The Wild. David Zindell
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and considerable pain. But then he stood away from his ship, and his bare feet seemed to draw strength from the soft, cold touch of the sand. He stood straight and still, looking down the broad sweep of the beach. To his left, the great grey ocean roared and surged and broke upon the hardpack at the water’s edge. To his right, a dark green forest of fir trees flowed like an ocean of a different kind, toward the east and south, and northwards where it swelled up into a headland of rocks and steeply rising hills. There was also something else. Just above the foredunes and beach grasses, where the sand gave way to the towering trees, there was a house. It was a small chalet of shatterwood beams and granite stone, and Danlo suddenly remembered that he knew this house quite well.
No, no, it is not possible.
He stood staring up at this lovely house for a while, and then the cold wind blew in from the ocean and drowned him in memories. Soon he began shaking and shivering. The wind found his belly, and he was suddenly cold as if he had drunk an ocean of ice water. He looked down at his lean, ivory legs quivering in the cold. He was still as naked as a pilot in the pit of his ship, but now that he stood on soft shifting sands, he realized that he was naked to the world. Because he needed to protect himself from the bitter wind and cover his nakedness, he returned to his ship to fetch his boots, his heavy wool cloak, and the racing kamelaika he had once worn while skating the streets of Neverness.
My mind is naked to Her. My memories, my mind.
The Entity, he thought, could read his memories exactly enough to incarnate them as wood and stone – either that or She could make him see this unforgettable house out of his memory where no house really existed. But because he thought that the little white house beneath the forest must be real, he quickly left his ship and returned to the beach. He began trudging up the dunes, the fine sands slipping beneath his boots and his weakened muscles. He worked his way forward and up against the pull of the Earth as if he were drunk on strong alcoholic spirits. Soon, however, with every step taken as he drew nearer the house, he began to acclimatize to the planet’s gravity. He remembered how to walk on treacherous sands. He remembered other things as well. Once, in this simple house of white granite that he could now see too well, there had been long nights of passion and love and happiness. Once, a woman had lived here, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the great heart and broken life whom he had loved and lost. But she had fled this house. In truth, she had fled Danlo and his burning memories. It was said that she had even fled Neverness for the stars. Although Danlo did not think it was possible that she could have found her way to this mysterious planet deep within the Solid State Entity, he hurried up the beach straight towards this house to discover what (or who) lay inside.
Tamara, Tamara – in this house you promised to marry me.
At last, on top of a small, grass-covered hill, at the end of a path laid with flat sandstones, he came up to the house’s door. It was thick and arched and sculpted out of shatterwood, a dense black wood native only to islands on the planet Icefall. Shatterwood trees had never grown on Old Earth, and so it was a mystery how the Entity had found shatterwood with which to build this house. He reached out to touch the door. The wood was cold and hard and polished to an impossible smoothness in the way that only shatterwood can be polished. He traced his finger across the lovely grain of the door, remembering. Somehow the Entity had exactly duplicated the door of Tamara’s house. In Danlo’s mind, just behind his eyes, there were many doors, but this particular one stood out before all others. He remembered exactly how the door planks had joined together in an almost seamless merging of the grain; he could see every knot and ring and dark whorl as if he were standing on the steps of this house on Neverness about to knock on the door. But he was not on Neverness. He stood before the door of an impossible house above a desolate and windswept beach, and the pattern of the whorls twisting through the shatterwood exactly matched the bright black whorls that burned through his memory.
How is it possible? he wondered. How is it possible that all things remember?
For a long time he stood there staring at the door and listening to the cries of the seagulls and other shore birds on the beach below. Then he made a fist and rapped his knuckles against the door. The sound of resonating wood was hollow and ancient. He knocked again, and the sound of bone striking against wood was lost to the greater sounds of the sweeping wind and the ocean that rang like a great deep bell far below him. A third time he knocked, loudly with much force, and he waited. When there was no answer, he tried the clear quartz doorknob, which turned easily in his hand. Then he opened the door and stepped across the threshold into the cold hallway inside.
‘Tamara, Tamara!’ he called out. But immediately, upon listening to the echoes that his voice made against the hall stones, he knew the house was empty. ‘Tamara, Tamara – why aren’t you home?’
Out of politeness and respect for the rules of Tamara’s house, he removed his boots before walking through her rooms. Because it was a small house laid out across a single floor, there were only five rooms: the hallway gave out onto the brightly lit meditation room, which was adjoined by the bathing room and fireroom at the rear of the house, and the tea room and the small kitchen at the front. It took him almost no time to verify that the house was indeed empty. That is, it was empty of human beings or evidence of present habitation. True, the kitchen was well-stocked with teas, cheeses, and fruits – and fifty other types of foods that Tamara had delighted in preparing for him. But everything about the kitchen – the neat rows of coloured teas in the jars, the oranges and bloodfruit piled high in perfect pyramids inside large blue bowls, the tiled counters completely free of toast crumbs or honey drippings – bespoke a room that hadn’t been used recently, but rather prepared for a guest. Similarly, the cotton cushions in the tea room were new and undented, as if no one had ever sat on them. And in the fireroom the shagshay furs smelled of new wool instead of sweat, and the stones of the two fireplaces were clean of ashes or soot. It was as if the Entity, in making this house, had perfectly incarnated the details of his memory but had been unable to duplicate the chaos and disorder (and dirt) that came of living a normal, organic life. But certainly She had duplicated everything else. The rosewood beams of the ceiling and the skylights were exactly as he remembered them. In the tea room, the tea service was set out on the low, lacquered table. And along the sill of the window overlooking the ocean, there was the doffala bear sculpture that he remembered so well and the seven oiled stones. Each object in the house was perfectly made and perfectly matched his memory. Except for one thing. When Danlo walked into the meditation room he immediately noticed a sulki grid hanging on the wall by the fireplace. And that was very strange because Tamara had never collected or used outlawed technology. She had never liked experiencing computer simulations or artificial images or sounds. And even if she’d had a taste for cartoons and other such seemingly real holographic displays, she never would have allowed them to be made in her meditation room. Because Danlo wondered what programs this sulki grid had been programmed to run, he pitched his voice toward it, saying simply, ‘On, please.’
For a moment nothing happened. Most likely, he supposed, the sulki grid would be keyed to some voice other than his own. He stood there breathing deeply, and he was almost relieved that the sulki grid appeared to be dead. He had imagined (and feared) that an imago of Tamara would appear before him, as tall and naked and achingly beautiful as ever she had been as a real woman. And then without warning the spiderweb neurologics of the grid flared into life, projecting an imago into the centre of the room. It was like no imago that Danlo had ever seen before. It was all flashing colours and shifting lights, like a column of fire burning up from the floor – but not burning any thing, neither the inlaid shatterwood floor tiles, nor the hanging plants, nor the air itself. Soon the display settled out into a kind of pattern with which he was very familiar. It was an array of ideoplasts, not the ideoplasts of mathematics, but rather those of the universal syntax. A scarce three feet in front of his face, glowing through the air in jewel-like glyphs of emerald and sapphire and tourmaline, were the three-dimensional symbols of the language beyond language of the holoists that he had learned as a young novice. It was a highly refined and beautiful language that could represent and relate any aspect of reality from the use of alien archetypes in the poets of the Fourth Dark Age to the pattern of neural storm singularities in the brain of a dreaming autist. Ideoplasts could symbolize the paradoxes of the cetic’s theory