Requiem Of Homo Sapiens - The Wild Part 8

Nils Ordando, founder of the Order of Cetics.

Simulations must not become realizations.

- Horthy Hosthoh, founder of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame During the following days there were other ecstasy-making sessions in front of the fire, sometimes as many as five in one day (or night). Sometimes they would spend whole nights locked and sweating in the lotus position while Tamara lightly raked his eyelids and face with her fingernails and, like a tigress, bit softly at his neck. Despite the intensity of these dangerous pleasures and despite a hundred other techniques for smas.h.i.+ng the icy inner walls that separate two lovers there never came the moment of breaking through into that golden realm of oneness and true bliss that Danlo had always cherished. And neither could they penetrate each other's deepest self with mere words. In the morning, they liked to sit by the window in the tearoom sipping coffee and talking as they watched the gulls fetch their meaty breakfasts from the ocean. They talked while taking their stroll at low tide along the beach, and in the fireroom before sleeping they talked in hushed and intimate tones. They talked endlessly and sincerely about everything from the Ent.i.ty's capriciousness in keeping them prisoners on an unknown Earth to the universal nature of love; they opened their hearts to each other, or tried to, but in some mysterious way they were as strangers to each other.

In those dreadful moments of doubt when Danlo was alone in the house or down by the ocean's lapping waves, he found that all his thoughts of her had come to involve conflicting images and paradoxes: she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but all too often her golden face fell dark and deep as s.p.a.ce and was terrible to look upon; she loved him with the same burning pa.s.sion as she always had, and yet sometimes when she touched him in her great need for love, her fingers were like icicles stabbing into his heart. And then there was the deepest paradox of all. In some way that he could not yet apprehend, Tamara was truly herself, and yet she was not.

She is not she, he thought. She was not quite the same Tamara that he remembered.

Little things about her disturbed him. To begin with, there was the matter of her solitary, nocturnal walks along the beach. As they waited day after day for the Ent.i.ty to speak to them again and reveal the nature of their respective tests, it became Tamara's habit to leave the house after midnight and wander the moonlit dunes by herself. On Neverness, of course, her profession had required her to make many journeys alone across the city's icy night-time streets. Danlo knew that Tamara was as brave as any courtesan as brave as anyone and yet he had never suspected that she liked skating along the Serpentine where it narrows down in the darkest part of the Farsider's Quarter, where the wormrunners and other dangerous men (and sometimes aliens) wait in the shadows of the brothels and whistle at any woman who pa.s.ses by.

Tamara, he was beginning to see, liked dangerous situations, not for the sake of danger itself, but rather for the sense of personal power that she gained in overcoming her natural fears of the world. Tamara, on Neverness's sometimes deadly slidderies and glissades, had always worn a little finger-gun, a spikhaxo, that murderous weapon favoured by warrior-poets and other a.s.sa.s.sins. In fact, in another age, the warrior- poets and the Society of Courtesans had once been the closest of allies, and it was the warrior-poets who had taught women such as Tamara about ekkana and naittare and other secret poisons. Like many of her sisters, when Tamara was out on an a.s.signa- tion, her spikhaxo was always loaded with several poison darts that she might fire into the flesh of any man so foolish as to think he might accost a beautiful courtesan and wrest a little grunting pleasure from her for free. And Tamara's darts were always impregnated with the black ink of naittare, a poison so poisonous that within seconds it would penetrate the blood-brain barrier and set off electrochemical storms in the cortex akin to an epileptic fit. Except that, the chaos of the brain that naittare caused was worse than any epilepsy; for it always killed, almost instantly, a horrible, hideous death of popping eyes and foaming lips and limbs jerking to the whip of randomly firing nerves. The agony caused by this drug was said to be even worse than that of ekkana, and for the victim the dying lasted nearly forever. Tamara's willingness to use naittare against men had never surprised Danlo because he understood the deterrent effect of such a poison; over the last thousand years only a few courtesans had ever fired a naittare-tipped dart at anyone, and these few instances were well-remembered in the stories that the wormrunners told in the cafes and had caused even the most depraved criminals to treat the courtesans with respect. But, on the first night that Tamara walked alone by the ocean's edge, Danlo was astonished to see her loading these deadly, black darts into her spikhaxo. And Tamara was astonished at his astonishment. She cited the tigers that hunted the beach at dark as reason enough for such precautions; who knew better than Danlo, she asked, about the tigers who preyed on innocent lambs? And Danlo did know about tigers, of course, but he could not understand why Tamara didn't carry a sheshat or some other kind of tranquillizer dart that would instantly immobilize a large predator and render it unconscious but would not kill. After all, there was no deterring one tiger by causing the hissing, screaming death of another. After all, Tamara loved animals, especially cats, whom she regarded as the most graceful and beautiful of all animals. Danlo would have thought that Tamara would do almost anything to preserve an animal's blessed life.

Her response to Danlo's bewilderment was strange. As he watched her carefully slide a black sliver of death into the finger-gun's chamber, her face fell lovely and ruthless in intense concentration at the task at hand. When she had finished, she pulled the black spikhaxo glove over her fingers, looked up at Danlo and said, almost jubilantly. 'I've always loved your faithfulness to ahimsa, you know, but I've never quite been able to share it. If a tiger hunts me, should I be afraid of killing him? I've always dreaded being afraid. I've always dreaded killing anything, but there's always killing, isn't there? Oh, dear Danlo sometimes it seems that life is nothing but killing and death.'

In the fire of her dark brown eyes and the beautifully controlled pa.s.sion of her voice, it almost seemed that she sought the chance to slay a tiger, to experience deeply the extreme peril of life. In a way, this was consistent with her purpose as both courtesan and woman. As long as she could remember, she had sought to live more deeply, more truly, and thus to awaken herself to a new way of being. Unfortunately, her inborn temperament and love of life often worked against this goal. Tamara loved all the things of life, and she could never get enough of it, whether it be s.e.x or food, music, drugs, wine, or dance, or conversation, maithuna, rock collecting or intellectual gourmandizing. So keenly did she love the tastes, colours, sounds, and textures of the world that when she was younger, she had often found herself moving from one pleasure to another with all the restlessness and energy of a bee flitting among a field of wildflowers. It was her natural tendency to abandon any activity precisely at the moment when she began to feel tired or bored. Her meditation masters, appreciating her almost bodily hunger for excitement and ecstasy, had warned her that she possessed something of a 'monkey mind', a talent for leaping agilely from one branch of experience to another but never holding any one experi- ence very tightly or very long. They meant this as no insult, but rather an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of her wonderful vitality. Their criticisms, however, had devastated Tamara. From the very beginning of her novitiate as a courtesan, when she was a shy and nervous girl only twelve years old, she had vowed to overcome the flightiness of her mind. She found within herself immense desires for love and ever more life, and yet she found as well an immense will to control those very desires. All through her novice years and even into her time as a voluptuary, with a ferocious discipline that impressed the elder sisters of her Society, she cultivated for herself a new mind, a 'dolphin mind' as she called it, a way of diving deeply beneath the waves of her life's experience in order to drink in the essence of whatever task or pleasure engaged her. Whether dancing or was.h.i.+ng dishes or memorizing the formulae for the methyl-tryptamine series of poisons, she learned the art of concentration, the ecstasy of details. She learned to pay attention to things. And most of all, she learned to enter into any new experience with all her natural verve and zest coupled with a marvel- lously intense awareness of the world. And so it shouldn't have surprised Danlo to see her strap the spikhaxo onto her lovely hand and step out beneath the full moon onto the beach, but nevertheless he was surprised. The logic of Tamara's life demanded that she experience everything possible as deeply as possible but human beings are nowise consistent, and their lives are patchwork robes sewn together from various incongruities, whimsies and pa.s.sions. And compa.s.sion. The real Tamara, Danlo thought, the blessed woman whom he remembered so well, would fight like a fury to save her own life. She would fight a tiger fight all the demons of h.e.l.l to protect those she loved. In truth, she could kill, would kill, at need, but she would never seek out fighting or killing for its own sake merely to know what it was like to kill. The real Tamara, he felt certain, in this one instance would hold illogic and compa.s.sion closely to herself as tightly as she had grasped his body at their first mating.

After much contemplation and discussion and the delicate probing of the extreme facility with which Tamara recalled her past Danlo decided that there must be some- thing wrong with her memory after all. It was not that her memory was not good. In a way, it was much too good. At times, her memory of the moments they had shared was as clear and pure as glacier water, and it was this very purity of memory that disturbed him. For Tamara, unlike himself, had never possessed anything like a perfect memory, and even if she had, her clear recollection of their first meeting or their last all-night dance session bore none of the depth nor murkiness nor hidden currents of real memory. When he looked into her quick, dark eyes, he saw a vast distance between the things she remembered and her most intimate feelings for those things. She seemed to have all the memories that she should have had, but they somehow failed to connect her with her deepest self or with the most vital and beautiful moments of her life. It was almost as if she wore her memory too lightly, as if it were nothing more than a glittering golden robe that she might remove at any time and replace with something more pleasing. But real memory, Danlo thought, was more like naked skin inextricably fused with the body, or rather, it was all deeper tissues and bone and nerves connecting every part of one's bodymind. He decided, then, that the Ent.i.ty had healed her poorly, or at least incompletely. Perhaps it was part of his test that he discover this. Perhaps this strange G.o.ddess was testing the depths of his perception and compa.s.sion. But test or no, he must find a way to restore Tamara so that she was truly herself again. He had known this since the moment that he first learned her memories had been destroyed. Somehow he must help heal her and if this was no part of the Ent.i.ty's test of him, then it must be his test of himself, of his faith, of his prowess, of his ability to love unconditionally and completely despite the flawed nature of Tamara's soul.

One night, as they were sitting by a driftwood fire down on the beach not far from Danlo's lights.h.i.+p, as Tamara stared into the dancing flames and held his hand beneath the thick red blanket that covered them, Danlo looked at her and asked, 'Would you ...

like to practice some of the remembrancing att.i.tudes with me?'

Instantly, her hand tightened in his, the same convulsive squeezing of her finger muscles that would have triggered the spikhaxo glove to fire a dart if she hadn't taken it off before sitting with him. She turned to him in puzzlement. 'It's been a long time, hasn't it? But why would you want to remembrance now?'

In the light of the fire, her eyes were dark liquid pools full of doubt and hurt. He thought that he should be careful of what he said. He thought that he should remind her of why she had once taken an interest in the remembrancer's art. Perhaps he should speak of the courtesans' dream of waking up the cells of the human body, of awakening the whole bodymind so that a new kind of human being might be born. In this way, he might ease her into the att.i.tudes of gestalt and imaging and so trick her into remembrancing herself. And thus into healing herself. As he looked into her soft, trusting eyes, he saw that he easily might have accomplished this little deceit. But he could not bring himself to lie to her. His was the guile of guilelessness, and so after a long time of looking at her, he finally said, 'Because it would be a way ... toward the union that we've always talked about.'

'One soul,' she said. 'One soul in two separate bodies.'

'Do you remember the night we first breathed each other's soul?'

She nodded her head and smiled. Once, on a brilliant night of snow and starlight after they had promised to marry each other, he had held his mouth over her nose and lips, breathing out while she breathed in. And then she had held her mouth over his. In this way, which was the way of Danlo's brothers and sisters among the Alaloi tribes, their spirits had pa.s.sed into each other and interfused to become one. 'I remember,' she said. 'But why should we seek backward in remembrance for this union?'

'Because we were ... so close.'

Tamara squeezed his hand more tightly. 'I've never been as happy as I am now.'

'I think you would remain here forever, if you could.'

'In our house,' she said. 'With you, here, forever I'd love that.'

'Then you would never return to Neverness?'

'No, never,' she said.

'Have you forgotten your calling, then? Once a time, you wanted to wake people up, their cells, their ... souls. You wanted to wake up the whole universe.'

At this, she laughed beautifully and looked down toward the ocean s.h.i.+mmering in the moonlight. She breathed in long breaths of salt air and listened to the pounding waves for a moment before saying, 'That was before I came here. There's something about this Earth just as it is it's already awakened, don't you see? And while I'm here, by the forest, by the water, I feel as awake as I've ever been, perhaps as I ever could be. I don't care about the rest of the universe, Danlo. How should I care?'

Danlo looked down the beach where his lights.h.i.+p gleamed darkly beneath the stars.

During the time since his planetfall, the wind had driven sheets of sand up against the diamond hull, half-burying it in a new dune that built a little higher every day. And every day, upon awakening at first light, he promised himself he would dig his s.h.i.+p free in preparation for the moment when the Ent.i.ty permitted him to continue on his journey. But he always found other things with which to occupy himself, whether it be cooking elaborate meals with Tamara in her kitchen, or dancing with her in the meditation room, or joining on the floor of the fireroom to work their way through the many hundreds of positions of the s.e.xual yogas. Sometimes his lack of mindfulness and his fading sense of duty alarmed him. Sometimes, on those bittersweet nights when Tamara fed him bloodfruit and tea and cried out in a strange voice during their love play, he forgot about his mission to the Vild, even forgot that the dying Vild stars were part of a greater universe whose boundaries were measureless to man.

'Sometimes,' he said, 'on this world, after I wake up in the morning and listen to the ocean ... it is as if I am still sleeping. Sometimes I look at you, breathing, lying so peacefully next to me, and you seem so far away. And then I feel so strange. So ... alone. I wonder if I could ever truly understand you.'

'I just want you to be happy is that so hard to understand?'

'But I am ... almost happy.'

'And sometimes when we're together, you're almost sad, too.'

'Yes.'

'Is that why you want to practice remembrancing together?'

'There was a moment.' he said. 'The moment when we first saw each other. That is where everything began. Your eyes, the light, the love, in that moment it was as brilliant as the sun. Do you remember? I would recapture that moment, if I could.'

Beneath their wool blanket, in front of the smoky fire, Tamara turned to face him.

She looked at him for a moment and then she said, simply, 'I've always loved you. I always will.'

'Tamara, love is-'

'Love is like the sun,' she said quickly. 'Like the sun, at first it's all fire and brilliance.'

Danlo looked up into the blue-black sky a moment before asking, 'And then?'

'The sun that burns too brilliantly does not burn long. It explodes, you know. Or it consumes itself and dies.'

'No, no,' he said softly, 'love can never-'

'A love that lasts is more like the sunset,' she said. 'Even as the brilliance fades, the colours deepen.'

'But there must be a way to keep the brilliance,' he said. 'If you look deeply enough, inside the deepness, there is always fire, always light.'

'Oh, Danlo, Danlo if only that were true.'

'It is true,' he said. 'Shall I show you?'

'You would take me into one of the remembrancing att.i.tudes?'

He nodded his head as he looked at her face all warm and lovely in the light of the fire. 'I would take us into recurrence we could relive the moment that we first saw each other.'

'Isn't it enough that we remember this moment?'

'But ... to see each other, as we were. To be ourselves again, as we truly are this is everything, yes? If we relive our first moment together, then we can begin truly to live again, to love again, all the moments of our lives.'

'I'd love that, but...'

'Yes?'

'I'm afraid.'

Yes, he thought as he caressed her fingers, she was afraid, he could see the dread (or awe) of some terrible thing flickering like fire across her face. He thought he understood the nature of her fear. Once before, out of a vain desire to preserve her memories, she had lost him and lost as well everything most sacred to her. He thought he understood her secret, then. She, this beautiful woman who sat before him with love pouring out of her eyes like water, had an immense gift for love. But her attachment and identification with this primeval emotion was so great that she was always afraid of losing it. This was the secret of her soul, that despite the ecstasies and little affirmations of her life, it would all be meaningless without love.

'But there is nothing to fear,' he said at last. 'Truly, in remembrance, nothing is lost.'

'Then why do I dread it so?'

'I ... do not know,' he said. He turned to gaze at the fire, and in the flash of the leaping flames a startling thought came to him: She is afraid because she is not quite herself yet. Because there is always fear inside fear.

'I dread it,' she repeated. 'And yet I think I long for remembrance, too. And that's so strange. Because if I already remember everything about us, what more is there to know?'

'But there is always more to memory,' he said. 'There are always memories inside memories.'

She considered this for a while, and Danlo thought that she might be afraid of where her memories would lead her. She was afraid of something that he could not quite see, perhaps something dark and disturbing out of her past that was invisible to her as well.

'I used to love the remembrancing ceremonies, didn't I?' she said.

'Yes, you did.'

'Do you think we could make a ceremony together, by ourselves?'

'I had hoped that we could.'

'But we've no kalla, have we?'

Danlo smiled at her and said, 'Kalla is just a drug. A key that opens the memories.

But there are other keys, other ways.'

'The ways that Thomas Rane taught you, the secret ways of the remembrancers that you always said you'd show me?'

'And I would have but there was so little time.'

'But now we've all the time in the world.'

'Yes,' he said. 'Time. Time is one of the keys, dissolving time. I would like to take us back to the time we first met eyes. The moment. It was the moment when I fell into love with you.'

She removed her hand from the blanket and touched his face. She touched his lips, his eyes, the scar cut into his forehead. She looked at him for a long time. And then she said, 'If we remembrance together, if we actually relive this moment of failing, it might be different to what you'd hoped. I might be different, you know. You might see me as I really was or as I really am.'

'And how are you, truly, then?'

'How could I know? How could anyone ever know?'

'But you will always be yourself, yes? You will always just be you.'

'Perhaps, but-'

'And I will always love you,' he said. 'I always have.'

'Oh, Danlo, Danlo I hope that's true.'

The following morning they began their preparations for a private remembrancing ceremony. Of course, they might have tried entering the att.i.tudes immediately and without much formality, but they decided that this would be unwise. Tamara was none too eager to relive her life, and she knew that in remembrancing there was always danger. She knew that the remembrancers, over the millennia, had established many techniques and rules of order to minimize the dangers of delving deeply into the mind; since she was a great respecter of rules, she was quite willing to follow the remembrancing guidelines precisely and with great attention to detail. As for Danlo, although wildness was his wont and he was always ready for extreme states of consciousness and being, he understood that there was always a time for planning and taking exquisite pains with one's work. In truth, he loved the work of readying himself for remembrance. And he loved rites and ceremonies of all sorts, especially those employing the time-honoured technologies of the mind which over the millennia had lost none of their vitality and were often effective in guiding one straight toward the mystical heart of the universe. And so he willingly joined Tamara in the purification of their house. With damp rags he wiped the dust from the stones along her windowsill in the tearoom, and from the lacquered black tea table and from every other object or surface in each of the rooms. He helped Tamara scrub and polish the wooden floors so that they smelled of lemon wax and shone like mirrors. While Tamara went into the forest to gather wildflowers for the blue vase that stood in the meditation room, he set out the candelabra and burned incense, the marvellously pungent buddhi sticks that cleansed the air of positive ions, dirt, noxious chemicals, or any sort of gaseous pollution.

The cleansing of their minds began soon after this. With meditation they purged themselves of anger, fear, hatred and sorrow all the doubts and distractions that might keep them from remembrance. For most of three days they tried to hold this deep, quiet, dear, meditative consciousness, and they did little other than stare at the burning candle that Tamara set out on the floor of her fireroom. They took little food or drink, they slept little, and they engaged in s.e.xual pa.s.sion not at all.

With Thomas Rane, on many snowy winter nights, Danlo had studied the more fundamental techniques for entering the remembrancing att.i.tudes. There are sixty- four att.i.tudes, from imaging to eidetics to syntaxis. Over five thousand years, the master remembrancers have devised many formulae for the sequencing of the exercises which prepare the mind for the att.i.tudes. These ancient formulae can be hideously complex. Depending on the initial att.i.tude to be entered and the final att.i.tude desired, according to one's age, s.e.x, personality type and a hundred other variables, the remembrancer will work out a formula and strictly follow this preparatory programme, changing exercises and initiating new ones as often as ten times in a single hour. This, the formalists say, is the soul of the remembrancers' art.

However, a second school of remembrancers, known as the constructivists, were always trying to refine the traditional formulae and create (or construct) new ones.

And then, of course, there were the radical remembrancers and revolutionaries who wanted to junk the whole arcane and c.u.mbersome system.

Only a few maverick remembrancers, such as the great Thomas Rane, had ever managed to break free from the ideologies of these schools. It was Thomas Rane's genius to respect the formalists and give them their due, even as he took the best of the constructivists' discoveries and used them with power and insight to go places that the radical remembrancers only dreamed of. It was Thomas Rane who had begun to articulate the mysterious sixty-fourth remembrancing att.i.tude, or 'the One Memory', the final att.i.tude that would somehow complete all the others. Thomas Rane conjectured that the remembrance of the Elder Eddas and the sixty-fourth att.i.tude were really one and the same and had devoted his life to the exploration of this theory. He had sought the entrance to it wherever and however he could and it was he who had taught Danlo the use of kalla and the more difficult remembrancing att.i.tudes such as recurrence. Thomas Rane, while honouring the ancient formulae as keen insights into the workings of human memory, believed that each remembrancer must find for himself the ideal sequence of exercises to enter any particular att.i.tude. This faith in the individual remembrancer's self-wisdom was his pride and his pa.s.sion.

So it was that when Danlo prepared Tamara and himself to enter recurrence, he devised his own sequence of exercises. Over most of a day, he breathed with her, and be danced with her, and he played for her the long, deep notes of his shakuhachi not rigidly according to some dry old formula, but rather moment by moment and paying close attention to the colours of her voice, the fire of her bottomless eyes, the rhythms of her brain and heart. He paid attention to himself. In this way, breathing and moving and inhaling the scent of each other's soul together they entered deep into the marvellous sixty-first att.i.tude that the remembrancers know as recurrence.

That is, they almost entered this att.i.tude deeply. When their time came for remembrance, they sat on the meditation room's beautifully polished floor, which was so warm and smooth that it was like sitting on silk. Before them, on the round table, was a large blue vase overflowing with lovely, pink rhododendrons. Before them, too, arranged in their stand in four concentric rings, almost floating above the floor, there were thirty-three long white candles tipped with red-orange flames. And so before them, as the remembrancers say, there were flowers and fire, but behind them there was only memory. As above so below, inside and out, and it would be their task that night to take that which was behind them and place it before their eyes that they might see a single moment of time as it truly was, as it always would be.

After pa.s.sing through the att.i.tudes of sequencing and dereism, they entered into eidetics, where the shapes and colours of various remembered things are seen as clearly as a five-pointed eveningstar blossom held a foot in front of one's face.

Eidetics is like a key unlocking the door of recurrence, and it opened Danlo to a moment in false winter two years past when he had stood in a long room full of paintings, sulki grids, wine gla.s.ses, and bowls of steaming food. He saw himself eating from a plate piled high with golden kurmash grains while he regarded the beautifully-dressed people all around him. Even as he sat on the floor of Tamara's meditation room with his eyes tightly closed, he stood at the far end of this glorious room so distant in s.p.a.ce and time. And then he was no longer watching himself gulp down huge mouthfuls of kurmash. He sensed a break in s.p.a.ce, a snapping of time, a vastening of consciousness almost like a light being turned on in a lark room. His sense of himself sitting by Tamara and listening to her slow breathing dissolved utterly, and when fee opened his eyes he could no longer see himself because he was suddenly inside himself, as if he had mysteriously incarnated once again into that wonderfully infolded matter behind the deep blue eyes of his younger self. He no longer saw himself regarding fat, old Zohra Bey and the beautiful Nirvelli; he saw these famous people directly, standing before him across a few feet of cool, dear air.

It was as if he were truly seeing them for the first time. The intensity of his vision took his breath away. It occurred to him that he was looking upon this room with a much greater clarity and sense of reality than he had possessed two years before. That is the miracle of memory, that even though we stumble through our lives as sleepwalkers lost in a trance, a part of us remembers deeply and perfectly all that we do.

Once again he listened to Zohra Bey tell the young woman standing beside him of his famous journey to Scutarix (he was the first and only human amba.s.sador to have survived a mission to that incomprehensible world), and Danlo saw him finger the hairy mole on his jowly old cheek. Danlo thought that he hadn't paid any mind to this rather one-sided conversation, but apparently he had. He had sensed many things around him that he was sensing truly only now. Before him, a few steps away, the cool and elegant Nirvelli stood surrept.i.tiously watching Danlo through the curved gla.s.s of the wine goblet from which she was drinking. The earrings that she wore were wrought of Gilada pearls, perfectly spherical and priceless, and their perfect whiteness made a stunning contrast against her s.h.i.+mmering black skin. There were sounds all around him: sizzling meats and clicking chopsticks and a waterfall of laughter and bright, bubbling human voices. He noticed that Zohra Bey, for all his ugliness, had a wonderfully mellifluous voice though in truth, it was really much too sweet, like honey mulled in a fine old wine. And the kernels of kurmash that he crunched between his teeth were really much too hot, seasoned as they were with the flame peppers grown on Summerworld. He sensed other flavours in this marvellous dish, especially the faint zest of quelqueche, which was his first taste of this rare and expensive alien spice. At that moment, with his eyes watering and the tissues of his mouth on fire, he felt that he could sense everything about everyone in the room, per- haps everything in the universe. Next to him, almost behind him, a vacant-eyed wormrunner was grasping one of the room's many sense-boxes. Danlo suddenly felt moist, hot lips pressing against his face, the coolness of silk in his hands. And this was strange because he knew that he held a plate of kurmash in his hands and his lips were touching only air. Once a time, this sensory pollution leaking out of the wormrunner's little black box had been almost below his threshold of awareness, but now he was aware of it all too keenly.

And then he looked across the room past all the brilliant men and women, past great pilots such as Radmilla Diaz and the Sonderval, and he knew what it was to be truly aware. A moment earlier he had almost heard the thunder of the dying stars out beyond Farfara and Perdido Luz, but now, for him, the entire universe had narrowed to a single woman standing tall and graceful in a sea of faceless people. He had seen Tamara Ten Ashtoreth ten thousand times, in meetings and memories and dreams; and yet he was all too aware that he had never truly seen her before. It was as if a flash of lightning had illuminated her hands, her dark eyes, her lovely face perhaps even her very soul. She burned with an earthly beauty, and she was nothing but fire and light. Inside her where her heart beat, she was full of animajii, the wild joy of life which she could barely contain. He marvelled at her incredible strength and will to live. He felt this primeval hunger of hers like a fire burning in his own belly. Tamara, he sensed, would always hold onto life more fiercely than a tiger gripping a struggling lamb in its claws, and yet she inhabited life gently, deeply, as naturally as a fern growing in the forest. And life inhabited her fully, consuming every part of her. She was overflowing with vital energies like a star bursting with light. It was this rare and splendid vitality of hers that pulled at his heart and fired all the nerve cells of his body. As with her so with him: He felt himself burning with animajii, too, burning as brightly as any star. It was the moment in his life when he first became aware of how limitless the possibilities of life might be. And for the first time, he became aware of how very aware other people were of him; he could see it in their faces, in the way they lifted their eyes toward him as if stealing cautious glances at the sun when they thought that his attention was elsewhere. They looked at Tamara this way as well.

The two of them were like double stars whose radiance filled the room. Like stars they were full of terrible beauty and immense gravities, and it was inevitable that their souls should pull at each other and cause them to seek each other out. There was a moment when she began to look at him across a mere fifty feet of s.p.a.ce. It was a moment of blazing awareness almost too brilliant to bear. Deep in remembrance, in the eternal light of recurrence, he saw something that he had once seen at the very beginning of his love for Tamara but never allowed himself truly to see: in the moment that they had first touched eyes, he had known that their love for each other would cause them the greatest of suffering. There was torment and death deep inside Tamara's eyes, perhaps inside his own. But in his sudden rus.h.i.+ng sense of immortality, in the wild pa.s.sion of his youth, even as he began to fall, he was ready to endure all the fires of h.e.l.l for a single moment of love. Love is blind, not innocently and lightlessly blind like a babe floating inside his mother's womb, but intentionally blind, wilfully, like a scryer who puts out his own eyes. All this Danlo saw at last, even as he foresaw that someday all their agony and suffering would be redeemed by love, by life. And seeing this he almost beheld the true Tamara, she of the terrible beauty, whose purpose was love and beauty, and something more: love inside love, beauty born of ever deeper beauty. But he could not behold her, not yet; he could not quite hold onto the beautiful memories that lived inside him. Now, in this long lovely room that existed only in remembrance, they were beginning to meet each other's eyes again for the first time. This should have been a moment of love, of light, of secret understanding. As she turned her head to look at him, he could almost see the little black circle at the centre of her eye that would let in the light of his soul. Only now, as they began their endless and terrifying fall into love, a simple smell destroyed the moment. In truth, it was not a simple smell at all, but rather the hormones, esters, sweat, sweet amino acids, the essence of tangerines the essence of Tamara's scent that some part of him had been aware of before he had even seen her. These were the molecules of memory floating in the air, waiting, the hundred different fragrances that a deep part of his brain a.s.sembled into a kind of scent-mosaic of Tamara. He had always been keyed into the nuances and subtle colours of this extraordinary scent.

And now one colour had grown much too strong, much too bright and he smelled the steely red acridness of sweat and fear. Now this smell was like a red-hot knife being driven up his nostril into his brain. For the ten thousandth time, he opened his eyes.

But he was no longer in a faraway room on Neverness two years past, but rather in Tamara's clean meditation room all warm and bright with the burning candles. He had finally fallen, yes, but not into love. He had fallen out of recurrence. In truth, he had fallen out of remembrance altogether, and so had Tamara. She sat across from him with her eyes wide open, looking at him. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, and her moist neck glistened in the candlelight. She looked long and deeply at him, not in love, but in failure and fear. It was as if she had almost seen some deep part of him that she desperately wanted to see, but, like a thallow chick unready to fly away from her nest high in the mountains, had turned away from this terrifying abyss at the last moment. As if she had turned away from herself.

'I'm sorry, Danlo.'

'Do not speak. Not ... yet.'

Tamara looked at the blazing candles and wiped the sweat from her face. Softly she said, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'

'Shhh, be quiet. There might still be a way for us ... to return.'

'But I don't want to return. I can't.'

'But we were so close,' he said.

'No, no please.'