Chapter 17 You Are Here

In West Sussex people believe that the ground on which human blood has been shed is accursed and will remain barren for ever.

—James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1900)

You are here.

Further along the great wheel of rebirth. There is no stagehand to hold up a sign MID-21ST CENTURY IN THE YEAR OF YOUR LORD but you know perfectly well—you don't even have to check your phone's calendar—that it is. It's the ninety-fourth century after Rakesfall. It's been four hundred years since Act One.

There is no stage. This is not a play. This is a conspiracy.

The three of you are rebelling against the pedagogic tyranny of the tenured old farts of the Department of Ritual History. That's why you are here studying old texts in the spotless archival room at the Museum of Tabooed Things. The Museum is on the southern coast, far enough from any city to maintain green and pleasant grounds outside for visiting scholars to refresh themselves and watch the sea.

But every day you all ignore that to huddle together in this room. You are engaged in deadly struggle against the stultifying pap that the Department preaches, the dead narratives that it upholds about the song-cycles of your ancestors, who you firmly believe are also your past lives—mere superstition to all of your professors but one. In these ancient texts you hope to find evidence, and explanations.

Today, you and Embi are letting Fernando do the reading because, frankly, he needs the practice.

A long, long time ago,reads Fernando. The scroll he's reading is dark brown with age, and would have been difficult to read even if it was new. Fernando reads it in the slow and hesitant fashion of a man who is used to the European convention of spaces between words. The ola leaf scroll has none; it bridges thoughts with the kunddaliya, giving a sense of breathlessness to Fernando's reading.

In the time of the beginning of all things, the Creator flowed like water from past to future and there was time, for the first time?this world-in-time bifurcated into tributaries?like maggots in dead flesh, in time there arose two kinds of life: first, those who loved time and worshipped its change and mutability, who were called the Yoke; and second, those who loved time and wanted to protect and keep it from harm, who were called the Rake? ?and they went to war.

Fernando pauses briefly and looks around, as if wondering whether you and Embi were following; you nod encouragingly.

Many ages passed in war,Fernando goes on reading, the time of ash and the time of the green and the time of monsters, until it was the time of the gods in the first age of cities.

Today, you know those first cities lie underwater off the coast, buried by ancient inundations. Scrying orbitals have mapped the great bowls of their sacred theatres, like empty eye sockets in the sea's hadal deep.

Fernando seems to be struggling with the text, so Embi takes his place in front of the leaf, murmuring a line to brighten the ambient light and enhance the magnification of the faint, spidery writing.

"All right," Embi says. "Listen: the Yoke won the first war—they broke the glaciers, claimed the moraines of the north, and they drove the Rake south, as far south as they could go, which is to say, here where we are, overlooking the world-ocean. The territory that would later be claimed by the Son of Seven Mothers."

This is comfortable territory for Embi, who just completed her master's on the sacred poetry of Pre-Kaliyuga civilizations, most particularly the long silver age between the Toba supereruption and the ancient world war now known as Rakesfall. She has explained to the conspiracy her model of the poetics/politics of deep time, the ritual song-cycles that retell and anchor history, compose causal chains, and sing narrative into being.

What makes Embi a heretic, and you with her, is the idea that magic was not always part of the everyday world. The idea that something happened at a particular point in history—an intrusion from a different eon—that changed all of history before and after that point. That all this had not already happened, until it had always already happened. Embi wants to know who did it, and why, and how. She recruited you and Fernando through sheer force of will, but you are all committed to the idea now.

"The fleeing Rake made a home in the ruins of a long-forgotten elder civilization that was destroyed by volcanic ash six hundred centuries ago, and whose name is unknown even to the gods," Embi summarizes, after reading in silence for a minute. "They built a stronghold there—this location is lost, we have no idea where. Probably underwater south of here? For a while there was détente, but nine thousand years ago the Yoke army came south and the Rake fell. That was the end of their great-power status, and the beginning of what we consider the modern era of poetry, and the history and physics that go with it. Here's the part we were looking for: there were a few Rake survivors who went into hiding."

"So we could be right," you say. You're kind of proud of that we, because you were the last to be recruited into the conspiracy. "The so-called demon encountered by the de Cerpe expedition to Kataragama four centuries ago. The Implied Thing in the Jungle. The ITJ."

Embi beams at you. "Yes!" she says. "The ITJ broke history. The past changed. The world changed."

"That's a little exaggerated," Fernando says. "You can't break history. History is just the things that happened. All you're saying is that you think something else ought to have happened."

You make a gesture repudiating that ugly ought. Embi waves it away, too, as if it were a physical thing sitting there on the table, squat and squamous.

"We can point at the (posited) 1642 irruption event as a fixed point that is always-already anchoring this brane to a particular configuration in the mythopoeic register," Embi says. She gets technical when she's tetchy. "Something came into this world. Something from before the Fall came back and our songs changed."

"But there's still no indication that the ITJ ever left occupied Vilacem," Fernando says. "No ravening elder-world monster came rampaging out of the jungle to conquer the empires of the day."

"This is why we need Imiya's model," Embi says. "To show that the ITJ can have widespread causal effects at a distance, in both space and time."

"The ITJ doesn't need to go anywhere," you agree. "You read the ola leaf. It was one of the first things born in time. It warps causality simply by existing in the post-Fall regime of poetics. It probably thinks the arrow of time is something it can shoot out of a bow! And it might be right!"

"Calm down," Fernando says, laughing. You hate that, and for a moment you hate him, but then he sees your face and he leans forward to kiss you, which is his way of saying sorry.

"This paper is going to blow everybody's minds," Embi says happily. "Professor Devakirti is going to be so proud."

Remember to stretch. Look up at the sky—through the ceiling, yes, past its secret cavities, its terra-cotta or asbestos or metal, through the layers of air and cloud and vacuum. Feel the earth under your feet, transmitted through foundation and concrete and brick and metal and tile and stone and whatever else might intervene. Look at the moon, even if you have to look through the entire earth to find it. Do not look at the sun.

(Now playing: fragment of annotated video discovered misfiled in the Library of Old Adam, three thousand years after Act Two. Playback recovery interrupted by compression artefacts and the cruft of centuries of format conversion errors.)

We are like heirs to a fortune which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being regard it as having been an original and unalterable possession of their race since the beginning of the world.

—James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1900)

Zoom in from a great height. At first, seemingly unbroken ocean. Then signs of habitation. There used to be a large island here, and the network of floating habitats and research institutions in this area like to anchor themselves to the islets that were its former mountaintops. Not because they crave terra firma, which they do not, but because those regions provide easier access to the now-submerged archaeological treasures of those elder civilizations which spent eons retreating to higher and higher ground, ever since the Yoke shattered the Himalayan glaciers at the very beginning of history.

The history of this place is about retreat inland and uphill: from invading armies, from the invading sea, from the poisoned air, the vengeful sun.

The Library of Old Adam is an environmentally controlled habitat carved into a solid cube of stone that rises almost twenty feet above sea level. Once this cube was a sacred mountain.

The video enters the Library, descends through many passageways to a room with a student and a teacher. They have just finished reviewing some ancient poems. Embi is trying to explain their context and implications. The video drone misses most of this, but arrives just in time for the student's rejoinder.

"No," says Deva—her stubbornness is palpable because the video comes with affective attachments. "The lesson is that false consciousness has always [obscure] our people to their true selves. The ones and the others; the white and the black; the north and the south; the lion and the tiger; the colonizer and the indigene; these were all a distraction from the true and essential distinction, that the [obscure] people must fight all forms of oppressors."

Embi closes their eyes and tries to find the right words to explain—words that can refute, but won't get their ration cards revoked for revisionism. It's hard to teach history, much less poetry.

"The Yoke and the Rake didn't begin and end in war," they say. "War was not their only relation. Recording it as such was the fundamental error of [obscure]. The phrase [obscure] means they sang together. The confusion arises because some of the oldest songs were songs of sacrifice, and war."

Nineteen thousand years after Rakesfall, when the sea has been coaxed to recede again, Embi comes back to the low slopes of Mount Elder.

She's taller in this life; she comes walking on air, descending from the clouds in leaps, but stopping in a wary hover before her bare feet touch the ground.

The soil below her is dry. The only green here is ugly, hardy plants she doesn't recognise. (She remembers those long-lost rainforests). They don't really fit the Prevailing Aesthetic. If she's not careful, this zone might be voted over to a different maintainer. She bends down to test the soil with her fingers. The nitrogen cycle's still not right; she spits into the earth and mutters instructions for the animalcules in her spittle to go to work rebalancing the soil.

It isn't the Prevailing Aesthetic that worries her. She's been composing a poem of memory ?guilt ?witness ?fury and she's stuck. Every time she puts herself into archive-trance to remember her past lives, she recalls the debt she has to this earth.

She checks in with Fern, whose hallucinated image appears beside her. Fern is doing something complicated with her face—she's got half of it peeled off to install something that looks like a giant beetle that pulsates in iridescent green.

"Are you agonizing over your Rake again?" Fern says. Fern always says she moved on lifetimes ago, though yet again in this life 'Miya and Fern have fallen out again over their mutual trance-memory of the torture incident. It's made for some awkward parties, because it's hard to avoid the few other people who still hang around the old Earth.

That we still hang around is a sign, Embi thinks. None of us have really moved on, except Deva. She doesn't say that out loud. Instead, she says, "What are you doing with your face?"

"I'm leaving," Fern says. She doesn't sound sure. "I'm tired of trying to fix this broken-ass planet."

Fern says this every other decade. She's not serious. Or at least, Embi doesn't think so.

"Have you talked to 'Miya about it?"

"You know she doesn't talk to me," Fern says. "Why would you even—Look, I'll talk to you later, okay? If I get this wrong I'll have to print a new head and start all over again."

The hallucination of Fern vanishes. Embi sighs. Fern's never been ready to hear what needs to be done, and 'Miya's sworn off all responsibility for the deep past. Deva joined the diaspora three lives ago and now lives in a hard-vacuum habitat somewhere in the galaxy's other arm. People move on. Embi hasn't.

It comes down to her responsibility in the end, as it did in the beginning.

She steps down onto the earth—she makes herself do it before her resolution can waver. The ground is warm and dry. Later (she silently circumscribes that with an if), she'll figure out how to re-irrigate in a way that sticks. She'll clap her hands and make it rain. She'll sing rivers across the land and teach them a hundred thousand lakes. But first, she walks over to a tree and snaps a branch, letting it hang by its own peeling bark. Takes a deep breath, in case it's her last.

"Hello," she says. "I think it's time."

The Rake appears so quickly it feels as if they had been waiting just for her, their author. Their form manifests transversely across the temporal aspect of the local brane: humanoid in cross section but serpentine in totality. Everything that might seem human about them is distorted in this fashion: they seem many-headed, many-handed, crowned by infinite undulating serpents, teeth grinning tusks, tongues absurdly long. The Rake undulates, spirals, encircles her. She tries to choose a face to look upon.

"I broke the compact," Embi says. "For reasons that don't seem so important now. You remember—you didn't have to die and forget, like me. I've felt guilty about it for hundreds of lives, only I couldn't always remember why. I do now. I've come to help you."

Or to fight you. Dirges of power hum behind her lips, ready to unleash lightning and fire. Far, far overhead, satellites tense and arm themselves. But she swallows the words, broadcasts forcible stand-down orders. More violence isn't even a last resort on this blasted earth that she and everyone else has spent so long painfully regreening.

"We've become too much alike," she admits, though she says that more to herself than them.

The Rake sings like a storm, in a voice multiplied by three hundred billion mouths:

A broken bough in the last sacred place,

home of the seven-mothered son sieged by the sea;

sister of the yoke, welcome.

Sing with me.

"No," Embi says. Her head is ringing. "You loved time, didn't you? You wanted to protect it. I made you hurt it. That's my fault."

Time flows.

I love,the Rake whispers like thunder, rattling her bones.

I forgive.

Embi stares at them. "You… forgive. I've left you trapped in a foreign poetic regime for ten thousand years. It should have been otherwise."

There is no other wisdom,the Rake says.

"You don't have to protect me," Embi says. "If protecting the world means that I need to be sacrificed, I'm ready. It took me a while to get ready, but I'm ready."

Youare the world, the Rake says.

There is no difference.

She touches their many faces, and it feels like rain.

This is our new compact.

A Lemon

In a Bengalee story it is said that all the ogres dwell in Ceylon, and that all their lives are in a single lemon. A boy cuts the lemon in pieces, and all the ogres die.

—James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1900)

For all the things of this world are no more than mere shadows, and the reality is always different from that which shows itself to us. So now we shall leave these minute details which we have related regarding the Island of Ceilāo, and proceed with the narrative of the war in that Island, which has been calling to us from the grave of forgetfulness when it should be alive in our remembrance.

—Jo?o Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilāo (1685), translated P. E. Peiris (1909)