I was born and raised to be a member of the administrative classes. It went with my genes and it went with my education but despite everything that Their Majesties believe, genes and education will never be the sole determining factors in the life cycle of the human zygote. The flaw of experience remains: the flaw of freedom.
So now I’ll try to trace the flaw back to the start - back to Nouakchott. I loved Their Majesties then. How could I not? I was ten years old in the rich lands of the New Sahara. My parents lavished me with love and attention. I lived in a splendid old house with a lush bamboo garden, a white walled courtyard circling a private well and an ancient bay tree. I had two older brothers and a younger sister. In the cool shadow of the early morning, we’d all run around the grounds playing Hide and Seek, Zed Men and Pasteracht, or Cricket with a battered triplet of stumps my father claimed he’d been given for taking all ten wickets against the Madras 2nd XI on an invitation touring match in 1928 A.H.
We kept horses and camels, fierce white Arabian stallions and surly great dromedaries chewing the sweet water fat grasses with expressions of cynical amusement, as though anything other than the razor-sharp desert vegetation their evolution had programmed them for was a decedent indulgence from which no good could come. I spent a lot of time in the stables, keen to ride almost as soon as I had learned to walk. The stablemen taught me how to gain an animal’s attention, how to read the signs of its patience and think outside the little pool of a child’s own selfish ego.
Nouakchott was a loyalist city, solid and reliable without any of the zealous fanaticism I was to observe on my later travels. They flew the flag on the barracks and there were respectable pictures of Their Majesties hanging from the outside walls of the Council Chamber. I never saw any of the rabble-rousing posters that flutter in tattered pride in the dust towns of Middle America, with their stylised images of Their Majesties looking like Virtuality stars – Imran brandishing a sabre and Katarina smiling seductively behind a pornographic fishnet veil. No, I was brought up as a good Sunni Muslim, learning to honour Allah first and Their Majesties second under the sober interpretation of the Resource Management World Government civil service ethos.
I liked to read. Anything and everything but travel books were my favourites. My mother bought me a hard copy illustrated rendition of Gunter Keverill’s “Journey across the Bubble” for my twelfth birthday. It was my favourite present. As I grew older, I took an active interest in other popular works about the life and culture of the Contemporary races and galactic history. I wanted to travel the stars myself, although I knew it was unlikely, I would ever have the opportunity. I never imagined it would happen in the way it did.
My father was a tax collector; a man with ambitions, certainly, but they were limited ambitions. He wanted me to join the more prestigious offices of the civil service, so he encouraged me to study and to explore the rich varieties of multi-cultural experience, which Nouakchott offered. That was how I came to visit the shrines of the Sulamon, and the churches of the Void Priests. And I learned to debate theology, new historicism and cultural materialism with the itinerant sociologists who plied their trade in the marketplace, offering tailored political arguments to young Sunni aristocrats for fees of wine, rice and silver. It was also the place where I had my first alien encounter with a trade representative from the werm T’annak Collective. It was negotiating some deal on the sale of frost pumps and I was formally introduced by one of my teachers. I don’t remember much of what was said. I was only an observer. But I do remember my sense of excitement and interest at the fathoming of strange minds in strange bodies. I remember looking at the rubbery limbs and intricate nets of gold and silvery clothing which shifted under electromagnetic control, and I wondered what it must be like to be an interstellar trader and to share the thoughts of a werm collective. Thus it was in the beginning; the first crack, the first development, the first flaw…
The screams of the ex-security man who only yesterday counted himself amongst our pilgrim band have disconcerted everybody. His name is Talamon Ka, and he was a major in the Zephyr Home Cadre, a loyalist and a fanatic of the worst kind. It’s a kind I know well.
“What will happen to him?” one of the pilgrims asks with listless anxiety. She is a tall woman in her mid-thirties with long golden-brown hair tied back by a bright green ribbon. From the cut of her dark purple robes and the style of her metallic chain belt, I recognise that she belongs to one of the high cast clans of Blue Home. She has introduced herself as Dywhyiss and she has travelled from the far side of the Solar Group to be here: that’s even further than my own journey.
“He’ll be alright. His sort always is,” the man on my left replies gruffly. A white tattoo across the shiny black skin of his forehead tells us all that his name is Edulon-602. That is the perverse way in which the free people of Escaloda choose to mark themselves.
My fellow pilgrims and I are gathered on the cliff top watching the churning waters of high tide beat impotently against ramparts of stern brown rock overhung with fringes of jungle greenery. We are waiting for our thinderin guide to return to lead us back to the temple for the third meditation.
“That wasn’t what the lady asked,” says the cadaverous old woman sitting right on the edge of the cliff. She is swinging her legs with idle energy, her heavy laced boots kicking stubbornly against the rock in sympathy with the waves below. “She asked what will happen to him, not whether he’ll be alright."
I have this one marked down as a troublemaker.
“But he will be alright, won’t he?” puts in one of the twins with a nervous little smile. The two young women are near perfect living reflections - pale sallow skin and straw coloured straggly blonde hair: skinny little things in their early twenties. One is called Tamsin and the other Samsin, but I cannot yet distinguish them. I would have put them down for clones if it were not for the fact that they are both wearing leather jump suits with the badge of the Wild World teams. The Wild World colonists do not go in for cloning.
“The thinderin are well prepared,” says a plump little balding man with oily skin. “We all know that it is to be expected that some will not be able to face the Chromatic Truths. Indeed, we know that in a certain sense it is necessary for the pattern of the meditations insisted upon by the thinderin. But such drama as we witnessed yesterday is not to be expected every time! The lieutenant will be cared for in the Temple hostel. Thinderin counsellors will help him to face up to his fears and his sins. Eventually the choice will be his - to return to the red mediation or to leave the Temple."
I find this pilgrim’s wordy rambling tone a little sanctimonious. Even without his black silken robes I imagine that it would be obvious that he belongs to the Order of the Holy Void. I have sat through enough of their sermons to recognise the style.
The hard-faced harpy on the cliff top seems to feel the same way.
“Are you going to tell us what you think or just repeat what we all know?” she mocks. “He’ll bottle it.”
Even those that don’t understand the idiom pick up her meaning, but she elaborates anyway. “He was sent here by the civil justice tribunal on Zephyr and now he has to confront the consequences of the things his secret policemen did. He deserves all he gets!” She spits into the waters.
“As do we all,” the priest adds piously. “As do we all…”
The rain changes from a light drizzle to a more determined downpour. We return to our dwellings to wait to be summoned and to mentally prepare for the orange meditation; to the extent that such preparation is possible.
I have two rooms in a cottage halfway between the village hall and the sea. The lodgings are spare, the walls plain, rough, and white. There are no eating facilities because we always dine communally. In the main room there is only a desk, two chairs and a wooden bed. The second room has a deep circular pool of a bath, recessed into the floor, and a washbasin. The lavatory screened in the corner looks primitive but that’s deceptive. Silusia Alpha is not a primitive world. Water supplies are comfortably and efficiently plumbed. The cottages are all kept at an equitable temperature and humidity by silent and invisible machinery. When advanced lighting is required, it is discretely and instantly available, although the locals seem to prefer candles. It’s the fashion here to hide technology behind overtly simple forms.
I am sorting through my few belongings when Frenane enters the hut offering me a drink of steaming jepett water. I smile at the fushem and catch her eyes exploring the desk.
According to traditional Silusian customs of hospitality modified by the ordained forms that the thinderin priests prescribe, all pilgrim bands are appointed a ‘fusheyea’ and two ‘fushem’ to take care of them outside the temple precincts. ‘Fusheyea’ apparently translates as something akin to ‘manager’ in an archaic bilachai language, a cross between a supervisor and a senior servant. The fushem work for the fusheyea in the role of junior servants. Fusheyea and fushem can sometimes call upon the services of a score of bilachai acolytes that also live in the village although the acolytes are not dedicated to serving pilgrims and may often be involved in other Temple duties.
Our fusheyea is an old bilachai ‘salt mother’ called Hessuru. Her two fushem are Rahelo and Frenane, a young married couple from the Sun States, indentured to the Temple complex for a period of ‘educational transfer’ administered by the Rain Cities social affairs department. I find the bilachai fascinating and not just because of my professional interests. The bilachai don’t have the star spanning civilization of the thinderin. They never leave Silusia Alpha and so I have not had occasion to study them before, although I’ve read a little on my journey to the planet. The average upright bilachai is somewhat smaller than the average standing human. They look rather like a cross between a seal and a talking otter, species in our Earthly fauna which although they became extinct in the early stages of the Dislocations, left lingering stories in human culture. Seeing the bilachai as striking living analogues of ancient anthropomorphic tales I warn myself that any subconscious connection I might accidentally make with childhood tales of ‘The Wind in The Willows’ or ‘Tarka the Otter’ can only be misleading.
Bilachai skin is a sleek rubbery black, although close up, fine lizard like scales form a pattern of protection across the back of the neck and down the hind legs. Their faces are angular with needle point teeth and their eyes are bright green with lamp wide lenses. They are mostly bipedal, but their forelimbs are long and sturdy and useful for locomotion, and they prefer to run on all fours close to the ground when speed is necessary. Conversely their ‘feet’ are also adapted for manipulation, capable of grasping objects and lifting them with their ‘toes’. They are near enough to being ambidextrous across the dimension of the fore and back limbs, making human physiognomy look specialised and clumsy by comparison.
Hessuru usually wears a blue belted robe, decorated with strips of some substance that looks like mother of pearl. It has ties at the waist and straps at the back of the arm, perfectly designed to accommodate her walking upright or running. Rahelo and Frenane dress in dark green overalls fastened with a row of oval wooden toggles. Frenane’s is let out at the front with an elastic panel. She is in an advanced stage of pregnancy, but it does not stop her from working.
The fushem are graceful, quiet, and efficient. They speak together in their own local bilachai language which sounds like bubbles bursting in an echo chamber, a combination of high frequency fizzing and lower frequency boiling tones. It’s very beautiful. They can also speak a perfectly comprehensible if peculiarly accented version of English.
It’s not just the appearance of the bilachai that makes me uneasy it’s the role they play with us as well. I’m used to working with subordinates but not with servants. Here in the village, it feels as though we’re caught in a nearly forgotten feudal past, or perhaps in the bad old colonial days of some long-gone Western power. We’re waited on and treated with exaggerated courtesy. But perhaps it’s just me that feels this way. The other pilgrims don’t seem to notice.
Although their fusheyea presents a front of competent detachment, Rahelo and Frenane are new to this service and cannot conceal their own interest in humans. Immigrants from the Solar Group have established a small community in Rillyon but few of them have yet penetrated the hinterland of the Sun States, an expanse of mountainous islands and sandy atolls straddling the equator of Silusia-Alpha. I doubt if the fushem have seen humans before this pilgrim band brought eight all at once.
I sip the jepett water appreciatively. It is acidic, sweet, and aromatic. It smells of lemon and mint. Frenane takes the spare chair and sits down uninvited, her broad flat tail wrapping unconsciously through and round the openings in the lattice work design. It isn’t rude to sit without an invitation in most bilachai cultures. It isn’t rude not to speak either. It’s uninvited conversation which is unwelcome until strangers have assessed one another. In this case I guess that Frenane is waiting for a polite interval before talking to me and we sit in a companionable silence that is more or less comfortable on both sides as I finish my drink.
“I am told that humans live on many worlds,” Frenane begins at last, formally, and shyly as I pass my empty cup back to her. “Is this true?”
“It is.”
“And have you lived on the first world – the birth world?”
“I have.”
“It is called Earth?”
“Yes. Earth by many humans. The birth world is the one that most love the best although we have done much to damage it.”
“Is it as big as our world?”
“Bigger. Silusia Alpha is only three quarters of the diameter of Earth.”
She considers this for a moment. “Why did you choose to come here?”
“The Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment is famous all over the Bubble,” I say, then realise that she doesn’t recognise the term ‘Bubble’. “It’s famous all over the sphere of human explored space. I had to see it for myself and that can only be done on a pilgrimage.”
Frenane curls her lip in a gesture I interpret to mean either that she disapproves of such frivolous tourism or that she doesn’t believe me.
“A friend sent me,” I add at last when she remains silent, oddly shamed into a minimalist version of the truth by her reaction. “I’d reached a crisis in my life. She told me that the Temple meditations might do me some good.”
Frenane doesn’t probe further, content for now to accept this token explanation.
“And you have brought these, what is the word please, these…?”
“Mementos”
“These mementos from Earth?”
“Some of them. Would you like to look?”
We go through the handful of my possessions, starting with my personal photo library cube. I show her some images of my old workplace – the language laboratories, the deep port submersibles, and the frozen beauties of the Antarctic.
“Is this your friend?” Frenane asks at one point. “The one who suggested that you come to Silusia-Alpha?”
It’s a picture of Alice on the foothills of Mt Erebus, smiling into the sun and the camera, protective goggles shading her eyes, her face framed in a thick fur hood. A lock of black hair falls over the zip at the front of her parker. There’s a little patch of red sunburn on the tip of her nose and you can see some smudging in the waxy white gloss which protects her lips from the fierce polar ultraviolet light. That’s my fault. We’d been kissing.
“No,” I say shortly. “That isn’t her.”
I show her two coins I keep in my pocket with the twin faces of Their Majesties on either side. “Naturally, electronic commerce is the norm on Earth, just as it is here,” I explain. “But the Resource Management World Government employ some older trading systems in the more primitive areas. I picked these up when I had business in a region called North America”.
We move on to a string of memgems on a silver chain.
“It was a present,” I tell Frenane. “I wear them round my neck for luck.” I demonstrate how the links fasten together, binding the circle of sparkling aquamarine stones.
My alien companion pays only polite attention to the coins and the jewellery. Her eyes have lighted on something far less valuable according to the conventions of interstellar trade but apparently of much greater significance to her.
“What’s this?” Frenane asks. “It looks like a seashell.”
“It is,” I confirm. “It’s called a cowrie shell. It’s native to the tropical oceans of Earth.”
The bilachai woman hesitates. I sense she wants to touch it but is waiting for my permission.
“Go ahead,” I say. “You can hold it if you want.”
She handles it reverently, turning it round to catch the rain muted light coming through the open door.
“Why do you keep this?” she asks.
I don’t want to explain it all, but I give her a brief version. “The shell was a kind of badge once,” I say. “A secret sign for a secret society. But that’s all over now.”
“It’s wonderful,” she says. “I know of no creature quite like this in the seas of my world, although there are many beautiful shells to be found in the Sun States. I have an interest in the subject.”
I study the smooth curves and the mottled brown and cream patterns afresh. I carry the shell from habit, and it is a habit which has made me jaded; the habit and perhaps the associations the shell’s symbolism inevitably evokes for me now. I’ve forgotten what a lovely object the shell is in its own right. Now I see it again through Frenane’s eyes and I agree with her. It is a wonder.
At last, the fushem replaces the shell carefully on my table with what sounds like a subdued wistful burble. We turn to the last of my treasures.
“You have a life deck? I thought only the thinderin had life decks.”
“It’s not a life deck, it’s just an ordinary human pack of cards. Humans have their own traditional cards, which evolved independently from the thinderin ones. Some human card games involve gambling for money, but we don’t use our cards to gamble on life chances like the thinderin. Look. A human pack is similar in size to a thinderin deck, but the cards are a bit smaller, and the design variation is less complex. In human packs there are a fixed number of cards in each deck - fifty-two in four sets of thirteen called suits. See?” I spread the cards out on the table.
“Will you teach me a human card game?” Frenane asks. So, I teach her cribbage to pass the time until the pilgrim band is summoned for the orange meditation. I must improvise an alternative to the conventional score board. Fortunately, the techno fashion averse acolytes provide supplies of simple graphite pencils and paper to all the pilgrims for traditional reasons which are long forgotten. These resources prove sufficient to draw a board and my coins serve as pegs. I’m pleased they are useful for something. I certainly never expected to spend them!
Frenane is a quick learner. It doesn’t take her long to pick up the essentials of cribbage and she plays well. I enjoy the game. It’s a distraction from the coming meditations although I’m not sure if it is a particularly good preparation for them. I’m not sure what would be.
Before we can finish there is a melodious peel of bells. It’s time to go to the Temple. Frenane casts a last longing look at my cowrie shell as she stands up to resume her duties.
On impulse I say, “Would you like to have it? You can take it if you want.” I realise that I won’t miss it. The shell is of no use to me anymore, even if I ever return to Earth. My secret is out.
Frenane looks surprised but pleased, if I can read bilachai expressions. “I would be honoured,” she says formally.
The thinderin priests, guides and Light Guards sometimes act as if they built the Temple because they have been its custodians for twenty thousand standard years. They didn’t though. The complex is much older than the period of their stewardship. In fact, it predates their entire civilised history. The Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment is amnyine work; at least five million years old and probably nearer to six. They bequeathed many strange and beautiful relics to the Contemporary Races after that curious period of galactic history now known as the Amnyine Passage. No one knows where the Passage took them when they left us - except maybe the Counter Xarctic Traders; and they never tell.
“This is the Circle Hall,” our guide explains as we emerge into a long gently curving hallway. “It is the way to The Dome of The Great Prism. Today’s meditation is to be conducted in the seaward ante chapel of the Dome.”
The Dome of the Great Prism is reached by ascending one of three shallow open staircases, which wind in long loose spirals round the inner circumference of the Circle Hall. They are very long staircases, and we climb slowly. Tapestries on the far walls of the Circle Hall, show scenes from bilachai and thinderin history. They are illuminated by dim red circuit worms and low orange lamps which still seem bright in the interior gloom. Obviously, the Light Guards don’t believe in wasting light. The tapestries are beautifully woven in complex patterns of earth brown, grey and green. I tentatively identify a few of the better known thinderin episodes but most are a complete mystery to me.
It takes us all of twenty minutes to attain the top step and proceed through a pointed archway two metres wide and eight metres tall into a colossal open space whose dimensions I cannot even guess. All I can compare it with is the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral, the ancient site which impressed me most when I lived in London, but I suspect this room is bigger, and it is only part of the whole Temple, I remind myself.
Pale yellow circuit worms trace out the bones of the structure, running away from the eye until they are too faint to see on flying buttresses, arches, and distant ranks of columns, but the main source of illumination comes from a huge crystal, twenty metres high at least, roughly spherical and cut into an intricate pattern of sharp faces. It is the Great Prism, raised high underneath the central dome on a thick pillar of clear glass.
“Above the central dome there is a long network of tunnels lined with mirrors, which opens up to focus on the sun,” we are told. “Even when there is much cloud, the optical properties of the passageway ensure that this place is only really dark at night.”
The light of Silusia comes straight down from the roof onto the Great Prism, where it is broken up and scattered over the delicately carved interior, in reds, blues, greens and yellows. We pilgrims stand and marvel for a long two minutes before we are guided to an enclosed circular room within the greater Dome raised above the floor by a few short steps. This is the seaward ante chapel.
“The Chromatic Altars contain lasers which can be tuned to a finely chosen wavelength,” our thinderin guide says. I’ve no idea how this is done. As far as my limited scientific knowledge extends, it is the essence of a laser to hold a precise wavelength, but that very quality ensures that it cannot be tuned. Laser light is emitted as stimulated electrons jump between precise quantum atomic energy levels. How can the amnyine altars modify this?
“Human eyes are capable of differentiating between only a few hues with wavelengths ranging from roughly 380 to 700 nanometres,” the guide continues, “You do not distinguish even those basic colours with accurate and consistent linguistic representations. Our species is capable of a much more precise appreciation of the Temple and will commonly engage in meditations of thirty-eight stages. In your terms, these commence within the infrared and end in the ultraviolet, progressing through a subtle series of graduated wavelengths. For coarse human senses we offer only a condensed set of meditations.”
Edulon-602 stirs restlessly beside me, as though perceiving racial arrogance in this little lecture, but I know better. Such anthropomorphism is a misunderstanding of the thinderin way. They do not understand our petty competitive attitudes and are blind to either pride or tact. Or so they say.
I manage to ignore my own mild irritation. In any case, I have heard that the Amnyine themselves were reputed to engage in two thousand stage meditations although I’m not at all sure how anyone knows this for certain.
The third meditation is orange. Orange fruit, orange juice, orange flames…
To begin with, the light simply illuminates the chapel walls like any ordinary lantern. Details of the chamber and the wider walls beyond stonework traceries are clearly visible as the light brightens. But a moment comes when this natural vision is suddenly transcended. It is not as though the light is blinding - it is of a uniform and tolerable intensity at all times, but it suddenly allows for no extraneous decoration: no more detail. After the instant of immersion, the light is everything, invading the optic nerve and producing a uniform field of perfectly monochromatic radiance that is impossible to reject. You cannot shut your eyes to blink away perception. By now, the altar has a direct line into the brain of each pilgrim and the meditation must progress to its conclusion. Some say that the thinderin use drugs to induce the experiences, which inevitably follow. I know better. The mind is quite capable of producing its own hallucinations when denied the customary trappings of sensory perception. Human beings have proved this time and again in deprivation tank experiments and so it must be for other races. There is something more about the quality of these meditations, though. Something mediated through the pilgrim band and stimulated by the altar.
In the orange light I start to feel the warmth of fire on my face. I start to imagine change where there is none - to project the hollow heat between coals and the crumbling embers of burning logs. This is an easy delusion for me. It has no hidden terrors. I have picked the pattern up from the neural resonance, which the Amnyine chamber allows us to reflect through our skulls. And in the end, I am not the one to break the pattern. It is Dywhyiss who is led sobbing from the chapel as the meditation finishes. Two coloured meditations. Two breakdowns. It seems that we are to have a traumatic beginning to this pilgrimage.
