The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (65 page)

“David? David!”

At last he appeared, teeth clenched. He made an ungainly leap, pitched forward and stumbled into her, flung himself down on his rump, and just sat there, panting and laughing weakly.

“What an entrance,” he said finally as he pushed up to his feet. “The Chapalii must not get vertigo.” The little ship backed away as if repulsed, lifted up soundlessly, and vanished from sight. “I’m not sure I can get back the same way I got on.”

Together they looked around the room: A featureless, circular chamber of black stone that looked like obsidian. A single gray disk resembling the color of the tower’s outside walls marked the center of the room. The archway through which they had come was the only outlet.

“We’ll step on that thing together,” said David, and taking Ilyana’s hand he led her over. As soon as they stepped onto the disk it sank down into the floor. Ilyana held her breath, but the rate of descent remained steady, and her stomach didn’t leap up into her throat. It just went down and down and down for what seemed like eternity.

“Sakhalin said he came up a staircase,” whispered Ilyana.

“But that was in nesh. Your legs could climb this high in nesh, but it might be more difficult in the real world.”

She shivered, thinking of Valentin, who seemed more and more to think that the real world was irrelevant. “Valentin ran away. He’s hiding in the old caravansary.”

“Had a fight with your father?”

She nodded, unable to speak past the sob catching in her throat.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, resting an avuncular hand on her shoulder.

At her feet light exploded. As if they were emerging from a vertical tube, they sank down into empty air and settled onto a floor of granite. Above, in the ceiling, a round shaft bored upward into blackness. They stood in a gray-toned entry hall. Behind them lay a wall of granite. Ahead stood a portico lined with columns.

“Come on,” said Ilyana, wanting to get it over with. She started forward, took the steps with gusto, and halted staring into the next room.

“Well I’ll be damned,” said David. “It’s Karnak.”

It was. An avenue of ram-headed sphinxes dressed out of red-rock sandstone led through a pale stone land that seemed, just barely, to have a roof far far overhead, streaked with a delicate filigree of cirrus clouds. They walked down it. There was no dust, nor did the Nile River flow past behind them.

But as they approached the pylon, the monumental brick wall that marked the entrance to the temple, Ilyana saw a slight shine in the gateway, a whispery gleam. There, waiting for her, was Genji.

David gulped down a sound in his throat. Ilyana just stared, even though she knew it was rude.

Genji looked a little like a Chapalii male who had been shined until he glowed; yet it wasn’t a gaudy kind of light but more the soft richness of a pearl. Her head was narrow, her mouth like the opening of a clamshell, her skull behind the slender face swelling into a very inhuman but subtle bulge to the sides and behind. Her eyes were faceted like crystals. When she spoke, the sound seemed to emanate from her throat, not from her mouth.

“I welcome you, young one. The ke may wait here at the gate.”

She turned. Her robes were like banners of silk swept up by the wind. They murmured with the crackling of a thousand distant campfires or the muted fall of a stream over rocks. Ilyana squeezed David’s hand and bravely walked after Genji.

Massive walls loomed on either side, pierced by a doorway whose lacework trim bled a ghostly light into the passageway. Passing through the door, they came out into a vast hall. It. was so big that the single statue placed in the middle of the hall could have been any size. Ilyana simply could not estimate its dimensions from where she stood now.

“The anteroom to the hall of monumental time,” said Genji.

“Anatoly Sakhalin said there were a lot of statues in here,” said Ilyana, looking around and feeling faintly disappointed. She had thought maybe there would be odd, exotic, alien things, something no human had ever seen before. The distant statue she recognized, even though it was small: It was Shiva. Or maybe, she thought wildly with a half hysterical gasp, it was Kori’s Uncle Gus, frozen in the act of dancing the part. She squelched the thought and concentrated on Genji, who after a pause now began to reply.

“A-na-to-ly Sa-kha-lin.”
She pronounced each syllable so distinctly that at first Ilyana didn’t realize that she was repeating the name. “The prince of the Sakhalin, who has now gone to approach the emperor. You know him?”

“Yeah. I’m, uh, sort of related to him.”

“You are his sister.”

“No. More like a cousin.”

“This word, cousin, denotes a genetic relationship?”

“Well, not really. I mean, maybe. I’d have to ask my mother if there was any marriages between the Sakhalins and the Arkhanovs, which there probably was at some time, but it’s more that the Sakhalin tribe is First of the Ten Elder Tribes and the Arkhanovs, and the Veselovs, that’s my father’s people, are two of the younger of the Elder Tribes.” Then she felt like an idiot for babbling on and not making sense. Why would Genji possibly be interested in a bunch of barbarians on a backwater planet?

“Like the ten princely houses recognized by the emperor. Of course, one of the princely houses passed through the rite of extinction just moments ago—or perhaps that was several years by the way you would reckon time. The emperor will no doubt be pleased that another princely house has risen so quickly into the vacuum created by the rite of extinction.”

It took Ilyana some moments to sort this out, because she wasn’t quite sure what a rite of extinction was, except for what she knew about trilobites and dinosaurs. “Don’t you reckon time the same way I do? I mean, isn’t there only one way to reckon time?”

Although she hadn’t really noticed it, they had been walking the entire time, as if with seven league boots covering more ground than they ought to have been able to.

Genji extended an arm. Her sleeves were as much an extension of her robes as discrete sleeves, extending all the way to the floor. Cloth whispered. “Here is Lord Shiva, in his aspect as Nataraja, Lord of Dance. With this dance he can both create and destroy the universe.”

Shiva stood poised before them, his body circled by a mandala-ring of fire. His skin was a lovely burnt golden-brown, except of course it wasn’t really skin. He was a statue cast of bronze. The statue was about two meters high, the same height as a man and the same proportions, except he had four arms.

Ilyana walked a ring around Shiva. The graceful play of his four arms fascinated her. He balanced on his right foot on a dwarf, the demon of forgetfulness, and his left leg swept upward in an elegant line that, frozen, yet suggested the essential dynamism of the dance. “But he’s just a statue,” she said.

“Is that all he is? Language is simply a map by which we make sense of the world. The world exists outside of language, just as the dance of destruction and creation, the great cycles of time, exist outside of the linear time in which the brief flashes of consciousness you call an individual life are measured.”

Ilyana shivered. Genji made her feel so… insignificant. “Do you live a long time?”

“Time is a language by which you measure the world. Even the speech by which you communicate measures space as linear time. You depart. You progress. You arrive. The speech begins and it ends. It unfolds with the expectation that there will be completion.”

“Oh. Right. Are you immortal?”

“Not even the stars are immortal.”

Shiva regarded this exchange with raised brows and a half smile, simultaneously delighted and aloof. But of course, he was just a statue. He was made that way.

“Kori’s Uncle Gus—Augustus Gopal, well, I guess you wouldn’t know him—says that dancing is the oldest form of magic. He said that with enough power he could dance the universe into and out of existence. That’s why he did the Shiva piece. Well, you wouldn’t know about that either.”

“Do you seek to learn this knowledge of the dance? It is not mine to teach.”

“Neh. I mean, when he dances, it’s beautiful, but after it’s over there’s nothing left. It’s like a cloud. It takes shapes, but there’s no solidity to it, it just dissolves. That’s why I like buildings. I’m studying architecture with Dav—with my ke. I guess it always seemed to me that buildings last longer than anything else, even than the civilization that built them.”

Ilyana caught a sense from Genji that she was pleased in some alien fashion: whether for the clever answer or the choice of buildings over dance, Ilyana didn’t know.

“Temporal power is indeed both fleeting and insignificant.” Genji began to walk again, toward the far end of the vast hall, and Ilyana followed her, followed the rustling of her robes, a little sorry to be leaving Shiva behind, with his lithe young body caught in stillness while still in motion.

“But we remember the names of people who lived before, in our history,” Ilyana objected.

“Names are names. Language is a map, and if the map loses meaning, or the map is lost, what is left?”

“But people don’t think about what’s going to happen after they die. They live now, while they’re alive. Well, I guess they could hardly live any other way. But I was named after a man who is leading a big really big army to try to conquer the world.” She frowned, a trifle annoyed with the implied suggestion that human pursuits were somehow trivial. “Even in the Empire, don’t the lords and dukes and princes try to, I dunno, try to become more powerful? It must mean something to them, just like it does to humans.”

“To what end? A mighty civilization could flourish for ten million years, as you reckon time, in some far corner of the universe and yet never meet another intelligent species. Did not your philosophers wonder if you were alone in the universe? Is it not mere coincidence that your ten million years have overlapped with ours, and in such close proximity? It would have been far more likely that you grew and flourished and faded into nothing and thought yourselves always alone, while a billion years before another species rose in a distant galaxy, asked the same questions, and died, and a billion years later in another place, the same process occurred. So you might not be alone, but separated by gulfs of time and space that can never be bridged.”

“Then you might just as well be alone, wouldn’t you?”

“The void is like the fathomless waters of a pure ocean, and there universes float, coming and going, a fleet of exquisite but frail boats. Here we pass through into the hall of monumental time.”

Ilyana paused and looked back toward Shiva, who remained, as ever, soaring in perpetual motion and eternal stasis ringed by the fire of cosmic energy. “But I thought Shiva represented time.”

“So he does. But the Nataraja dances death and creation, the eternal recurrence of the rhythm of what you call nature. Pass through.”

Ilyana walked through a low doorway that barely cleared Genji’s head and found herself in an even vaster hall, if that was possible. Beyond, a cliff dominated the chamber. It was so tall that its height was lost in clouds. Cut into the stone, in relief, was a huge image of Shiva, sitting cross-legged, one hand raised, palm out. The great hall smelled dry, almost metallic, and Ilyana realized all at once that the usual spicy scent she associated with Chapalii air was absent.

“There sits Lord Shiva in his aspect as the supreme Yogi. On the tower of ice called Mount Kailasa, he meditates upon the eternal. He is both unchanging and unchanged. There he will sit while one hundred civilizations rise and fall, while vast reaches of space are explored and abandoned and an immense net of light spreads its tendrils between thousands of star systems and then collapses back in on itself until it is only a weak flame burning at a single point, soon to flicker out from lack of fuel.”

“He looks very calm,” said Ilyana, staring up at the rock face. She liked the dancing Shiva better.

“His disinterest is truly divine.”

“But if nothing is immortal, then how long will he sit up there?”

Genji turned away and walked back toward the doorway that led them into the hall of the dancing Shiva. She seemed amused. “Temporality has so little to do with the massive presence of eternity, Il-ya-na Ar-kha-nov. Like imaginary space, it is infinite, all-encompassing.”

That made Ilyana think of Valentin. “Uh, I always wondered, I mean, I know you have nesh here. Some people—” Fleetingly, Ilyana wondered if Genji could read minds and know she was thinking about her brother. “—some humans, that is, they think that the imaginary space of nesh is more real than here, the real world. But maybe that’s like these two kinds of time—what you said—linear time that moves and monumental time that really isn’t time but just
is
.”

“Building occurs as a biological process,” answered Genji. “All of what we call life is a building, a fine edifice that rises and decays and vanishes only to rise again in a new form, balanced against the static repose that is the meditation of Shiva upon the eternal, the fathomless waters.”

“I remember what this is called,” said Ilyana, pausing in front of Shiva dancing and then running to catch up with Genji, who had kept walking. “Kori and I did a project together on her Uncle Gus’s set of dances.
Anandatandava
, the fierce dance of bliss. Shiva’s dance is him doing five things at once.” She bit her lip, trying to remember it; she felt impelled to impress Genji with her knowledge. “He creates, maintains, veils, unveils, and destroys his creation, which is the world, but at the same time he grants release to the person who worships him.”

“Here is the gate, and your escort. You will visit me again.”

“Uh. Yes, I will.”

Genji turned away. The soft rustling of her robes skittered through the hall, the faintest of echoes.

“Wait,” said Ilyana, aware of David standing in the shadow of the passageway. She gathered up her courage to ask the question she had most wanted to but had not been sure she
ought
to or was allowed to ask. “I just wondered, why did you ask me to visit you?”

“Because you came to my notice.”