The tent was just big enough for the girl to stand up in. It was pitched at a crossroads in the desert, where two tracks crossed the sea of sand. It would have been a town or even a city long since, but the nearest water was three days" ride away. The tent had been here for four days, and might be here another two or three, depending on how long the man stayed in the dream-leaf sleep. She took up a pitcher from a small tray and filled a cup with water. She went over to the man, and put the cup to his lips, holding one hand under his chin as she carefully tipped the cup.
The man drank, still moving. He turned his face away after he'd drunk half the water in the cup. She took a cloth and dabbed at his face, removing a little of the sweat.
Chosen, he said to himself. Chosen, Chosen, Chosen. A long way to a strange place. Taking the Chosen one through the scorching dust and the mad tribes of the badlands to the lush meadows and gleaming spires of the Perfumed Palace on the cliff. Now he reaped a little reward.
The tent sits between the trade routes, outside turned in for the season, and in the tent sits a man, a soldier, back from uncounted wars, scarred and seared and broken and healed and broken and healed and repaired and made good again… and for once he was unwary, guard down, committing his mind to a wild, affecting drug, and his body to the care and protection of a young girl.
The girl, whose name he did not know, brought water to his lips and a cool cloth to his brow. He remembered a fever, a hundred and more years ago, a thousand and more years away, and the hands of another girl, cool and tender, soothing and smoothing. He heard the lawn birds keen from the grounds outside the great house that lay in the estate cradled in the broad river's bend; an oxbow of calm in the livid landscape of his memories.
Torpor-heavy, the drug flowed through him, winding and unwinding, a current of random ordering. (He remembered a stone beach on the river's banks, where the ever-flowing water had swept silt, sand, gravel, pebbles, stones and boulders in a linear progression of size and weight, ordering — through its steady, liquid weight — the elemental stone in a curve, like something distributed on a graph.)
The girl watched and waited, calm that the stranger had taken to the drug like one of their own, and was himself calm under its influence. She hoped this was, as he seemed to be, an exceptional man, and not an ordinary one, for that would imply their nomad kind was not the uniquely strong race they believed they were.
She had feared the power of the drug would be too much for him, and that he would shatter like a red-glowing cooking pot dropped into water, the way she had heard other strangers had, vainly thinking the dream-leaf was just another dalliance in their self-indulgent lives. But he had not fought it. For one who was a soldier, used to fighting, he had displayed a rare insight in just giving in without a struggle, and accepting the prescriptions of the drug. She admired this in an outsider. She doubted the conquerors would be so pliably strong. Even some of their own young men — often the most impressive, in every other way — could not accept the crushing gifts the dream-leaf brought, and yelped and gibbered through an abbreviated nightmare, mewling for their mother's breast, pissing and shitting and crying and screaming their most shaming fears to the desert winds. The drug was rarely fatal, in the supervised quantities that had become ritual, but the after-effects could be; more than one young brave had chosen the blade in the belly to the disgrace of knowing a leaf had been stronger than he.
It was, she reflected, a pity that this man was not one of their own kind; he might have made a good husband, and sired many strong sons and cunning daughters. Many marriages were made in dream-leaf tents, and she had at first taken it as an insult that she had been asked to shepherd the stranger through his leaf-days, until she'd been convinced it was an honour, that he had done their people a great service, and she would be allowed her pick of the tribe's young novitiates, when their testing time came.
And, when he took the dream-leaf, he had insisted on the stage that they normally reserved for their elder soldiers and matriarchs; no child's dose for him. She watched him circle, flexing continually from the waist, as though he sought to stir something in his brain.
By the roads, by the crossed signs of those single lines, worn by trade, commerce and passing knowledge; thin trails in the dust, pale marks in the brown page of the desert. The tent stood in Summer, when the white side was turned out and the black side in. In Winter it was outside-in.
He imagined that he felt his brain revolve inside his skull.
In the white tent that was black, and both at once, by the crossroads on the desert, a white/black impermanence like a fallen leaf before the winds blow, trembling in the breeze beneath the poised wave that was the stone circumference of mountains, capped by snow and ice like foam frozen in the high thin air.
He swept away, leaving the tent, so that it fell away beneath him, became a speck beside the thin trails in the dust, and the mountains swam past, white capping ochre, and the trails and the tent disappeared, and the mountains shrank, and the glaciers and the starveling snows of summer became white claws on the rock, and the curved edge pressed in, compressing the view, so that the globe beneath became a coloured boulder, stone, pebble, gravel, grain of sand, speck of silt-dust, then was lost in the sandstorm whirl of the great revolving lens that was the home of all of them, which itself became a fleck on a thin bubble surrounding emptiness, skeined to its lonely siblings by the fabric that was only a slimly different articulation of nothingness.
More specks. All vanished. Darkness reigned.
He was still there.
Beneath it all, he'd been told, was more. All you had to do, Sma said, was think in seven dimensions and see the whole universe as a line on the surface of a torus, starting at a point, becoming a circle as it was born, then expanding, moving up the inside of the torus, over the top, to the outside, then relapsing, falling back in, shrinking. Others had gone before it, others came after it (the greater/smaller spheres outside of/inside their own universe, seen in four dimensions). Different time-scales lived outside and inside the torus; some universes expanding forever, others living less than a blink of an eye.
But it was too much. It all meant too much to matter. He had to concentrate on what he knew and what he was and what he had become, for the moment at least.
He found a sun, a planet, out of all that existence, and fell towards it, knowing this was the place, the font of all his dreams and memories.
He searched for meaning, found ashes. Where does it hurt? Well, just here, actually. A wrecked summerhouse, smashed and burned. No sign of a chair.
Sometimes, like now, the banality of it all quite took his breath away. He stopped and checked, for there were drugs that did that; took your breath away. He was still breathing. Probably his body was already set up to ensure that anyway, but the Culture — Chaos bless it twice — had set up a further program in him, to make certain. Cheating, as far as these people were concerned (he saw the girl in front of him, and watched her, through mostly-closed eyes, then closed again), but that was just too bad; he'd done something for them, little though they really knew it, and now they could do something for him.
But the throne, Sma had said once, is the ultimate symbol for many cultures. To sit, in splendour, is the highest articulation of power. The rest come to you; lower, often bowing, frequently backing off, sometimes prostrate (though that is always a bad sign, said the Culture's blessed statistics), and to sit, to be made less animal by that evolutionarily uncalled-for posture, signified the ability to use.
There were some small civilisations — barely more than tribes, Sma had said — where they slept sitting, in special sleep chairs, because they believed that to lie down was to die (did they not always find the dead lying down?).