Alobar spent much of the voyage seated alone behind the bowsprit, enjoying the energy of the waves, refreshed by the salty sprays that needled him. For him, the blustery days provided calm introspection, a time for putting his long, strange life into some sort of perspective.
“Pan is right,” he thought. “Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing.” The sea hissed at him, but he didn't flinch. “If Kudra is dead, dead as all the others who have died, then I must refrain from driving myself mad by wishing her alive. I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case. If Kudra is dead like all the others, then it does me well to curtail my grief, lest my life become a deathly imitation through depression and sorrow.” He wiped a piece of foam from his eye and, without malice, flicked it back into the waves.
“Ah, but suppose she is dead in the manner of the Bandaloop, able to pass back and forth freely between This Side and the Other Side. Although six months have gone, that still is a reasonable speculation due to her unusual abilities and to the very significant fact that she did not leave behind a body to molder in the sod: she took it with her. Hopeful I am, yet to ride that hope each day from dawn to sleep the way this vessel rides the bucking ocean is also a kind of death. Certainly I sail to New France, with my lure of K23, intent upon meeting her there, but I should be prepared to thrive even if she fails to appear.”
On every side of him, the cold viridian waters stretched as far as he could see, and for every wave that reared and whinnied upon those waters, there was a question to rear and whinny in his mind. Did the Bandaloop really come and go as they pleased, with no regard to normal distinctions between “life” and “death"? Where was the proof? Who were the Bandaloop? Where were they now? Was Kudra with them? A swell of jealousy pitched him, as if he were a ship upon an autumn sea.
He had placed a lot of emphasis on the perfume, but what if its scent could never reach Kudra? Or, if it could, what if she was powerless to react, or, worse, what if perfume no longer mattered to her?
And, yes, what was the connection, if any, linking Kudra and Wren? Now there was a mystery. If Wren had written in the dust of the sitting room, wouldn't that mean that she, too, was alive behind that curtain that separates us from the Other Side? And since Wren knew nothing about dematerialization, since she regarded the notion of immortality as unnatural and vain, wouldn't her message on the mantelpiece mean that a person need not harbor immortalist ambitions in order to survive after death? Did the so-called Bandaloop practices merely provide a different brand of life — longer, healthier, more flexible — and have little or nothing to do with death per se? Suppose Kudra, not Wren, had written that word ("Erleichda!") employing Wren's language and handwriting, which she had somehow appropriated in the afterworld? Did a man's wives all blend into a single entity after their deaths? Would he blend with Navin the Ropemaker if and when he died? Was it wife soup and husband soup on the Other Side? Or was it simply soup?
At that moment, La Salle, the penniless young nobleman, approached the bow, intending to engage Alobar in genteel conversation, but Alobar's gaze was sweeping the Atlantic, and so absorbed was he in trying to imagine a soup as vast as that ocean that he heard not a word of the fellow's greeting. Miffed, La Salle walked away, his stride, despite the heaving of the deck, revealing the stubborn pride that a few years later would prevent him from admitting that he was lost in Texas when he was supposed to be exploring Louisiana (his frustrated men finally assassinated him, depriving him of the opportunity to found New Orleans, America's perfumed metropolis).
Alobar continued to survey the sea. Was that wave over there Kudra and this one Wren? Or was there a drop of Kudra, a drop of Wren in each and every wave that rose and fell? Wren. He had loved Kudra so long and so well that he'd almost forgotten how he'd once loved Wren. It had been Wren who comforted him when that first white hair slithered like a viper into his happy garden, Wren who had aided and abetted his subsequent subterfuge even though she'd been shocked by his crazy notions of personal identity and survival, Wren who had plucked him from the burial mound — and that very night spread her legs for his successor. Ah, women: the mystery of them sometimes seemed greater than the mystery of death.
One thing was certain, had it not been for Wren he wouldn't be here, seven hundred — yes, seven hundred! — years later, embarked upon the strangest adventure of his strange life. And now, after all that time, Wren had contacted him. To tell him what? Lighten up!
Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play — more than piety, more than charity or vigilance — was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.
Quite damp now from the spray, Alobar took no step to go below. He had made one promise in the teeth of the sea, and he would stay to make another. He thought that he would persist in his devotion to his individual consciousness. Perhaps it was selfish. Perhaps someday, despite his efforts, he would end up in the one big soup, anyhow. Yet, looking at his life and the life of the world from the vantage of seven continuous and well-traveled centuries, he would say this to anyone with ears brave enough to hear it: the spirit of one individual can supersede and dismiss the entire clockworks of history.
“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”
If there was any crack in his conviction, a seam opened, perhaps, by remembered teachings of the Buddhists at Samye, it closed when he turned his face from the stiff salt air and caught a whiff of K23.
Alobar was benefiting from the voyage, but for Pan it was a sea horse of a different color. It was, in fact, the most terrible experience of his life.
The old god had endured severe setbacks in the past: the disdain of Apollo and his snooty followers, the rise of cities, the hostility of the philosophers — from Aristotle to Descartes — with their smug contentions that man was reasonable and nature defective, and, most damaging of all, the concentrated efforts of the Christian church to discredit his authority by identifying him as Satan. The arrogant attacks, the dirty tricks, the indifference had rendered him weak and invisible, and might have destroyed him altogether had not an unreasonable affection for him persisted in isolated places: hidden valleys and distant mountain huts; and in the hearts of heretics, lusty women, madmen, and poets.
Recently, he'd been yanked from his indigenous crags and set down in an urban environment, a move that some might have thought would apply the coup de grace. Indeed, it was hard on him, but one cannot truly escape nature by paving streets and erecting buildings, and Pan found in Paris enough grass and trees in its parks and vacant lots, enough animal compulsions in the souls of its citizens, to sustain him. A ship, however, was a different matter.