"This is like talking to breakfast cereal," said Fredericks. "Give it up, Orlando."
"Hang on. Zunni, is 'Dog' a person?"
The tiny ape spun. "No, no, not person—old! Million years!"
Kaspar shushed some of the younger Tribesfolk again. "He is old person. We call him 'Dog.' He lives in Cobweb Corner."
"Older than rocks!" shouted one of the monkeys.
"Older than Uncle Jingle!" giggled another. "O-O-Old."
Tortuously, Orlando managed to glean the information that some old person called something like "Blue Dog and Krite," or just "Dog," kept an elcot in Founder's Hill at TreeHouse, and along with some other people had once created gear under the name of Melchior.
"Made Blast-Up Button," Zunni remembered with pleasure. "Put it on someone head, push it—boooooom!"
Orlando hoped that she was talking about something that happened to sims, not real people. "Can you get us back into TreeHouse so we can talk to him?"
"Woof!" said Zunni. "Even better. You-view-he, he-view-you."
"We get him right now," Kasper explained. "Dog, he love Wicked Tribe. Always he says, 'Just what I need!' when we visit him for fun games."
The monkeys rose in a sudden yellow cyclone, spun so rapidly they seemed to smear like melting butter, then disappeared.
Orlando sat appreciating the silence. His head was beginning to throb, a slight feverish ache. Fredericks rose and glided to the vandalized pyramid of trophies, stopping in front of the Black Elf Prince. "Dieter Cabo would love this."
"Don't blame me, blame the Tarzan Memorial Art Appreciation Society."
Fredericks glided back. "So you think these micro-scannies are going to help you find something you see in your dreams? Orlando, do you ever listen to yourself any more?"
"I'll follow whatever lead I can get."
"Yeah, I noticed." His friend hesitated. "How are you feeling?"
"Don't start. I shouldn't have told you anything."
Fredericks sighed, but before he could say anything else, one of the 'cot walls went permeable and a blizzard of monkeys blew through it.
"Come on!" one shouted. "Come now fast-fast-fast!"
"What is it?" Orlando couldn't make any sense out of the Tribal din. "What?"
"Found Dog." Zunni's voice purred in his ear. She was hovering just above his left shoulder."He having big secret Strong-line, throughput plus, all kinds of colors! Come 'long!"
"Dog is doing something," elaborated Kaspar in his other ear, "Something he is trying to hide. Big secret, but no one fools the Wicked Tribe!"
Orlando could not help thinking of a cartoon he had once seen, a man with a devil hovering on one shoulder and an angel on the other, each trying to sway him to its own ends. But what if you had only voices of uncontrolled anarchy in both ears? "What are you talking about? What kind of secret? Throughput?"
"Big hole to somewhere. Come! We hook you up!" Zunni was buzzing at his ear like a bumblebee. "We surprise Dog! Laugh and shriek, laugh and shriek!"
"Wicked Tribe mejor net-riding Krew!" shouted another. "Kilohana! Fasten belts!"
"Slow down!" Orlando winced. The fever headache had suddenly gotten fierce, and he did not want to be rushed. But it was too late for any chance of consultation—the monkeys were in full-speed-ahead mode. Fredericks wavered and disappeared, sucked away to only the Wicked Tribe knew where. The entire 'cot began to swirl like several colors of paint poured down the drain.
"Damn it, wait a minute. . . !" Orlando shouted, but he was shouting into emptiness and a hiss like an empty signal as they took him, too.
Darkness washed over him. He was falling, flying, being pulled apart in several directions. The crackling in his ears grew louder until it roared like the jets of an interplanetary rocket.
"Hang on, 'Landogarner!" Zunni shouted happily above the noise, somewhere in the darkness. She sounded completely undisturbed; was this unsettling experience his alone, or were these mad children simply used to it? The sensation of being pulled grew stronger, as though he were being stretched thin and sucked through a straw. It was like being in some roller-coastering simulation, but surely they must be between simulations . . . Orlando could hardly think. He seemed to be going fester, ever faster. . . .
Then the universe collapsed.
Everything stopped, as though something had seized him with a giant hand. He heard distant shrieks, the thin voices of children, but not happy now. Faintly, as through a thick door, those children were screeching in terror. Something had them . . . and it had Orlando, too.
The void began to tighten around him, a squeezing fist of nothingness that froze his thoughts and heart. He was helpless, suspended in an arc of slow electricity. The part of him that could still think struggled, but could not free itself. The darkness had weight, and it was crushing him. He could feel himself flattened, pressed, until his last remaining piece of self fluttered helplessly and ever more slowly, like a bird caught beneath a thick blanket.
I don't want to die! It was a meaningless thought, because there was nothing he could think or do to change what was happening, but it echoed over and over through a mind that was running down. All the death-trip simulations in the world could not have prepared him for this. I don't want to die! I don't want . . . to die. . . .
Don't . . . want. . . .
Astonishingly, the darkness was not infinite.
A tiny spark drew him up out of the unspeakable emptiness. He rose toward it helplessly and without volition, as though he were a corpse being dragged from the depths of a river. The spark became a blur of light. After the killing blackness, it seemed an impossible gift.
As he floated closer, the light grew, shooting out at all angles, scratching bright marks on the endless slate of night. Lines became a square; the square gained depth and was a cube, which then became something so mundane that for a moment he could not believe it. Floating in the void, becoming larger every moment, was an office—a simple room with desk and chairs. Whether he rose to it or it descended to him he could not tell, but it spread and surrounded him, and he felt the freezing numbness inside him shift and loosen a little.
This is a dream. I'm having a dream. He was certain—he had fallen asleep wearing his jack before and knew the sensation. It's the pneumonia, must be—a fever dream. But why can't I wake up?
The room was something like a medical examining room, but everything in it was made of gray concrete. The vast desk looked like a stone sarcophagus, something from a tomb. Behind the desk sat a man—or at least Orlando thought it was a man: where the face should be hung a radiant emptiness.
"I'm dreaming. aren't I?" he asked.
The being behind the desk did not seem to hear the question. "Why is it you wish to come and work for us?" The voice was high but soothing.
Never in a million years could he have anticipated such a conversation. "I . . . don't want to work for anyone. I mean, I'm just a kid."
A door in the wall behind the desk slowly swung open, revealing swirling, smoky blue light. Something moved inside this brilliance, a shadow with no discernible shape that nevertheless filled him with horror.
"He wants you," said the shining personage. "He'll take anyone—he's bored, you see. But on our side we have slightly higher standards. Our margin is very slim. Nothing personal."
"I can't have a job yet. I'm still in school, see. . . ." This was a dream—it had to be. Or maybe it was something worse. Maybe he was dying, and his mind had cobbled together this last fantasy.
The thing in the room beyond moved, making the light waver. Orlando could hear it breathing, the deep, ragged inhalations coming a long time apart. It was waiting. It would wait as long as necessary.
"Well, then I suppose you might as well step through." The figure behind the desk gestured toward the open door and the terrible something beyond. "If you don't want the job, you shouldn't have wasted our precious office hours. Things are busy just now, what with the expansion and the merger."
The h
oarse breathing became louder. Orlando knew that he did not ever want to see what made that noise.
"I've changed my mind," he said hurriedly. "I'm sorry. I want the job. Is it something to do with mathematics?" He knew he had good scores—wasn't that what grown-ups wanted? Good scores? He would have to ask his mother and father for permission to leave school, but when he told them about the thing in the other room, surely they would. . . .
The shining person stood. Was that rejection in the set of shoulders, in the cold white fire of the faceless face? Had he argued too long?
"Come and give me your hand," it said.
Without knowing how it happened, he was standing before the desk. The figure there put out a hand which burned like phosphorus, but without heat. At the same time, he could feel the cold air billowing out from the blue-lit room, air that made his skin shrink and his eyes water. Orlando reached out.
"You must remember to do your best." As the figure enveloped his hand with its own, he felt warmth flooding back into him so swiftly that it was almost painful. "Your scores were good. We'll take a chance."
"Don't forget Fredericks," he said, suddenly remembering. "I made him come—it's not his fault!"
The thing in the room beyond made a horrid noise, part bark, part wet sob. Its shadow moved forward, darkening the doorway and quenching the cube of light that was the office, blotting out even the brilliance of the thing that held Orlando's hand. He shouted in terror and stepped back, and then he was falling again.
Falling.
The setting sun, as it passed behind the haze that shrouded Calcutta, seemed to kindle the entire sky. An orange glow spread along the horizon, molten light against which the factory smokestacks stood in charcoal silhouette like the minarets of hell.
It has begun, he thought. Even the skies reflect it. The Dance has begun.
The holy man bent and lifted his single possession from the sand, then walked slowly down to the river to wash it clean. He was finished with it now, this last tie to the illusory world of Maya, but there were rituals to be observed. He must finish properly, as he had begun.
He squatted in the brown river, a delta finger of the mighty Ganges, and felt its sacred waters wash over him, thick with the effluvia of Calcutta's industrial and human waste. His skin itched and burned, but he did not hurry. He filled the bowl and then poured the water out again, rubbing and scraping with his long fingers in all the crannies until the bowl gleamed in the dying sunlight. He held it up before him with the teeth resting on his palm, and remembered the day he had come here to ready himself, a full two years before.
No one had troubled him as he picked through the ashes of the cremation ground. Even in the modern Indian Federation, where pulsingly new electronic nerves ran through the flesh of a nation as old and withered as humankind itself, there was still a superstitious respect for the Aghori. The cremation sites to which he and a few other devotees of Shiva the Destroyer still search for purity, were ceded to them, the most untouchable of untouchables. Those who believed welcomed evidence that the old ways were not completely gone. Others, who had once believed, turned away with a guilty shudder. And those who did not believe at all had better things to do than worry about what might go on in the festering bonepiles beside the great, filthy river.
On that day two years ago, when he had shed his city clothes as easily and completely as a snake sloughs its skin, he had carefully inspected every pile of human bones. Later, he would return to them in search of unconsumed flesh, for the servants of Shiva eat carrion as well as live with it, but on this first day he had been searching for something more durable. He had found it at last, complete but for a jawbone, sitting on the scorched remains of a rib cage. For an idle moment he had wondered upon what scenes the empty eye sockets had once looked, what tears they had shed, what thoughts, hopes, dreams had lived in the now-hollow braincase. Then he had reminded himself of the first lesson of the cremation ground: everything comes to this, but this, too, is illusion. Just as the death represented by the nameless skull was all death, so also was it no death, merely an illusion of the material world.
His mind refocused, he had taken the skull down to the riverside. As the sun, like this day's sun, had sunk down to disappear at last into the western haze, a torch doused in a basin of muddy water, he had found a sharp stone and begun to work. He had first placed the point of the stone in the middle of the forehead in the place where a living man placed a pundara mark, then scored the bone all the way around the skull's circumference, across frontal, temporal, occipital—words from his previous life that he now discarded as easily as he had put off his clothes. The circle delineated, he had taken the sharp edge of the stone—which was nevertheless not very sharp—and begun to saw.
For all his patience—he had spent that first night without a fire, in shivering nakedness, so as not to lose concentration—it had not been a simple task. Others of his kind, he knew, chose a skull which had already been weakened by fire, or which in some cases had already broken open, but, with some thought of the ultimate rigors before him, he had not allowed himself such luxury. Thus, it was not until the sun had reappeared in the east and turned the river to rosy copper that he lifted the top of the skull free and tossed it aside.
He had taken the rest of the skull down to the river then, his first time touching the holy waters since his arrival. Although he had been feeling a thirst like fire in his throat for hours, it was not until he had sanded down the edges of the hollow on a flat rock that he allowed himself to dip it into the river and drink. As Mother Ganges' polluted waters passed down his throat, replacing the thirst with another kind of fire, he had felt a great clarity transfix him.
Lord Shiva, he had thought, I reject the coils of Maya. I await your music.
Now, as he stared at the bowl for the last time, the Aghori began to speak. His voice, unused for months, was dry and faint, but he was not talking for anyone's benefit but his own.
"It came to Lord Shiva's ears that there were living in the forest of Taragam ten thousand heretical priests. These heretics taught that the universe is eternal, that souls have no lord, and that the performance of works alone is sufficient for salvation. Shiva determined to go among them and teach them the error of their ways.
"To Lord Vishnu the Preserver he said, 'Come, you will accompany me. I will put upon myself the seeming of a wandering yogi, and you will put upon yourself the appearance of the yogi's beautiful wife, and we will confound these heretical rishis.' So he and Vishnu disguised themselves and went among the priests in the forest of Taragam.
"All the wives of the priests found themselves filled with painful longing for the powerful yogi who came to them, and all the rishis themselves were full of longing for the yogi's wife. All the business of that place was disrupted, and there was great unrest among the priesthood. At last they decided to set a curse upon the yogi and his wife, but all of their cursings were to no effect.
"So the priests prepared a sacrificial fire, and from it summoned a dreadful tiger, which rushed upon Lord Shiva to destroy him. But Shiva only smiled a tender smile, then pulled the skin from the tiger using only his little finger, and wrapped that skin about himself for a shawl.
"The furious rishis next evoked a terrible serpent, vast and poisonous, but Shiva smiled again and snatched it up, then hung it about his neck for a garland. The priests could not believe their eyes.
Lastly, the priests brought forth a hideous black dwarf with a club that could shatter mountains, but Shiva only laughed and set his foot upon the dwarfs back and then began to dance. Shiva's dance is the source of all movement within the universe, and the vision of it, and the splendor of heaven's opening, filled the hearts of the heretical priests with awe and terror. They cast themselves down before him, crying for mercy. He danced for them his five acts, creation, preservation, destruction, embodiment, and release, and when they had seen Lord Shiva's dance, the priests were freed from illusion and became his devotees, and error was forever burned
from their souls.
"Thus it is that as the First Cause—sometimes called 'The Terror' and 'The Destroyer'—dances upon darkness, he contains in himself both the life and death of all things. So for this reason his servants dwell in the cremation ground, and the heart of his servant is like the cremation ground, wasted and desolate, where the self and its thoughts and deeds are burned away, and nothing remains but the Dancer himself."
When he had finished speaking, he bent his head and shut his eyes. After a few moments, he set his bowl down upon the sandy soil, then lifted a heavy stone and broke the bowl to pieces.
The sun had disappeared, leaving only a bloody ribbon of light stretched on the horizon behind the city. The Aghori stood up and walked through the ashes and smoke to the place among the reeds where he had left his briefcase twenty-four months earlier, protected by a plastic bag, nestled in a pile of rocks. He took it from the bag and placed his thumb against the lock, then opened it. The scent that rose from the case, to senses now used only to the smell of the charnel house, was that of another life, one that seemed impossibly different. For a moment he allowed his roughened fingers to indulge themselves against the almost unbelievable softness of the clothing that had awaited him there all this time, and marveled that he had once thoughtlessly worn such things. Then he lifted the silky bundle and took from beneath it a pad in an expensive leather case. He flipped open the lid and ran a finger across the touchscreen. It glowed into life, its spark-chip still charged. He uncapped his neurocannula and swabbed it with alcohol from the briefcase pocket—there were some things for which even the sacred water of Mother Ganges was not entirely suitable—then unspooled a fiberlink from the side of the pad and plugged it in.
Ten minutes later Nandi Paradivash unplugged the fiberlink and stood up. As he had anticipated, the message had been waiting. It was time to move on.
He pulled on the pants and shirt, helplessly conscious of their soft feel against his skin, then sat down on a rock to don his shoes. The cremation ground had prepared him, but for the next part of his journey he must return to the city. What he needed to do next would require access to serious bandwidth.