Crazy. Witless. Typical Faye.
But you don’t want me moaning how screwed up I was. Either you’re sick of that too, or you don’t believe me. Just a middle-class drama queen, blathering about her dodgy past when she seems pretty damned functional. Good health… addiction-free… loving family… not overly crippled by depression, neurosis or psychosis. Not even ugly with freckles anymore. Stop complaining, bitch.
Fair enough.
But hating the way you get the mopes doesn’t make it easier to step clear of the past. Or the present. Or the future when it scares the bejeezus out of you.
Fear is fear. Pain is pain. Even when you know you’re being boring.
It bored me too. Frustrated me. I kept telling myself, "Get over it!"
Words, words, words. Words don’t make willpower… and anyway, willpower isn’t the right tool for some jobs. Instead of holding on with white willpower knuckles, sometimes you have to let go.
So. There, in my office, scared of the world-soul Xe, worried about Tic’s sanity and shamed by his question, "Stick or bag?"… I finally threw myself back on my Vigil training. Meditation. Acceptance. Discipline without discipline. Like I’d been working on for seven years.
Down into my center — the part that breathes if you just get out of its way.
Don’t see this as an apocalyptic transformation; don’t think I grappled down my fear for all time. Nothing is ever so easy. But I sheltered back into my training and let myself take a step.
Forward.
The mind is a bottle filled with sugar syrup, salt water, and vinegar. Empty it.
The mind is a book filled with poetry, laments, and curses. Click delete.
Empty bottle.
Empty book.
Empty mind.
If you dip your hand into the sea, then scoop it out again, what do you have? No more than a sheen of wet over your palm. You can’t capture handfuls of water by strength; you can’t possess it. But if you dip your hand into the briny and leave it there — if you let yourself feel the cold and smell the salt — then who’s to say you aren’t holding the whole ocean?
Don’t seek, don’t avoid…just observe. If you want to activate a shy part of the brain, let the rest fall silent. When the consciousness shuts up, quieter voices may speak.
Memory isn’t linear… except tiny patches, ten seconds here, half a minute there. Only flicky-brief flashes where you can track through a sequence of events without skipping ahead, without finding other memories dragged in by association. The meat of your brain squirms against linearity, terrified of falling into some autistic steady state that locks out the world.
Then we Homo saps come along, and sludge-wits that we are, almost every activity we invent for ourselves moves in a straight line. Step-by-step instructions, agendas for business meetings, timetables and milestones for working on a project. Our whole culture = first A, then B, then C. Binding the tiger with a chain of one link after another.
One thing at a time. Society pounds away at us, "It’s wicked-bad-sinful even to contemplate the possibility of experiencing everything all at once."
But I wanted everything — everything I said and did that night before Chappalar died.
I opened myself to the memories: not commanding them to come, because the commanding part of my brain wasn’t the nub I wanted to activate.
Open the inner eye. Just see what’s there.
Chappalar and me saying good night in front of the Vigil’s office. The dear funny sight of him bouncing through the grove of other office trees in our neighborhood. Me walking down to the transit station, where I caught a scuttler for home.
No sign of anyone following either of us.
Off the scuttler and heading for my home compound. Preoccupied, gloomily self-absorbed: worried about the link-seed bomb ticking in my head.
Sudden memories of a different time — don’t fight the change of subject, let it happen if that’s what my brain served up. The face of a senior student I’d known marginally, someone who died from data tumor early in mushor.
An imagined picture of scalding blood, squirting from his eyes. The horror his family must have felt. The horror my family would feel if it happened to me. Our kids, trying all their hard-won attitudes, arrogance, outrage, coolness, and finding nothing that shook the grief. My husbands and wives with a few more funerals under their belts, but still deep-struck because they depended on me… depended that I’d be the one in trouble, the one who needed close watching, the first one all eyes turned to when someone asked, "What shall we do tonight?" because Faye might’ve got one of her moods…
Moods. A torrent of moods flooding into me… not memory anymore, but Remembrance: touching all the moods I’d ever had, not just the night prior to Chappalar’s death, but all the angry moods before, all the guilty moods after.
Everything all at once.
Not data tumor. The deluge didn’t come from the datasphere but from my own mind, chagrins and shames I’d tried to squash down, and joys that I’d run from because they were undeserved, too good for someone like me…
My whole subconscious suddenly exploded to the surface, like an eruption of gas bursting out of deep ocean, wretched stinks and sweet lost perfumes, hates, loves, humiliations, triumphs…
Subconscious becoming conscious for one gasping moment of totality.
Then it was gone again, the ocean clapping back into place, subconscious plunging into drowned depths, the moment of revelation getting swallowed under heavy black water.
I opened my eyes. Tic was watching me closely. He hadn’t moved; but he must have known what happened by the look on my face. Softly he said, "Some proctors grow addicted to that experience. That moment of knowledge. They don’t enjoy it, but they have to look again and again. Others would rather die than repeat it. Wisdom lies between those two extremes: use memory as a tool, not a drug. But. Fanobo roi shunt, aghi shunt po."
An Oolom proverb: acting wisely is easy, until it ISN’T.
I said nothing. Speechless. Breathless. In the quiet, Tic’s goggles hissed out a puff of mist to keep his eyes moist.
"I didn’t tell anyone about Pump Station 3," I whispered. "Not by name. Chappalar must have mentioned it to someone. His lover. Maya."
Maya.
"Who is this Maya?" Tic asked.
"A human woman. I’ve never met her myself — just heard some of the other proctors talk about her. Chappalar said she was a hundred and ten years old."
"And Chappalar saw her the night before he was killed?"
"So he told me."
"Long-term friendship or recent acquaintance?"
"Recent, I think."
Tic raised his eyes to the ceiling a moment, then lowered his head again to look straight at me. "There’s no such woman in Bonaventure."
I was a hair away from asking, "How do you know?" but stopped myself in time. Tic must have used his link-seed to call the world-soul and check our city census database. The search wouldn’t take long — since Homo saps had only lived on Demoth half a century, there weren’t a lot of us aged 110. Sure, a few of Demoth’s original humans arrived in their fifties or older; but not many. Colonization was a sport played mostly by the young.
"She might not have told Chappalar her right age," I said. "Humans sometimes fudge how old they are."
"And a charming foible it is," Tic answered. "Never trust a species that tells the truth about everything — they’re either stupid, arrogant, or only interested in documentaries. But there’s no human, male or female, anywhere over the age of one hundred with a name that’s close to the word Maya… not on the voters’ lists in all Great St. Caspian." Oh. Pity.