Quibble, 3. Unity
Quibble's foster mother, Vega, teaches her about keeping secrets.
3. Unity @Quibble
The Zero’s name was Alsephina. It means ship, a large sailing vessel. Cradled in her arms as in a boat rocking under a cloudless sky, I sailed away from Quandary and Quiddity. I would not feel their touch or hear their voices again for sixteen Fears.
To One, a Fear is a fuzzy idea, not marked by a determined number of cycles, which vary in length. A dream’s nature is such that One has no way to mark time while dreaming. There’s no telling how much time has passed since last Fear or how much remains until the next. One can tell only when Fear is approaching: Without waxes.
Are you perplexed, Numberless? Don’t grieve. I will make all of this plain.
My exile of sixteen Fears was fuzzier even than that. In the place Alsephina took me, where I stayed the first six Fears, there was no Fear, for there were no tarry-nots through which Without may penetrate. Zeros assured me I wouldn’t stay there forever, but they never told me when I could expect to leave.
“When Unity decides you’re ready,” they always answered. But how would Unity reach that decision? As on many other matters, It was silent.
Unity continued to teach me, but Zeros were also my teachers and I came to rely on their instruction as well as on my own experience. That place was a small spiral of only thirteen chambers, the largest of which – the Axle at the center – was not the usual circle but a square. Openings, which the Zeros called arcs, let out at each of the square’s four corners. Beyond each arc was a succession of three circular chambers which grew smaller and curved as they went – so the next arc was not situated opposite the last but somewhat to the left. I understood geometry well enough. When I could walk and had liberty to go where I would, I made a quick study of the spiral. It was not difficult. By my sixth cycle afoot, I knew those chambers as well as I ever would.
But learning to walk, to begin with, was a hard matter indeed! I sorely tried the patience of Zubana, the Zero whose task was getting Ones firmly on their feet. “It’s a bodily function,” she exhorted, each time with more annoyance. “The mind has almost nothing to do with it!”
“The body only obeys the mind, doesn’t it?” I protested.
Sighing, Zubana grasped me under the arms and lifted me up. “Of course your mind tells your body what to do,” she said, “but doing it is not an intellectual process. It’s instinctive! The body just does.”
If there was no intellection in the body, I had to say, I could not well imagine why One should need it. And if One didn’t need the body, why did One have it? Why, I asked the Zero, were we real? Why have skin, fat, muscle, tendon, bone, and marrow? Why the cell? Why cytoplasm and nucleus? Why nucleotides and the sequences by which they recombined? Why did this protein bind to that protein? Why did one spell to the other the kiss of death? Why did death exist at all? Why did we live shackled to its inevitability even as to our bodies? And beyond body, cell, membrane, protein, and molecule, why were we composed of atoms, and within those atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, positrons, and tinier yet, quarks—
“Ask the sphinx!” Zubana said. “They are, so we are, and that’s the end of it!”
Used as a verb, the word end is an outright heresy, and even as a noun it’s taboo. I reminded Zubana of this, warning her not to rouse Unity’s wrath.
“Behold, Quibble, no control comes. Unity will not censor me. Zeros don’t live in consensus. I may use what words I like.”
Now, this I thought terribly unfair. What was so special about Zeros, that they received such an exemption from control and censorship? Zubana wouldn’t answer this question. Instead, she exhorted me to walk, to try again and then again.
“There must be control,” Zeros are fond of saying. Their reasoning never struck me as anything but self-evident: life Within requires consensus among Ones, and for there to be consensus, there must be control. Sometimes Zeros enforced control through their glasses, which Ones do not possess. But most often, not Zeros but Unity enforced control – this was what Zubana meant when she observed that no control came. Those large glasses Ones obey by rote, which are called orbs, move among us as autonomous agents of Unity. Through these orbs, in a visceral way, Unity possesses us. We are Its creatures, Its creation. Or so One believes.
I submitted readily to Unity’s control, which could be severe. Only a few times in the Small Spiral did the red light of a Zero’s controlling dream subject me. The last time was on the eve of my departure, when the Zero Vega quieted me. I had learned I would be leaving soon. I demanded to be returned to Quiddity. Denied, I pitched a tantrum. Rather than summon Unity to deal with me, Vega revealed to me one of her glasses.
Her dream of control was frightening though not painful. Within it, I discovered I had no will or agency. I spoke when Vega let me speak, and I could only speak softly. I still had my own thoughts and feelings – I felt resentment at what was being done to me – but between my inward life and my outward speech interposed an overwhelming desire to yield to Vega’s will, which I comprehended intimately in the first fiery flash of her glass.
She said she didn’t want to punish or torment me. She used control as last resort; I’d driven her to it. She wanted me to hear out the explanation for why young children lived only in consensus with each other, not with other Ones, not even their parents. She wanted me to be calm and see reason. Despite her influence on me, I promised only to contain my temper and listen to what she would tell me.
I think this answer surprised her: she expected total capitulation, not a grudging tolerance. But she extinguished the control’s light and, sitting down cross-legged on the floor as was her habit, she held me in her lap and stroked my hair as she talked.
“I know it’s difficult, child,” Vega said. “Believe me, you live here now for your own benefit, for the sake of educating and protecting you.”
“Protecting me? From what? Are not all Ones a consensus?”
“All are, yes. But that’s more an ideal than a truism on which you can depend.”
“An ideal?”
“An article of faith,” she clarified. “Unity can’t see or know everything, all that happens to you or any One. It has power to protect you only when It knows. Before you can live fully in consensus, you must learn what dangers there are – dangers Quiddity can’t keep you from – and you must learn how to avoid them. Failing their avoidance, you must learn what to tell Unity.”
“Do you mean,” I hazarded, “there are things I shouldn’t tell Unity?”
Vega was silent for a long moment. Her fingers ran in my hair and began plaiting it, something she liked to do when we talked. There wasn’t much point in this: the next cycle would begin soon, and while we dreamed, isos always undid whatever we’d done to our hair. They like it straight, or Unity has it so. Still, I always enjoyed letting Vega try different ways of plaiting my hair. I liked her. She was as kind as a blue orb.
“Don’t tell Unity I said this, child, but It is fallible. There are things It can’t know or understand about the hearts of Ones. I don’t speak of mind – Unity is all mind. No, I speak of spirit. Tell me, Quibble, what do you do when you dream?”
“When I dream, what do I do?” The question seemed to answer itself. “I dream.”
“Only that? Whatever Unity gives, you receive? You simply imbibe it?”
Now I really thought. “No,” I admitted at last. “I create while I dream. Passages of scripture, of a sort. Just words I like in certain sequences. As a scrivener would.”
“Poetry. You’re writing poetry in your dreams. Now, Quibble, think: the words you arrange for yourself – that’s a private occupation, isn’t it? You do it by yourself and for yourself. It’s no part of what other Ones dream. It’s against consensus. Isn’t that so?”
“I suppose it is,” I said, feeling caught in a trap of my own admissions. Yet what worried me most was how Vega had so easily wrested such a secret out of me.
“Don’t fret, child,” Vega went on, at the same time tugging hard at a braid. “I’m not scolding you, only making a point. Why does Unity let you write poetry?”
This question took a lot of thought. The more I thought about it, the less that I felt I really knew the answer. Finally I said, “I don’t know.”
“In a word, Quibble, imagination. Unity lets you imagine. It must allow this: One without imagination soon dies. It’s a curious trait. To tell the truth, I’m not sure why it exists Within, where One sees nothing except what an orb or a glass shows. Needing to imagine, here, ought to be a disadvantage.”
Vega held her peace a little while.
“One imagines. I believe you can draw your own conclusions from that, Quibble. There is no specific thing I can say with certainty you shouldn’t tell Unity about. But the occasion will arise – heed me, it will arise – when you’ll need to hold something back, for your own sake or some One else’s.”
“So we won’t be sent Without?”
“Yes.”
You, Numberless and knowing what Without truly is, may think Vega was a fool who scared little children with shadows. They are not shadows, not to Ones – they are what shadow is made of, the dark, the truth. We often said, to explain a thing for which we really saw no reason, “Unity has it so.” This meant It was a law-giver, an unyielding force which governed our lives, and ours was not to question It but to obey. Mortal fear clung to all our dealings with It. This was the fear I heard in Quandary’s voice and even the precocious Quiddity’s. The greatest shadow – or, as Ones have it, the greatest light – was annihilation Without, death of body and soul, surpassing the bodily death to which we all went, rectification. We acquiesced to all Unity asked of us to avoid this doom.
Something was different about Unity, there in the spiral where my earliest Fears passed. Before I was born, It had only spoken to me when Quiddity dreamed. Now, It spoke when I dreamed, but quieter, less insistent than It had been. Its lessons remained endless, but now It had more patience. It didn’t expect me to learn anything as a matter of course. Zeros sometimes lost their cool, but Unity always kept Its self-assurance. It seemed to know perfectly well, or It wanted me to know, that It was in control. But Its aura of authority struck me as fundamentally at odds with the extremity of Without, Its most feared sanction. If Unity wielded such complete control, then what need was there ever to threaten banishment Without?
Realizing I had in Vega an interlocutor who would answer me frankly, I put this question to her.
“Hush now, child.” She held me to her shoulder, stood. “It’s not wise to inquire too far into Unity’s nature. An answer will come to you somecycle, I think. Until then, keep the question to yourself, and cherish it. Unanswered questions are good to have.”
Thus Vega left me in the dark, figuratively and literally. A soft blue flame burned in the dark. The flame stole over my eyes and pulled me, helpless to resist, into dream.