"When first you begin to see," Hummingbird said, voice soft against the respirator's background hiss, "you will see too much. In this darkness, you are sensitive to even the least perturbation. By day, you would be almost blinded by the immense detail of the world. Right now, you are aware of the electromagnetic field around living things. The Midge is illuminated because our aircraft carry vibrations from their engines, from the motion of flight, from the powered systems onboard."
"I'm seeing an electromagnetic field?" Gretchen started to laugh. "That's impossible!"
"You see the light from a glowbean or a wand, don't you? This is the same, only much much fainter." Hummingbird took hold of her shoulders and turned her toward the open plain. "The 'helper' I gave you has broken down a barrier in your mind, a perceptual filter to which you've become accustomed since you were born. Look out there, into the emptiness. What do you see?"
"Nothing…wait, there's a faint radiance along the dune faces."
"Heat is radiating from the earth. Soon it will be gone and the sand and air will be the same temperature. Then there will be no difference for you to perceive."
Gretchen gave the old Mйxica a sick look. "Is this what you see? All the time?"
Hummingbird shook his head. "No. A student on the path must overcome many obstacles — this is the obstacle of clarity. I fear…" His voice changed timbre and Gretchen was aware of a change in the glow outlining his face. "The drug you took is one given to students who have been training and preparing themselves for months. But we have no time to guide your feet along the traditional path — "
"You're not supposed to be training me at all!" Gretchen interjected suddenly. Memories flooded back and she remembered the strange conversation in darkness. "I heard voices arguing as I slept — 'only men may become tlamatinime.' Women must become…" She paused, trying to remember. The memories were fading, scattering like pine needles in a fall wind. "Skirt-of-knives said…she said…ah, it'sgone."
Hummingbird had become quite still, his gaze fixed on Gretchen's face. "You heard a woman's voice? An old woman?"
"No — she was young — but there was an old man, he sounded like a stage actor."
The nauallis made a queer barking sound, which Gretchen remembered was what passed for laughter for the old man. "She was young long ago. But I was thinking of that day while you slept." He sighed, an honest sound of regret. Then he began to sing, but only for a moment. "We leave the flowers, the songs, the earth. Truly, we go, truly we part."
"You were there." Gretchen knew the truth of the matter even as she spoke. "You were in the room, a young man. The old actor was sitting in a wooden chair. He stood up to leave."
"Yes. And he was right — he is right — and I've broken an ancient law, speaking to you as I've done, giving you the 'helper', setting your feet on this path."
"I am in danger?"
"You've always been in danger," Hummingbird said in a sharp tone. "But now, today, you must learn to see again."
"I think," Gretchen said, "I see too much!"
Hummingbird nodded. "Yes — listen closely, there is not much night left. Your mind has been forced awake by the 'helper.' A veil of perception has been cast aside, letting you see as a human organism naturally perceives the world. Your mind is now exposed to a flood of data — a flood which in normal course is filtered, flattened, reduced to aggregates and symbols — but your consciousness is not ready to operate in such an environment.
"Now you must learn to concentrate on the important. You must learn to see selectively."
Gretchen felt itchy all over and shook her arms and hands. The z-suit felt strangely tight. "Didn't I see before? I mean — you're saying this sharpness, with everything seeming in focus all at once, even things far away — is what happens anyway?"
"Even so." Hummingbird raised his hand in front of her face. "But your mind was hiding the true world from your consciousness. Look at my hand tonight and you see every single bump and groove in my glove, you see the fire of my bodily electrical field, you see each pore in my skin. But yesterday? Yesterday you saw an idea of a gloved hand. An abstraction. A great part of human mental activity is devoted to reducing this raw flood of images and smells and sensations to remembered symbols. A hand. A man. A dog. An ultralight."
He swung his hand, indicating everything within sight. "Those symbols are not real, but they are very convenient. They let the lazy mind operate in such a confusing world." Gretchen could hear a grin in the man's voice. "Have you seen a baby watching the world? Their eyes are so wide! Their entire mentation is focused upon trying to understand everything all at once. A baby becomes a child and then an adult by replacing raw truth with layers of abstraction. By learning speech. By learning to read and to write. All those tools — the tools which build Imperial society and our science and our technology — hide the true world behind symbols."
"I…I understand." Gretchen felt faint and swayed. Clumsily, she sat down on the sand. The sensation of touching the earth, the sound of sand shifting under her hands, was nearly overwhelming. "What do I do…to be able to, say, move around?"
"Your body can handle everything," Hummingbird said wryly. "If you let it remember. Come, stand up. Let's go for a walk."
Nearly an hour later, Gretchen climbed gingerly across a slab of wind-polished stone and came to a halt, staring down into a wide bowl-shaped depression. To her right, a black lightless cliff rose up into the night. The bowl below her was strangely smooth.
"Where are we?" Anderssen slid down a splintered section of rock and came to a halt a handspan from the surface of the bowl. "This is hard-packed dust," she said, looking up at Hummingbird, who crouched atop the slab. "Not even sand."
The old Mйxica pointed to the cliff. Gretchen turned and saw — suddenly, as if the opening had materialized from the rock in her single moment of inattention — a door. She stiffened, feeling the freezing cold keenly through the insulated layers of her z-suit.
"This is where Russovsky found the cylinder." Hummingbird spoke very softly, though the trapezoidal opening in the cliff-face was entirely dark and still. "Do you see anything?"
Gretchen felt the cold settle into her bones and the pit of her stomach. Learning how to walk again had been easy — just a matter of keeping her mind occupied elsewhere. The body remembered how to breathe, how to walk, how to keep its balance — as long as the mind didn't try to interfere. Talking to Hummingbird about nothing of any importance had let her mind settle and regain its footing in simple physicality. The encompassing darkness restricted her vision to faint thready ghosts of heat and electricity. In time even they seemed to dim and fade as she got used to them. The nauallis claimed she could focus now, once her mind adapted, to bring clarity to bear on a single object.
"Go on," he said, remaining atop the slab. "Let yourself see."
Gretchen sucked on her water tube, eyes closed, feeling her heartbeat speed up. Then she opened her eyes again and looked at the doorway.
"Nothing unusual," she said after a moment. "Worked stone. I don't see any lights inside. Should I?"
"I don't know." Hummingbird made his way down into the bowl. "I came here last night and watched for a time. There were no lights, no blue glow. But I feel uneasy. Everything here is so old…worn down by time. Such places are dangerous, being all of a single cloth. Differences," he said, "are easier to perceive."
"Are we going to go in?" Gretchen still felt cold and a nagging thought was beginning to curdle in the back of her thoughts.