Quibble, 6. Without
Quibble makes a shocking journey and finds joy at the end, then sorrow.
6. Without @Quibble
At last Unity released me from my exile. Vega had told me to think of it as an education, but to me it could only be a separation from the Two who first held me, One within herself. This was why, as Alsephina intimated, Quiddity should have undergone my Passage dreaming: then I wouldn’t have lived with the burden of knowing her. But then, had I not sensed her absence every moment I was wakeful and wished for nothing more than to touch her again, perhaps my precocity would have gotten the better of me, and I would have turned out headstrong, disobedient. Then I would have stayed in the Large Spiral even longer, but I would never have grieved the exile as I did.
I had no right to expect Unity to return me to the Two, Quandary and Quiddity, but without thinking of the consequences I grew to resent It for keeping me from them. No measure of exile could have been brief enough to prevent this. You understand best why, Numberless, or anyway you should. We all torture ourselves with the past.
Leaving the Large Spiral at last, I regretted only one thing: Classification was not coming with me. We had grown close, this One and I. She was a Fear younger than me but my equal in wit. We were thrust together by Rasalased soon after my third Fear in the spiral. I’d yet to make many friends – the Ones remembered what transpired at my first Fear and kept their distance – and Classification, for her part, also suffered anxiety attacks, the first of which occurred during Fear.
“No One else understands what you’re going through,” Rasalased told us. “You both need touch, I think.”
She was right. At first, Classification and I were skittish with each other, hesitant to give or receive touch, but when at last we let our guards down, how we reveled in it! Like many Ones drawn close, bit by bit we invented our own haptic language, a private symbology and syntax of touch. I’m here, we’d tell each other when an anxiety attack beset either of us. I’m with you. We are One. And her touch, I discovered, relieved an attack even better than slow, steady breathing. We soon became inseparable.
Together, we even dared to appeal to Unity to make us faithful somecycle. It had other plans for us both, though. It made Its will known to us with the harshest control, the sternest censorship.
I have touched you, and you are mine, It reprimanded. One does not belong to another One, even in faithfulness. All are One. We are a consensus. You will heed the consensus.
Another reason I resented Unity. By what right did It separate us? Classification, born dreaming, didn’t know her parents, and she didn’t care where she went if only she could be with me. What did it matter to Unity? What consensus did It now admonish us to heed? I didn’t see how the issue mattered to any One but me and Classification. But I knew better than to debate Unity, whose word was law, and finally I acquiesced.
During my prior journeys spiral to spiral, I’d dreamed. This time, Alsephina bore no glass, gave me no dream when she came to take me away. She said I was old enough and, by all reports, wise enough to need no control now. These words troubled me. On our previous journeys, the glass she had borne was a kindness, blue, its dream calming. I had never considered it a form of control, rather a luxury. I didn’t risk the imprudence of asking the Zero whether she had misspoken, whether she rather meant I needed no kindness on this journey.
Undreamed, the journey shocked my senses.
We followed an uphill leg of the Large Spiral a long way, perhaps to its terminus. I couldn’t say how many arcs we passed through. Alsephina led me by the hand, never touching the walls. Just as they somehow knew where all Ones were, Zeros didn’t need touch Within to know where they were. We stopped. Ones spoke nearby. Flashing her blue glass for their attention, Alsephina told them to leave. Then she led me to the right, across the chamber, and pressed my hand against the wall, covering it with her own.
Carnival, thrall, concise.
Even as this strange mantra came to me in the Zero’s quiet voice, I knew I wasn’t hearing it – she didn’t say it aloud. I had no time to think about this then, for as soon as the last word entered my mind, I felt myself disintegrate.
Or that’s not quite right, is it, Numberless? You don’t feel that disintegration. You simply know it to happen.
Then to unhappen. I existed, and it was almost as if I’d only imagined not being there. But somehow I sensed I’d been transported somewhere between – and now I was elsewhere. I yelped in alarm. “Hush!” Alsephina said, gently stroking my hand, which rested on the wall beneath hers. “Behold, Quibble, you’re still Within.”
“What happened to me?”
Alsephina didn’t answer. She took my other hand and pulled me onward.
I could make no sense of it. I had been there and now I was here, still Within but now in a spiral where echoes and the air’s smell were different. Between there and here I had been nowhere, I had been nothing – not this or that. Hadn’t I? What of the Zero’s unspeaking voice in my head? I wanted to ask her what those words meant, but again prudence held me back. Perhaps I’d only imagined them. It wouldn’t be the first time a flight of fancy overtook me. Perhaps Alsephina had not intended for me to hear them. Yes, I thought after mulling over it a while, if she won’t tell me how we came here, plain she didn’t mean for me to hear – my mind stammered at the thought – how she made it happen.
For that was clearly the soundless words’ significance. They transported us. Or, I guessed, praying the Zero couldn’t hear my thoughts, the place where we touched the wall transported us at the words’ command. Even if this didn’t really explain what happened, at least it had a logic. In fact, I found myself delighted with its logic. A Zero had spoken to the stone, and it obeyed her. It performed a miracle at the call of mere words uttered in her mind. So words could wield a power over the world, over substance. For all I knew, they might wield power over flesh and darkness as well as stone. Maybe, right down at the bottom of it, Within was only words. Maybe—
This is heresy, sheer heresy.
So I remonstrated myself. But the trouble with heresy is that One cannot at will put it out of mind. Once there, it lodges, festers, nags. That, I saw later, was why Unity responded so severely, threatening One’s banishment Without. The punishment was proportionate not to Unity’s power but to the power of heresy itself. And what has Unity Itself ever been, I thought then, but a voice speaking words? And if It is only words, if, then—
How heresy ensnares One! What an endless litany of if, then it sings to you! How impossible it becomes to escape, when once it has you in its clutches.
We were again amid Ones – a crowd breathed all around us. Alsephina now lit no glass, but they must have known a Zero moved among them, for they did not speak to us but only murmured to each other. Alsephina slowed and stopped.
“Quandary,” she said, and I held my breath, suddenly and inexplicably fearful. “Tell your faithfulness she has tried Unity’s patience, and ours, sorely. Now Quiddity may desist in her inquiries. We return this child to you.”
One nearby let out a small and strangled cry. Then a hand found my shoulder, arms encircled me and lifted me up. The One held me close.
“Quibble?” he said, and I knew it was indeed Quandary.
“Yes, it’s me.”
His embrace tightened. He began to sob. I threw my thin arms around his neck, fighting back tears myself.
“Be still,” I said, “hush now. We’re together. We are One.”
After a few moments, managing to master himself, Quandary called out to all the Ones around us: “Quibble!” They repeated my name, passing it chamber to chamber. Thus consensus – my consensus – was recreated around me, thus I was welcomed home. As the last echoes died away, a single voice split the silence, calling out my name as if to continue the chorus. The voice was so distant I could hardly hear it, but I knew it – the voice of Quiddity. She kept crying out my name until she found her way to me.
Nor will I ever cease saying the name Quiddity, all the time I wander Without, until I find her again, wherever she may be.
I was with my consensus for eighteen Fears. With Quiddity, seventeen. That time and its joy lingers in my mind, which has let go of nothing, but I can tell you little about it. As the scrivener says, “Joyous! How is One to tell about joy?”
I can tell you about grief, Numberless. I missed Classification sorely. Unity made Its will plain when I reached thirty Fears and It made me faithful to Colophon. But that betrayal, which I accepted at Quandary’s bidding, was not to be the worst.
Quiddity lingered at tarry-nots.
Sometimes Quandary went with her, but he did so reluctantly and afterwards he wouldn’t tell me anything about it. Once, not long after Colophon and I were joined in faithfulness, Quiddity took me to a tarry-not. When we reached the chamber, she didn’t speak or sing out as Ones typically do to orient themselves. Instead, she told me to wait and left me by the arc. I waited a long time. “Quibble,” she finally called, “come here!”
Once I reached her and took her hand, I touched the inside of her arm, brushing and tapping out a message: I’ve seen Without. It’s nothing special.
This is, she promised. Stand here – she nudged my left elbow gently and I took a short step to the right – and look up!
Far overhead, almost too small to be seen clearly, there shone a bright white disc. What’s that? I tapped.
Quiddity drew near and embraced me, and I felt her breath on my earlobe as she whispered on the verge of silence, “It’s the moon!”
I almost laughed aloud but caught myself in time. “It can’t be!” I whispered back. “We’re not dreaming. That can’t be the moon.”
She drew back from me. Her fingertips stroked my cheek. It is, daughter, she said. Believe me, I know it! Now, I don’t want you to hyperventilate, so take a deep breath.
I sucked in air.
Close your eyes a moment, then look forward and open them.
When I did, at first I thought I was seeing the moon’s afterimage like the ghost of a dream. Instinctively I raised my hand to reassure myself it was not real, but instead of passing through the ghost my fingertips found the ridge of Quiddity’s eyebrow, the soft hair there I knew so well. I gasped. As I traced her brow and then her temple, the ghost changed color. Now a faint blue glow suffused her skin. Wherever my fingertips went, the blue glow followed. I took my hand away, and the glow faded into the whiteness of the ghost. I touched Quiddity again, and the blue glow reappeared.
“But that’s—” I began.
She gripped me fiercely at the elbow and I quieted. Again her fingers on my arm: It’s not a ghost, Quibble. It’s me. Look down.
She drew her finger in a deft stroke along my arm from crook of elbow to wrist. A line of blue light appeared all at once, then almost as quickly faded into the darkness. I stared in disbelief: where the light had been, now there was yet another ghost. I knew, without being told, that was my arm itself. A sigh shuddered out of me, and Quiddity pulled me again into a tight hug.
“Breathe easy,” she whispered. “No One can see it but us.”
“But how? If One can be seen—”
“—then One is not real?” Now I felt her body shake with quiet laughter. “Have we both gone mad? No! It’s simply not true. The Sensory Confession is a lie.”
“Mother!” I was too afraid even to whisper the word, so I touched it: Heresy!
“And that’s a lie, too. Do you hear, Quibble? One either accepts or denies Unity’s confessions, but there’s no such thing as heresy. We believe what convinces us, and that’s all there is to it! Now you’ve seen what One may see at tarry-nots. Are you convinced?”
Unity tells Its own story of the ghosts One may see at tarry-nots, especially those One may see in the Axle during Fear. That story doesn’t end well.
We never knew what happened to Quiddity, for Unity would not tell us. It said nothing of her. As if she’d never existed. That thought often came to me, unbidden: She never existed. And if she never existed, was she ever mine? Of other Ones, a record remained. Every Fear, Unity recited the names of rectified Ones, also – as a warning – the names of those sent Without. So, when Quiddity vanished and Unity answered neither Quandary nor me about what had become of her, I looked forward to the recitation at Fear.
Quandary did too, though he seldom spoke of it. He was deeply hurt. I think his grief exceeded even mine. He wanted to hear a reason, an explanation from Unity.
“One’s faithfulness is so much to lose,” he said to me, “but then silence?”
Knowing Unity would be displeased, might censor him, I buried his words deep, out of the reach of dreaming. Vega was right: there were things One couldn’t tell Unity.
I couldn’t tell Unity how my exile from parents and consensus made me resent It, how Its dictates about my faithfulness hurt me, or how Quiddity’s disappearance made me hate It now. To tell the truth, I didn’t care to hear Its explanation. I could imagine no reason good enough to justify my loss, and now I was at the end of all my patience with Unity. I only wanted to hear a name, an acknowledgment.
The One Quiddity existed. Your mother lived.
