visit was something like routine for me - a pleasure,
not just one. But we love them anyway, and serve them as they serve us.
I feel Robert waking in the little apartment and know that it is time to show him the day of the world.
I do not understand why he must know it now, but then I must follow as well as lead. I descend the bridge again and call to him in his kitchen. He doesn’t hear me, so I take on a form. It is strange to wear a shape made of the world’ s stuff; it feels uncomfortable, even when I’m wearing mostly memories and reflections, barely poking out of the world’s shadow into the world itself. This time he hears me.
In himself he’s lame, of course. It’s the mark of sacrifice on him. But when he hears me, his walking self comes to the fore, and it is whole. So he climbs out of the window and comes to where I wait for him, in the alley.
“ I dreamed of you last night. I was hoping it was just a dream. You said you had to show me the ‘day of the world.’”
I smile broadly, forcing broken tires and jar lids into a grin. “I do!”
“Is there any particular reason it has to be today?”
“This is the day of the world!” I answer. He doesn’t seem to understand the right questions. When it’s a calling like this, I cannot tell them to him on my own.
We cross the barrier between flesh and spirit together. I wrap around him for protection, but even so a few shards of the wind at the world’ s edge cut his legs.
It is a sign that his walking self must change too. There is another self inside him that he does not yet see.
Together we travel, and that is its own story, which I shall not tell you. It ends when we arrive at the pool of the Beached Whale, which my self tells me is the one to instruct Robert about the day of the world. r n @ R ” G I was the Beached Whale, the guardian of those things which sacrificed themselves without apparent gain; I lived in a pool above the north pole, in what had been a crater at the crest of the old Axis Mundi before a change moved it all outside. It was a quiet place, full of starlight and the quiet whispers of passing souls on their way to the gentler havens of the dead. As the Beached Whale, my skin was of course taut and black, and its sheen matched the polished parts of the heavens.
Sometimes an aspect of the world called on me to show things from my vista. The old axis had stopped being a channel of power two ages before this particular visit, but it retained a king’ s-eye view of the world. I learned, over many centuries, the names and natures of many of the great totems, and discovered that I made quite a good teacher despite the difficulties and misunme rt’ ut me presenr. I derstandings flowing from our various languages. So this visit was something like routine for me - a pleasure, because I liked the Rubbish and the students it brought, and was glad to see it again before its funeral.
The young man seemed unimpressive, though I knew that looks were deceiving. I remembered him a few years later, and how he performed the rites of passing for his chosen ones. So I greeted him as if I saw that reality then. “Hello, Robert. Your guide said it was time for you to see the day of the world.”
“Um. Yeah.” I smiled, a big baleen smile. He had already learned one of the secrets of power: when you gave a noncommittal assent, you could draw out more.
I struggled to express myself around the barriers of his thought. “Before you departed, you have come here to look in the pool.” He puzzled for a moment, then figured it out and walked over to look.
The pool’s surface froze, then smoothed. Inside he could see the world as it had been, a smooth orb without features, without soul. “This was before dawn.” A faint glimmer of sun appeared behind the ball. “ Before the sun rose, there was only potential. There was no actual form, either matter or spirit, to grow or change or live or die.” One of my flippers stirred the pool, and a single wave whipped across the surface. The sun in the pool rose. So did the sun behind the old axis.
The age’s first part began as sunlight spread across the world. Life stirred in the seas and on the land. Birds rose from new treetops to fill the air. The Dragon Kings reared their great heads and founded an empire, while the first humans climbed down out of their trees and emperors united China and the Renaissance swept over Europe. The Demon Emperor set up his throne, casting shadows into the morning.
“Which of this came first?” Robert asked. I appreciated him asking in the tense I could understand, but the question itself couldn’t be answered the way he thought.
“Dawn came before noon, which came before sunset, of course,” I answered, trying to explain.
“But all this stuff happened at different times,” he objected.
“That was how things got marked up in one calendar,” I said. “This was another way to see things.”
“Oh.”
As we talked, he saw how souls entered the world.
The great souls of the creative forces divided and divided again until everything had its distinct nature. At first there was no difference between matter and spirit, but that couldn’ t last. Day and night, alive and dead, male and female, thought and action.. .inevitably there had to be spirit and matter, and so there was. Once separated, the spirit of each thing retraced its journey back: from individual to family to kin to kind, the hierarchy of spirits sprung up at each level where flesh had divided on its way down.
“I thought that spirits shape the world.”
“They did. But also matter shaped the spirits. The pool didn’t lie to you.”
“Oh.”
Throughout the world, men and women (and others, but they were of less concern to Robert) moved to and fro. They held each new thing in their hands and saw its spirit as well as its matter. They climbed into the spirit realms and mapped the web of ties. Occasionally they spoke to each other and discovered that their maps were mostly different. Sometimes they fought over this, and sometimes they refused to speak about it. But NWN The sun rose higher; Robert watched the world’s WHERE’S @URHI%RY? one day unfold. “I think I get it,” he said at last. “There’s an underlying pattern to all the world’s different actual days, right?”
I shook my head, scattering drops of old water across my visitors. “What the pool showed you. What did you see.. .” I struggled to express thoughts of the present, which didn’t come easily to me. “ What did you see when you looked in, and when you kept looking, before you stopped looking later?”
Robert looked confused at that. The Rubbish whispered, “What do you see?”
“I see one day, with everything from different eras all happening at once. When I try to trace them out, things slide away from each other just enough to make some space for each other. They don’t notice each other.” anything. well, that’s a gooa one, once you srarr talking to Hermetics and hackers and what-not, and listening to their litanies.
Several reasons, I told him.
First, we’re not really about us , so to speak.
Shamanism is about being part of a community.
Beine its healer 2 er “And what made you think that that was less true than what you remember living through?”
Robert stopped. “Remembered.. .but I did live through it. Didn’t I?”
“I’m not the one who doubted,” I said. “You should have continued looking.” I set the example by turning to peer into the pool, and after a moment’s hesitation he did the same.
The sun shone brightly on Asia. Great empires flourished, some of them binding together the whole region. The light was patchier in Africa, with clouds hiding most of the lands away from the major rivers. Only scattered bands and clans walked much of the interior. In Europe, Rome and England and Prussia and a dozen other lands achieved their heights of glory. The architectural marvels of each century shone, though without glare, in the bright midday light. Shadows covered most of the Americas, breaking to illuminate many culturally sophisticated but technically primitive cultures hiding in the interstices of the American empire. In the deep recesses, the Demon Emperor’s minions slaughtered all.
I sent more ripples across the pool. Each one froze in a little peak over the soul of one of Robert’s kind. “See here, and here, and here,” I said. “ Wherever a society and what was in the web. They made homes for themselves, each one finding some place in the web just right for their souls to rest.
I turned to wave my tail at particularly prominent examples of this in what Robert thought of as the Middle East. “These were your kind,” I said. “ These were what you would call shamans. In the morning they learned what things were called and how they related to each other.” listened to the spirits, your predecessors and your descendants spoke for their community. They taught and healed.
And they fought - you see how many spirit magicians were great warriors? Understanding never made quarrels go away; sometimes it made them much sharper. Over here, where the society did not listen to the spirits, your kind worked quietly, speaking to the underclasses and outcasts or dressing up the spirits’ messages in acceptable language. You knew something of that yourself, perhaps.” is communicy. 3 AFTERNWN The sun moved on, and we continued to watch.
Robert didn’t take his gaze off the pool, even as he started to ask more questions.
“I understand how there are different ‘maps’ of the spirit world, and I don’t have a problem with that. Souls don’t have mass.. . ”
I coughed quietly.
“Urn, I don’t think souls have mass. Anyway. Bodies do. If what your pool showed is, er, was true, how come we never noticed it all happening at once?”
“At home you walked through dust all the time.
How often did you ever notice or think about it?”
“When the light shone on it against a dark background .”
“And what did you think of people who told you they’d seen things you didn’t in a moment of illumination from outside the sky?’’ “Urn.”
I gave him a friendly pat. ‘‘ The worst finished already, Robert. You did very well. Lots of your colleagues never quite got the point, or got it so quickly.
They kept thinking of the unseen world as outside the walls, not inside with them, too. It took getting used to, for each one that got it. You did fine later on assimilating it all.”
“Um. I, urn, I’m not sure I should ask this.”
“This place didn’t come with a list of forbidden quest ions.”
“The way you talk. Are you in the future?My future, that is?”
“When you were born, were you just one thing?”
“I think so.. .”
“Your intestines were filled with little organisms on which you depended for digestion. Creatures with their own genetic heritage swam in your blood and tissues.
Some of your cells’ organs showed their own distinctive legacies. Were all those just one thing?” It was only one view, the view of the world most recently and fostered by some humans, but it made my point.
“I guess not.”
“When you came here, you came to a place where ‘present’ meant as much as ‘just one thing.’” I noticed flickers in the pool. “But look.”
As the sun began to set in the west of the world, things fell apart. The great lords of the sun set to squabbling with each other, and their oppressed subjects rose against them. Kingdoms of inhuman powers succumbed to greed and envy, dismantling their own cities in the feverish pursuit of new gains. The Demon Emperor devoured himself and his courtiers. Throughout time, empires crumbled. Barbarians raised up for the purpose gloried in the ruins.
This time Robert beat me to it, scouting out his cousins. “They’re hanging on. I see a lot of efforts to record traditions one way or another, and a flurry of training successors.”
“Yes,” I answered. “Many of them didn’t know consciously that the end of their peoples was coming, and many of the spirits they dealt with didn’ t, either.
And yet something in them made them prepare so that as little as possible would be lost when the darkness came thicker.”
“But.. .” This time I waited, and eventually he continued. “1 know just from the other shamans I’ve already met that new things get started at the same time.
It isn’ t the same time of day everywhere on a round world, either.”
“You remembered about seeing the dust just sometimes ?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t see the other times of day, either, but they were there.” ‘(1s there really time at all?”
“You looked around as you came in, and could have answered that one for yourself.”
NIGHT Robert looked back at the pool and gasped out loud.
“This is awful!”
I followed the movement of his eyes. “Yes, it was.”
“Was? Does this have to happen?”
“The day of the world couldn’t go on forever,” I said.
“Every day as you saw it ended innight, and that was true for the day of the world, too.”
He wept as he watched darkness creep over everything. War, plague, disaster and less comprehensible perils swept away every society, leaving behind monsters and scattered bands of survivors to wait for a dawn that, unknown to them, would never come. Gradually the world lost its definition, pieces blurring into mist or drifting off into the void. In the depths of the world’s midnight, the innermost fires went out, and the world’s story came to an end.
He groped for hope. “But.. . after each age, there’s another age!”
“Not for those whose story was the end of theirs.
The beginning of an age was a different story, belonging to someone else.”
“Does it all just end in death, then?”