Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (26 page)

 
          
These three aliens
and the native
Getkans lead us through into huge workshops, manned by scores of Getkan heroes.
A , wonderful alchemy is at work here: the transmutation of matter into
metamatter.

           
Angel hairs of the dead are blended
with sand from Menka, and cold-fused by Askatharli light into helmet-masks,
mirror- shields, dream-panels.

 
          
We
tour the hoppers of sand, and golden fluff, and the slender cones which focus
Askatharli light from an upper level of the pyramid. We watch the multicoloured
crystalline sand flow and melt and change into something that is matter once
again—an opaque, metallic, glassy stuff—but which now has, locked in it, the
key to the Beyond.

 
          
Ren6
scoops his hand into one of the sand hoppers and lets the grains trickle
through his fingers. “So it’s from Menka?”

 
          
“It
comes from the Sands of Memory beyond the mountains,” agrees Darshanor’s
Tharliparan. “It comes from those singing dunes that bathe in the light of the
Eye of Menka.” (Which is their name for the gas giant—the physical analogue, in
Low Space, of the whirlpool of creation.) “The crystals become capable of
capturing thought. Seeded with the Askatharli life-stuff they form our tools.”

 
          
“Was
the High Space pyramid made here too?”

 
          
“It
was dreamed by the dreams of the dead—by the Imagining which yearns for other
beings to know it. It was projected to your world, and took on substance
there.”

 
          
A
tiny voice nags: that they don’t
know.
Ultimately they don’t know. They’re simply guided—by something beyond their |
control, something that whispers in the persuasive language of vision,
Getkasaali, which has sunk its roots so deep in them, and in us. Yet this
something wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist except for them ... Paradox.

 
          
Shut
up, measly little voice, voice of fear! This is an evolutionary threshold we’re
at; once beyond it, we shall see all things in a different light, the light of
the Beyond.

 
          
We
return to the vestibule. We mount the cantilevered ramp, up past the floor of
dreams, up to the multifloor.

 
          
As
at Menfaa, it stretches out in all directions, the centre of everything seeming
to be right here, where we are. Veils mask the distance—where we spy some
Getkan heroes in transit. They disappear. Others linger in the distance,
faintly, as if in waiting.

 
          
Yet
this floor is different from Menfaa’s. Somehow, there are many other
planes—half-visible, if that—other ‘axes’ rising and descending around us. The
common plane of this floor and the other floors holds steady—in a Getkan
configuration, yes!—but there are other
potential
alien configurations juxtaposed and interpenetrating, centering on the primary
plane of this floor. They are in a state of . . . semi-existence—out of phase.
If we could set foot on them, if we could select for their full existence, we
would transfer across not to Lyndarl or Shabeet but to . . . another world.
Zerain. Or Earth. Here is the switching point, the hinge.

 
          
“Many
worlds are conjoined to God’s World, through the space that imagines them.” The
Zeraini gestures. “A hero chooses his track. He imagines it into being. When
one of you has died, the other can walk home. All the way home.”

 
          
“The
breath of Being traverses all existence constantly,” croons Shabeet’s
Tharliparan. “It renews existence all the time. At every moment the whole
universe ceases to exist and is restored again.”

 
          
“You
mean that space-time is being switched off and on again all the time?”

 
          
“That’s
what Samti told us in the pyramid on Menfaa island,” I tell Ritchie. “But you
weren’t
compos mentis
at the time.”

 
          
“Christ,”
exclaims Ritchie. “I get it. All kinds of strange sightings can be explained
this way. Transient creatures, phantoms, apparitions—those that aren’t
tulkusl
—flying saucers. Those must be
wandering alien heroes, who can’t occur physically —not entirely, as there’s no
bond with the world they’re seen on, ours. They’re in transit. That’s how they
showed us the avatars. They’ve got a technology for harnessing the fact that
the universe switches on and off! ”

 
          
“And
this takes time?” asks Zoe suddenly, alarmed. “How long does it take? Why does
it take time?”

 
          
“It
took
us
time to get here through High
Space!” I hiss at her. “Otherwise our identity would have broken down.”

 
          
“Watch,
here comes a hero from Zerain.” The barrel-being points. Upwards. At an angle
to the axis of the multifloor. A second, phantom Zeraini, masked, holding its
mirror-shield to consult the reflection in it, is stepping down one of the
planes of choice, gradually gaining solidity and substance. It sets foot upon
our common Getkan plane and stomps along towards us.

 
          
The
two barrel-beings hoot and bray and gently interlock their microfingers.

 
          
The
newcomer is an even burlier specimen. He greets us once ‘our’ Zeraini has
explained who and what we are.

 
          
Traffic
of worlds! He was on his own world only a little while ago! Oh Earth, you are
not far . . .

 
          
“We
have a God-book on our world,” says Zoe quietly to the Tharliparans. “It is
called the Koran. In it there’s a story about how a ruler called Solomon asked
his companions if any of them could bring him
instantly
the chair belonging to the woman who ruled another
country. She was called the . . . Yarrish of Sheba, and she was visiting
Solomon. He asked his people to do this so that she would believe in the will
of his God when she saw it happen before her very eyes.” (Shabeet listens
attentively, while Darshanor seems impatient.) “An Askatharli creature who was
present said, ‘Oh, I shall bring you that chair in the time it takes you to get
up out of your own chair, Solomon.’ But an ordinary living man, who was called
Assaf, spoke up. ‘I shall bring you it in the time it takes to blink your
eyes,’ he said. And he did just that. There it was before them:
Sheba
’s chair.
Immediately
. The man Assaf accomplished this . . . this recreation
of the chair through Askatharli space in the blink of an eye. The Askatharli
creature would have taken several moments to do the same.”

 
          
“Well,
Starborn?”

 
          
“Just
this: the walk to Zerain or Earth takes time. It isn’t instantaneous.”

 
          
“So?”

 
          
“So
maybe it isn’t a real God-power that achieves it.” Shabeet drinks Zoe for a
long time. Finally he purses his lips. “This Solomon wished to impress his
visitor with the
will
of his God? But
Askatharli doesn’t possess will, except for the will that we ourselves lend to
it. Our will is still anchored to the world— so a certain small time is
required. There is your answer.”

 
          
“And
where is
God’s will
in all this? What
do we have here?” she adds quickly in English. “A drawing upon Genie-power: a
kind of immense, composite Jinn ...”

 
          
“Zoe,”
drawls Ritchie, “does it really matter if it takes a few moments to step across
the light years? It sure seems fast enough to me! ”

 
          
The
two faery Dindi whistle and twitter impatiently. “Nitpicking, that’s you.”

           
I agree.

 
          
Movement
again: the faint, distant Getkans who are loitering out among the veils start
towards us. They’re carrying several extra helmet-masks, in addition to those
they wear. They come; they emerge—and merge with our reality.

 
          
“Those
masks are for you to wear,” says Darshanor. “They have been borne through
Askatharli to temper them.”

 
          
“Yours,
yes,” twitter the Dindi.

 
          
“Yours,”
booms ‘our’ barrel.

 
          
Ritchie
flinches. We all remember the hell storm!

 
          
“It
is quite safe now, Ritchie Blue,” purrs Darshanor. “You will learn to see the
energies of creation that surround you. Then you may tame those, and not they
you. When you accept a mask, being close to Askatharli as you are here, it will
resonate uniquely to you. Once the path is open to your world, material for
tools of vision will make itself available there too . . .”

 
          
The
newcomers present our masks and mirror-shields to us.

 
          
Do
we really remember
all
of the hell
storm? Wasn’t there something else? Something that Ritchie heard and saw? The
momentary suspicion slips from me like a blob of quicksilver, fragmenting into
tiny beads that vanish down a hundred cracks. I accept my mask. We all do—Wu
last of all.

 
          
We are ‘in* a superfluid, superconducting
emptiness, so charged with the potential for being that nothing can yet be.
Distance no longer has a meaning, nor size, nor length, breadth, height. A
whole cosmos is ‘here*: in this monad which we are, infolding immensities in a
set of self-connected points. This space has a granular, quanta!
structure—composed of ‘moments* of existence, even though time is all one to
it. Yet somehow we can slip through the quantal grain into successive facets of
existence, elsewhere. Lines of light bend through the plane-maze of this monad
—guidelines, pathways to other reality-aspects. They knot themselves into
nodes, which are destinations. We*re only separated from these by our ‘here*-bound
lives. If one of us dies, and the other one lives, I know that the other can
pass through step by step on the wings of the dead one*s imagining. Even now,
we can see through—unscrambling those far nodes, not by focusing directly on
them, but in reflection in our shields. For here reflects there, and there
reflects here—just as the whole universe reflects what underlines it. And now
those nodes unknot themselves, at our envisaging—

           
“See your world. See the loved
places you are linked to, through your lives,” calls Darshanor—or Shabeet.

 
          
—and our shields are a window, of farseeing.
Suddenly we are ‘there*, angelically hovering, looking through—dreaming the
distant realities, as the Imagining of High Space dreams them into independent
status, substance and reality.

           
We all see different places. Actual
places on Earth. An American city—the crowded downtown section; the ramparts of
an old French town; the viscous black soil and rolling mists of
Szechuan
. Peter sees Kilimanjaro poke its bald pate
impossibly high above the clouds, untenanted African
Olympus
, haunting emblem of sky-contact. I see
Athens
—it was a magical visit that took me there
and to the islands; now I work magic in midair...

 
          
In
mid-air. People actually see me. They see something. There’s sudden turmoil in
the streets. Cars brake and bump each other. The drivers jump out and stare,
along with the pedestrians. People are seeing ... a light, a phantom existence.
An angel?

 
          
“We’d
better stop!” It’s Zoe who jerks her shield aside. “What are we doing to them?
They’re seeing things.”

 
          
She’s
right. We mustn’t disorient the world—until we can actually step through to
explain the wonder of it.

 
          
Reluctantly,
we disengage. We all do.

 
          
“We
shall go back down now, Starborn,” says Darshanor. “As you see, no inner wall
exists here. But the pyramid has an outside wall. We shall climb up the stepway
to the top, and you will see into the Eye of Menka.”