Quibble, 14. Summary & 15. Orb
Caught in a fateful, frightening dream, Quibble almost dies.
14. Summary @Quibble
Just below the vertex of the parabolic arc before us, an orb hovered, shimmering, barely excelling the faint white light which spilled into the chamber through a shaft – a wide tarry-not gaping in the roof of mountain. Beneath the orb floated a wizened man, ancient beyond reckoning. His toes were some six feet from the stone floor. He wore the thin cotton shift of a One. His head was thrown back and his arms were extended in the air as if he was hanging onto something.
Answering my questions, unasked, Alnasl intoned, His name is Epigraph. The orb is a yinman blue, the most vivid kindness there is. Sensing my caution, he went on: Don’t fear to observe, Quibble. Look at the glasses if you will. The natural light mitigates their effect at this distance. My amber also protects you. But once Epigraph summarizes, take care. The next glass will be the rectifier, a large, kind red we call Meissa’s orb. Its dream is inescapable, so if you look at it, you must focus hard on the amber’s touch. Don’t let the orb distract you!
I hardly heard him. My eyes were fixed on the blue orb. Awash in its light, I felt tranquil, indescribably calm, and almost as if I too were unfettered from gravity and rising from the floor. Epigraph’s levitation was a truly wondrous phenomenon. I had known glasses to levitate – but Ones? Was that commonplace?
Ones cycle suspended as they dream, Alnasl informed me. You once floated like that, Quibble. It’s partly why Ones live so long: their bodies aren’t as taxed as ours.
How old is Epigraph?
Five hundred forty-six Fears, he said. Now attend to the rectification.
I knew well enough now what Fear really was. It came when the sun reached an equinox over a spiral and its light poured straight through the spiral’s tarry-nots, boring all the way from the surface to caverns Within. By the calendar Without, Fear occurred twice a year. The One was two hundred seventy-three years old.
The Zeros all gazed at him in silence. Alnasl and I stood with most of them in a semicircle near the chamber’s rear wall. Some ways before us, three Zeros stood in a triangle – a woman on the left corner, a man on the right, and before them, in front of the One, another man. Of us all, only these three had their hoods down. The man at the triangle’s head wore a white cloak; the other two wore cloaks all black. Their hair was cropped close to the scalp in the Zeros’ monkish fashion. I couldn’t see their faces.
That’s Aladfar, I guess, I intoned to Alnasl as I gazed upon the man in white at the fore of the triangle. Who are the other two?
On Aladfar’s right is the lord of control Alioth. On his left, the lady of kindness Vega.
Vega! Hearing her name, I wanted to rush to her, greet and embrace her, take the hands that once held me, hear the voice that soothed me and told me about the secrets I would learn to keep. But I realized this was neither the time nor the place for a reunion. As Vega and Alioth stepped forward to flank Aladfar, I asked Alnasl about their roles.
Vega will assist Aladfar with the glasses, he explained. They must focus on the One’s reverie, his dream, which grows ever more fragile as he moves toward control, at the red end of the spectrum. Alioth holds another red glass, but he won’t use it unless he must, unless Aladfar or Vega make a mistake with their glasses. If they do, Alioth will control Epigraph. That almost never happens with Ones this old – and thank kindness, for this lord of control is pitiless.
What happens when younger Ones are rectified? Just how young are they, anyway?
Alnasl ignored me. The ritual is beginning. Attend, Quibble.
Aladfar grasped Epigraph by the ankle and pulled him earthward. The yinman orb followed, keeping a precise distance from the One – maintaining his dream. The Zero let go of the One as his feet found the floor, where he stood practically on tiptoe. Vega reached up to take hold of the orb. As she brought it out of suspension, Epigraph dropped his arms and head. His eyes still rested on the orb. He let out a little gasp as he settled on his heels. I couldn’t help but shudder at that: even in the remarkably soothing light, even in the throes of the tranquil dream it imparted, the One was still in pain. His own weight pained him as it bore down on his frame.
He’s not used to it anymore, Alnasl intoned. Ones his age always cycle suspended.
Aladfar produced a light blue glass from his cloak and held it next to the yinman in Vega’s hand. The yinman faded as the lighter glass began to glow; Epigraph’s eyes shifted from one to the other. The yinman blinked out. With a fling of her hand Vega tossed it away, but the orb, rather than falling to the floor, took flight. Glided away into darkness. Then Vega lit a yet lighter glass, this one cyan. Epigraph cried out in growing agony as they transferred him to the new glass. Aladfar put the light-blue in his cloak. The two Zeros repeated this process five more times, alternating which of them held the active glass. A green glass the shade of holly leaves, a resplendent neon green, a yellow that glinted like daybreak, a burnished gold, a deep orange. As Epigraph fixed his gaze on the last glass, he let out a howl of misery. At that, I could take no more, and releasing Alnasl’s hand, I stepped forward with a demand: “Why do you make him suffer?”
Aladfar, who now wielded the lit glass, looked over his shoulder at me. Above his forehead was a clean-shaven tonsure; beneath, a finely lined face came to a point at a thin mouth. Though he didn’t look old, he seemed careworn. But his glare said, Silence!
Alnasl clasped my hand and yanked me back into the arrayed semicircle. Don’t shame me, he intoned. Mark I mean it well. If you can’t control yourself, Alioth will do it.
But the One—
Say nothing more! They let him suffer because he must. Suffering is the lot of One’s old age. Now Epigraph will wake and give summary.
Do you mean— My curiosity fought with my indignation. —Aladfar is going to let him see what’s around him?
“Be silent!” Aladfar commanded as he turned back to the One. A jolt ran through Epigraph’s shriveled-up body and his face froze in a grimace, but he quieted. “You will receive no harm,” Aladfar said to him, gentler.
“I know your voice,” Epigraph said, his eyes still fixed on the brightly burning glass but his own voice edged with alarm.
“You needn’t fear me,” the silence replied.
“Another speaks, and she asks why I suffer. Tell me that, Zero.”
Aladfar was quiet a while. The orange’s glint softened, faded, failed. Epigraph’s eyes twitched, blinked, then relented and left the glass. He took in a gulp of breath. The sigh of release was a while in coming.
“Now we see each other face to face,” Aladfar said. “You suffer that we may do so and you may learn the truth of your existence. The veil lifts. All dreaming ends.”
As the silence spoke, Epigraph’s gaze left Aladfar’s face and roved the chamber, taking it in: first the cloaked forms of Vega and Alioth, the semicircle of Zeros behind them, then the dim but visible wall at our backs and finally the lit circle far overhead – the tarry-not, through which the full moon shone. He flinched at its light, looked away. Feeling his fear, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was looking at Aladfar.
“If all dreaming ends,” Epigraph said, stuttering on the forbidden verb, “why do I dream at all? Is there a reason, any purpose?”
“One dreams, but not forever,” Aladfar answered him. “Dreaming sustains your imagination, which is to say, your will to live. Need there be any other purpose?”
That’s heresy! I thought.
You’re One to talk, Alnasl said. At the Arc of Summary, there is no heresy – for where is Unity? One is alone here.
I fell silent, contemplating this.
“Now the veil lifts, Zero, what would you have me do?” Epigraph asked.
“Speak of your life,” Aladfar instructed. “Summarize.”
“What am I to say?”
“What you wish.”
“Before Unity, which is the sacred heart of the dream,” Epigraph said, reciting a prayer of age Ones call the Negative Confession, “censoriousness is perfecting. I censor myself that I may avert my soul from the impurities of the seen, wherein lies Without.” He seemed uncertain how to go on. After a pause, he added the First Confession: “All are One. We are a consensus.” Then he said nothing more.
Disappointment stabbed at me. Is that all you have to say, after what you’ve seen?
Not all Ones have the courage you did, Alnasl chided.
I puzzled over that. I’d never told Alnasl how I had betrayed Unity, how I forced myself awake. Fearful and bewildered by the light of a blue orb which couldn’t capture me, couldn’t return me to the dream, I’d gone to the tarry-not and found the Zero there, but I only told him that I wished to go Without. Did he know of my heresies anyway? Had he always known? If he now heard these questions in my mind, he gave no sign of it. His whole attention lay now with the ritual, with Epigraph.
“Is that good?” the One said to Aladfar.
“It’s orthodox,” the silence said evenly. “You needn’t think of what Unity would have you say. Here, you are not in consensus with any One. You’re alone before Zeros. We would have you speak your true mind, Epigraph. You needn’t censor yourself. And do not fear for the purity of your soul. When you have summarized, I will rectify you.”
The One kept his peace a while, and I suspected fear and mistrust had the better of him. Then he began again, slow: “I hardly know what to say. I think I dreamed a long time. Grief taxed me. Ones came and went, like Fear. I believe some went Without. For them I grieved the fiercest. But now, behold, Unity is no more, Within is no more – now those Ones are all vindicated. And now I come forth by day! Only one grief remains.”
“What’s that?”
Epigraph swallowed hard. “I was too afraid to go Without myself,” he said.
Relief washed over me. Well said! I thought, feeling proud of the One.
Yes, Alnasl intoned. His words are a victory for kindness. And now he’s free at last.
I heard something strange in the vision’s voice, even intoned through the amber. I looked at him, expecting to see the awe he had expressed when speaking in the byre, but I found something else, altogether unexpected. He was crying. His eyes welled and the tears streamed freely down his face, which bore – of all things – a look of admiration and envy. Alnasl only glanced at me, and I knew just as clearly as if he’d said it that his tears were not for Epigraph at all but for us – for himself and for me.
You and I will never transcend as he will, the vision told me. Then he returned his gaze to the ritual. Attend to the rectification. A second later: No, Quibble! Look away!
15. Orb @Quibble
His warning came too late. As I faced the scene beneath the arc, my eyes fell at once on a gleaming crimson orb. It drew my gaze like iron to a magnet. I followed it as it floated away from Aladfar’s hand, caressed only by air.
I tried to look away. In vain, in vain. The orb had me. I could no longer see the chamber around me. The orb was now not an orb but a red dream. Though imparting control, it was also a kind dream, beneficent, even graceful. Within it, images of people appeared and passed.
The first was a young girl, clad in a shift. She appeared starved, a mummy, pallid skin clinging to knobbly bones. She looked at me and begged, “Am I real?”
How could I answer her? Lost in dream, I grasped wildly for my reality, for any reality outside the dream. Then the girl fell. Yet, falling, she didn’t reach the stone floor. She gave up her substance, turned to dust. First her feet. Then her disintegration sped up, shot through her body. By the time her shift folded itself voluminously on the floor, it was empty. The dust she had become hovered a moment in the air and disappeared.
Suddenly, in the girl’s place stood a woman with long, curly, white hair. She said nothing, only squared her shoulders bravely and blinked. It seemed like a Zero’s assent, though she was One. Then, like the girl, she fell. Her body crumbled to dust, vanishing. More people: now an old man, another child. On and on the panoply went, one ashen face replacing another with gathering speed. Only the girl had spoken, but many of the faces seemed to radiate the same question: Am I real? The Ones fell, disintegrated. I was struck with horror as I understood who they were: Ones the orb had rectified. Then my horror became panic: If I don’t break free, this dream will kill me!
Still I could not escape. The last person in the dream was a beautiful woman clad in a black cloak. Her hood was thrown back, her hair cropped close. A soft amber light surrounded her, and in her cupped hands she held a minuscule glass, an amber smaller than Alnasl’s, oval in shape. Her eyes were not dull and dead like so many Zeros’ eyes. They held a dare, or perhaps it was a wish. Her smile was tender, perceptive. Then the smile melted in a cry of the deepest agony, and she too fell, ghosting into nothingness.
Suddenly I bathed in the iridescence of a kaleidoscopic rainbow – all the colors imaginable! – at the center of which sparkled a crimson sun. The sun grew, expanding in sudden pulses, inch by inch consuming the whirl of colors surrounding it.
I was terrified as never before, but I no longer knew why. A muffled voice called my name. I couldn’t answer. The voice was familiar – but unreal, otherworldly, like the wail of a ghost. It died away in a fainter and fainter echo, and then the crimson sun was all I saw, all I knew. It was swallowing me, overtaking me, becoming me.
Me! My reality! Real! I thought, frantic. Am I real? What’s real?
I struggled to remember anything real. Nothing, nothing. The sun was all. It was taking me Without. I reeled in a delirium that was not quite pain.
Pain! That’s real. Remember pain!
At first I felt only a keen awareness of something alien, something not myself. Then there was a tickle, and suddenly a bolt of pain hurtled through me. It leapt up my left leg even as I realized the leg was there, was real. Then I felt the sliver of glass in my foot. A tingle spread throughout my body, like a limb waking up, and into the edges of my vision there crept a silver opalescence.
Yes, pain. Now touch, remember touch.
Texture of silk. The warmth of a hand clasping mine, stroking a callus. Before me stood a woman shrouded in moonlight. The light fought the sun, the Without – pushed it inward, pressed on it like gravity on a collapsing star.
A star! A thing. Think of another thing. Anything.
Glass rained in shards against a stone wall. The silver light raced to the center of the sun, snuffing it out. Seconds or a lifetime later, the world entered my vision. I stood awash in silver light. The chamber’s floor and wall, all its heights and expanses, corners and crevasses lay bare. The light emanated from within them, from within things.
Two arrays of Zeros stood on either side of the arc, facing each other, their hands outstretched. Miniature stars blazed in those hands – blue stars to my left, red stars to my right. Though these suns glowed brightly, they didn’t hold my gaze as the prior did. Between the arrays of Zeros stood Aladfar. He stared in wonder at his left hand. Blood dripped from his fingertips. At his feet lay the body of the One.
Stepping back from the corpse, Aladfar looked first right, then left. In his tightly clenched right hand, an amber glass radiated such brilliant light that I felt it burning my palm and fingers as if I were clasping it myself.
“Silence!” he demanded, his voice ragged with exertion, as he pivoted to look at one array, then the other. “Stop this madness! Stop it now!”
At his words, most of the blue and red stars fell dark, but two of them shone on, gleaming even more fiercely than before through the silver dream. The Zeros holding them – Vega, Alioth – began arguing, but I didn’t take notice of what they said. My eyes wandered back to the corpse lying under the arc. Then I looked through the arc’s gap into the chamber beyond, bared in silver light too. At its far side stood another cloaked figure, his hood thrown back. He held no star. He was tall and thin, dressed in black. He looked at me. His severe face was scrawled with a faint, knowing smile.
Then the whole scene – chamber, Zeros, One, arc, stranger – fled, instantly gone. Alnasl stood before me, grasped my shoulders, shook me, in a pleading panic shouted my name. I couldn’t answer. He shouted again, then struck me. It felt like being doused with freezing water. I woke from the silver dream. I was back. Me. Real. I spoke to him.