Noman (31 page)

She turned and walked away down the long room between the mirrors to the open door.

M
ORNING
S
TAR CAME AFTER A WHILE TO THE SEA OF
grass. In one place to the side of the road the grass had been trampled into a narrow track. She turned off the road and followed the track, the waving grasses brushing her shoulders on either side as she went. The track led her to a small white clapboard house with a pale blue door.

The sun was high in the sky and burning hot. The interior of the house, glimpsed through the grass-fringed windows, was cool and empty and white. She knocked on the faded blue panels of the door. No one answered. She tried the handle and the door opened. She went into the house, seeking its shade.

"Anyone here?"

No need to call loud, it was a small house. The occupants would hear her come in even if she hadn't called. But no one appeared from the side rooms. She was alone.

The plain white-walled room pleased her. There was a blue cornflower in a glass on the table, which she took as a sign of welcome. She explored the house, and the more she saw, the better she liked it. It seemed to her that small though it was, there was just the right amount of room for everything. A main room for cooking and eating and talking. A bedroom just big enough for its bed. A washroom with a long brick-lined trench for washing clothes and dishes and people.

Outside a back door that opened from the washroom there was a small yard, a rectangle of bare earth cleared of the tall grass. Here there grew a single bay tree, shading with its broad waxy leaves a stack of stove wood and a well with a timber lid. Beside the well lay a tin dipper on a cord. She lifted the lid and dropped the dipper and heard it slap into water not far below. The water was sweet and cool on her dry lips.

She sat in the main room, with her cup of water in her hands and her bare brown feet stretched out before her, and let her eyes close. For the first time since the disintegration of the Joyous she felt something like a quietness of the spirit. These had been bitter days for Morning Star. One by one the pillars that had held up her world had broken and fallen away. The Nom was destroyed. Her passion for the Wildman had passed like a dream. She had lost her colors. The Joy Boy was dead. Seeker was gone. And most heartbreaking of all, she had watched a great gathering of people acclaim the coming of a god she had herself invented.

It was hard after so much loss to be so alone. But at least here in this plain house she could rest. She would go on her way again later. She would find Seeker later. For now, she let her head grow heavy and her breaths come slow, and the heat of noon passed overhead without touching her.

She woke and opened her eyes and there was Seeker, sitting in the chair by the stove. For a moment it seemed so natural that he should be by her side that she smiled and said, "There you are."

It was as if he had gone out earlier and had returned, as if this was where he belonged. Then, waking more fully, she let her smile turn to a laugh, and laughed at herself.

"I don't know what's happening to me," she said. "Where did you come from? What are you doing here?"

"I live here," he said, smiling back.

He looked so like the old Seeker, with his friendly face and his worried eyes, that all her recent fears of him slipped away.

"I came in for the shade," she said. "There's a well. There's sweet water there."

"I know."

"I don't believe you live here. You never said anything about it."

"See that cupboard." He pointed to the cupboard on the wall by the stove. "Look inside. There's a tin of oatcakes there. And a half-eaten jar of honey. Look in the bedroom. Hanging on the back of the door there's a belt with a bone buckle."

"So you've had a look around."

"Why should I make up things like that?"

"I don't know why. I don't know anything about you any more. You've gone somewhere so far away I can't follow you there."

"But you can read my colors."

"No. I lost my colors."

"You lost your colors! How did you do that?"

She gave a small shrug.

"It was too much. I couldn't go on living like that." She remembered then how the world had looked just before she fell. "There was a waterfall. It was very beautiful."

"A waterfall?"

He was looking at her with such an odd expression. She wondered why she had said that about the waterfall. It can't have meant anything to him.

"So you're telling me this is your house?"

"It's Jango's house," he said.

"Who's Jango?"

"A sort of a friend. He's old. He lives here with his wife."

"Is she old, too?"

"Yes. I'd say they're about the same age. They're very close."

Seeker looked at her in that new odd way of his and spoke the words Jango had spoken to him.

"My dearest friend, my life's companion, my comfort in old age, and my one and only love."

"The old man said that about his wife?"

"Yes."

"I suppose they'll come back soon. I hope they won't mind finding us here, sitting in their chairs."

"No, they won't mind."

Morning Star looked round the simple room.

"Don't you envy them?" she said.

"Not exactly," said Seeker.

"Oh, I do. To have one person to love, and to know they love you."

"One person above all others."

"Yes, I know. It's not the Nomana way. But all that's over now."

She looked away from his intent and curious gaze, feeling a wave of sadness pass through her.

"Do you say that because the Nom's been destroyed?" he said.

"That, and everything."

She didn't want to explain more, ashamed of what she had done in Radiance.

"Do you remember, Star?" he said. "Do you remember how you felt when you first came to Anacrea? When you wanted to join the Noble Warriors?"

"Of course I remember."

"Do you remember hiding by a wall in the night, and crying, and me finding you?"

"You were crying, too."

"You had a little bundle in your hand."

"I have it still."

She reached into her pocket and took out the plait of wool her father had given her when she had left to go to Anacrea.

"It's to remind me of home."

"And do you remember," said Seeker, "when we were on the road to Radiance, how we slept out in the open one night, and we both prayed, and the Wildman couldn't believe we meant it?"

"Dazzle me and flood me," said Morning Star, remembering his words then.

He nodded, pleased.

"No more memories, Seeker. They make me want to cry."

"Why, Star?"

"Because—because I wish I believed now what I believed then."

"Just because the Nom was destroyed," he said, "it doesn't mean there can't be another Nom, somewhere else."

"That's what makes me so sad. There can be as many as you want."

After that she knew she had to tell him, and she found that she wanted to make her confession.

"There is another Nom, right now, in Radiance. I told them to build it, and now everyone believes the Lost Child has returned." She spoke quickly, wanting to get her shameful tale over with. "But I just made it all up, so they'd stop fighting each other."

He was smiling at her as he heard her.

"And they believed you?"

"Yes."

"You must have done a good job."

"But Seeker, don't you see? It's all fake. There's nothing there. Just the mystery, and the promises, and the wanting to believe. There's nothing in the Garden. Not just there. In our old Nom, too. In any Nom anywhere."

He didn't seem shocked. She herself was shocked to hear her new convictions spoken aloud, and also relieved.

"So there's no Lost Child anywhere? No All and Only?" he said.

"No," she said. "Nothing."

"Nothing is dependable," said Seeker. "Nothing lasts."

"I don't know what that means."

"Does it make you angry, Star? To have been so deceived?"

"Not angry, no. I don't think I've been deceived. I think I've deceived myself."

"Because you wanted so much to believe in the All and Only?"

"Yes."

"So did I," said Seeker. "Strange to feel so much longing for something that doesn't exist."

"That's because even though it doesn't exist, we can imagine what it would be if it did."

"That's true," said Seeker. "And that's strange, too. We can imagine something that we've never known. What can the imagining consist of?"

"It's what you said. A longing."

"Like wanting love?"

"Very like wanting love," said Morning Star. "Oh, Seeker, it's so good talking with you again. No one else understands the way you do."

"So imagining god is like wanting love." Seeker was following his own train of thought, his eyes lingering on the blue cornflower. "But love does exist, even if we don't have it. We were loved when we were children. We know what it would feel like to be loved again. Maybe it's like that with god. We believed in god when we were children, didn't we?"

"But now we've grown older we know the Garden is empty. It was all a lie."

"And love is a lie?"

"No, no. That's different. At least, I hope it's different."

"You're willing to go on looking for love?"

"Oh, yes."

"Then why not go on looking for god, too?"

Morning Star realized then that these questions he kept putting to her were tugging her in a particular direction. There was something he knew that he wanted her to discover, too.

"Just tell me, Seeker. If you've got a way to make me believe again, just do it."

He was silent for a few moments. Then speaking slowly, frowning as he spoke, he began to tell her.

"Strange things have been happening to me," he said. "Not everything has come clear yet. But I'm perfectly sure that the All and Only is real."

"Even though the Garden is empty?"

"The Garden is not empty. The All and Only is there, in the Garden. And here, in this house. And outside, in the wide world. The All and Only is always and everywhere. Why do we have so many names for our god? Because our god is not limited to one place, or one person,
or one nature. How could god be limited? It's not our god, it's ourselves that are limited. Our minds can't contain the immensity of god. So we build a Nom, we fence a Garden, we say the god is in there, and we're comforted. That's not a lie, Star. It's just a very small part of the truth. And when we discover that there's no radiant being in the Garden, that's not the end of god. It's the end of our little idea of a little god. It's the beginning of the discovery of the true infinite and eternal god."

As Morning Star listened to Seeker she felt the stirring within herself of a new and fragile hope. She half understood him and half felt him—felt that intense conviction that charged every word he spoke.

"Do you think it's so, Seeker?"

"I know it's so."

"How do you know?"

"I went in search of the True Nom. I found it, and I didn't know it. I know it now. It's all round us, Star. The whole world is our True Nom. We pass through the Shadow Court every evening at twilight. We enter the Night Court as darkness falls and we look up at the stars. We find our way every new day through the columned cloisters of our lives. And there waiting for us, whenever we choose to see it, is the Garden."

"But where? What Garden?"

"Come. Let me show you."

He got up, taking the cornflower from the glass as he rose. He opened the door and went outside into the long grass. He led her into the waving sea, and there they stood in the afternoon sunlight looking round them at the shimmer of fronds, and the trees beyond, and the distant heathazed hills. He gave her the blue flower.

"Look at it as if you've never seen it before."

She looked.

"It's beautiful. Such a perfect blue."

Seeker then broke off a stalk of grass and held it out to her.

"Look at this, then. No blue here."

She looked at the stalk, and the feathery fronds that grew from its top.

"See how it's made? See how every part comes out of another part. See how the branches grow from the stalk, the spikes from the branches, the fine hairs from the spikes. It hasn't been built. It's unfolded from itself. Do you see?"

Under his eager pressing she did begin to see.

"Every part of the grass is right and inevitable. Do you see? And every part of the flower. Don't you think that's beautiful?"

"Yes," said Morning Star. "That is beautiful."

"Now look up. Look over all the grass growing round us. We're in a sea of beauty."

"Yes, we are."

"Now look wider. Look as far as your eyes can see. We're in a universe of beauty."

"Yes," said Morning Star, catching his excitement. "Yes."

"I don't know how to say it better than that. Beauty isn't pretty shapes, or pretty colors. It's the life in all things, being rightly lived. Our whole world is the Garden, if we can only see it."

"I do see it, Seeker. A little."

"Remember the Nomana Catechism?" He spoke the familiar words. "So will the All and Only never come?"

She replied with the response from the Catechism.

"The All and Only is with you now."

"Will I ever see the All and Only face-to-face?"

"You will," she responded, smiling.

"When?"

"When you are a god."

"That's it, Star!" He clapped his hands, laughing aloud in his delight. "All the time I've lived with so much power, and people have wanted to treat me like a god, and I've driven them away, I've told them, No, I'm not a god. Of course I'm a god! And you, too! We call our god the All and Only, don't we? And aren't we too part of the All? The world is our Garden, and we're the gods!"

She smiled to see him. He made her so happy, he was so true and good and bursting with the excitement of his thoughts.

"You make a better god than me, Seeker."

"No, but you do see it, don't you, Star?"

"I see it. But it's hard. It's like finding that your father and mother don't know any more than you do. I think I liked it better when I believed there was something beyond anything I knew, living in secret in the Garden. Even though it terrified me."