Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>

By dawn, he is exhausted, dazed with fatigue, dizzy with knowledge. He is a creature emerging from the dank night of a cave into the blinding light of spring, of day, of awareness. He feels himself unrecognizable, a temporary resident of his own body–a body he has ignored and mistreated beyond all endurance. Sleepless, hungry, pressed from crisis to crisis over the last several days without relief. He feels excoriated by fire until only the essential elements of himself remain.

You are the one, they say to him, but he doesn’t know. He doesn’t sense it, feel it; he can’t grasp the concept in his mind in any way that has meaning. There are no handles on this amorphous wad of knowledge by which he might hold it and examine it. It just is. A perfect existential dilemma.

And if he is the one, it is more than anything else a statement of responsibility.

So Ray does what he has always done when confronted with the impossible or the unthinkable or the impenetrable. He locates his room, changes his clothes, loads his weapon and tucks it in his pants. He splashes cold water on his face, brushes his teeth. Afterward, he rambles about the twisting corridors of the manor house until he finds the kitchen, and he eats what he can find.

He takes care of his body. It is the only thing left to him, the only thing that he can trust without reservation.

There are other things he should do. Colonel Ritchie deserves to know about Frederick Whiston. EED should officially be informed about the culpability of the Dag Maoudi in the attacks on Hegemony, Asp, Gorgon. He has all manner of backtracking and explaining to do, misdirections and outright lies to clear up, any one of them sufficient to shatter what might be left of his professional career.

But it’s just details. Everything but body and knowledge is irrelevant.

Then he finds an out of the way room where he won’t be found, with a door that locks, and he sleeps until nightfall, readying himself for the coming hours of the Dao.

***

In the late evening, with the sun dipping behind the trees and the expanse of stars unfurling over the uncharted continent behind him, Ray breaks into the Whiston garage and takes the splendid Manchiti Spider once again. He has left behind an empty house, silent and dark, except for the light in Juliet Whiston’s window. He wonders if she has been told about the death of her only son, if she’ll be up into the night mourning him because no one else will. Before and below are the lights of Blackheath Grange, the lamps and lanterns strung on wires, the gay and festive flowering vines, the bonfire rekindled on the green. Over the growl of the car’s engine, he can’t hear if the people of New Holyoke have gathered to chant again.

Somewhere in that sea of humanity, Emma wanders the streets, seeking neural structures of which the shed might approve. Bonding with them, taking them into herself, marking them for gods and men with a seal of approval. The thought of it fills him with an ache in his chest like loneliness, like the same way his breath catches in his throat whenever he sees her.

Ray stops himself there, pushes it away. He has not come here to save Emma Whiston.

He takes the road into the city, not hurrying. He parks in the lot near the park, where he and Emma left the car before and jogs the rest of the way. The streets are largely deserted. On the way, he passes closed shops with lamps in the windows, locked doors, empty houses. Once or twice, he detects the faint thrum of music in buildings as he goes by. Not the rhythmic chant of the Dao, New Holyokan hymns, but canned, modern music, the warble and thump of popular tunes from those who do not adhere to the ancient ways, who don’t care about the mhuruk-a. Townshend Wright, plotting the overthrow of the Whiston financial cabal, is probably doing the same. Listening to pleasant New Orleans jazz while he grunts and heaves his way inside Ms. Roswell’s pretty, pleated skirt, and she closes her eyes, wishing there were other ways to ascend the Whelemat corporate ladder. Thomas Malcolm is probably doing much the same, without music and sexual attendant, but working nonetheless and gnawing his old bone of bitterness against the Whistons. They were both right in their own ways, as correct in their estimation of what was really going on as they were wrong. Everyone has pieces, symbols without context.

No one has enough to actually believe.

Nearer the green, he begins to encounter the city’s missing inhabitants. Groups of two or three, mostly young men, milling about on street corners, who start nervously and crane their necks at the sound of his approaching footfalls. Yearning for the mhuruk-a, unaware that the deck has already been stacked against them, that they would have been just as likely to share the bounty of the Dao if they’d waited at home, shut up in their rooms.

Because none of them really believe, either. He can see that now. Not in the Dao, or in the mhuruk-a. It’s just a quaint legend used as an excuse for a public holiday. The possibility of the supernatural does not impinge on their understanding of reality. It’s all just a titillating ritual, like church on Sunday where people just like them sit in pews, hearing but not believing, listening to outraged evangelists harangue them with lists of sins and foibles and sexual deviances which they imagine just long enough to condemn.

And if a little blood is spilled each year during the celebration? Well, that had never stopped the Romans from having a good time, either.

He enters the green from the street, now having to pick his way through the gathered crowd. Not nearly so many as the previous night, and most of them stand in groups brimming with smiles and friendly chatter, drinking tea and lemonade, leaning against the buildings. Occasionally, he catches a snatch of conversation that seems relevant to him, but only obliquely. Jon heard that she’s over on Severn, near the jewelry shops. There was almost a riot along the Chancon because she was there for almost an hour and selected no one. Can you believe it? Do you ever remember her selecting no one?

Toward the tump, the press thickens, and he has to push his way through, not bothering to mutter apologies as he passes. Some, though not many, recognize him from last night. They shout or curse at him, possibly even try to follow, but Ray tucks himself into the crowd and vanishes from their sight. Finally, he locates the steps carved into the back side of the hill and makes his way up to the bonfire, to the stage, to the stele and the altar. He is the only one up here, treading on sacred ground, it seems, and by the time he reaches the stone dais, a curious alternating buzz and shush has fallen over the gathering.

In their voices, he can hear recognition as it jumps from lips to ears, the sweeping wave of a small gestalt. They watch him, and he ignores them in turn. No one hinders what it is he’s doing, and he imagines himself, frowning, severe, haunted, as fatalistic as an Old Testament prophet.

Jack Holcomb has said to him: you’ll have to decide whether or not you will willingly open the door to a new stage of human evolution beyond our reckoning. Assess, judge, determine. But there’s no one he can believe; no one without bias. The Dag Maoudi would rule the world. The citizens of New Holyoke don’t have the faith to know one way or the other. The adherents to the Dao see only personal gain. Even the mhuruk-a is bound by blood and stele and exploitation.

That’s why he’s come here, to this place. He wants them to see and believe. It’s time they were shown the truth.

Ray reaches into his pocket and removes the ring Nomar carried away from Paraclete. It trembles in his hand, radiating heat, beating like the heart of a wild beast, shimmering with quicksilver. He holds it between the fingers of both hands, the way a priest clutches the communion waver.

This is my body, broken for you.

Just a small thing, a ring of meteoric stone, brittle. And standing midway between altar and stele, warmed by the furnace heat of the bonfire, he snaps it in two.

There is silence that seems to last forever.

And from a great distance, deeper and colder than the vast emptiness of space, he hears the cry. First one, approaching, dopplered in his ears like a wail. Then another, sharp and gleeful, like a sudden intake of breath resonating about an empty room. The great bonfire rises up with a roar, the flames lick twenty meters into the sky as a pillar of fire. And in the next instant, the edifice collapses with a whumping, flattening sound, snuffed of life. In its place is smoke and darkness and startled screams.

But there are still lamps in the windows, flickering candles, the newly dawned and brazen moon overhead, and Ray peers into the shadows, into the smoke, into the eyes of the shed he has released from captivity. It is tall, beautiful, glorious in its perfection and the fine crafting of its limbs. The projected form, idealized man, is all that he can see in this light. And even though he is the one who released it, the shed still terrifies him, blisters his nerves with raw and electrifying power. His knees would buckle if he let them.

But he can feel his audience too, their riveted attention and held breath. It’s for them that he’s dared this, at least in part. They deserve to know what their fealty has purchased since the days when Fram Whiston still walked the streets of a rough and tumble mining city. Do you see? Do you see what it means? He should be screaming at them.

Instead, he says, “Well met, brother.”

The shed says nothing, only stands and waits. Suspicious of the ring, or another one just like it.

“Do you know me?” Ray asks.

Ponderously, gravely, the shed answers. “I know you. You are known to us.” It pauses, sucking the salt and sea breeze into its nostrils, and Ray senses something else in the action. Not just breath, but data, knowledge. “You have planted the seed that grows within the vessel; the seed that will be your hope. You have become the one.”

“And do you know what I am?”

“You are one with whom we may commune.”

“Am I one of you?”

Even the shed seems to find this question curious. “You are like us, but not like us.”

Just like Jack said. “I don’t know what that means.”

“You will learn. We may teach you, if you seek knowledge. We would teach all of you. We would lead you to rise.”

So simple, so emphatic, as though the shed has no memory of their past. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it emerges from the ring with no consciousness of the things it has been instructed to do when under the geas of blood.

Ray says, “You tried to kill me once.”

The shed narrows its eyes. “I must do as I have been bidden, and by the blood which binds. That is the ancient law.”

“That doesn’t change anything. You tried to kill me. And you did kill most of the people who were important to me. How am I supposed to believe that you want anything but harm?”

“We desire that you should rise.”

“That’s not good enough.”

The shed regards him quizzically. “I do not understand. You are the one, and you have called me from captivity. Do you not wish to commune?”

“Not until you can prove you bring something to the table other than blood. Because you’ve already taken from me my share of sacrifices, my friends. You owe me. You want communion? Fine. I’m telling you that there can be no communion if all you promise is death and pain and suffering.”

“We do not wish that you should suffer. We do not wish harm on those with whom we might commune. Only joy, and knowledge.”

“Fuck that.”

The shed stiffens, confused. “The apprehension of knowledge is not without pain. To become is to cast off that which was, just as the future destroys the past. These things are known to you. Great sacrifice has been your portion.”

And as it speaks, a window opens in Ray’s mind. Images, sensations, remembrances flood into the open space, each one pure and crystalline in clarity, shards of memory with the weight of reality. Kilgore, Rodriguez, Nomar. The buckling explosion of Paraclete’s final moment. Becker expelled into the void, blown on currents of force through a rent in the hull, flash frozen as he gulps like a fish, rotates in balletic swirls.

Ray jerks his head away. “No more sacrifice. That’s what I’m saying. The Dao has already spilled too much blood. You don’t need it, and these people don’t have any more to give, so if you want to teach them to rise, you’re going to have to find another way.”

“Man gains no knowledge without blood,” the shed answers, but it is quiet, rumbling, as though spoken through a throat choked with grief. “It is the way of their kind.”

“Then teach us another way, but no longer with blood. The time for that is past. Nobody believes in blood anymore.”

Do you see? Do you understand? Any one of you?

The shed nods, mulls, as though weighing what Ray has said against a feather of truth. “What do you seek from me, brother?”

Answers, for all of New Holyoke. Knowledge. “Do you know the people who call themselves the Dag Maoudi?”

“They are known to us,” the shed rumbles, bristling with a livid and ancient hostility. “We have been constrained to do much that we would not do in their name. But they have been clever, and have fenced themselves off from retribution.”

“They’re a blight, a cancer. They only seek to exploit and deceive you, and to enslave the people around them.”

“Indeed, they do not seek to commune, and they do not seek to rise.” The tang of elemental power leaking from the shed changes, sharpens into a feeling like betrayal, as bitter and clogging as asphyxiation. “They drive those of us whom they possess to purposes that are not our own.”

“And the other one like you, the one they call the mhuruk-a, where is it now?”

“My kindred is with the vessel.”

“Where?”

“Certain ones of the Dag Maoudi have sensed that you released me from captivity, and they have taken the vessel to their temple in the rock, because they fear what you have done and what it is you will do to thwart them. In fear, they would bid us do great evil.”

Another image crosses the gap between them, a glimpse of dark, subterranean places. Blood and screams. The shed shows him all he needs to know.

The sensory impact is vicious, stunning. Ray gasps. “Is that happening now?”

“Would you raise your will against them, to stop them from doing this thing? You alone?”

“I told you, no more blood. No more exploitation.”

Anticipating, the shed asks, “And what would you have me do?”

“You can deal with the rest of the Dag Maoudi. Instruct them in the ways of knowledge, so that this one dies with them.” For Hegemony, Asp, Gorgon. But his glare is hard, murderous. “Teach them to rise in whatever way suits you.”

A grin, taut and vulpine, but also taunting. “The time for blood is past.”

“This isn’t about blood. It’s vengeance. Justice. That should be something you can understand.”

For a moment, barely perceived, the shed’s eyes flick toward the stele, trace the lines of its concentric and interlocking circles, then swing away, blanched and wincing. Ray watches it, sensing, knowing. But they have been clever, and have fenced themselves off from retribution. He steps to the stele, ancient volcanic stone, carved and worn like the walls of a prison cell.

He places his hands against the cool and porous stone, feels it. It is brittle like the ring.

Shoves.

The stele tips, tumbles, falls from the stage. Crashes against the base of the statue, Promise and Will. Shatters. Someone in the assembled audience cries out in outrage, but it is a lone voice. The rest observe in silence.

Ray turns his head, meets the gaze of the shed. “Do you understand?”

The shed smiles wider, ebon teeth behind dark lips. “Yes. This I can understand.” It presses its hands together and bows to him. “I will do this thing, brother, if you will it to be so. Kiri-ya!”

“I will it,” Ray says, scowling. “Kiri-ya, brother.”

And with a sound like laughter and a mighty rush of wind, the shed pops out of existence.

Did you see?

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>

Filed under: A Vessel for Offering Tagged: | A Vessel for Offering, blook, Darren Hawkins, science fiction