Quibble, 23. Touch
Quibble lets herself be drawn into a kind dream — with terrifying consequences for Alnasl. The doctor Gienah explains how Ones become Dazed.
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23. Touch @Quibble
“Why didn’t Utopia answer me?”
“About whether It’s a person? Maybe It doesn’t know.”
“It’s had kindness knows how long to think about it!”
Utopia’s interfaces were pulling us back to the hub’s hatch. This time, we seemed to be going slower than before, but there was no way to tell for sure. How large was the hub? I guessed from what I’d seen in the spindle that the hub was spherical, but it could also be an elongated oval with its lengthwise axis set in line with the spindle.
“Quibble, tell me something,” Alnasl said. “You saw Epigraph rectified, and now you’ve seen his avatar. He transcended to Utopia. Do you believe in my heaven now?”
I considered it. “I don’t know. Epigraph’s avatar didn’t sound like him. It wasn’t grave or sorrowful. It didn’t seem triumphant, either, as the One did at the end of his summary. If that’s Epigraph, he’s undergone quite a transformation.”
“He’s joined Utopia. It changes One. He has a wider perspective.”
“I imagine so. But things here just don’t feel real, you know?”
“Real becomes not-real when the unreal is real,” said Alnasl, perhaps thinking a passage of scripture would appeal to me. I’d never read Dream of the Red Chamber, but I knew it was important, practically the only text Zeros read. The quotation was popular.
“But think about that, vision,” I retorted. “It puts all reality in question, in limbo. And if you accept that Ones transcend, then what’s their earthly existence worth? Why do they live out their lives Within? Utopia asked when it will all end. Why not rectify all the Ones and be done with it?”
The interface I held slowed yet further, pressing itself against me. The hatchway ahead, hidden until now, appeared and slid open. Getting a grip on its edge, I released my interface – it zipped away – but the vision held onto his.
“You’re staying?”
“I’d like a private word with Utopia.” He lit his amber. “See the night-door? The key is ‘transit, micron, hunter.’ You’ll have gravity on the other side. Be ready for it.”
“Should I just go back to the night-door to Earth, wait for you there?”
Alnasl brooded a moment. “Go see my friend Gienah. He’s an adept of kindness, the Egg’s physician. He’s likely making rounds now.”
The night-door was marvelously precise. Traveling through it – there, not-there, there – I thought I’d fall to the corridor’s floor. Instead, I found myself standing, only with my back bent. I straightened up, turned my back to the wall and leaned against it, and looked about, reorienting myself. The corridor was bare, white, as anonymous as any other in the Egg.
“Utopia!”
“Yes, Quibble?”
“I assume you can talk to me and Alnasl at the same time?”
“Of course.”
“He wants me to see the doctor Gienah.”
“Are you hurt?” Utopia’s voice was edged with surprise and concern.
“I sprained my ankle down on Earth, coming here.”
“Ah.” There was a short pause. “Gienah is tending to Appendix. I’ll direct you.”
I set off into the maze of the Egg. Utopia gave directions: “Second left, now right, descend this shaft, first left,” and so on. As we went, It let loose a profusion of chatter at odds with Its terse personality in the hub. “A guise for the unwary,” Alnasl had called this aspect of Utopia. Indeed, I now knew, for all Its ebullience, It was really reticent, at times even evasive. Despite the Ones’ faces and voices Utopia took when seen, the intelligence behind them was alien in nature, inhuman, uncanny.
Somehow I was reminded of a monster of the oceanic abyss I’d seen in the monastery library’s book on ichthyology. Spiny and phosphorescent, the fish resembled no other fish in the book. It was at once fascinating and revolting. And, in its otherness, deeply unsettling. Utopia, soaring in Its own abyss of space, was a sphinx.
It told me the story of Egg 14, lost many thousands of years ago: “There were a lot of satellites in high orbit, out towards the Clarke Belt, running out of fuel for station-keeping. As their orbits decayed, these satellites rained down on the nine Eggs in low orbit, overworking their Siblings. Egg 14 had already lost a Sibling – the hydrazine ran out – so its other two were like pieces in a chess game trying to defend against too many threats. A reentering satellite struck Egg 14, fortunately not in the hub or spindle.”
“So the Utopia and Its Ones survived?”
“Yes, but the Egg couldn’t maintain orbit around Earth. That was a great pity. 14-Utopia had only gathered Ones for a few decades, so It wasn’t embryonic yet, but all It could do was take the Ones It had. It boosted the Egg out of orbit, refueled, pointed the hub at a star, shed the shell, deployed the solar sails, burned the jets. Eggs renumber as their peers embark, but there’s no Egg 14 now. We retired the number after that.”
Strange, Utopia believes in luck. “Did 14-Utopia find planets around that star?”
“It’s still on Its way, Quibble.”
“You said this happened thousands of years ago.”
“Yes, and stars are incredibly distant. Even with our help, the Infinite never solved the problem of faster-than-light travel. Embryos travel incredibly fast, but they still take a very long time to reach their destinations. But what is time to the Infinite?”
“So, which star did 14-Utopia head for?”
“It didn’t tell us. Second one to the right, I imagine.” Suddenly Utopia burbled: “I was delighted you spotted the pangram!”
“I’m a scrivener,” I told It. “Not a very talented one, really.”
“Any literary person has my respect. Zeros aren’t much for reading, you know? I play chess and go with Gienah when he has time. He’s quite good, original at strategy for a human, but he can’t match me for sheer calculating depth.”
I was now walking down a corridor with rooms to left and right, tiny cells from which emanated the faint green light of active orbs. I peeked into a cell, careful not to let my eyes fall directly on the orb within, which hung like a specter over a bed. A woman lay there. She wore a threadbare shift, nothing more. She stared at the orb, dreaming.
“Are these Ones?” I asked Utopia as I walked on.
“Yes. They’re being treated. Gienah is with the newly Dazed. This door.”
The cell’s light was strong and blue, and as I entered, I shielded my eyes with my hand. The Dazed on the bed was scrawny, a scraggly specimen of a boy perhaps twelve or thirteen years old with elbows and knees that jutted acutely under vellum-like albino skin. His shift was in better repair than that of the One I’d seen. By the bed stood a Zero, a squat, rotund, somewhat elderly man in a navy-blue cloak. Atop his pug nose, held in place by wire-thin stems sinking in the mess of black hair around his ears, sat a delicate apparatus of two oval-shaped lenses set in steel hoops. Holding the Dazed by the wrist, the Zero stared at his own wrist, to which a small, round contraption was strapped.
“Good, very good,” he murmured, then glanced up at me. Sharp, inquisitive eyes peered through the lenses and met mine, which I blinked in a Zero’s greeting. Looking momentarily surprised, he reciprocated. “You’re Quibble?” he asked.
I nodded, and without waiting for me to speak, he said, “Tope told me you were coming with a sprained ankle. Told me a lot about you, point of fact. It said you stare.”
“I don’t mean any offense,” I offered.
“Of course not!” Gienah said.
I pointed at the contraption on his wrist. “What’s that?”
“Oh, the watch?” he said, smiling. “The resurrectionist Concordance made it for me. Wondrous thing, just wondrous! Look, you can see the mechanism moving inside.”
He held it out to me. Within the watch spun interconnected cogs regulated by a flywheel. I had to say it was indeed a wondrous device, but what did it do?
“Keeps time! Tope can do it for me, of course—”
“More accurately,” Utopia chimed in.
“—but I like taking a pulse the way the Ancient doctors did. Bit more of a human touch.” Turning back to the bed, the Zero pressed a hand to the Dazed’s forehead, then extracted a glass cylinder from his mouth, looked at it a moment, shook it, slid it into a cloak pocket. “Everything’s all right. Time to wake Pend up.” Gienah eyed me. “Care to do the honors, Quibble?”
“Me?” I was taken aback. “Oh, I don’t think I could!”
Gienah snorted. “Bet you can! You’re an excelsior, aren’t you?”
Of that I was still uncertain. Utopia had seemed confident in Its pronouncement and didn’t object now, but I remembered all too clearly the strength of Meissa’s orb and, before it, the yinman. Though I was curious to know what I could do, this day’s chaos of surreal visions and arcane knowledge made me timid. I thought of coming Without, of writing for the first time, of Nish pulling the glass shard from my foot and stitching the wound. What would she say? “No knowing till you try. Experiment.” Very well. Meissa’s warning came to mind: “Look first to be sure it’s safe, then touch.”
I unshielded my eyes, skancing the orb. Its glow felt peaceful, restful. No dream overwhelmed my sight. I gave it a steady stare: the vaguest suggestion of a dream came to me, but its outlines were indistinct, just blurry image. Reaching out, I touched the orb with a fingertip. A soothing sensation surged up my arm.
“How does it feel?” Gienah asked.
“Like getting up from a good night’s sleep.”
I clasped the orb between both hands. As my grip on it tightened, its light grew, pervading the room with a deep blue fire. And never had I felt so good!
“Now extinguish it,” Gienah instructed.
“How?”
“Can you see its dream?”
“Not clearly.”
“Enter the dream, and tell it to end. Use the verb ‘end.’ The orb will obey.”
As I pulled the orb to me, I noticed the Dazed’s eyes following it. I stared at the glimmer in its heart. The dream swam up to the orb’s surface, becoming more defined, and suddenly I was in it. Words and pictures met my gaze. With a thrill, I recognized a beloved scripture of Unity, the earliest to follow the First Confession as I floated in my first Within, Quiddity’s womb, learning to read.
A frog and a toad keep each other company. Frog is ill. To cheer his friend, Toad tries to think of a story to tell him, but he has some difficulty doing it. He tries so hard that he makes himself ill, and at last it’s Frog who tells Toad a story.
The scripture was plainspoken, repetitive, lulling. The pictures showed Frog and Toad content in the faith of their friendship, at peace with One another, never bickering or quarreling. As I read, I yearned for what they had: a happy and simple life, forever feeling comforted, pleased, blessed, forever together in a private loneliness—
The text vanished as red light flooded my eyes. I heard Alnasl’s voice: “Quibble.”
“I’m here.”
“Give the orb to Gienah.”
It slipped from my hands into others. Control faded and blinked out.
My body was drenched in sweat and I was dizzy, as after breaking Meissa’s orb. I felt removed from myself, as if I’d given up my existence and then reclaimed it – much as I’d felt when Alsephina carried me away from the Large Spiral by night-door. I sat on the edge of the Dazed’s bed, took deep breaths, and held my hands before me, focusing on my fingers, flexing them. It was like seeing them for the first time. I’m real.
“Are you insane?” Gienah said.
“No,” I replied, looking up. But Gienah was looking at Alnasl, not me. The vision sank with a huff into the chair by the bed. His face was drawn with terror, and seeing it, I was suddenly frightened myself. “What happened?” I asked.
“I popped!” Alnasl said, his voice shaking, as he stared at the amber in his hand.
“In the Egg!” Gienah exclaimed.
“Not on purpose, believe me.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s wrong with popping in an Egg?”
Both Zeros stared speechlessly at me, as if I’d sprouted wings. Utopia piped up: “Night-doors are the only way to teleport safely within Eggs. Amber glasses lack the frame of reference they need – namely, Earth.”
“But the Egg orbits Earth!” Though it felt strange to demonstrate for a bodiless voice, I circled one hand around the other. “Doesn’t someone walking on the ground—”
“The rate of acceleration due to gravity is different. At Earth’s surface, that varies a bit, not enough to confuse an amber. But here, it doesn’t know how fast it’s falling.”
Alnasl looked at me. “Why did you touch the orb?” he demanded to know.
“That’s my fault,” Gienah interceded. “Tope said she excels. I wanted to see that for myself. I just assumed...”
The adept of kindness trailed off as the vision gave him a withering look. The Zeros gazed at each other. After a long moment, Gienah gave assent, shutting his eyes slowly and then opening them again. When Alnasl didn’t return assent, it seemed as if there was a cord between the two of them, stretching taut. The longer Alnasl gazed without blinking, the closer the cord came to a breaking point. At last, just as it seemed ready to snap, Alnasl gave assent back. They both relaxed.
“Kindness, I’ve never been so scared!” the vision said with another hard look at me. “One moment I was floating in the spindle, the next I was here on my feet – and you had a lit orb in your hands! Dreaming! Quibble, what were you thinking?”
I sighed and shook my head. “I figured I had to try at some point.”
“Don’t be cross, vision,” Utopia reprimanded. “No harm’s come to your protégé. And she’s right. One must touch orbs to master them.”
“That’s heresy!” came a voice at my back. I turned where I sat. Against the wall at the far side of the bed huddled the Dazed, sitting up and hugging his knees, his shift doing him little good in the way of modesty. “One does not touch orbs,” he said.
“Appendix!” Gienah said. “Sorry, in all the hubbub, I forgot we woke you. How are you feeling today?”
The Dazed looked towards the Zero, but his eyes roved a bit, unfocused. When he spoke again, his voice was warmer: “I’m well, thank you.”
“Hello,” I said, leaning towards him and reaching a hand for his knee. “My name is Quibble. You can call me Quill if you like.”
“Don’t touch me!” the Dazed bleated.
The command surprised me. Wasn’t the boy a newly Dazed? So wouldn’t he still have One’s habits? “Touch is trust,” Ones say, and it’s their custom at a first meeting to touch each other, even to embrace.
“Pend’s a bit shy,” said Gienah. “He’s had a rough emergence Without.”
“Connotation’s syndrome?” Alnasl inquired.
“Naturally.” Noticing my confusion, Gienah went on: “Connotation’s syndrome is the most common way Ones come Without. It’s a genetic neuromuscular disease with traits similar to those in multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy. Onset starts in childhood, usually in the Large Spiral. As in sclerosis, the mind loses control, so to say – its ability to give commands to some parts of the body. But there’s no degeneration of nerve tissue in Connotation’s – that’s the most mysterious thing about it. One suffers seizures, yes, but not loss of major organ functions. However, later in the progression, One begins to experience cognitive and visual impairments.”
“One’s mind can’t make sense of dreams,” I guessed, not envying Pend his blunt, encyclopedic doctor. “One sees unclearly, and at last the dream just doesn’t register.”
Gienah pursed his lips. “Hmm. Your adroitness told you about it, did she?”
I threw Alnasl a nervous skance. He shrugged.
“I nursed Definition through her gestation in the Egg and her first few months in the Dazed monastery,” Gienah told me. “Point of fact, I gave her the abbreviation Nish. She had an uncommonly hard time of it, worse than Pend. Connotation’s devastates newly Dazed, on account of – well, you know.”
“Yes,” I said, recalling how afraid I was during the storm my first night Without. My anxiety had been bad enough, but had flashes of lightning also brought on seizures, I could only imagine what a hell that night would have been.
“To me,” Gienah said, “what’s truly interesting about Connotation’s syndrome is how it up and vanishes. The symptoms gradually disappear after One comes Without.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You said it’s genetic.”
Gienah smiled. “Tope, tell Quibble your theory.”
“It isn’t One’s disease at all,” Utopia said. “It’s an evolutionary adaptation.”
“How do you figure that?”
“An accelerating rate of incidence. Whatever Unity does to arrest the inheritance of the genes, Connotation’s syndrome persists. It’s spreading.”
“But why would Ones be evolving to go Without?” I pressed.
“Population decline Within,” Utopia said.
“That’s not how evolution works,” I said, chuckling, amused I should have to explain this to such a being as Utopia – it felt almost like correcting Unity. “Organisms don’t evolve against the demands of their habitat, much less towards a habitat they’ve never even seen!”
“Unless, perhaps, they were genetically programmed to.”
“The Infinite?”
“Who knows?”
I sniffed. I was beginning to understand Utopia’s exasperation with the Infinite, whoever they were.
Alnasl was shaking his head. “That doesn’t comport with the story we heard in the hub,” he said. “There were no Dazed or Adroit in Meissa’s time, but the Ones had already dwindled in number. I know next to nothing about genetics, but I know at least that it doesn’t wait on kindness.”
Gienah knelt before me, tapped me on the knee, and pointed at my feet. I crossed my legs, lifted my left foot, pulled off the boot to let him examine the sprained ankle. Swollen, it was blue, almost purple, but it didn’t look as bad as I’d thought it would.
“Can you walk on it?”
“Slowly, but I’m managing. Going up to the spindle was the hardest part.”
The adept grimaced. He withdrew a roll of cotton gauze from a cloak pocket and began to wrap the ankle. “Going into zero gravity with an injury!” he mumbled. “Wish you’d seen me first.”
The foot went back into the boot with some resistance. I stood and put weight on it, wincing. For the first time, I imagined the hell there’d be to pay with Nish. Not only had I gone missing and left my chores at the monastery undone, I’d broken my promise not to let anyone take me to see a rectification without her, and as if that wasn’t enough, I’d gotten myself hurt being chased by Far. She’ll have a conniption, I thought.
Alnasl rose, tilted his head to one side. Time to go. Giving Gienah a quick assent, he strode out of the cell. I thanked Gienah and offered Pend an awkward goodbye, then paused in the corridor just outside the cell and steadied myself again. Disorientation in the Egg was clearly a problem for me: every time I saw the concavely curving corridors afresh, my head swam. I looked for Alnasl. He waited far down the corridor, nearly out of sight. I hobbled towards him, annoyed that he now expected me to walk alone.
“Aladfar sent me a message while you and Gienah were talking,” he said once I caught up. “He’s on the Egg. We’re going to meet him.”
“Can I lean on you again?”
“Sure.”
We went some ways in silence.
“Can Pend see? Why wouldn’t he let me touch him?”
“He has no adroitness. You came Without with some experience of seeing things already, like Exclamation. It was new, I’m sure, but not all that strange. But everything Pend sees strikes him as a dream. One sees a dream, One touches wakeful – never both at once. He can’t wrap his mind around it yet, so it scares him.”
“I guess that’s why Gienah’s so blunt with him. There’s more to fear in ignorance than knowledge, so inform the patient.”
“That’s just Gienah’s way,” the vision said. “He might’ve been a lord of kindness by now. His indiscretion’s kept him stuck at adept.”
“But he’s your friend.”
The Zero kept his silence, and I let him. This didn’t feel like a wall, as before, but rather like a bridge. Some things about my life pass all explanation, he was telling me.
A sound of brisk footfalls came from ahead; a moment later, Aladfar rounded the corridor’s curve. Seeing us, he gave assent to Alnasl, cast hardly a glance my way. More than hurried, he seemed impatient. His face was stone, his voice grave.
“The lady of control was right,” he said. “Did you consult Utopia?”
“Of course, silence,” Alnasl said, matching Aladfar’s gravitas. “It’s convinced the orb burst to escape a paradox created by Quibble’s resistance to rectification. I’ll explain in council. At any rate, we have an answer. In Utopia’s opinion, Quibble does excel.”
The silence brooded on this information only a moment. “The lady of kindness will have ended her parley by now,” he said. “We’ll see what she says, and then maybe we’ll see what else this excelsior can do. Come, let’s go!”
Aladfar turned and walked off just as briskly as he’d come. Alnasl moved to follow, but I stood still. He looked at me inquiringly. I shook my head. He took his right hand from his pocket, and the amber he held flickered briefly. Aladfar spun on his heels, facing me for the first time since demanding my silence at the Arc of Summary.
“Perhaps you didn’t understand? We’re going to see Vega.”
“I understood perfectly,” I told him. “No. I will not have any more experiments performed on me. I’m not taking one more step at your behest. If Vega wants to see me, fetch her here. But then I’m going home to my monastery and my adroitness.”
Aladfar looked at Alnasl. “You should control your protégé,” he suggested.
“None of this ‘lord’ nonsense, you said so yourself,” replied the vision. “Quibble is free to stay or go as she chooses. She always was.”
I skanced him gratefully, then returned my eyes to Aladfar and let them rest on his left hand. Hanging loosely outside his cloak, the hand seemed like an orphan, out of place and uncertain where it belonged. The tips of three fingers – index, middle, ring – were bound in gauze. The silence had seen a doctor, too. I took a deep breath, stared the Zero in the eyes, and challenged him: “Control me yourself, if you think you can!”