Quibble, 4. One & 5. Fear
Quibble sees shadows Within – a sign she may be insane – and learns something even more surprising about a Zero.
4. One
One does not see, except in dream.
One listens. Before, behind, to either side, One listens. One speaks. One hears an echo. One turns away from it, toward it. One leans forward and backward, speaking. One steps to the side and speaks again. One learns to hear a difference.
So, listening, One decides where to go. One learns to chart a path by sound. One charts a straight line, a curve, a revolution by the nearness or the distance of sounds.
One never runs. Running produces wind, the sound of wind, in which One only becomes lost, so One walks. One touches, smells, tastes – but foremost One touches. All are One. We are a consensus. Touch is trust. If One cannot be touched, then is One real?
If One can be seen, then One is not real. Things seen are dreams, or the ghosts of dreaming. Wakeful, One should not dream. To dream wakeful is to hallucinate, to lose One’s grasp of reality. Again and again hallucinating, One goes mad.
Wakeful, One does not see.
5. Fear @Quibble
During my first six Fears, I lived in the Small Spiral among more than forty Ones, all young children like me. Seven Zeros instructed us. Their most important lesson was that I should obey them in all matters wherein Unity told me nothing. The Zeros taught this lesson kindly, whenever possible.
But this was not so in the Large Spiral, the next to which Alsephina took me. There, I was One among Hundreds, and chaos always threatened to reign. The Zeros met it with an insistence upon order. Their punishments were exact, strict, sometimes harsh. For the first time, I experienced the pain a red or orange glass wielded by a Zero could inflict, of which there were various degrees and manifestations. Burning, for instance, could be anything from an unpleasant tingle to the itch of a rash to the unbearable heat of a deep sunburn. I didn’t have analogies like sunburn to describe things at the time, but I didn’t need an analogy to know what hurt most.
At least Zeros never inflicted pain without reason. With Ones, it was a different matter. We were forbidden to strike One another, and no One dared risk the control which followed breaking that rule. But larger children sometimes lurked in silence and tripped me on purpose when they heard me passing. I went down on my face many times, suffering bruises and even a chipped tooth, before I learned to thrust my hands in front of me as I fell. I took care to avoid causing any One such a spill.
If these miscreants were caught, they said it had been an accident, but usually the Zeros punished them anyway. And for whatever reason, some of them persisted in this pointless trickery despite correction.
One called Quotation was the worst of the older lot. He didn’t prank or hurt One. His failing was presumption. He saw himself as Unity’s equal, a censor in his own right. Disregarding Zeros’ authority, he meted out commands and reprimands. After my first Fear in that spiral, he grew worse. Thank kindness, he mostly left me alone. Zeros tried to reprove him, but he didn’t listen. By my second Fear, at which Unity spoke his name, Quotation had disappeared. The Zeros made his fate clear: he was sent Without.
I wondered how the Zeros could be so aware of our movements, where we were, who was who, amid that din of Hundreds. If Zeros had supernatural talents, I believed among them must be an ability to speak without words. Sometimes, I heard a Zero start a lecture only to fall silent, and I guessed another Zero had interrupted her, challenged her, corrected her – out of earshot. Zeros never openly contradicted each other.
Or Unity. After Vega, no Zero I met ever said anything the least bit critical of Unity. A perfect faith pervaded the array of Zeros ruling the Large Spiral. It was why, I supposed, they felt free to impose a harsh discipline.
As well as large, the spiral was irregular. There were no straight lines, no simple geometric patterns. It took me quite a while to map the spiral’s geography in my mind. Until then, I relied on Zeros and a few kindly Ones who knew their way well.
Five disparately sized arcs yawned off the circular Axle. Two led to legs trending uphill, the other three downhill. The uphill legs had few chambers, the downhill many. The chambers grew first smaller, then larger, smaller again – this created bottlenecks at the arcs. Following the deepest downhill leg, One passed through successively tighter bottlenecks until at last One reached a narrow arc only wide enough to admit One at a time. This arc fed into the spiral’s utmost depth, an enormous chamber with a concave floor called the Depth of Night. Returning, One had a long, steep climb back to the Axle. Ones never went to the Depth of Night unless guided by Zeros.
The Large Spiral was a school. One attended this school to earn One’s voice in a consensus. Doing well there, One might even earn a faithfulness. I gathered that many of my schoolmates were quite a bit older than me, a few of them nearly full-grown. Those few, I soon noted, were the unruliest of us all. The implication was plain: One’s adeptness at lessons was inconsequential; what really mattered here was good behavior and obedience. I behaved and obeyed.
I remember my first Fear very well. During Fear in most spirals, the light of Without comes soonest and grows brightest in the Axle. This was not so in the Large Spiral. There, Without came first to the farthest chambers of the uphill legs, and those lay empty some time before it came to the Axle. Before Without could reach the Axle, the Zeros gathered all the Ones together there. They separated us into three groups by height or age – it was hard to say which – and herded these groups one by one into the deepest downhill leg. We were destined for the Depth of Night.
The Zeros led us down and down, and as we migrated through the bottlenecks, we tended to crowd closer and closer. The press of bodies let up once we emerged into larger chambers again, but then we again entered smaller chambers. The Zeros tried to keep us spread out, in order. But some Ones felt anxious, others alarmed. One cried out in panic, and then a cacophony of frightened voices rose.
I expected the Zeros to light their red glasses and exercise control. Instead, they answered the outburst with an insistent chant. In three tones, a single word: “Unity.” Their chant grew louder, battling the chaotic cries of the Ones. Understanding what the Zeros were doing, I took up the chant with them. Some other Ones did likewise, then others and yet others. We beat back Fear with our chorus: “Unity! Unity! Unity!”
The last of the fearful Ones joined their voices with the consensus, and we were again all One. We resumed our downhill trek, still chanting. As we passed One by One through the last arc into the Depth of Night, ahead of us a red glass flickered in staccato flashes. Knowing this signal, we quieted and listened. The Zeros sorted us with nudges to left and right, instructing us to maintain a single file and follow the chamber’s wall.
While I paced in line, one hand on the shoulder of the One before me and letting the fingertips of the other glide along the smooth wall, I kept my eyes on the flickering red light, alone in the chamber’s center and high up. It was impossible that a Zero held that glass, for I knew that any Zero standing at the center of the concave floor would be lower in elevation than I was. Yet I also knew the glass was a Zero’s, for Unity’s orbs do not flash so – they stay lit, continuously imparting their dreams.
How can a Zero make her glass float? I wondered. Does Unity assist her?
I had often dwelt upon a similar mystery: orbs float in the air. Unity has it so, but how? Some zealous Ones once told me Unity was simply that powerful. Yet, I posited to myself, afraid to utter such a heresy aloud, if Unity is merely manifestation, the god-thought of our consensus, doesn’t it stand to reason that it is only our faith which makes orbs float? And if that’s true – if faith can conquer gravity – what other powers do we Ones unknowingly wield?
It was not the only such mystery I pondered. A dream’s transmission by light seemed no great conundrum to me, but what of the dream’s choice of subject? How did an orb emitting a single light give different dreams, at once, to the Ones in its ken? How did it single out One for control, inflicting onlookers with pain but leaving them free to avert their gaze and avoid its capture? An even greater puzzle would beset me later, when the Zero Alnasl instructed me: how did Zeros twist their glasses’ light for effect? By what marvel of physics did they make a vortex of light? Was it not a well-known law of physics that light travels in a straight line?
A Zero’s voice intruded on my thoughts, hauling me back into the here and now. She ordered us to halt and face the flickering light. She repeated the second command: “Face the red.” Apparently, some Ones were unwilling.
All at once an array of light-blue glasses gleamed before us. One of these glasses fixed my gaze, drawing it and quickening me like touch draws and quickens the body. I entered the dream. It was soft. It told me to be unafraid. “Sit,” it said, “and lean back against the wall.” I obeyed. As I sank to my haunches, a burden of worry I didn’t even know I was carrying fell away. I felt at great peace.
“Now for a time we are One, silent, in the dark,” the dream instructed. “Fear approaches. Watch. Without enters, but it does not touch you. Do not close your eyes. Look upon Without. Wait, be silent, and watch. Do not close your eyes. Without does not touch you...”
So the dream went on, its voice susurrant, as its soft blue light dimmed bit by bit. I struggled to keep hold of it, but I couldn’t sustain the effort amid the calm washing over me, and at last the dream faded and fled. Now it was dark, utterly dark. Darkness such as you do not know, Numberless, such as you cannot know.
Then a glow appeared, high up, very high – far above where the red glass had been. The One to my left gasped. Simpleton, I thought, guessing the event for which we all waited was not yet fully upon us.
The glow grew. It was diffuse. Unlike the light of an orb or a Zero’s glass which locks the eye, catching body and mind and spirit, this light brightened into a pervading banality which gave no dream, which said nothing. It only kept growing. As it grew, it took on contour, an evolving shape. Dazed, I would come to know that shape well. You know it too, Numberless: the moon as it phases, new to full.
How gradual, how painstaking the passage from phase to phase is!
As this moon approached full, it produced a shaft of Without pouring into the middle of the chamber. The shaft sharpened and reached the zenith of its strength, a beam that hung like a straight, thick thread. My eyes followed the thread down. The light of Without did not fall all the way to ground; it instead struck a clear, crystalline sphere hovering on a level with my eyes.
Numberless, here is something else you know well: glint. In all the vast night Within, even among Zeros flashing their glasses like beacons, One knows only that lone glint Without makes, the spark of Fear.
Are you now imagining copious radiance? A cavern filled with light? Put that image out of mind!
Without sparked on the orb – colorless yet containing all colors, all possibilities for dreaming yet no dream – but the orb swallowed Without, absorbed it. Thus did Unity reveal that Without – this glint, seen – was a dream of endless nothing, a hell of nothing incarnate, infinite. At the same time, Unity proved Itself greater than this hell, its master and my bulwark against Fear. This is the mystery at the heart of One’s faith.
But to me, it was not to be the mystery of that first Fear. I comprehended Unity’s claim, but I had also anticipated such a claim. Unity is always strutting Its stuff, just on the verge of boasting. No, I entered then into other, darker mysteries.
My gaze strayed away from the glint. Unity, dreamless, had no power to hold it there. Afar, beyond the sparking orb, dark figures greeted me – many dark figures. At first I thought my eyes were playing a trick on me – some curious relic of Without, like the afterglow which dances before One’s eyes when emerging from dream. I noticed the figures maintained their positions, though. Squinting, I saw some of the figures were larger than others and, though their edges bled into the chamber’s enveloping night, they all kept their rough forms, distinct from night. Therefore, I reasoned, they were not dreams or even the ghosts of dreaming. But nonetheless they were seen things. I looked upon them with wonder and terror. Was I going mad?
The figures blurred at the periphery of my vision. Though it meant taking a risk, I turned my head to either side, right then left. More figures. Everywhere. The more I turned my head, the more they grew in size. I had then neither a sense of scale nor even the wits to guess the largest were also nearest, but perhaps I intuited it, for I did wonder whether these unreal things, these portents, were within my arm’s reach. Touch is trust, Ones say, but I was too frightened to reach out and try to touch them.
Do you laugh, Numberless? Why, then, do you stiffen and flinch at a touch? Why are you afraid of touch? Does it seem unreal?
Curiosity tugged at me, but my fear overcame it. I returned my gaze to the glint, which was by now nearly gone, and stared steadily, refusing to think of the dark figures. A few moments later the glint disappeared; the thread of Without that birthed it became only a faint shaft again. The tarry-not’s moon phased from full to new, then lost shape. Just a diffuse glow now. Then nothing. The light died. Utter dark.
Fear had passed, but the Zeros didn’t relight their glasses. We sat in silence, each One contemplating Fear’s revelation of Without, probing it, considering its meaning. We waited a long time. At last, we began to talk.
“Did you see?” said the One to my left, the One I had thought simple, as he laid his hand on my arm. “Did you see what lay beyond the light?”
I covered his hand, returning the touch. He gripped me. I let out a heavy sigh, relieved I had not been the only One to experience the dizzying brush with madness.
“Yes. I saw.”
“Such a revelation!” he enthused.
“What do you suppose they were?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, his grip slackening.
“The figures.”
He released me.
“Figures? Whatever you saw, I recall no figures, no images or text, neither in nor beyond the light,” he said. “I saw Unity, entire and perfect. I saw Its ubiquity. I saw Its might. I saw—” He faltered, resumed: “Why did you imagine figures?”
“I don’t know,” I stuttered. “What need of them, when so much is plain? I mean, when Unity reveals—”
I lapsed into silence. A breathless moment passed. Then he spoke again, now more hesitantly, but not to me: “Did you see what lay beyond the light? Did you hear what Unity said?” He had turned his attention to the One on his other side.
The One to my right touched me and spoke. I answered her shortly, divulging nothing. She started to chatter; I paid her no heed. My mind swam, adrift in confusion, and I could not feel my body, or rather where my body had been now there was only a great numbness, a dull tingle like that of a limb awakening after One has lain on it long and put it to sleep. My face and even the top of my head tingled. Trying to ignore it, I tilted my head back and gulped in air. A breath in, a breath out.
In, I told myself, out.
This had happened before, but never when I was sitting, only when I stood. “An attack of anxiety,” Vega had called it once, after I recovered from a spell of it brought on by the control of Zubana, who had finally lost all patience with me. “How strange,” I said to her, “that a mere feeling can attack One.”
Vega explained that she meant attack only as metaphor: it was a colloquialism for this sort of fainting spell. “It’s quite an unusual thing, Quibble,” she added. “Very few are the Ones who suffer from anxiety in this way. I’ve never seen it in One as young as you are, One who hasn’t at least undergone Fear. I wonder what it means.”
“Maybe it means I can dream on my own,” I said, and though I hadn’t meant it as a joke, Vega laughed. Then she taught me the breathing exercise One uses to control anxiety: In, out. Slowly, deeply. In, out.
Slowness of breath, I had discovered, was especially vital. In the grip of anxiety, I wanted to breathe deep but fast. This only worsened the attack, making me more liable to faint outright. Once in the Large Spiral when a Zero controlled me with great pain and I felt anxiety approach, I deliberately quickened my breathing in order to faint and thereby escape the dream. The Zero suspected nothing. She responded with concern, as Vega had, and must have advised the other Zeros to deal with me leniently. Thereafter, I never again suffered so painful a dream at their hands.
I woke in alarm, drew a breath, returned to myself.
The One to my left, the simpleton, was prodding me in the buttock with his foot. “Didn’t you hear their command?” he said. “Rise, walk.”
I scrambled to my feet and walked, stroking the wall and shaking my head to shuffle off sleep. Whether induced by anxiety or memory, in the attack’s aftermath I had dozed. One should not sleep, wakeful. There is no need for Unity to forbid it, for One sleeps while dreaming and never lacks for rest.
Now all my thoughts were a muddle. What had I seen? The white of Without, glowing, shafted, threaded. Then? A glint? Yes, a glint: Without striking an orb. No dream. Nothing in that glint but the message of Unity: You are safe in my embrace, safe from annihilation. And then? What then? Blotches of dark blurring with the dark of the night Within? Had I dreamed them? I was unsure. I remembered the conversation with the simpleton who now walked behind me and the heresy I had almost uttered, but I distrusted every facet of my memory.
Marching in step with the consensus, I told myself to forget. Best not to court danger. The least heresy was dangerous. Small heresies led to greater heresies, and for those One could be sent Without. What matter if, as Quiddity had told me, there was nothing wrong with being precocious? What matter if One did not abide in perfect faith with Unity, if One only put on a sham of it? One lives all the same.
We had walked some ways; I was certain we must now be near the arc. I yearned to pass under it, to rid myself of all lingering sense of the depth’s horrors.
“No,” a voice said, “not that One.”
The voice belonged to a Zero all Ones in the Large Spiral knew. Rasalased, the head of the lion. An apt name. I was yanked out of line, told to stand still and wait.
I could hear Ones mumbling, some saying my name. The simpleton even flung an accusation: “Heretic!” It was followed by a brilliant red flash from which I shielded my eyes. The Ones fell silent, but I could still hear their feet scuffling on the floor as they filed through the narrow arc. Then all sound faded away.
I was alone with the lady of the spiral Rasalased, the leader of its array of Zeros. At once, before I had time to inquire anything of her, a scarlet-red glass blazed before my eyes and she took me under her control.
During Fear, you didn’t look at Without. You looked away. I observed, Quibble, so don’t pretend otherwise. What did you look at?
Darkness.
Only darkness?
Darkness deeper than darkness.
I warn you, Quibble: don’t play games with me.
Lady, I’m playing no game.
Would you rather I render you unto the mercy of Unity?
No! Please, no.
What did you see?
I tell you, darkness. The night Within. But within that, there were deeper darknesses.
Deeper darknesses? Do you mean shadows?
Excuse me?
I sensed the Zero’s control diminish, then the scarlet glass flamed out to leave only a red specter of itself swaying in the dark. Chaos engulfed my mind. I crumpled to the ground, but Rasalased caught my head before it could knock against the stone. She kneeled and cradled me, murmuring to me as Vega once had.
“Be easy, Quibble,” she said. “Take deep breaths. In and out, slow. Just breathe.”
Once I recovered, Rasalased pulled me to my feet. “Follow me,” she ordered, her voice again as hard and cold as ice. She clasped my hand and tugged me along, through the arc and into the chamber beyond, in a hurry. Soon we began the long ascent toward the Axle. The Zero’s pace slackened, though not enough to suit me.
“Forgive me,” she said after a while. “I forgot you can’t take such harsh control.”
“Can we slow down?” I pleaded.
Rasalased stopped. “Would you rather make your own way back?”
“Yes,” I said, not knowing where I found the courage.
“Very well.”
The Zero placed a hand on my shoulder. I could tell by the shifting weight there that she was bending over me, bringing her face close to mine.
“Heed me now, Quibble, and mark I mean it well,” she whispered. “Whatever you see during Fear, speak of it to no One. You may count on my discretion in this, but don’t abuse it. Remember, a Zero can cry ‘heretic!’ as easily as any One. Mention no jot of it to Unity in particular. Not a word, not the least hint!”
“But, lady,” I said, “what did I see? What are these shadows you spoke of?”
“The truth,” Rasalased replied.
Then she was gone. I stood there a few moments meditating on this unexpected revelation of the Zero’s nature, as startling as the shadows cast by Without. Vega had said I would need to keep something secret. Now Rasalased had enjoined me to keep a certain secret – and not only did she enjoin me, she promised to keep it with me.
I found my way to the chamber’s wall and, following it, uphill to the next arc. Up and up I went. From time to time, I thought I saw an amber gleam far ahead.
Some Fears later, I can’t remember when or which of my many heresies spurred the thought, it occurred to me that certain Zeros – Vega, Rasalased, a few others I met – were Unity’s servants in name only. Really, they served Ones – not the consensus but each One individually. They valued each of us in a way we seldom valued One another, so they protected us from each other, from cruel Zeros, and even from Unity. They kept One’s secrets and taught One how to keep them as well. They inducted us into secrecy, the deepest consensus there is.
Remembering Vega’s advice, this too I kept to myself.