“Why can he not speak to it?” Ia asks. “He is like us, he is us. The box may tell him things that will be useful to us all.”
“He is not like us,” says Awir. “He is an imitation.”
“I’m still here,” I say. “Seems like you guys know something I should know as well.”
“We will allow him to tell you. You should learn this from your own kin,” Awir says as the door closes shut and he presses a button I think will take us to the uppermost floor.
“My kin?” I ask.
“Yes,” Awir says but doesn’t explain.
I never thought I had any more family in this world. Perhaps a distant brother?
“Who am I to meet?”
“Whoever shall be waiting for you.” Awir again.
It seldom happens that I like a person for no reason. It had happened with Awir. His voice, his posturing, his manner of speech. I suppose those are in fact reasons, all likable to me on some level. Now the paradigm shifted. Everything about him suddenly innerves me. Where his illusive answers sounded wise and seeded with hidden meaning, they had become irritating.
The lift, as they call it, stops on the uppermost floor and opens to reveal to me everything I have thought I’d never see. The sun drifts above a yellow layer of grit, swimming inside a blue sky. Its light is too strong for me to look at, and a huge shape seems to block a part of it. It is a dark, shimmering circle. I walk forward, but no footsteps follow mine. The door closes behind me. I am left staring at a man in black, at the very end of a needle-shaped balcony. He stands immobile. My path is slow, steady. The wind howls, cold and relentless. Reality around me begins to flicker, twist in on itself, the center of which is the man in black. Something grabs onto my mind, a recollection. Images flicker forward in a rush. I am…
“Come,” it willed. “I shall show it to you.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “I’m having a bit of a difficulty with the ‘coming’ part.”
There was a crackle and a terrible pain in my spine, shooting up from the base of my bone structure to the very tip of my head. Time lost its meaning to me as everything I knew and everything in existence was pain. Sharp, dull, never-ending, forever pain. But just as it seemed reality had been debased into me arching my back and yelling out, screaming, the pain subsided and a feeling of relief washed over me. I cried out what had probably been the last bit of moisture left in my body.
“Rise,” the earth shook.
I got to my feet, the monolith inches above my head. I could feel the prickling of its discharge, an electrified aura that surrounded it making my hairs stand on edge. The wobble of it, like a coil constantly recharging, choked the air and spun like clockwork. Wuuum wuuuumm wuuuumm wuuummm... The sound was irritating, everywhere, timeless and inescapable. If I tried to dispel or lessen it by pressing my hands to my ears, it was even worse, then felt like it wasn’t just out there, disrupting the molecules of air, but had nested inside of me, in my head, throbbing.
“There’s nothing on this world,” I said. “No greenery or shrubs, no ocean. How am I breathing? Why have we detected oxygen when flying over this space-rock?”
“There is air because I will it to be.”
“I wish I could understand what you mean,” I said. “How does anything will something into existence?
“The mind of your species is unique,” it said, as though that was supposed to answer anything. “It is unique in its incapability to imagine anything outside its frame of reference. Everything you see, everything you do is imprinted upon you. There are no truly new thoughts which come out of you, through you, save those of the most abstract nature. Yet even those are regurgitated, processed, repackaged, accessed through the collective subconscious. You are the most unoriginal species in the galaxy. Yet in your unoriginality, is the key to everything. You produce variations upon variations of variations. This is indeed the very reflection of how you were created, the process you call evolution, the folding and enfolding of space and time into things that can, eventually, interact with space-time itself, see it, examine it, marvel in it. I, on the other hand, am the original thought. The first and the only. I do not possess appendages to will things into existence. I do what you would call ‘think’, and thing become.”
“Impossible,” I murmured.
I am standing behind the man in black. He is sitting cross-legged, his massive bulk shooting out spirals of his shape. His shoulderpads swim in the light, the majesty of it creating ripples in the contours of his richly detailed armor. A multicolored bow.
Some men have you standing in awe of them. Our ego, however, is too small and petty to admit it to the conscious mind. Adir is such a man. He leaves me standing with mouth gaping. I don’t know how I know his name
I recall my meeting with the old man inside his box, his coffin.
He had asked me what I dream of, and I told him.
Freedom.
“Come,” says Adir, his voice grumbling as though I were listening to the surface of the sun. There is something familiar about it. Too familiar. “Sit with me, Loregar. Find your mind. Find it and set it free.”
CHAPTER 20