NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-Two

“I see a spiral of green and brown, turning inward and outward forever. I see light and dark, hard and soft, near and far”

“For me it is more of a feeling than a seeing. I see sounds, and I hear all of the endless curving lines; I smell the fragrance of vastnesses.”

“And what have we here? What have we here?”

Alissa, Sonorandelan, and Glomorominith had moved into the center of the clearing just as twilight started to dim the light of the day. Alissa had guided them through a ritual vaguely described in the stories, going from stone to stone, including the one in the burrow under the arranged bark-pile, reciting words, focusing their minds, concentrating themselves in each moment, each carrying a fragment of the fragment of dried armoyse from that burrow.

“And let us sing twilight songs of concentration,” she had suggested, as they completed the circle and then moved into the center.

Many of her friends and neighbors back in the rich dark earth, storytellers though they were, would have laughed or expressed doubts about the solemnity with which they carried out the ceremony, Alissa had thought. But it felt right to her, for whatever reason, and S and G had carried it out with her, entirely without question or frivolity. They had each taken a mouthful of the armoyse leaf and let it sit within their feeding chambers, slowly dissolving.

And then the world had dissolved.

“Do you feel at all ill?” Alissa asked, thinking suddenly of her body, which seemed to be essentially missing.

“Not at all,” Sonorandelan replied, in a voice full of blissful abstraction.

They turned and wheeled in the air, or not in the air but in some colored space full of spirals and impossible fragrances and the sound of the universe singing.

It is odd, she thought to herself, that I have lost my own body, but I can clearly see the bodies of Sonorandelan and Glomorominith swirling around with me, transfigured into beings of wind and light.

“Hello!” said a voice from nowhere, feeling like rainwater running over her mind.

“Hello, hello! Glomorominith!” came the voice of Glomorominith from somewhere.

“It is good to see that sweet confluence being used again,” the booming world-filling voice said from everywhere.

“It is good to have found my way back here,” said the voice of Glomorominith, speaking in a way she had never heard Glomorominith speak before.

“Ah, dear sibling, you are right on time!” And the universe was full of beings, made of beings, every twig and every gust of wind, every place and every thought, a separate individual raising a voice in song, joyously greeting Glomorominith, and with perhaps just a little less delighted recognition also greeting Alissa and Sonorandelan, as they all swirled around and around without moving, in that place of smells and time and stems and stories and songs.

“Is there a meaning in your coming now, my darlings?” the voice, the voices, asked after a moment or a century. “Is there a thing that you need to tell us, or a place that you need to go? All is open, here.”

“It was time,” Glomorominith answered, voice full and booming and gratified, “simply and purely it was time. A map was dispatched and read, there was a rustling in the stems, and we met three beings from another stream.”

“Mystery,” the voices of the universe sang, “mystery and mystery, all is mystery!”

Alissa felt a wave of vertigo pass through her, almost as though her body existed again, but was immediately buoyed up by all of the souls around her. She remembered how simple everything was, how all wisdom has always been contained in everything, how there are no secrets.

“Is there something you would like to do, my friends?” Glomorominith asked, “Now that we have remembered how?”

“For myself, I am utterly content,” Sonorandelan replied, “to be speaking to you in this place.”

Alissa thought, swirling through the densely-packed nothingness. Would she like to hear more stories? To see the earliest stories being played out in the ancient times? To meet the great linguists and inventors of the past?

“I would like to see those grubs again,” she found herself saying, “I was never able to communicate with them properly.”

All communication is perfect, she thought, because all is part of the same whole. But still, I would like to speak to them again. They were interesting.

Fling Forty-Three

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty-One

“Wait, Steveykins, you got thrown in jail?”

“He totally did.”

“Maybe, I don’t know, these people are bizarre. They netted me with all these, like, net-guns, but they were tooting horns and making all these crazy noises, and then they put me in this sort of cell with stretchy rubber walls, and–“

“Ooh, tell them about the fish!”

“Phht, ha; there was like this slot outside of my cell, did I mention there was a kind of barred window in it facing the street? And anyway there was this coin-slot thing on the outside, and people could put coins in it, and these fish would drop on my head.”

“Oh my oh my!”

“But that’s not it, that’s not it; they have Casimir Effect rigs here, and they use them for child’s toys!”

“Were you in jail for stealing from children?’

“No, no, I like had a little accident while trying out a couple, and ended up in some sacred or restricted place or something–“

“You knocked over a bunch of priests or teachers or government officials, I think.”

“Hey, they were all laughing! Or I think it was laughing. Really jolly bunch they have here. But the rigs! They’re small and slick, definitely mass-produced, probably self-tuning, and they had some kind of acceleration controls!”

“I don’t want to be a wet blanket or anything, but if this is just a virtuality, then you were just playing a computer game of rig-riding weren’t–“

“It didn’t feel like that at all, not a bit. And I’m not sure of the whole virtuality theory anymore.”

“Oh, here’s Tibbs back.”

“Wait, one sec; the important thing is that I got a look inside one of them, and did a few little tests, and I have some ideas about how they stabilize and control their acceleration–“

“Yay, you can make us all rich when we get back home!”

“Do I infer that you humans are anticipating returning to your home plenum already?”

“Already? Hasn’t it been, I don’t know, years or centuries? We were on the Alpha alone for at least a decade. Maybe.”

“Well,” the shimmer known as Tibbs replied, “time is not well-defined in the company that you youths have been keeping.”

“Are our bodies alright, back in the real?”

“I would, as you say, go out on a limb here, and state that they are. At least, speaking practically, it seems that you could successfully return to them at any time.”

“Oh!”

“At any time?”

“Now that I have arranged for us to be allowed to access the center, or as it might also be called the surround, of the Interbridge here. That is why we rode the Alpha all that way, after all. Or one of the reasons. To maximize our, or your, options.”

“Wasn’t that a big, you know, universal nexus back at the old house, where we met Alissa and S and G? Why did we have to cross to this other universe and speed along the rainbow bridge for years–“

“Hey, is this Asgard? Is that where those Norse stories come from? Did someone get here back in the day?”

“Wait, don’t distract Tibbs…”

The being known as Tibbs pulsed and shimmered in a way that might have signaled amusement. “I have no opinion to express on the subject of Norse Mythology at this time. And while that was a relatively powerful nexus, from your description, from the way that you proceeded onward from it, it is unlikely that you could have returned to it any more conveniently than you have reached this one.”

“Those were some excellent drugs.”

“I think we’ve lost Colin. Did you find a book in some human language?”

“No, just looking at the pretty pictures until we start off for the next bit of future.”

The group allowed that they could continue the conversation and move toward the nexus at the same time. In the street (something approximating a street), Tibbs obtained for them a conveyance (Steve was disappointed to see that it had wheels rather than anything more interesting), and they slid off toward the center and surround of the city.

More than an hour and less than a day later, Tibbs presented some token or password to something like a guard at one end of an alley, and walking to the other end of it the four of them stood at the edge of a possibly-endless flat brown plain, with the wall of the city stretching possibly-endlessly off to their right and left.

“So if the wall curves forward, this is the center of the city, and if it curves backward, this is the edge of the plain surrounding the city?”

“Something like that.”

“Where is the nexus?”

“Forward, forward!”

Kristen felt reality thickening around them, beneath them, as they walked forward into the plain, with hints of affordances almost presenting themselves to her virtuality-trained senses. The ground under their feet in the direction of gravity was flat and featureless, slightly yielding, high-friction and neither hot nor cold.

“I like this,” Colin said.

“This in general, or this something specific?”

“This in general,” he replied, “this present moment. My current experience, including my recent and more distant memories, and my anticipation of the future.”

Kristen smiled and him and, walking between the men with Tibbs a shimmer in the air a bit ahead, she took both of their hands.

“Wholesome!” Steve grinned.

“Feels right somehow,” she said, and no one objected.

Things began to change as they walked, taking on different forms and aspects, objects coming and going, fragrances washing over them. Things that might have been clouds formed above them, thickened into ropes and pillars, and reached down to touch and meld into the ground to their left and right. A bluely-glowing crescent moon came out from behind the clouds, and the light became rich and silver.

“There’s a star in the dark part of that moon,” Colin noted with a lilt.

“Rookie mistake,” Kristen said, “unless they’re doing it on purpose, ironically.”

“Or there could, you know,” Steve suggested, “just be a star in the dark part of that moon.”

The others agreed that that was entirely possible.

Some amount of time passed again (Colin is thinking that time is an illusion). The ground under their feet seemed to rise, as though they were walking uphill. Tibbs somehow spread out ahead of them, the shimmering area of light expanding and curving around as they walked. Then the humans noticed that they were thinning out and spreading out as well, and a wind came up and they were blown somewhere else entirely.

Fling Forty-Two

NaNoWriMo 2022, Fling Forty

The next day, after the brightening of the second dawn, Allisa and her two large companions went to examine the pile of bark fragments that sat where the last stone might be expected to be, and into which the three grubs had disappeared in that prior night.

It was not, they quickly noted, a mere large pile of bark fragments. Rather than lying at random and separate, the fragments were arranged in various lines and rows, aligned with each other in places and at square angles to each other at others. They were also not the usual crumbling fragments or bark or twig that one encountered casually while strolling or gathering good seeds; they seemed, in most places, to be hard and fresh, as though part of a living trunk, although they obviously weren’t.

“A singular pile!” Sonorandelan noted, “Are there such things in any of your stories, storyteller?”

“Indeed there are,” Alissa replied, “although not in those stories that are my particular field of interest. It is said, in some stories, that in past times there were those that produced arrangements of wood and bark, in hopes of creating, so to speak, stems and trunks and indentations of their own, to last for many seasons.”

“Ambitious!”

“For certain,” Alissa said. They were moving slowly into the large hollow place in the center of the pile. It was dark and irregular, and full of unfamiliar fragrances.

“The stories that I know are cautionary tales, advising the listener not to bother, essentially. They are of the same time, I believe, as the stories about making marks on leaves, and how futile that is, and interfering with more essential activities.”

“And yet here we are, guided by markings on a leaf, and looking here and there for items of interest within an intriguing arrangement of wood and bark!”

“Well, yes,” Alissa allowed, “we do seem to be. It occurs to me that we may be… unusual people. Although I would never have thought that I was.”

“I have always known that I was,” Sonorandelan said, “and I expect good Glomorominith is the same, to the extent that mere words could make an impression there.”

“Glomorominith”, noted Glomorominith, whose head and antennae were moving here and there rapidly, in an attitude of searching for something nearby.

“Do you suspect something, friend?” Sonorandelan asked, and at that the person addressed emitted a happy “Yes!” and began moving off deeper into the comparative darkness.

The others followed along, and found themselves descending into a kind of square-edged tunnel or burrow, that led to another hollow place beneath the ground. It smelled more familiar here, Alissa thought, more like earth and plants and less like… arrangements.

“Well!” Glomorominith hummed from up ahead, and she saw a dim greenish light from beyond the large rough form.

Moving to the side and forward in the dim space, with all of her eyes open, Alissa saw another of the stones, standing at the back of the space, against another squared wall of arranged wood and earth, the smaller stones embedded in its surface giving out a subtle leafy-green glow.

“Just as one might have expected,” Sonorandelan said with satisfaction, coming up on the other side.

“And!” Glomorominith exclaimed, “and, and, and!”

With a rustling of antennae, from somewhere nearby in the dimness, there was now produced a sheaf, so to speak, of long thin dry leaves, apparently attached together at one end.

“And here we have the armoyse itself! Saving us a search or a journey back to my collection.”

“Here in this burrow? Has it not gone bad?”

“It seems to have been expertly dried,” Sonorandelan said, running sensitive antennae over the bundle, “and protected from the elements. I would say that these have been here for a very long time, but still have their scent and I would imagine their taste. And also…”

“Hm?” Alissa prompted.

“And also I would say that a fair bit of this leaf has been broken off very recently. Perhaps our pale acquaintances.”

“Oh, the grubs?”

Sonorandelan’s voice held amusement, “Yes, the grubs or small mammals or whatever they were.”

“Perhaps they knew the old stories as well, and used the armoyse in the circle of stones that first night after we met them.”

“Perhaps they did! Shall we follow their example, and take the remainder of this leaf out to the circle with us from this dark burrow?”

“The stories mostly recommend interacting with the circles in the twilight.”

“We shall, then, indeed we shall; and we will eat and sing until then.”

The three of them went back up the stairs and out of the crumbling old house, without recognizing or touching any of the old books on the shelves, or the odd apparatus off to one side, because these things had no meaning to them. Which was really just as well.

Fling Forty-One