Читать книгу Humanity Prime - Bruce Mcallister - Страница 6

CHAPTER THREE

I swim on, and discover that the old euyom has placed a dozen of his females in a line which leads from the bigshinegray’s island to me. The soft souls call to me and I follow their calls, always swimming toward the strongest pink voice somewhere just ahead of me.

But the pale feelings sent to me by the females fail to pale the darkness of my expectations. The bigshinegray should offer the brightest blue of joy, but instead brings shadows of fear which dwell in the path I will have to take. The touch of the dry world lies before me....

So I find other ways of bringing light to my shadowed soul. I choose to think of general truths, and in them find distance from the darkness of personal deaths and the unknowns of nearing moments in the now.

“See it: The truest truth of feeling and colors....”

When there is time to be spent in simple lounging—where no action makes demands upon me—I often pass the time by summing up the bits of my past days and molding a truth to embrace them all. I touch this kind of truth with a feeling that compares with the yellow satisfaction I feel on discovering new scaly faces, new pounding souls, new shapes of reefs in the endless waters.

I once gave this truth to poundgrayly, and to make a gift of it I found myself needing to shape it with clear symmetry, order it in soul’s unnatural logic. I chose all the important colors of feeling, one following the other, and placed them beside all important feelings, one following the other.

The truth of white.... Loving: bright white all around. Hating: deep bursts of white, churning in black. Happy: bright white flashing. Sad: heavy and endless dull white. Friendly: a flattened white, nearby. Fearful: deep swirling dull white. Calm: misty white, some distance away. Angry: pounding dull white all around.

The truth of yellow.... Loving: bright yellow all around. Hating: deep churning brown-yellow. Happy: bright flashing yellow. Sad: heavy and endless brown-yellow. Friendly: bright yellow, nearby. Fearful: deep swirling yellow-brown. Calm: pale misty yellow, some distance away. Angry: pounding yellow-brown all around.

The truth of green.... Loving: bright yellow-green all around. Hating: deep churning brown. Happy: bright flashing yellow-green. Sad: heavy and endless brown. Friendly: bright yellow-green, nearby. Fearful: deep swirling brown. Calm: pale yellow-green, some distance away. Angry: pounding brown all around.

The truth of red.... Loving: bright pink all around. Hating: deep dark churning red. Happy: bright flashing pink. Sad: heavy, endless dark red. Friendly: bright pink, nearby. Fearful: deep dark swirling red. Calm: pink, some distance away. Angry: pounding red in darkening depths.

When I completed the truths—from white through orange and purple to blue—poundgrayly said with pale yellow precision:

“No doubt you see the simpler pattern of the truths, so why did you not express them more simply?”

“There is power in repetition,” I answered.

“There is also insanity in repetition—for the aged and for wild souls.”

Poundgrayly was correct, and so I found the simpler truth....

Light pleases the eye, and pleases the soul behind it. Darkness pleases no one, as it gives birth only to fear and chaos. The brighter colors—whether they be bright yellow or bright blues—are the currents of contentment, as their blood is light itself. But when darkness threads a color, making it dull or gray or black as eye’s night, only dark feelings can be felt....Yellow offers happiness when it is pure, and disturbing feelings follow when it is touched by colder hues, or by black’s distant depths. Red is the color of violence, and its touch strips other colors of their pleasantness: red touches green, and brown pounding follows—red touches blue, and purple swirling is felt. Red itself carries joy only when washed in light, giving birth to the pinks of familiar tinglings....

Neither I nor poundgrayly was able to catch the whys of colors’ truth. A truth needs no familiar reason to be a truth. It is, and that is enough.

I continue swimming, and the truths of yellow and red, black and white end their comforting touch. I begin to slip down into personal days, and the truth of white becomes gray, and gray becomes the shiny scars on Father’s back.

“No....”

I flee from screamdeep in the only way I know. I take him, take one small memory of him, and use it for another summing, another truth to lighten my soul.

“See it: The day Father told me with fatherly feelings that I was his son and always would be.”

He told me, and later when I thought again and again about the power of his telling, I realized that the act of talking—one soul’s act upon another’s soul—has four discernible parts, interwoven as one, in the flow from soul to soul.

The lighter lip of screamdeep’s soul spoke to me with precise pictures, visions which were—it seemed—without feeling in themselves: “You (smaller, fishsinging depths, from waterjoyup’s depths: are and flow: from Me (larger, deepscreaming depths, now and also before).”

The wider face of his soul spoke to me at the same time without precise visions, but with colors which wound around the pictures, or gave them a surrounding hue, or gave them a blended shade: “Bright white, bright blue, pale rushing white, bright yellow (yellow-brown): line of bright white, pale mist: orange and pink and brighter red....”

The deeper flesh of his soul was adding feelings to the visions and the formless colors, giving them the truest meaning: “Near, needing love, loved by me, from the previous near—needing-love-loved-by-me: happy living: from this loving-hating-sad-happy-fearful-friendly-angry-calm me.”

And all of these things from Father’s soul were making a rhythm: Lum, ba da da, lum bum bum, lum, ba da da, lum bum bum, lum, ba da da....

So this was the fourness of talking, divided—

No, there was a fifth part—not of the soul, but a part that spoke as meaningfully as the soul itself did. The body....

As screamdeep’s soul gave its colors and pictures and feelings and rhythm, so his body surrounded them all with gestures whose meaning sprang from the depths of soul’s sharing. He put his arms out toward me, opened his hands, spread his fingers, moved his hands apart, and stared at me with his face’s eyes; then he spread his arms slowly, tightened his tails together, and tilted his head back; then he pulled his arms in, coiled one tail around the other softly, and touched his chin to his chest briefly.

But what do I have now, with my fourness plus one? When I blend them together, still keeping them visible as a fourness plus one, do I really have the truth of my father’s love, of his words that day?

“You (lum), in the love (ba) of brightest (da) white (da)”—he moved his arms toward me—“you (lum), the smaller (bum) always (bum), bright white (lum) of nearness (ba) needing (da) protection (da)”—he spread his fingers—“you (lum) of fishsinging (bum) blue-white (bum) happy (lum)”—he moved his hands apart slowly—“you (ba) born of Her (da) of waterjoyuping (da) depths (lum) of once-bright-yellow (bum) but of now-sad-yellow-brown (bum)”—staring all the time at me with his face’s eyes—“you are (lum) and living flowing (ba)”—he spread his arms apart—“in calm white mist (da)”—he tightened his tails together—“of even white lines (da)”—he tilted his head back—“born of me (lum) of red-orange (bum) friendly (bum)”—he pulled his arms back—“born of me (lum) the larger (bum) giving protecting loving (bum)”—he coiled one tail around the other—“born of me (lum) here and now (ba) then and there (da) of calm loving-hating-sad-happy-fearful-angry (da lum bum bum)”—and he tucked his chin to his chest.

“No,” I say to my own embarrassed soul, “that is not the real truth of Father’s talking.... The fourness—and all things like it—is a game for the lonely soul....”

I swim on, thinking, “A day’s swim....And today is one of the longer days, twice as long as some days, tiring in its persistent half-light and half-darkness—”

In that moment my soul’s mumbling is interrupted.

“Eohmmmah...rakk....”

The familiar voice makes my soul jerk in purple annoyance.

Murmursome swims into eye’s range, continues his yellow affection and begins circling me.

I stop swimming, look into the simple soul of the simple ayom—look at the hairy body, the slick flat limbs, the long curved whiskers on the face—and say “No” and resume swimming.

“Aooowahammmm? rakk!” The affection is persistent.

“No!”

(Murmursome left me alone six days ago, and I want to return the hurt. So I choose to ignore him. “And besides,” my soul tells me, “this day is too important to be wasted in the foolish games an ayom always wants to play.”)

But murmursome’s soul continues its offer, its confusion at my rejection, its request that I stop to play.

And when I listen deeply to the ayom’s voice, I find something new and odd in murmursome’s murmurs.

“Eoomahh (soulove) rakk rakk mooow (deatherenow) rak rak (go)....”

...As if the dumb ayom had suddenly learned to use the clear images common only to the souls of euyom and my own kind.

No, the images are not very clear, their forms too faint, so I explain them away as simple echoes of my own soul’s depths. Such echoing is not uncommon, and the lies it tells are frequently confusing.

(“After all,” I tell myself, “my soul has been disturbed by the coming of the bigshinegray—and is therefore an easy prey to tricks and lies of the inner eye.”)

“No,” I repeat, concentrating on the direction of the nearest female in the euyom line to the island.

Murmursome refuses to give up. He darts around me, nearly brushing me, trying to catch my eyes’ attention.

I close my eyes and do not pause in my swimming.

The ayom pretends to shiver in soul’s flesh, but fails to capture sympathy.

“Go away.”

“Eoomahh (listen) rakk! (fishdance) aooowahmm (listen).”

“Go away!”

Murmursome departs now, and the heavy brown sadness trailing from his simple soul surprises me. The brown face of feeling seems more complex than an ayom’s usual sadness—perhaps it is only a lie from—

It makes me recall the many brown levels of Father’s soul. And in turn the brown levels make me remember the advice screamdeep often gave.

(Father would ask me: “Murmursome bothers you?”

(“His friendship,” I would answer, “is too persistent. If he would pale his rushing yellow more often, demand less of my own soul’s yellow, I would be able to enjoy his presence.”

(“Listen to me,” Father would say, with the only plea he ever used to me. “You must be patient. I am not alone in feeling that a secret of truest truth lies in murmursome’s kind. The wish is that I possessed the voice to give you that secret, but I do not, so you must manage faith in an unknown depth. Murmursome is an ayom, and the truth which so many souls have sensed hides in the pounding bond between ayom and men, and I pray to blood that you will chase the secret from itself before the day you find your death has found you....”

(“I do not understand,” I would say, objecting as every son objects to his father’s life. “How may a soul carry faith in a truth—truest or not—which it cannot know?”

(“You are being stubborn. I am asking that you treat murmursome with some kindness, because I fear that if you do not you will see yourself a sightless fool someday—the day you find the ayom’s truest secret opening to your older soul.”)

I reach out faintly, but the ayom is gone.

And now my body announces its hunger.

I could cover hunger’s voice with a plant-soul lie, and try to surprise any fish in the immediate area—but this would take time, and it is rarely successful.

I could swim to the distant bottom and pluck sponges from their rocks or soft crabs from their burrows—but this too would take time.

And the colors of the day urge: There is time only for swimming....

So I will continue swimming until my body bellows, refuses to move arms and tails. Otherwise the shades of nearing guilt would manage to taint any food I took time to find now.

Suddenly, in the next moment, the question becomes important.

An uiu soul, clashing purple, jumps to my inner eye.

This far from the bottom?

The uiu’s flow comes: “Ssssssssss....”

I hesitate, feel the uiu’s nearing, watch with soul’s eye as the animal feels my presence and stiffens.

“Sssk!” The flow changes to the rhythm of attack. “Ksss! Sssk!”

I do what is necessary, and the lies covers my truer soul quickly. The image of a wounded female ioe will work equally well against the smaller jaws of an uiu soul.

“Sssk?”

I hold the lie tightly around me, and it blurs the incoming uiu image as well as my own outflowing soul.

But with my face’s eyes I am able to see the uiu’s form of flesh as the animal nears.

The uiu arches its back and begins to move its forelimbs in circles to slow itself. Its small jaws continue to open and close, but its body has begun trembling in gray of fear.

“Sssk?”

The uiu’s eyes see me as an unthreatening yellowish gray body, but its soul is stronger, believing that an enraged bulk of teeth, talons and bleeding muscle lies before it

The uiu utters its submission: “Shhhhhh...,” and begins to turn away.

But it turns back. “Sssk!”

I’ve found in the ioe lie a current to unfortunate memory. I stumbled in the vision of Father’s day of death, and my lie weakened for lack of attention.

The uiu ignores its own confusion and rushes forward screaming.

Scream in soul and rush in eye shakes my place in memory—but screamdeep still embraces me, and the tease of death begins.

(Do I want to die in the same way Father died? Jaws that would equal those who took him...blood flowing from my body so similar to his....)

Abruptly the bigshinegray of expectation finds a voice:

“You may not die until you come to know me.”

Quickly I shake the motherly fingers of death from myself, and lift the lie once again to perfection.

The uiu is close now, rushing on.

To the lie I add an ioe scream, and with two motions of my tails I move sideways.

The uiu rushes past, and changing its goal, does not turn to snap at the yellowish gray flesh.

“Shhhh...shhhh....”

The uiu swims on, gains speed in the urgency of renewed fear, and in a moment is beyond the touch of eyes and soul.

I find myself screaming another ioe scream—without clear will—and then sigh, my body falling limp, my soul falling to pale babble.

Why an uiu so far from its usual coral lair on the bottom?

—Unless the bottom holds a thrashing oio, rooting with its giant plated body in the coral structures, seeking the soft bodies of hidden worms, scurrying crabs.

I listen carefully, but the bottom is distant and only a commotion of faint colors and murky rhythms can be heard. Such a commotion might have any number of causes.

If an oio were truly down there, disturbing those fish and plants who choose the coral faces as their territory, then there is a chance for easy food.

Some plant bodies, when torn from their rocks and coral places, float upward.

I kick twice with my tails, stop, swim backwards with two kicks, and wait nervously.

Plants would not float upward very quickly....

I begin to swim toward the bottom slowly, but before I have moved six tail lengths downward, a pale repetitive soul appears somewhere near me and grows clearer as it floats up toward me.

A stiff plant? A sponge? A piece of yau?

Only a sponge would be edible.

As the approaching soul clears, giving out a porous white fringe of soul, I realize my hunger will soon be attended to.

The sponge floats into eye’s sight, and begins to pass me. I reach out, grab it, and turn back around in time to find another porous soul nearing me.

Holding one sponge between my left arm and my side, and the other sponge in my twisted left hand—to free my right—I begin swimming and eating.

(As I swim I am deeply, obscurely aware of death-desire still calling to me....)

I pass the fourth, fifth and sixth of poundgrayly’s females, and not far from the island I’m met by the faint outer finger of the seventh and last soul.

Her body is still out of eye’s sight, but I can hear her sigh and relax in the lavender way only a female euyom can.

When the water grows shallow and the bottom comes into view, I stop. The euyom feels my hesitation and calls to me with a tinge of red impatience.

But I have questions to be answered on my own. I remain where I am, waving my tails slowly among the yau leaves and calming my soul in the calm bright waters.

Yes, poundgrayly would have known the answers. Why didn’t I anticipate the problems I will have in leaving the sea?

How will I breathe in dryness?

How will I move in dryness?

How will I keep dryness from burning me?

I will imagine that I am poundgrayly...perhaps then the answers will come.

Poundgrayly would say: “You have certain things around you. Yau, coral, sand, water, and in a moment one of my females. Your answers will come from them.”

The answers do come, and seeing their simplicity I can only doubt them. Nevertheless:

I swim quickly to the bottom, find the base of a long yau plant and chew through its main stem. Stripping the stem of its wrinkled leaves, I take care to remove them without leaving holes in the hollow stem.

With the first stem looped around one arm, I move on to another, which I also bite in two near its base, but which will not be stripped of its leaves.

I resume my swim toward shallower water and the euyom who await me, and the mass of yau leaves still attached to their stem drag behind me like a mangled fish-tail.

“Do come,” the female calls, making her calling into a rhythm that matches the rhythm of my tails’ motion, helping me to pace my tired swimming.

I near her and when my face’s eyes touch her, I find her own small eyes staring back at me, her head motionless, her limbs calm as she hangs in the shallow water before him.

“I am happy and I am sorry for you,” she says, and her soul bears the softest lavender face I have ever touched; is her deepest name perhaps lavender? “Is there a way I may help you?” she asks.

Now I begin trembling. The vision of myself thrashing in pain, screaming in dryness as I leave the sea, has begun again easily.

“I have a body,” she says. “Bodies are often helpful when comforting grips of soul fail....”

I know a hundred hues of thanks, and I try to give them:

“I am—”

But the familiar interruption comes.

“Rakk?”

I shout at the ayom in the distance, and the female euyom jerks a little in the small red of my anger’s tide.

(I am annoyed by my own foolishness. I should have realized that even after a rebuke murmursome would follow me, keeping just outside the clear sight of my soul. I should know that the ayom soul suffers from the dark jaws of aloneness just as deeply as my own soul always has; but instead I choose feelings of superiority, and tell myself that murmursome’s persistence makes him no better, no more meaningful in my life than the repetitive souls of plants and minor animals.)

“Rakk?”

“Leave!” I shout.

(And perhaps I should realize that my own trembling in the previous moment brought the ayom to me, anxious about my well being. Instead I find his affectionate manner annoying.)

Murmursome fades away again, and I turn back to the euyom—

But another distant soul intrudes.

“Where-where?” it is babbling, “when and where-where?”

I reach out, find the other soul faintly, and the red of anger lifts bubbling inside me again.

A girl...a young woman?

I throw the red scream out.

“Go go away away! My territory here!”

The distant soul falls to blue confusion, murmuring, “But I...I...I....”

“This is my place of my moment!” I continue, only dimly hearing the euyom whisper, pink reprimanding, “There is time for understanding....”

“I...I am here....” the soul of girl rambles vaguely.

“Leave!”

The soul does not leave, remains distant, unmoving.

I turn to the euyom, make a quick suggestion to her, gather the unstripped yau stem up around me, and begin unraveling the naked stem until it lies at full length waving in the water.

Taking the mass of leaves, I place them on my own shoulders and hold them there with my left hand.

Crawling onto the euyom’s back, I grip her shell with my right hand, clench the end of the naked hollow stem between my teeth, and motion to the euyom with a pale jerk of my soul.

Slowly the female begins moving toward the end of water, the start of dry sands, to leave the water as she has often done when her eggs cried out in need of a dry sandy place for hatching.

“One moment,” I say abruptly, and the euyom stops, and the two of them bob under the bubbling waves in shallowest water, the bottom so close, the surface almost touching.

I want, need, want a prayer to blood. So I sigh to my deepest name, and begin to pray, wanting, needing, praying.

(For my kind a prayer is soul’s finger back through time. Each family, every line of blood, has its own prayer growing with each new generation, passed down from father to son to son’s son, all leading back to the pounding remembered beginning.

(So I pray, turning my soul inward upon itself, and the finger begins pointing, chanting the red-orange of memory, rushing to cover the million days of my fathers, as my soul becomes them praying, praying, and the darkness is made light by the coursing of time’s blood.)

I am fishsinger, praying....

I am screamdeep, praying....

I am purplewave, praying....

I am hardred, praying, and simplehere, praying....

I am bluehair and dancedark and greenflow, praying....

I am songsung and pinkup and finrunner and sweetcall and oncegray and whitemine and everred and whispernow and saybluish and wavingdown and therepale and darklove and whilesoftly and orangeweb and threeveins and greenhump and redson and jawwhite and swingup and wholehole and youpiece and findyellow, praying....

I am largebluehereandnowson and largebluenowandhere and mewhite and mered and clearme and huntingmeme and menow...? and me...? and livingme...?! and help...? me...! and memaybe “Tam”? and memaybe”Tam”! and memyself-of-sometime”Tam” and Iamfrom”Tam” and me”Tam” and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me...sah and pale...? and living...? and darklight and...? and...? and...?, praying....

I am mefrom”Geor”and...and meherefrom”Geor” and...and “Geor” and...and “Sim”andsonof”Ruik” and me”Ruik” and me”Tiss”andsonof”Sim” and “Sim”and...and “Jums”-and...and “Bedee”and...and sonof”Hel” and “Hel”and....praying, praying....

I am fishsinger, farthest from the first, and I pray to the blood of the bigshinegray which brought me, me, me, me, me, me here, now and then....

...To the bigshinegray, that has come—

(I and my fathers have always prayed to the past for the future—and the future is light, and I’ve often seen that the future is the only real light we have. If that light should ever dim....)

I complete my moment and find that the euyom under me still trembles.

“You, so many souls,” she mumbles.

The distant soul of girl is still present, and I envelop my anger in the white of another attention.

To leave the bubbling waters....

One end of the long hollow stem will be clenched between my teeth—the other end will remain in the water.

The mass of wet yau leaves will be held on my back.

And the euyom will carry me out into dryness...but with the stem and leaves I will bring some of the sea with me.

The euyom resumes her swimming, slow and sure.

(And when the length of hollow yau stem can no longer cover my distance from the water, how will I breathe then?)

The water soon grows so shallow that bubbles of dryness make breathing difficult. I cover the end of the hollow stem with my lips and begin sucking, breathing easier with the bubbleless water pulled through the stem.

Only a few hands’ lengths ahead of me, the scaly head of the euyom suddenly breaks through the surface into dryness.

In the next moment my own head snaps from water, is washed by a wave, and then is completely in dryness. And in the jaws of shock.

(My soul screams yellow and black, and the surprise of the rise of two opposite feelings makes me scream again.

(The bright yellow of joy, the depths of fear’s darkness—this moment becomes one long day, and the stomach of my soul throws up shimmering faces of darkened seas, brilliant lights, funneling greens of a strange sweet green flesh, and reds of bitterest bones.

(So now all of my people scream within me. My prayer comes alive, gains flesh, and I am its own prayer, living. I feel, I see, I know myself leaving the water, and a million unblinking eyes watch me, praying, living.)

The dryness strokes me, but not unpleasantly.

And the bodies of tiny invisible souls begin to die on my drying skin; and they scream—but not unpleasantly.

And the last unpleasant quiver of my flesh is rushed into joy when the strongest image I have ever known begins to rise from bottoms beyond bottom in my soul.

The image begins formless—whites and blues and whites—but in a moment is a form whose clarity is greater than my own fishsinger name. It grabs my body, tells it to shiver in bright yellow of the widest white, and I obey it without question.

And then the rising image faces me:

A pale fish...crawling from the sea...into dryness.

(I scream, and oddly my scream is one calm “Yes.”)

The stem slips from my mouth—

A pale fish! crawling from the sea! into dryness!

(My soul gathers its thousand fingers and throws the image out, higher than dryness, faster than speech, to the ends of water.

(And I dimly recognize the image. Screamdeep knew it twice. All men know it, and scream their pleasant “Yes,” and give it to the women who will bear their children.

(And the image is like my name. It is like me, leaving the sea on an euyom’s back, touching her, making two bodies one—

(Touching? I can remember Father’s advice against touching anything....Why?)

But in the end the image of the crawling fish is greater than my name, greater than my act, and my soul knows this truth without being told.

The image has been expelled and my body is suddenly weak, soul babbling. The lavender soul under me is babbling too, rigid from the screaming glory of an image she has never touched before.

I slip off her shell, back into deeper water, and lie there panting, too weak to hold the stem with limp jaws or the yau leaves on my back with my trembling left hand.

The soul finds rest more easily than the flesh, and in a moment my thousand fingers are again reaching out, seeking other fingers, and finding the same two other distant souls.

Murmursome far away, bouncing in excitement, but not approaching....

The soul of girl, different now....Though the distance is great, it seems as if she has received the screaming image, swallowed it.

(And it seems that she too is trembling in a similar image—another crawling fish brought to life inside her by mine—but I fail to understand this, so I make no effort to believe it.)

I try again. Move the yau leaves onto my back. Place the end of the hollow stem in my mouth. But now I hesitate.

(My skin is cool now—and memory of my brief moments in the hot dryness frightens me.)

“You must go,” lavender says. “Your second time will disturb you less. I do now, as I have been there a hundred times....”

For a moment the euyom—whose name continues to be lavender whether or not it really is—offers rhythms that are certainly those of a mother, and I say without will: “You are alive. I did not kill you after all.”

Lavender understands enough. She says, “You are falling into other times. Do come back. We must go now.”

My thousand fingers reach out one last time, find neither murmursome nor the strange soul of girl, and—

(—For a moment I am afraid. Have I injured, killed a soul, many souls—with the force of the crawling fish? Have I hurt murmursome? or the soul of girl? No, the crawling fish doesn’t do such things.)

“Go, then!” I say, pulling myself back onto the shell.

Lavender moves.

The dryness strikes.

My soul stirs, but the crawling fish dies in the bones of fatigue, and refuses to return.

I am completely in dryness now, and I suck frantically on the hollow yau stem.

(Fear! Will my chest be strong enough to pull the water through the stem for a longer time?)

At first the water resists, but then rushes into my mouth. I breathe deeply.

The dryness invades my nose. My head begins to ache.

(Will the yau leaves slip from my back—leaving my flesh to crack in dryness?)

The yau leaves grow heavy on my back and do not slip. I pull my left arm up to my side and hold it between my body and the euyom’s shell.

After a few moments of sucking, I become aware of stranger murmurings everywhere.

But in their strangeness they are also familiar. They are yellow, soft, come from everywhere, but lack the solid forms of ioe, ayom or euyom souls. They respond in waves of pale colors to my own thoughts, and in a moment I understand their presence.

These murmuring souls in the dry world are the brothers of the tiny invisible souls, the hordes of invisible bodies who make talk possible in the sea.

(So I realize now that talk will be possible in the dry world too—and proof of this truth lies in the unnoticed fact that I can still hear the rhythms, the rippling colors of lavender under me, under her own shell.)

“I thank you for all of this,” I say. “A hundred ways, a thousand corners—”

“I am poundgrayly’s,” she says, and the dryness seems not to distort her soul’s message at all. “He is yours, you are his, so you are always welcome to this body and soul.”

Slowly but perfectly the euyom continues crawling, her limbs weding into the sands of dryness, and her beak opening and closing as if she were breathing the dryness itself.

“You breathe dryness?” I ask, the pale blue of astonishment.

“I do—as does poundgrayly, all of our kind.”

(I should have realized it long ago. Although they seemed infrequent, poundgrayly’s visits to the surface have always occurred according to the larger rhythms of his euyom soul, and have always been born of a reddening need for something I never bothered to understand....)

My left arm has slipped down from my side, down the euyom’s shell, nearly touching the sands of dryness, so I try to lift it back up—and find the motion very difficult. And the strength of my face’s eyes is dimming too, so I close them quickly.

(I am weak....)

(Or is it that my arm is somehow heavier?)

(Or both?)

“In dryness,” lavender answers, “we are all weak. Wetness embraces, holds us lightly, and we move with ease.”

“Then I will never be able to move by myself here!” I say, brown rising.

“Why the brownness? You will not find me throwing you from my back.”

My tails are beginning to shrivel, and I feel it. The skin on my legs, back and arms is tightening too. The embrace by dryness is far from the good touch of soul that dispels loneliness, and I begin to whimper in fear.

I open my eyes, and for a moment can see again.

But before long the dimming returns.

“I cannot see!” I shout, scream with the gray to black of annoyance to anger. “Face’s sight is gone!”

My shadowed shout does something strange. The hordes of invisible little souls and bodies in the dryness around me hear me all too clearly—they die by the millions.

(I am surprised, then sorry, then proud, then afraid again....)

Lavender has no precise answer, and she chooses not to offer murky visions of the imagined or guessed.

“Where is your need of round eyes,” she says, “when your soul is able to touch with killing here? The many little ones now dead had never known deep slaps of darkness—my kind certainly cannot wield such slaps. They were unready; and now they are merely food for their own kind or other little ones.”

(“Your kind throws darkness uniquely,” poundgrayly once told me. “The souls of my kind have never lifted a scream as finely ribbed with teeth of blackness as your own fellow yom have.”)

The blindness persists. Face’s eyes begin to sting, tiny talons grating them.

In a moment I realize: again the work of dryness! Dryness hurts—would hurt my chest but for the hollow stem which brings the sea to me. Yes, my face’s eyes have no touch of the sea on them now.

I cup my right hand and into it exhale the next breath of water. Bringing my hand to my eyes, I wet them, and suddenly the forms in the dry world clear again.

(In clearness the forms are very strange. In strangeness they bring me a gray yawn of fear.)

Through my face’s eyes I see plants that do not sway like the yau or other gentle plants of the sea. The tallest of them are half as high as yau, but their stillness, stiffness, great thickness, their brown and gray skins which look as tough as an oio’s hide, and their unfamiliar souls make them seem larger than any plants of the sea, and as dark as a pack of ioe.

“I know them,” lavender says. “They have no means for hurting us—nor the will, nor the need to do so.”

(Still I bob in fear. I expected my forefathers’ memories to comfort me, to prepare me for sight of the living bodies and varying souls in the world of dryness.)

My soul feels the approach of a small nervous soul—not completely unlike that of a fish. The approach is not at my level, not on the dry land itself, but above me in the dryness.

I wet my eyes again and see the small dark body circling and hovering over me.

It comes down, touches a nearby dry rock, and remains there motionless.

I look and cannot understand the function of the strange form. The very thin black body lacks any form of tail familiar to me. The two pairs of thin, almost invisible fins are attached to either side of the body in a manner useless for swimming. The black head with its two large shiny eyes—each eye the size of the head itself—would make swimming difficult and slow.

In a moment the small soul grows anxious. The body lifts from the rock and moves away through the dryness more quickly than any body I have ever known.

I close my eyes and try to understand the impossibility.

(Such quickness should be impossible. The faster a body moves in the sea, the more the sea resists, pushing against it. This dryness offers no heavy pressure to push against my flesh, but it makes difficult the lifting of my arm, the moving of my body at all. But the small black body moved easily, swimming quickly through the dryness—how?)

Lavender hears my question, but offers no answer.

“You saw it?” I say impatiently.

“Yes, and many others like it,” she answers, never halting in her crawl.

“And you have never questioned their strange fins, their quick swimming?” I accuse quickly, reddening frustration.

“Your ignorance should restrain its red. I began questioning such things when you were yet unborn. But a soul must cease its questions where neither an answer nor a soul able to give one can be found.”

My soul slips to a pale yellow. “Forgive the red. The changes of a younger soul—”

“The unchanges of an older soul,” lavender says softly, “understand the youth of you. Understanding makes forgiving unneeded.”

(I do not understand her reef of euyom wisdom, but the touch of a lavender soul is enough to make me turn again with confidence to the expected moments not far ahead.)

Face’s eyes are dry again, and I wet them again with water in the hand of an arm that is as heavy and tired as my neck. But I lift my head to look again at the forms ahead.

“How do face’s eyes,” I begin to ask, “see so far in dry—”

A bright light suddenly strikes my eyes, and pain strikes with it. It is as if one of the twin lights high above me has fallen to my level and is among the stiff plants in the distance.

But the euyom does not hesitate, continues on, and in a moment the light becomes a bright spot on a smooth, tall and wide form that rises ten times higher than any of the stiff plants.

The form has a color, and the color is the color of the longest dream, and my soul becomes that color shouting.

I stare with face’s eyes. They dry, I lose their sight, but I continue staring with the eyes that blindness can never touch.

The bigshinegray is very near, and for a long moment I bite down hard on the hollow stem’s end and forget to breathe.