometimes, I heard voices. Ankaa, Iklil, Yed. They seemed to speak not to me but each other. I don’t recall all they said, only fragments of a pointless debate.
“Her crime was kindness,” Ankaa said. “Is that so terrible?”
“Spare her,” Iklil said, “and you may yet spare yourself.”
To these appeals, Yed gave only one answer: “There must be control.”
Let me die, I said to them, let it all end. They couldn’t hear or wouldn’t listen. Their voices faded. Then I dreamed a vastness of white light, and I prayed it was my death.
< Previous chapter | Index | Glossary | Appendix | Next chapter >
rem
Many thanks to filmmaker and photographer Michael Shainblum for use of the image accompanying this chapter. Click here to see more of Michael’s stunning work.
rem
One is welcome to comment.