Requiem Of Homo Sapiens - The Wild Part 9

From Danlo's first night of drinking kalla, he knew that there are always things that a person will not willingly remember. Tamara, he thought, in her plunge into the dangerous waters of remembrance, had finally entered the fleeing stage where she couldn't help fleeing herself. All men and women will find in remembrance, somewhere in themselves, some dark and dreadful thing that they must flee from or die or so it seems. But Tamara was still liminal, still on the threshold of remembrance, though he didn't think that she had achieved full recurrence, as had he.

Danlo could see this in her dark, disturbed eyes. A simple word from him or a few moments of silence might move her back into herself, gently back into the current of memories that flowed beneath her surface fears. He could not, however, take her or force her where she would not go. This is the first and last rule for anyone who would guide another into remembrance. Not even Thomas Rane would dare force anyone through the shadows and the writhing worms of memory down to that place of blackness and unknown possibilities where the truly terrible things dwelled.

'It is all right,' he said. He moved over across the floor so that he sat behind her, holding her. 'It is all ... all right.'

She was quiet for a while as she leaned back into his arms, back against his chest as it rose and fell. Her head was pressed back against his lips, and he smelled the lovely thick fragrance of her hair as well as the bitter sweat that ran down her neck. Then she broke away from him. She stood up and went over to the candles. One by one she snuffed them out. Thirty-three times Danlo heard the hiss of water vaporizing, and there came the sickening smell of incompletely burnt wax. Soon the room was full of darkness; its only illumination the starlight streaming in through the windows. In this faint, cold light, Danlo watched Tamara move over to the vase of rhododendrons. She grasped the stem of the smallest flower, which she quickly broke off. She took his hand and pressed this beautiful flower against his fingers. And then she said, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry we were very close, you know.'

Later that night, as they were sleeping on the soft furs of the fireroom, Tamara's dreams began. Danlo came awake to the restless turning of Tamara's body next to him; he lay in the darkness stroking her silky hair and listening to her heavy, uneven breathing. And then she began to whimper and murmur strange words that he could not understand. As she cried out in her nightmare, he held his fingers lightly over her lips lest her spirit escape into the room and wander the world in darkness and con- fusion and thus become so hopelessly lost it might never return. He felt her hot breath against his fingertips, and he bent over her to kiss her fevered head. And then he whispered, 'Shhh, mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih. Go to sleep now, my woman, go to sleep.'

But she did not go to sleep, or rather, she did not descend into the cool, deep, healing embrace of dreamless sleep, which according to the Alaloi way of thinking (and that of the cetics, too), is the one and only true sleep that a human being can know. She dreamed vivid, shaking, sweat-streaked dreams; sometime toward morning she came awake screaming out of one of her dreams, screaming and gasping and clutching at Danlo as she held her head against his chest and sobbed. When she could talk, in a quavering voice, she told him of her dream, of how she had fought a murderous, slashing knife-fight with a man who had no eyes. She had killed this man, she said. Beneath a sky with three red moons as full and round as drops of blood, she had stabbed her killing knife into this terrible eyeless man, and then she had cut his heart out of his chest.

'It was so real,' she said. They were sitting up on the furs, now, and Danlo was holding her hands. Her eyes were full of tears, and she said, 'I've never had a dream that was so real.'

Danlo listened to her talk about her dream, paying particular attention as she described her feelings of terror and exaltation at having to fight beneath these three ominous moons. From her description of the moons' configuration they loomed low in the sky and their centres formed an equilateral triangle he surmised that she had dreamed of the infamous red moons of Qallar. And this was strange, because, as she admitted when he told her of this, she had never seen a foto of Qallar nor had she known that this deadly planet was even graced with moons.

'It was as if I wasn't really dreaming at all,' she said. 'Just after I ... after I'd killed this man, I looked up at the moons. I could almost feel them pulling at me, the gravity. I could feel the blood on the knife. The wetness. The heat of it it was really quite horrible, you know. Oh, the whole dream. It was as if I was awake inside my dream, as if I was living this horrible murder moment by moment as it happened and I couldn't wake up because I wasn't asleep, I wasn't dreaming at all. In a way, it was as if I was reliving it all again, over and over. I'm not really sure how that's possible. But it was so real, too real too real not to be real, and that's what frightens me because when I squeeze my hands together, I can still feel the heart there all b.l.o.o.d.y and slippery. And alive it was still beating when I held his heart in my hands, and I can't forget that Danlo, I'll never forget.'

For a long time she stared into Danlo's eyes, all the while squeezing his hands between her hands as if to rea.s.sure herself that she was now truly awake and that he was as real as the hard wooden tiles beside the furs on which they sat. And then Danlo said, 'You know about the sixtieth att.i.tude, yes?''I'm not sure.'

'The remembrancers call it dreaming recurrence. It is one of the recurrence att.i.tudes. Like the sixty-first att.i.tude, it is reliving one's memories only while dreaming instead of being awake. It is possible that you have only descended from waking recurrence into this att.i.tude.'

'But if I was only dreaming,' she said, 'then what I dreamed wasn't real.'

She looked at him hopefully, searching in his eyes the way someone lost at sea might search the sky for a familiar star. When he saw how full of fear she was, he was almost afraid, too.

'No,' he said softly. 'No, sometimes dreams are real. Sometimes we dream our memories. And in the att.i.tude of dreaming recurrence, our memories are so real that it seems we are living them again. In a way, we are living again. Ourselves. Our ...

lives. There is no time. Truly, no time what was real is real. It always will be.'

Tamara thought about this, then said, 'But I've never been to Qallar. I've never killed anyone I know I haven't. I know. How could this be anything more than a dream? How could this be a real memory?'

'I ... do not know.'

'Oh, Danlo it can't be a memory, can it? Whose memory? Not mine, please, say you don't think it could possibly be mine?'

But Danlo couldn't say that because it would be untrue. Neither, however, could he quite understand how she had remembered such a thing. For the count of a hundred of his heartbeats he sat holding her hand and stroking her hair. He listened to the ever- present sound of the ocean beating against the beach outside. And then, for the ten thousandth time, he thought: She is not she. Over many days he had repeated this phrase in his mind almost as he would a mantra. She is not she, she is not she the sound of these words rose and fell inside him like waves beating through his consciousness. He knew that in these four simple words there was a deep truth. He had known this from the moment that he had first thought them. Only now, watching her as she sat weeping over her terrible dream, he sensed that this terrible thought might be literally true, that she was really not she in a way beyond mere metaphor, beyond even the metaphysics of selfness and ident.i.ty. She is not Tamara this thought was like lightning in his brain, and the pain of it was all the greater for his knowing that he had known this all along. For too long his eyes had known this, and his hands, and even the rhythms of his heart. He touched her hair, then. He touched the tears running down her face. He sensed that her flesh was not Tamara's, and neither were her memories or her soul. But if this was true, then who was she? Where had she come from? What was the soul of this strange woman who sat grasping at his arm and looking to him for an answer to the mystery of her life?

She is who she is, he thought. But she is not a human being, not truly.

In truth, she was something other than human, some-thing less, perhaps something more and although this conclusion was hateful to him (and astonishing) logic had led him to believe this as surely as the track of blood upon the snow might lead a hunter to a wounded animal. Danlo had been born with a keenly logical mind, and he loved logic even when he loathed the ways that others some-times misused this dangerous tool. 'You use a razor to shave with,' his Fravashi teacher had once said.

'But to smell the essence of a fireflower, it is better that you should use your nose.'

Logic was the keenest of the mind's razors, but it could cut at only what the intuition and senses knew to be true. And what did he really know? This Tamara was not the same woman he had loved on Neverness, and therefore she was something other.

What was she? He was not sure. He did not think that she could be a slel-mime, for if someone such as a warrior-poet had used programmed viruses to destroy and replace her brain cells with neurologic circuitry, then surely her memories and sense of her- self would be very different from the real Tamara's. If her brain had been truly carked this way, then surely she would have betrayed the robot-like behaviour that is the hallmark of this hideous transformation of human being into computer. Similarly, he thought it impossible that she could be a slel-clone. If someone had slelled her DNA in secret and used this sacred matter to grow a clone resembling the real Tamara, then surely her mind would have been programmed for some hideous purpose, as the minds of slel-clones always are. In all his time with her, he had sensed no such purpose or programming. Then, too, a slelled clone would bear the same DNA as did Tamara. The tells of her body would be the same. And they were not the same whenever he touched her, the cells of his body sensed a subtle but vital difference between this woman and the real Tamara, and he trusted the truth of this intuition. For an otherwise rational being such as Danlo to make such an affirmation was quite bold, but it was the time in his life when he was coming into his truth sense, that marvellous faculty of knowing which lies latent inside all women and men much as a shih tree waits to break open from an acorn.

She has been slelled, but not from matter not from DNA. She has been slelled from my mind.

It was possible that in the forty days that Danlo had waited for his last test to begin, the Ent.i.ty had created a woman who looked like Tamara. It was surely within Her powers to imprint this Tamara's brain with the various emotions, habits, motor functions and bits of knowledge that would enable her to function as a mime of human being. Even the warrior-poets and other modern engineers could make this kind of human being if one considers such soulless creatures human. But the Ent.i.ty had done something much more than this. She had done something that no modern engineer (nor even the G.o.d-men of Agathange) could do. From almost nothing She had created a mind that was almost human. To accomplish this feat of G.o.dly carking, She must have imprinted the Tamara's brain, not according to some information holo- gram or computer map of the real Tamara's brain, but almost solely from Danlo's memories. Danlo had a marvellous memory of Tamara's experiences, sensibilities, mannerisms, dreams, and a billion other things about her life even her p.r.o.nunciation of certain favourite words, the way she drew out the vowels as if she delighted in pro- longing the utterance of these words as long as possible. And the Ent.i.ty must have known all this.

She is almost she, Danlo thought. And I have almost remembered her.

Some time toward morning, after Tamara had finally fallen into a true sleep, Danlo lay awake next to her watching her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rise and fall like swelling waves upon the sea. He counted her breaths while he wondered at this beautiful woman whom the Ent.i.ty had made. It occurred to him that the mind of a woman (or a man) was infinitely more complex than the dark world that spun silently beneath him, pulling at him with such crushing gravity. The human brain-mind, with its shimmering webwork of a hundred billion neurons and trillions of interconnecting synaptic pathways, was among the most complex creations in the universe in some ways more complex than even the neurologic components that make up the brains of the galaxy's G.o.ds. He did not think it was possible, even for a G.o.ddess, to duplicate perfectly such a blessed creation. Certainly any attempt to mime Tamara as the Ent.i.ty must have done was doomed to fail. In the harsh light of the new day he could see this, as clearly as he could see salty tear-tracks marking Tamara's cheeks. The problem was with his memory. No matter how exactly he called to mind every aspect of Tamara's selfness and soul, the real Tamara, the one and only true Tamara, was much more than he remembered possibly more than he could remember. Once a time, after Hanuman had destroyed (or stolen) Tamara's memories of their life together, Danlo had offered to imprint her brain from his own memories. He had hoped to heal her memory, thus healing her mind. Out of love and despair he had made this hopeless proposal, never realizing what a terrible thing he was doing. But now, watching Tamara's breath ruffle the s.h.a.gshay fur pulled up beneath her chin, he knew. Even supposing that Tamara was a perfect incarnation of his memory of her (and she was not), he realized that his memory was far from perfect. From their first moment together, he had seen her not through the flawless lens of deep reality, but rather as through a million broken bits of gla.s.s stained with all the colours of his consciousness. As he looked at Tamara and brushed the golden hair away from her face, he thought of a saying of Thomas Rane's: We do not remember things as they were; we remember them as we were. This Tamara remembered their life together in too much the same way as he did he had been blind not to see this earlier. What was wrong with this lovely woman who lay sleeping beside him was that she was too much a reflection of himself, of his own mind. And what he had truly loved about the real Tamara was her otherness, that unknowable essence of her soul that he had sometimes glimpsed but had never quite managed to capture in his memory.

Ironically, he had remembered almost everything about her except the only true and important thing, and he realized that he could never quite grasp this mystery any more than he could keep a beautiful bird trapped in his hands without destroying it.

'Oh, Tamara, Tamara,' he whispered as he touched her warm, red lips, 'where are you? What are you, truly?'

Over the next set of days and nights, Tamara's dreams grew ever more terrifying and strange. There were cosmic dreams unlike anything she had ever experienced before. Once, she dreamed that her body was nothing more than a ball of molten nickel-iron, spinning in s.p.a.ce, pulsing in red waves through utter emptiness like an abandoned heart; once she dreamed that her brain was so full of fiery images and agony that it exploded in an expanding sphere of light and death, thus becoming the first of the Vild's supernovas. And there were the more personal (and disturbing) dreams where she relived the eating of unfamiliar meats and foods and heard again alien blood musics that she was certain she had never heard before. She dreamed of men whom she had never seen before, hard and beautiful men with violet eyes and quick, sensitive muscles that jumped like electric eels at the slightest stimulation or touch. These murderous men were thought to be smooth between the legs, but she knew that they were not, for once, on a night of strange hot winds and firewine, she had seduced a young man named Leander and lay with him beneath the three red moons hanging low in the sky. It had been her first time with a man, and nearly the last, for when three of Leander's cell brothers found them together on the gra.s.s, they cursed him for breaking his vows and cut him to pieces with their long, killing knives.

They would have killed her too, but she was good with her knife, so good that she blinded one of the brothers with a lightning slash to the eyes and disabled the other two before escaping through the towering black thorn trees that surrounded her and tore open her flesh. There was blood streaming from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like red milk, and blood in her eyes, and blood burning its way up between her legs into her womb. In all her dreams there was blood, especially in her worst dream, which occurred again and again, sometimes as often as thrice in one night. In this dream, a terrible orange energy ran through her body and brain and twisted her sinews, her nerves, her bones, carking her into the form of a beautiful tiger; dreaming this flaming image of herself, she could always feel her fingernails growing out as long, killing claws, the trembling of her muscles along her belly, the burning hunger to kill that was all torment and desire and was concentrated into gnawing pain between her shoulder blades. Once, she woke up out of this dream with blood in her mouth and on her lips; she came into consciousness writhing and screaming and biting at her tongue and clawing at Danlo's face when he came up close and tried to hold her. And then, when she saw that she had scratched open a b.l.o.o.d.y red gash on his cheek, she wept for a long time, pressing her forehead against Danlo's forehead with such desperation that he wanted to weep, too. After she had stopped weeping with her tears stinging like sea salt in the little wound that she had made on his face he looked at her and said, 'It will be all right.'

'No, no,' she said. 'I'm afraid to go to sleep at night. And I'm even more afraid of waking up insane.'

'You are not insane.'

'Sometimes, it's almost as if I don't know who I am.'

'You are you,' he said simply. 'You are ... who you are.'

'Sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror, when I look for myself, there's nothing there. What's happening to me? Oh, Danlo, Danlo what will I do?'

Danlo took her down to the ocean, then. In the shallows at the edge of the beach, he saw to it that she washed the blood from her mouth and hands. He himself laved handfuls of dark, salt water over his cut face. The water was as cold as ice but it burned his flesh like fire. They stood on the hardpack for a long time, shivering and watching the waves come and go. It was a day of grey clouds and a mist so fine that it floated down from the sky like an endless silken robe. Looking out through the early morning mist, Danlo could barely see the shape of Cathedral Rock where it loomed all black and menacing somewhere before him. Somewhere, in this soft and impenetrable mist, there were gulls and other birds, for Danlo heard them crying out as if blinded and lost at sea. Tamara, too, was still crying, not obviously in a spasm of voice and breath, but rather in the deeps of her dark, liquid eyes. She was crying for herself, he thought; as all people do, she was crying for what she might have been, for what she someday still might be.

After a while, she said, 'Sometimes, when I've stopped sleeping in the morning, I feel as if I've died and my waking life is only a dream. Sometimes I wake up, and I'm afraid I'm only awakening to a new phase of the dream, waking up inside the dream, over and over, this hideous, endless awakening. Sometimes I'm afraid there's no way out.'

Danlo picked up a flat stone half-buried in the sand and cast it into the ocean. It made a satisfying 'plop' and disappeared into the dark water. 'There is always a way out,' he said. 'Or a way ... further in.'

'Oh, Danlo I can't live this way.'

Danlo looked for his lightship down the beach, but the mist was so dense and grey that he could not see it. 'If you would like, I could ready my ship for a journey. We could try to leave this world I could take you back to Neverness.'

'No, I'll never leave this world. I can't, don't you see?'

With a snap of his arm, he cast another stone into the water. It skipped three times over the dull, smooth surface before sinking beneath a wave. He looked at her and said, 'I ... do see.'

'I can't live anywhere else, not like this,' she said. 'I feel as if I'm dying.'

'No,' he said softly. 'It is just the opposite.'

'Sometimes, after one of the dreams, I feel as if I want to die.' At this, she looked out at the cold water where he had cast his stones. 'Sometimes I want to walk out into the ocean and drown. If I can't live as I have, with love, with joy why should I live at all?'

'Because,' he said simply, 'life is everything.''Once a time, I thought that too,' she said. 'Once I wanted to taste every food grown on every world from Solsken to Farfara. I wanted to see every world in the universe, if I could live long enough. I wanted to go to Kateken and see the singing caves, and to Agathange. I wanted to love every beautiful man I could. I've always loved love, and I've really lived for nothing else, but how can I love when all I want to do is fall down screaming and die?'

Danlo moved closer to her and touched the tiny water droplets clinging to the downy hairs along her cheek. 'Please ... live.'

'But I'm not really living, not like this.'

'Then live as you will.'

'How?'

'Only you will know,' he said. 'But there might be a way ... in remembrance.'

'Oh, no please, no.'

'I am sorry,' he said. 'This will be hard for you.'

'You can't really know.'

'You have often said that you feel incomplete, that you always are on the verge of discovering some great thing about yourself.'

'That's the theme of all my dreams. That's the sense I have, you know.'

'I believe that it might help to relive your birth.'

'My birth? But why?'

'Because that is where everything began. That is where the secret of your life must lie.'

'You sound so sure.'

'I ... am not sure. In remembrance there are never any certainties.'

She took hold of his hand and dug her fingernails into the hard callouses that she found there. 'I was born in my mother's house don't you remember? You'd take me back to that? I don't know if I could bear to ever see that house again and I think it would kill me to see my mother.'

'I ... would take you back to the moment of your birth,' he said evasively. For a while he watched her shivering in the cold mist. Although he sensed that this birth would destroy this Tamara that he loved, he did not hesitate to propose a second ceremony of remembrance. 'I will help you find the way.'

'I'm so afraid.'

'I will not let you die.'

She was quiet for a moment as she looked into his grave, dark eyes. And then she said, 'Oh, Danlo I'm afraid for you, too.'

Danlo smiled at her, but said nothing. He listened to the moaning of the whales far out at sea, and he did not tell her that he was afraid for both of them, and for all things that had ever suffered the pain of being born.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

She.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

- Jesus the Kristoman, from the Gospel of Thomas.

As before, they prepared for remembrance. They brought fresh flowers into the house and spent several days doing the exercises that Danlo designed. This time, it was only Tamara who would relive a part of her life, and so Danlo would be free to guide her backward through the stages of her ontogenesis from fertilized ovum to adult human being. Therefore, he selected a different sequence of exercises than before. He saw to it that she executed these exercises perfectly. On the evening of her remembrance, he lit the thirty-three candles and sat with her on the floor of the fireroom. He looked about them to make sure that he had left nothing undone. Before them, the rhododendrons were perfectly arrayed in their blue vase. The wooden beams gleamed with golden light, and good smells floated all around them: orange essence and charcoal, warm skin and salt air and silk. It was with a smell or rather a taste, that Danlo initiated Tamara's return to the sixty-first att.i.tude of recurrence. After guiding her through many rounds of difficult breathing exercises, he reached into the pocket of his kamelaika and removed a blue vial filled with plain sea water. He opened the vial and held it up to Tamara's lips. 'Drink this,' he said. 'Taste the ocean inside; this is what it was like before you were born.'

And so Tamara drank a few drams of water that Danlo had scooped up earlier from the ocean outside their house, and Danlo told her that it was time to begin recalling the first conscious memory of her life, which they had previously discussed in great detail. Strangely, this memory also involved sea water. In Tamara's earliest conscious memory, when she was perhaps four years old, she was sitting alone in the kitchen of her mother's house. It was a huge kitchen of stone and steel and other hard things, but it was always warm, always full of the smells of mint tea, honey, spices, kurmash and roasting bread. On this snowy winter day, late in the afternoon, Tamara sat on the marble floor playing with jars of water. To her right was a clear jar of distilled water that her mother used in the rather forbidding cleansing ceremonies performed in the facing room deeper in the house. On her left was a blue jar half full of sea water imported from Sahasrara. When Tamara's mother cooked her huge, steaming potfuls of kurmash on feast days, she always added a little of this rare water to enliven the dish and impart the flavour of her family's home world. But on this unforgettable day out of Tamara's memory, Tamara was using the water for a different purpose. It was the day when she had first understood death. As a lively and imaginative child, she had always been terrified of dying (sometimes too terrified to sleep at night) and she had always wondered where she would go when light went out of her eyes and the readers of her church took her body away to be burned at the end of the incomprehensible ceremony of vastening. The idea of simply disappearing like the light of an extinguished candle, of never being again this utter annihilation and neverness of her life was as inconceivable to her as it was terrifying. Most of all, she couldn't bear the possibility of her love for her mother simply vanishing, for this love was her life, and to be separated forever from her was too terrible to contemplate. So intense was this love that she didn't realize how much she hated her mother, too, not even when the imperious Victoria One Ashtoreth stormed into the kitchen and caught Tamara playing with her precious water. Tamara, with her little but clever hands, had just succeeded in pouring a quant.i.ty of the salt water into the clear jar. She was sipping from this marvellous mixture when her mother saw what she was doing and gasped in astonishment and betrayal. She spoke no words of rebuke; neither did she strike Tamara as any other astrier mother would have done. She only looked at Tamara with her blazing, scornful eyes, and this single look was enough to tear open Tamara's heart. And so she was never able to tell her mother of her brilliant discovery. She never explained that when salt water was poured into the clear jar, it vanished from sight, yes, but the taste of salt spread out and pervaded the distilled water and would never go away. As with salt and water, so with life, and Tamara wanted desperately to tell her mother that although her life's consciousness might someday flow out of herself back into the world, it could never be destroyed. But the practical Victoria One Ashtoreth was not interested in the metaphors or metaphysics of a four-year old. In a clear and cold voice, she bade Tamara clean up her mess. She told Tamara that it was time that she was taught cooking so that she might learn to be careful with valuable things. Thereafter, on each feast day when Tamara sat at table with her father and her twelve sisters and brothers, as punishment for her transgression, her mother never failed to thank her for helping to prepare the sacred kurmash that they ate. And with each bite of the faintly salted kurmash that her mother placed in her wide and beautiful mouth, Tamara thought of how she had carefully measured the salt water into the huge steel pot in which their family's kurmash was always cooked. With each swallow of food that Victoria took, Tamara imagined that her mother was consuming Tamara's love for her, for despite the anger between them, she never stopped loving her mother, and she always prepared the kurmash with infinite care. It was her secret hope that her infinite love would somehow infuse her mother and transform her into a kinder and wiser woman. But it never did. Her mother remained a parsimonious taskmaster who demanded strict adherence to recipes, and Tamara was never able to add enough salt water to the kurmash to flavour it fully.

And she was never able to talk with her mother about love or death or any of life's other mysteries. It was only years later that her mother finally explained that when a worthy astrier was on her deathbed, her mind was encoded as a program and stored within the electron flows of their church's vastening computers. The human mind, her mother said, was a kind of program that could be preserved almost forever this way.

Therefore Tamara must continually cleanse herself of evil thoughts and negative programs lest she be found unworthy of this cybernetic heaven and the church elders denied her the grace of vastening. She must continually strive for perfection in her life, her mother told her, or at the end of her life she would have no more life, never again only blackness, nothingness, neverness. But Tamara remembered very well the day she had clanked jars and spilled salt water on the floor of her mother's kitchen. After this, she never trusted anything her mother said, nor did she ever accept any of the doctrines of her church. Somewhere inside her was a deep knowledge that she could never die, even when her heart was pounding inside her chest and she was close to dying even when she was terrified of death.

'Oh, Danlo, Danlo!' Suddenly, she cried out these three words as she lay on the floor of her meditation room. Her fists were clenched, and her whole body trembled as with terrible cold. Her eyes were tightly closed as she whispered, 'No, no I can't!'

'Shhh, be quiet now,' Danlo said. He sat beside her ma.s.saging her temples, touching her eyelids. 'Just remember.'

Gradually, the tremors tearing through Tamara's body subsided. She fell still and utterly silent as she descended down through memories that Danlo could only guess at. Except for her slow, deep breathing, she might have been dead. Once, for a few moments, her breathing stopped altogether, and then despite himself, Danlo began to worry. He placed his hand between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; he worried that her heart was now beating as slowly as the heart of a hibernating snow hare. For a long time he sat this way, feeling the faint thumping of blood beneath his hand. He listened to the sound of the sea beating in waves against the beach outside the house. He listened for the beating of his own heart and his own memories, and he was sure that Tamara had never told him anything about the first years of her life. If this almost-dead Tamara was now remembering anything at all, it could only be memories that the Ent.i.ty had imprinted in her. He wondered what strange memories these might be. He was willing to share any of her memories, no matter how false or painful, but the great ocean of remembrance is a private universe in which it is almost impossible for anyone other than the remembrancer herself to live. Danlo was not a G.o.d, and so he could not look into the image storm that must be boiling through her mind. According to his criteria and almost impossible ideals, he was not even a full man, let alone what he conceived of as a true human being, and so all he could do was to sit and watch and wait for Tamara to reach her moment.

Tamara, Tamara you were never really born, he thought. What must it be like to remember your birth?

Sometime in that long and timeless night, as Danlo kept watch over Tamara, there came the moment that he had been waiting for. Without warning, Tamara began to whisper, 'Yes, yes, yes, yes!' Only her lips moved; she kept her eyes shut, and the rest of her body was as motionless as a corpse. She repeated this word again and again.

Danlo supposed that she was remembering the truth about herself and finally making sense of her memories. And then, suddenly, she screamed. Her arms pulled up over her face, and her fingers clawed the air as her mouth opened in agony. She shook her head from side to side with such violence that Danlo was afraid that she might dislocate her neck.

This terrible scream broke long and deep from her chest, and it seemed to go on and on forever. Although Danlo tried to keep Tamara from banging her head on the floor or injuring him with her long fingernails, a terrible power had come into her. The sudden strength running through her arms and body shocked him. In a convulsion of muscle and nerves, Tamara came awake and threw Danlo off her. She sprang to her feet sweating and shaking and still screaming as if some invisible hand had grabbed her body and plunged her into a cauldron of molten iron. When Danlo came closer to help her, she shook her head to warn him away. But Danlo misinterpreted this motion as only that of an uncontrollable frenzy. He tried to touch her face, to cool her momentary madness. And then, with all the ferocity and merciless precision of a warrior-poet, she drove the heel of her hand into the soft s.p.a.ce beneath his ribs, beneath his heart. The force of the blow knocked him to the floor. He lay against the hard wooden tiles gasping for breath. Tamara stopped screaming then. She stood looking down at him, and her eyes were wide open and full of light.

'No, no,' she said softly, almost to herself.

She looked around the room, drinking in the sight of the floor cushions, the hanging plants, the shatterwood beams glistening above her head. There was an apprehension about her, a terrible awareness as if she were seeing herself in these familiar objects and reliving the first time that she had opened her eyes upon this room. And in this moment of awakening, she must have known that there was something other about the whole house, something more. It must have been as if the doorways connecting the rooms of this mysterious house were like doorways to other dwellings in other places, faraway in s.p.a.ce and time. There was starlight in Tamara's lovely eyes, and memories, and sadness, too, for suddenly she shook her head back and forth and murmured, 'Oh, no!' She looked at Danlo, who was now up on one knee as he fought to breathe and stand up to face her. And then she ran from the house. She fled outside, down to the ocean where the starry sky opened like a million doors upon the many- roomed mansion of the universe.

When Danlo finally found her, the sun had just risen above the mountains. From half a mile away he saw her standing down on the beach where the twelve flat rocks led out through the shallows to Cathedral Rock. It was a clear and windy day, and the spray from the breakers sparkled in the early light. The whole of the world seemed to be sparkling: Danlo's diamond-hulled ship, and the golden dune sands, and Tamara's beautiful hair which was flowing in the wind like a magic robe. The skin of Tamara's body sparkled like white marble, for she had taken off her clothes, and she waded naked in the deepening waters. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and belly and golden p.u.b.es were dripping wet as if one of the waves had surged up over her. Danlo ran down the dunes and over the hardpack, but when he reached the ocean's edge, he approached her warily. He stood in the rising tide at arm's length from her. The water was so cold that it instantly penetrated the insulation of his boots and shocked his bones. 'Please ... come out of the water,' he said. 'It is too cold.'

Tamara reached down into the ocean and scooped up a handful of water. She splashed her face with it and said, 'But I'm not at all cold.'

For a while, Danlo watched her playing in the water. In truth, she evinced no sign of cold. She seemed completely at ease, as if she had reincarnated as a seal or a hot- blooded whale. Apparently, her madness had left her. She seemed totally aware of the world around her, of herself, of him.

'Tamara,' he asked finally, 'what did you remember?'

She looked at him quickly, and her eyes were hot with anger. 'I think you must know,' she said.

'I ... almost know. But how can I know, truly?'

'You've known for quite a while, haven't you?'

'Yes,' he finally admitted.

'Oh, Danlo why didn't you tell me?'

'Some things cannot be told. They can only be lived. Or ... remembered.'

'My birth,' she said. 'My real birth. And then before -before my awakening in the other house.'