The Unreasoning Mask (35 page)

 

 

"Why did you resist?" Shiyai said.

 

 

"It is not what I want."

 

 

"You could have had the similitude of eternity in your Moslem paradise or
whatever paradise you wished," Shiyai said. "You could have had houris
to lie with, and your orgasms would have lasted for a thousand years
or have seemed to. You could have sat on the right hand of Allah while
hosts of angels sang their praise of you."

 

 

"I don't want similitudes. I want the real thing. Though, in this case,
I would not want the Moslem paradise or the Christian or any that human
minds have conceived."

 

 

"What is it that you do want?"

 

 

"I don't know. But when I see it, I'll know it."

 

 

"Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, you will never see it," Shiyai said.
"It is seldom that anyone gets the best, and it never lasts very long.
Why not settle for second-best?"

 

 

"It is not what I want."

 

 

"You are indeed appropriately named, Ramstan. Now. Put your left hand
on the glyfa and your right hand on me."

 

 

He did so while Shiyai put one hand on the egg-shape and one on Grrindah's
shoulder. The blue-robed one placed a hand on Ramstan's left shoulder
and the other on the glyfa, one finger touching the side of Duurowms'
long nose.

 

 

He had a horrifying thought. What if, somehow, the glyfa had already sucked
him into it and he was playing out one of its fantasies?

 

 

The glyfa could not have known what he was thinking unless he was
subvocalizing. Nevertheless, its words, transmitted as his mother's voice,
shocked him.

 

 

"You are a fool, Ramstan!"

 

 

He said softly, "So be it, then."

 

 

"What I am going to tell you is to be taken figuratively, not literally,"
Shiyai said. Her green irises and red, broken-veined eyeballs seemed to
be long spoons stirring up something in him. "You must let yourself fall,
Ramstan. Think of yourself as a great, heavy-bodied, but mighty-winged
eagle. You have to launch yourself from your high nest, and you will fall
before you soar. Then, if you do what must be done, you will become a
hummingbird. To do that, you must overcome your fear."

 

 

"Fear!" Grrindah said, and she laughed.

 

 

"She laughs because she, too, is afraid," Shiyai said. "I do not laugh,
but I am also afraid."

 

 

"What happens if one of us becomes so frightened that he or she withdraws
from the contact among us?" Ramstan said.

 

 

"It would not be good. Perhaps. Who knows? Shut your eyes. That helps,
though it is not absolutely necessary."

 

 

Ramstan did so. He had expected some sort of chanting or prelude, but he
instantly fell and saw himself hurtling in free flight. His hands were still
in contact with the glyfa and Shiyai, and he could feel Grrindah's hand
on him and the pressure of his feet against the floor and the edge of the
table against his stomach. Then the touch faded away, and the light began,
the light that blinded yet was overrich in vision.

 

 

He had told himself that he was not afraid, but that was a lie to himself,
the easiest of all lies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

... 29 ...

 

 

A ghost among ghosts, he sped "downwards" helplessly, turning over and over.
The light became brighter and brighter, his fear increasing seemingly in
proportion to the square of the intensity of illumination. Yet, the light
was not what he knew as photonic light. Its nature was different and
totally unfamiliar. And, despite his horror, it held at the same time
an attraction, a promise of . . . what?

 

 

Also, though the light blinded him, he could "see." He was falling through
what was still quaintly called outer space as if it were not true that
any space outside the skin was not outer space. Or was any space exterior
to one's self? Whatever the truth, he could see the pale phantoms of
blazing stars and darker orbiting planets and their moons and comets
and meteorites and vast gas clouds like wind-shaken curtains in a
haunted house.

 

 

Then he plunged through a wall, a shimmering barrier, and was, so it seemed,
in another universe not much different except for space-energy-matter
arrangements from the one he had just left. Now he began "hearing" voices.
Whisperings. Titterings. Screams. Agony. Ecstasy. Or sounds that combined
agony and ecstasy. Whimperings. Whistlings. (For a very brief moment,
he thought of the bolg.) Phantoms of thunderings. Spectres of lightning.
Muffled crashes of stars, of galaxies. Sighings as expanding universes met,
their boundaries merging as softly, lightly, and tenderly as two amoebae
touching.

 

 

Where was he going? Whatever the end of the journey, and perhaps
this had none, he was now both horrified and panicked. He struggled,
flailing or seeming to flail his arms and legs. Even his soul, that
nebulous and probably nonexistent component of himself, was writhing,
banging ectoplasmic hands against the walls of a cell.

 

 

The light seared yet soothed. If it had not been for that minute but
detectable element of soothing, of promise of relief, he would have
screamed his way back to the Vwoordha's table and regained the world
he knew but did not like very often. He would have backed away from the
table, his hands lifted as if he had just touched a leper or the thick
fur of a heavily breathing thing in the dark. But even then he thought
that he could not do that, could not break the contact and leave the
others falling forever in this blackness of light. He had failed his
duty too many times, failed of courage, deserted those who trusted him,
worst of all, perhaps, left himself in the lurch.

 

 

If he could have gritted his teeth, he would have done so. But he had no
teeth. No jaw. No tongue. No eyes. He was as organless as a jet of gas,
a drop of distilled water.

 

 

Now he began seeing planets at close view and in great detail, though they
were pale and transparent. The vegetation and animal life on these was
abundant, but there were very few sentients. These shown with a greater
whiteness than the other beings. Always, there were only a few thousand on
worlds that could support billions. Why so few? Then it came to him that
these were the only ones worthy or potentially worthy of immortality.
All the others, the now unseen, would and should perish forever.

 

 

But was not this thought a reflection of what he believed deep within
himself? And, if so, was he not himself unworthy for thinking this? Or was
the truth just too hard even for him to gnaw on, the tooth-breaking truth?

 

 

He was aware, without knowing their names, of the identities of those
who passed in review before him. Not one person that he knew was there,
not even his beloved father, mother, and uncle. No. He was wrong. There
was Benagur, who was possibly the last one he would have expected to
see. There was Nuoli. And there was, and this was as astonishing as
Benagur's presence, Aisha Toyce. Pleasure-seeking, often-stoned Toyce.

 

 

Now, with his horror decreasing a little and the light seeming to be a
somewhat enjoyable element, though far from entirely, he suddenly began
to go "upwards." Strings of a thicker light formed in the milky chaos
and connected the whitely flaming stars and their dark planets. He saw
through the walls of the universes surrounding the one in which he was,
and the filaments connected their stars and were attached to the filaments
of this universe. Everywhere was an orderly tangle of shining spiderwebs.

 

 

Nothing he was seeing was truly what it looked like to him. He would
never be able to comprehend what the phenomena really were. This was
no more possible than it would be for him to see the Vwoordha's table
top as a pattern of spinning subatomic particles. Thinking which, he at
once saw that the white "objects" -- but not the connecting filaments --
were made of googolplexes of spinners and twisters, among which were
vast emptinesses.

 

 

Thinking which, he at once saw that the empty spaces were filled with
a whiteness which, though not solid to him, was the "flesh" of something.
Some Thing.

 

 

"I am not in subjective or objective time. I'm in Real Time," he said
to himself. Or was he also addressing some unseen person?

 

 

His honor returned to him as he began to draw swiftly, to be sucked
towards, to be magnetized in the direction of something where there was
no direction.

 

 

Shiyai's "voice," no sound yet a voice, startled him.

 

 

"Now we are riding the thoughts of God," she said. "After you have gone
long enough to get used to this, though you never really get used to it,
you, too, will be able to travel as I did when I appeared to you on
Kalafala as a voice and elsewhere as a vision. But I have never been
able to progress beyond a certain point. Eons of much experience and a
great desire to go further have not been enough. There is nothing I can
do about that. I lack a certain inborn ability. If I had the slightest
potentiality for growth beyond that point, I would have developed it
long ago. Perhaps you, Ramstan, have that."

 

 

"What point?" he said.

 

 

"You'll know when you get to it."

 

 

Now he was "turned" and was enveloped within a filament. Or was he in all
the filaments at the same time? It seemed to him that the milky strand,
which had been like an unwavering beam with clearly defined boundaries,
was modulated now and its edges fuzzy. He was not moving, and yet he was
riding waves up and down, surfing the cosmic ocean. Though he felt that
he was as still as he had ever been in his life, stiller than a corpse,
he was twisting and bobbing with every electron in his being and with
something impalpable which was both in and out of him.

 

 

The horror had not left him, but the indescribable ecstasy was getting
stronger. If it increased much more, it would kill him. But he could not
be killed. He was beyond life as flesh and blood beings knew it. Perhaps
he was beyond life as the entities of pure energy he had glimpsed in the
white flames and hot hearts of the stars knew life.

 

 

Modulation. Were the filaments or the "currents" in them really modulated,
or was the "movement" just his interpretation? And could the stars be
neurons and the filaments message-transmitters for the cosmic body?

 

 

He did not know and probably never could. But what was knowledge as
conceived by sentients compared to this ecstasy? Perhaps the ecstasy
was the supreme knowledge itself. Knowledge was not just knowing facts.
Love and hate were knowledge of a different kind from that of the factual.
Desire and its lack, hope and despair, were forms of knowledge.

 

 

Now he began "hearing" something. Or was he "seeing"? Whatever it was,
it seemed to him that it was order slowly being made from chaos. What
order? What chaos?

 

 

Shiyai's voice came faintly. "You are beginning to hear the babbling of
the Pluriverse."

 

 

"Where are you?" he cried. "Don't leave me!"

 

 

"Not for a while," she said.

 

 

In the midst of the almost unbearable white of ecstasy appeared flickerings.
They were of all colors and hues, and he was sure that if his mind had been
differently constructed, he would have been able to see other colors and
hues. The flickerings were tongues of fire and rods of ice -- how could
rods of ice flicker? -- and they stormed by him. And as he fell upwards
he saw that the flickerings held stars within them, comets, gas clouds,
black holes, planets around the stars, planets desolate and full of life.
And then suddenly these were being modulated, they were changing form,
becoming distorted, toroids, tesseracts, Möbius strips, twisters, cubes,
and triangles. And there were shapes so strange that he could not quite
grasp them; they eluded the fingers of his mind.

 

 

"It is talking," Shiyai said. "Babbling, rather, expressing all the
sounds, which are really shapes, that it can. Eventually, if It is not
doomed to die, It will be able to form a syntax in Its mind. But not
unless we, Its parasites, become symbiotes and teach It how to talk."

 

 

The glyfa spoke then with the voice of Ramstan's mother.

 

 

"She doesn't want to be a symbiote. She wants to be Its master."

 

 

"You lie," Shiyai said.

 

 

Shiyai had said, or at least intimated, that she could not eavesdrop on him
and the glyfa. But she had lied, or else conditions here enabled her to hear
the dialog between the glyfa and himself.

 

 

"I did not know that you, too, were with me," Ramstan said to the glyfa.

 

 

"Yes, of course. You could not take this journey without me. Wherever
you go, I will go."

 

 

"Because it has to," Shiyai said. Her voice, the impression of her presence,
were becoming fainter. "But it cannot feel the horror and the ecstasy that
we do. Though it can feel some of the emotions of sentients, hate, greed,
desire, it lacks most of them."

 

 

"You lie!" the glyfa said. "I can love!"

 

 

"You?" Shiyai's scornful laughter was receding swiftly.

 

 

"Yes! As you say, I know hate, greed, and desire. But I also know love
and compassion. It is impossible to know one pole of the emotions and
not to know the other. No. That's a wrong analogy. There are no poles
to emotions. What is one-side-up is the other when the side-up becomes
turned and is side-under.