– Come, said Grimus. This is the last part of the Dance of Wisdom and Death.
The Stone Rose was actually not a rose at all. Flapping Eagle watched as Grimus set it, as it lay in its coffin in the small secret room, and began to understand.
Around the top of a central shaft, or stem, were a series of thin, star-shaped slabs of stone. Flapping Eagle counted seven such slabs. The top two had four points each, the next eight, the next sixteen, and so forth. Each slab rotated independently around the central stem. Setting the Rose appeared to consist of aligning the slabs in different relationships to each other. This is what Grimus was doing now. About halfway down the Stem, at convenient holding-height, was a sort of bulge.
– In some Dimensions, said Grimus, the Object is different. It varies according to the capabilities of the ruling species, you see. There are settings for space-warp, Travel to parallel dimensions, and so forth.
Flapping Eagle spoke.
– I haven’t changed my mind, Grimus, he said. I am going to break that thing. You can’t control it. It controls you. And then there are the blinks. The Rose is damaged, Grimus. It is dangerous. It has made you dangerous.
Grimus’ eyes gleamed for a moment, then went dull.
– Please, he said, and there was a new pleading tone in his voice. I would like to show you just one more discovery of mine. If it does not persuade you of the enormous value of the Rose, of the importance of preserving it and maintaining it when I am dead, then I will allow you to do whatever you wish. Just one discovery.
Flapping Eagle could not deny him. It was a small thing to concede. Now that he had the Rose in his reach, Grimus could not hold him back. After all, Flapping Eagle told himself, he was armed. Not just with bow and arrow, but with a powerful obligation. To Virgil. To his own, destructive past. This time his Ions could be put to good use: if he was a destroyer, let him at least destroy dangerous things.
Grimus had moved to a darkened corner of the small room. He took a cloth off a small object lying there. It was a transparent, spherical shape with a hançlle on each side. As Grimus picked it up by one of its handles, it began to glow.
– I foresaw I would have great difficulty in getting you to see my point of view, he said. It was for this reason that I conceptualized the Subsumer. If you take the other handle, we can communicate telepathically. Through the medium of this sphere. Are you willing?
Flapping Eagle hesitated for a moment.
– Are you afraid? asked Grimus in a child’s sing-song voice.
Flapping Eagle said: -No. He could take anything which Grimus, the ancient infant, could take. He had already proved the strength of his will, after all.
He put down his ju-ju stick on the edge of the Rose’s coffin and came up to Grimus. Then, taking a deep breath, he grasped the proferred handle of the-what was it?- the Subsumer.
The last thing he remembered as Flapping Eagle was Grimus’ high, shrill voice saying delightedly: -My old mother always told me, you’ve got to trick people into accepting new ideas.
(I was Flapping Eagle.)
(I was Grimus.)
Self. My self. Myself and he alone. Myself and his self in the glowing bowl. Yes, it was like that. Myself and himself pouring out of ourselves into the glowing bowl.
Easy does it. You swallow me, I swallow you. Mingle, commingle. Come mingle. Grow together, come. You into me into you. His thoughts.
Yes, it was like that, Printing. Like printing. Press, his thoughts pressed over mine, under mine, through and into mine, his thoughts mine. Mine his. The swallow is a graceful bird. Two swallows, and then one half-eagle-half-him and the other half-him-half-eagle. Yes, it was like that. We were one there in the glowing bowl, two here in the flesh. Yes.
My son. The mind of Grimus rushing to me. You are my son, I give you my life. I have become you, I have become you are me. The mind of Grimus, rushing through. The mandarin monk released into me in an orgasm of thinking. The halfbreed, semisemitic prisoner of war and his contradictions, the aportance of self coexisting with the utter necessity of imparting that self, cruel necessity, ineluctable, the mind of Grimus rushing through. Like a beating of wings his self flying in. My son, my son, what father fathered a son like this, as I do in my sterility.
The light faded in the glowing sphere; the transfer was complete. I let go of my handle-my body was mine to command once more. He released his grip as well. The sphere fell.
And shattered on the stone floor.
– Now, he said. Now we are the same. Now you understand.
Mad? What is mad? It would be easy to call him mad, but he is in my head now and I can see his whys. They are not whys which go well into words. The undermining horror of prison camp, the destruction of his human dignity, of his belief in the whole human race; the subsequent burrowing away, away from the world, into books and philosophies and mythologies, until these became his realities, these his friends and companions, and the world was just an awful nightmare; the monkish man finding beauty in birds and stories. And then the Rose and a chance to shape a world and a life and a death exactly as he wanted, and naturally since he had no regard for his species he did not care what he did to them. They had done enough to him. To his birds, he was kind. He gathered them around him and lived out his favourite story, his ornithological myth. Mad? What is mad? To him, ideas were the sole justification for existence; and when he found the knowledge and power to play with his ideas, he could not be stopped. Knowledge corrupts; absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely. Yes, he was mad. But he is in me, and I know him.
There is still an I. An I within me that is not him.
We are at war about the Rose.
– Look, said Grimus. (I was in him as he is in me. The Subsumer works both ways.)
He held up a small mirror, held it against his chest, angled up towards my face.
My hair had become white. It was his face now, his face entirely, his head on my shoulders.
I was Flapping Eagle.
A second secret door, leading into the room where Media slept. This small room, at the very centre of the house, adjoining most of its rooms. Grimus (who was partly Flapping Eagle) led Media by the hand to where I stood, by the coffin which held the Rose.
– Stay here, he said. Look after each other. They will come soon. But even Bird-Dog does not know about this room.
There was fear in his face. I recognized it; it was my fear. It was the me which he had imbibed that was scared of dying.
– You will not harm the Rose now, he said. We are the same.
And he left.
– He’s changed you, she whispered.
Media was looking at me, wide-eyed.
I held her hand. At least she was the same. One constant thing in a transfigured universe.
The Rose. The him in me had a will of its own, and it was forcing me to bow to its wishes. The I in me was weakened, enfeebled by the shock of subsumation. I stood looking at the Rose for a long, long time. The bump on its stem seemed to acquire a great fascination for me, a magnetic attraction. Perhaps it was the him in me which did that.
Suddenly, I grasped the Rose. By the bump. It fitted well into my hand. Then I screamed, and Media screamed. I screamed in pain. She screamed because I disappeared from the room altogether.
I had Travelled.
The pain is caused by one’s first experience of the Outer Dimensions. Suddenly the universe dissolves, and for a fraction of time you are simply a small bundle of energy adrift in a sea of unimaginably vast forces. It is a devastating, agonizing piece of knowledge. Then it-the universe- assembled once again.