Awake in the Night Land (39 page)

Abraxander said mildly: “Distinction. This one, me, I said the plenum elements were Disassembling. The process is an orderly backward infolding of the cosmogenesis, and return at low energy states of the original unbroken symmetries of fundamental concept-points. Does that one, he, grasp?”

Kitimil spoke. “Love.”

His voice seemed louder than before, almost a bark. We turned to look at him, but he was still staring at the round patch of light against the ceiling.

The Blue Man said, “Oho. The ape-man apes a man, oh, aye, he speaks his speech. I hear with my ear, yet I do not hear. Say your say, Kitimil!”

Kitimil the shaggy man cocked his head at a strange angle, looking almost like an owl twisting his head backward, and because his head was turned so far, it pulled his mouth askew, and made him squint, so he seemed to be sneering at the Blue Man. “Men do. Men do not know how to do. It comes. It is its own. It is done. Love.”

I said, “Why would they, the enemy, want us to love?”

Ydmos said, “What else will bring a man out from the Last Redoubt? For what else will he risk his soul to utter Destruction by the Forces that move in the Night?”

Kitimil said, “If it does not breathe, it cannot blow on the coal. If it does not love, it cannot mate; not mate, not bear. They need us to remake the All-of-all that is. We are their plant stalks. We are their seed corn. They hate love, but must have it now. They promise much; with both hands, they will give.” And he drew back his lips, and showed us the fangs of his grin.

And he scampered across the floor away from us, running on all fours.

Kitimil fled.

We all jumped up, startled. I don’t know what the others thought, but I brought my rifle to my shoulder and aimed at the retreated back of the shaggy man. But no: I could not shoot. What if Kitimil were running for some innocent reason? What if he knew who was traitor was and fled from him? (And, yes, the thought did not escape me that I might be the one, and some devil-thing inside me might be urging me to kill my comrade-in-arms.)

I lowered my barrel, grimacing.

And yet I remembered that he was the third mind reader in the group, aside from Mneseus and Ydmos. The siren song that Mneseus feared was audible to Kitimil.

He-Sings-Death, on his long legs, went ahead of us, his long spear held lightly on his shoulder, giving chase to the shaggy man. Mneseus rushed down the staircase aisle between the chairs toward the glass floor below, taking four and five steps at a stride, and his arrows clattered in his quiver on his back. These two were not quick enough, however, to catch up to Kitimil, who leaped from seat back to seat back down the endless ranks of the amphitheater.

The Blue Man languidly lifted himself to his feet and sauntered at no great pace through the ranks and ranks of seats down the stairs of the amphitheater towards the acre of glass where Kitimil, the Shaggy Man, was bounding. To keep an eye on the Blue Man, I followed; to keep an eye on me, (I presume) Enoch followed.

Abraxander-the-Threshold and Ydmos stayed behind for a moment or two, talking in low tones. Eventually Ydmos took up his heavy wheel-axe weapon and came down the long stairs behind us. The slippered feet of Abraxander made a slight noise against the soft substance carpeting the stair; somehow, the heavy boots of Ydmos made none.

Suddenly, all were still again. Kitimil was no longer fleeing; He-Sings-Death and Mneseus no longer pursued.

Kitimil, He-Sings-Death, and Mneseus were standing on the glass floor. Enoch would not step onto it, but leaned and peered.

I called, “What do you see?”

He-Sings-Death looked down. There was reddish light from under his feet; it threw shadows across his shoulders, cheeks and forehead. I could see the whites of his eyes as he stared downward.

Enoch spoke first. “It is the hell fire. The pit where the Fallen Elohim burn. There seems to be a long black tunnel leading to it.”

He-Sings-Death said, “May He-Brings-Light reach out his hand and take me up, as I take up the boy-child I love, and the girl-child! Captain Powell of Nantucket: it is no tunnel, but the night sky. The sun is under our feet, and the sun is the color of blood from an old wound. The sun is wounded, for I see dark tears and scabs on his face. How can the sun be below my foot? It should be up in the sky, over our head. How can the sun be wounded? Sacred and bright, bright and sacred things are not to be wounded!” There was a tinge of hysteria in his voice.

I stepped down the last few stairs. The glass floor was less than a yard from me.

Something made me hesitate.

From behind me, Ydmos said, “We are in some Redoubt or Tower of the Silent Ones. This must be a shaft leading to a new source of Earth-Current. I sense that the light is holy: but how can the tower of the enemy stand here? The Earth-Current surely must destroy them: they cannot abide the radiance.”

The Blue Man cocked his head, and looked back toward Ydmos. “Sensed? What sensors, me dainties, what extra eyes, does the man from the sunless world hide? Sense how?”

Ydmos strode forward, and when he reached the glass floor, he bowed his head and knelt on one knee. Carefully he laid his weapon down, and he removed his left gauntlet.

He spoke: “My Diskos grows heavy in my hand; I feel the joy in the blade: that means her circuits are drinking of the stored ambient power. That means the power is the Earth-Current, which is hale and salubrious for the children of Man, and hurtful to the Watching Things, the abhumans and Night-Hounds.”

Reassured by his strange words, despite that I did not understand them, I stepped forward.

What a sight I saw!

It was a monstrous sun, and I saw what seemed to be swirls of light wreathing its equator like smoke. As my eyes adjusted to the sight, my mind adjusted to the magnitude, I realized that these wreaths of spiral smoke were hundreds, nay, thousands of spiral and cylindrical galaxies, whole clusters of galaxies, orbiting a sphere of incandescent fire like the rings around Saturn.

Larger than worlds, larger than anything, it was.

Even as I watched, I saw the innermost ring of galactic clusters fall down toward that light. The spiral galaxies spun like pinwheels, unraveling, and the countless millions of tiny specks, the stars, turned red as embers as they rushed into the flames of that immense, unthinkable central sphere of light.

As my eyes adapted, I saw as well that there were streamers of colored vapor wrapping the galaxies, much larger than the galaxies, spread like an aurora borealis throughout the immensity of space, and all the streams and filaments of dust were likewise rushing toward that all-devouring central sun.

There were bands of brighter and dimmer ruby-red painted across the immensity of the central sun, parallel to the equator of its huge rotation; black splotches like sunspots, crusts and dapples of darkness floating in the fire.

From the north and south poles of the vast red sphere of flame, two beams, white hot, like the beams of a search light, splashed upward and downward, igniting the surrounding clouds to cool peacock-tail-colored fire.

The light was as red as the petal of a rose, red as a cherry, and inexpressibly beautiful to my weary eyes. It did not burn me.

It was sunlight.

He-Sings-Death was staring at Ydmos curiously. He pointed at him. He-Sings-Death points by jutting out his jaw with a jerk of the head. “What does this mean? What he does?”

Ydmos had his left forearm held near his mouth. He was staring down into the light. There was a small round discoloration, as if something were embedded underneath the flesh of his forearm. It was very near his mouth.

But then Ydmos lowered his hand and donned his gauntlet. “I am Prepared. I thought that if I were the one carrying the enemy inside, stepping into the light of the Earth-Current would make it show itself.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he had said, so calmly had he said it. He thought the light would reveal if he were contaminated. The thing buried in his arm was a lethal pill; a suicide device.

I said, “What is this thing? It looks like a sun, but no sun can be bigger than a galaxy, bigger than a million galaxies.”

The Blue Man stepped onto the glass and stared downward. His eyes evidently had his ghastly fluid in them, for the whites of his eyes turned blue, and so did his pupils, till he looked like a blind man. The blue pigment grew darker and darker, toward black, as the strange microscopic machines in his eye fluid drew in more and more light from the environment.

The Blue Man said, “A black hole, 'tis.”

Abraxander explained to me that a black hole was a body in space so massive that no even light could escape from its mass.

I said, “Why isn’t it black, then?”

The Blue Man said, “Ah, we are seeing surface turbulence only, me cuties. The surface area, it be not great enough to absorb the whole of everything, the universe, in one gulp; matter clashes against matter as it drains in, fearful symmetries are recompiled: types of particles, long forgotten ere the earliest universe, are being remembered and remade in yonder heat immense. The heat is caused by gravitational stress on the structure of timespace.”

Abraxander said gently, “That one, Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Seven, him, he speaks with less-than-perfect precision. Understand: the tidal stress on even very small particles is too great for the particles to retain, them, their internal cohesion. You know how myth says the Earth’s pull was greater on the to-ward side of the Luna as the fro-ward side? The difference flattened the orb, tide-locked her.”

“The moon always keeps one face toward Earth,” I said. “Kept, I guess.”

A sting of sorrow touched my heart. I remember Lisa looking up at the moon, that time we were on a boat near Spain, and the waves were silver in a shining path leading to the horizon. A blue moon.

She said a girl only would meet the man she was meant to meet once in a blue moon. She smiled at me. Now, there was no more moon. No moon ever again.

Abraxander was saying in his pedantic voice: “When, during the time of the Fifth Aeon, the moon came too nigh the Earth, she violated Roche’s limit, the satellite, her, she was pulled asunder by tides.”

For the moment I thought he was talking about a girl. By ‘she’ he meant Luna, the moon-goddess.

“At this phenomena, here–” Abraxander gestured toward the rose-red central sun. “The gravity gradient is steep enough, it, to pull small particles open. They suffer mathematical transformation into other particle combinations when that happens, still entangled with each other, though separated, them, by the event horizon.”

The Blue Man looked interested at that. “Science of my day, long-gone by-day, it would say that nothing reaches from inside to outside of black hole. Only mass, spin, angular moment. Entanglements shown to be inter-operable? Our theory held all signal must be null: no information from in-to-out.”

Abraxander said carefully: “The entanglement involves not merely timespace and other metrics, but also symmetries of mind and not-mind, being and not-being. At the fundamental level, it is all one. This one, he who observes: that one, it is observed: both one. At these energy states, a particle endpoint is indistinguishable from its paired mate elsewhere in time and space. Monopolar, honestly: something that cannot exist alone, them. Entanglement allows for what, in our frame, seems backward in time. Eternity is entangled here, too.”

I said, “Entangled? Are you talking about, what? Atoms?”

He-Sings-Death slapped me on my back, and said: “Cannot exist alone! So it is with me and She-Speaks-Fair, most beautiful of all the band. Maybe Abraxander-the-Threshold, he means,
they marry
. She ties him in her hair. Very soft, not rope, the tie that ties the marriage pair. Her hair, one hair from her head, is used when we sing the marriage song. Thread of hair is so slender, man could break, if he wants; but good man, never he wants: so thread is strongest of all things. It is tied to his smallest finger here.” He gestured with his pinky, “To show the man how gentle he must be, how little is his strength to pick up love. It is not to be grabbed with the hand.”

I said, “Didn’t cavemen bonk women on their heads with clubs, and drag them by the hair to their caves? You seem quite the romantic, sir.”

He tilted his head at me. “Who of your people ever saw my people? Why would they say this unkind thing of us?”

I had no answer for that, so I said, “Tell me of your wife.”

“How I miss the hair of She-Speaks-Fair! Hear my cry, He-Steals-Fire, steal her out of the black water again for me! This time, I will not forget! This time, I will not look back!”

Mneseus muttered: “No, Abraxander is talking about contagion. Once touching, always touching. This is the alchemic furnace to burn the universe into being. The Central Fire men of earth can never see.”

Abraxander gently disagreed: “These are image-word these ones, you, speak, they are likenesses, and imprecise.” And he pointed underfoot, saying: "Observe. This place-event, here-now. Omega point affects an ever larger metric, it. Matter-energy falls towards. Entangled particle pairs are pulled away from each other by tidal forces. Energy is released. Liberated. That is what we see. The core of that body, him, is denser than all number can measure, darker than all mystery. This light is an illusion; a side effect.”

The Blue Man said persistently, “But you claim information can flow from inside to out? How can that be? Black hole swallows all, all but those parameters I said.”

Abraxander said, “Quantum uncertainty, in highly compacted frames of reference, becomes macroscopic. Information can go from there to here, if the positions of there and here are sufficiently undefined. All that is required is that the information density of the N space be greater inside than out. Thermodynamics will require the greater flows to the less, seeking equilibrium.

“How else was the universe created by the Big Bang in the first place? All the mass of the universe concentrated at one spot, it could not have exploded, escaped to another spot, except that, at the same time, it unfolded both into time and space, to create the concept of "another spot". The unfolding was faster than the process of time itself, so that, at no point, was any particle traveling out of the creation gravity-well at faster than the speed of light. You see? It is an illusion.