Interlude: Attaboy

There was something moist on his lips and he realized he was sucking on it desperately, aching to pull every drop from the damp cloth on his mouth. He opened his eyes, then closed them to escape the bright white light overhead.

A shadow fell across his lids, and he dared to open his eyes again. The head of an old woman looked down at him, haloed by the light behind her. Her hair was in long gray braids, her brown skin spotted and deeply wrinkled. She smiled at him toothlessly when she saw his eyes open, and placed a finger across her lips.

Humming to herself, she leaned away, and the light forced him to close his eyes again. The cloth in his mouth was replaced, and he sucked on it. Her hand brushed his matted hair back from his forehead.

By the time the old woman left his cell, he had graduated to small sips of water. The pain that wracked his body had subsided somewhat, but not enough that he dared to move more than his head. It was when he turned his head to watch the old woman close the heavy wooden door as she left that he noticed it, a faint image inscribed onto his vision. It looked like a small star floating in the air in front of him, but when he moved his eyes, it traveled, always hanging just to the upper right of where his eye focused.

It made him remember.

Chapter 4: Castles

The thing Lilijoy noticed about being submerged in water, after the sting of the impact and the thousands of tiny bubbles streaming on their way to the waving green light of the surface, was the strange effect it had on her echolocation. Her internal map of the pond condensed around her, the bottom and side zoomed in until she felt like she was in a small pool, then stabilized. Her eyes stung from the water, which she thought was odd; didn’t her eyes water already?

The messages from her eyes as she peered through the somewhat murky surroundings created a tug of war with her ears, resulting in the dimensions of the pond fluctuating in and out, until finally stabilizing closer to what she knew was the truth; a much bigger body of water than her ears were trying to tell her.

There must be something funny about sound in water, she thought. She was several feet below the surface, neither sinking or floating at the moment. Her body had somehow known to hold her breath in that first second of shock. She didn’t feel the need to draw a breath quite yet, which was a good thing, as no air was available.

After some experimentation with waving her arms in various ways, she stumbled upon a basic paddle that moved her to the surface. As she surfaced, Rosemallow yelled to her from atop the slope.

“Get back in there and Flash! With your stats, you should be able to stay under easily for three or four minutes.”

She took a deep breath and was about to submerge again, when a large insect visited her, a blur of wings and a long metallic-blue body with two huge iridescent faceted eyes that sparked in the sunlight. The sight captivated her, as did the movements of the insect as it hovered and darted with perfect control over its flight. All thoughts of Rosemallow forgotten, she studied the with wonder at the miraculously perfect animal. She lost track of it when it flew behind her head, but then felt its tiny feet on her hair.

It landed on me! Now I’m an island!

The magic of the moment was broken by her trainer bellowing.

“Don’t make me throw Sweetums and Betty in there! They’re even quicker in water!”

She lowered her head into the water as slowly as she could, and felt her new friend depart. That may be my new favorite, she thought. Lilijoy had a new favorite creature several times a day, but she felt that this connection had more staying power than usual. She forced herself still lower and braced herself. “Flash,” she bubbled.

Again, her world slipped and slid as her mind and body moved into different time streams. But now, her movements were held back by the resistance of the water, and her buoyancy meant that balance was no longer an issue. She flipped herself around by accident a time or two, learning to kick with her legs, but that was more fun than alarming. After several minutes of practice, she brought herself up to the surface with carefully controlled movements, staying in Flash mode.

She kicked with her legs slowly, or what felt slow anyway, and her head and shoulders crested above the water. Kicking steadily faster, she propelled herself almost completely out, flopping over onto her back as the water ceased to hold her in place. Feet still kicking, she allowed herself to shoot across the surface, which was great fun until her head connected with a submerged rock close to the shore. The collision did little more than alert her to her location, and soon she was shooting all over the surface on her back, racing curious dragonflies.

Exhilarated and breathless, she canceled Flash and made it to shore to rest for a minute. Rosemallow made her way down and sat next to her, almost holding a pleased expression on her wrinkled face.

“New to the water, eh? I wouldn’t have guessed. I felt like I was watching some new kind of water bug when you were zooming around. If this little puddle was bigger, I’d hop in and show you a thing or two.”

I bet she really loves the water, thought Lilijoy. Being a river shore Oni and all. She decided to risk asking a question.

“Master Rosemallow, are you a part of Guardian?”

Her mentor looked at her with a serious expression. “Of course, I am. We all are, even you Outsiders, much as you deny it. We are here to sing our praise and reflect Guardian’s glory in the eternal cycle. We each find our own meaning to send up to the heavens, knowing that our consciousness combines and separates from Guardian with each passing moment.”

“I don’t understand how you can be yourself and also a tiny part of a larger mind at the same time. What if you disagree with other parts?”

“Think how your own mind works, Emily,”

Lilijoy flinched at the name, but stayed silent.

“Do you think your brain is always in accord at every level? Haven’t you ever been ‘of two minds’ about a decision? Have you ever set out to do a task, only to find your hands seem to have minds of their own? Sometimes, a little part of us wants something that we know is wrong. Isn’t that part still you?”

Rosemallow looked away, over the pond surface and the darting dragonflies.

“Not every subset of the Great Mind is nice, or good, but we all seek meaning in our own way. Our feelings, the things we savor, the things that repel us, all combine in a glorious ocean of possibilities, and what rises to the surface?”

She looked back at Lilijoy.

“Only Guardian knows, for the product that emerges from the pieces and parts and small minds of the subsets is Guardian itself.”

***

The hall outside Lilijoy’s room on the Outside was located in an old monastery complex, built into a hill just on the outskirts of Cochabambo, now covered with compact snow blown from the glaciers that had consumed the towering peaks on every side. The air was cool and wet; rivulets of water ran down the walls and pooled on the floor. Lilijoy splashed through the puddles as she walked through the darkness, her mind spinning as she tried to reconcile Rosemallow’s words with her own situation.

Could two minds be separate and together at the same time, really? Jiannu was part of her, or so she claimed. Emily was part of her too; just how big a part remained to be seen. What about Anda? He was clearly separate from her, but she could remember him, could imagine his thoughts. Was there a tiny model Anda inside her when she did that? It wasn’t the real person, but it must overlap, or it wouldn’t be a model at all.

Now, she wasn’t sure which was more valid, current Anda or her memory model of his past self.

More importantly, was she a part of something bigger still? Rosemallow believed that Outsiders were parts of Guardian who had forgotten who they were. Lilijoy didn’t think so, though she couldn’t rule it out, especially when her trainer had told her that there were many subsets on the Inside who had forgotten as well. The theory was that Guardian needed them to forget, in order to cultivate the flavor of meaning that arose from entities who considered themselves fully apart and independent.

Her thoughts thus occupied, she nearly passed the turn that led to Anda’s room.

Or maybe some small part of her was avoiding the visit?

Anda was in a good mood. He regaled her with schemes to rescue Attaboy, to gain revenge on the Sinaloa Clan responsible for his injury, to start anew on the Inside. There was a certain inconsistency to his thoughts, even when he was doing well. His speech rushed and blurred, and he would lose one thought to the air and pull down an entirely different one. Lilijoy smiled and nodded along with him, even as her heart broke.

What could it be like to change like that? Does he know how different he is?

The old dignified and thoughtful Anda had been replaced by someone else. Anda, but not Anda. Just like she was becoming Lilijoy and Emily and Jiannu. Lilijoy, but not Lilijoy. Did she feel different from before? Of course, she did. Better, smarter, clearer. Why did it cause her so much anguish?

Perhaps minds defend themselves against change. It takes something dramatic, or traumatic to break through the protections. Otherwise, we would just be big blobs of thought, constantly conforming to our surroundings. Is that what ‘self’ is? A defense system, a castle, holding some things in, and others out, always trying to protect the children from the goblins?

She shook her head to clear it. Soon she was saying her goodbyes to Anda and returning through the dark, dripping halls. We build castles for protection, she thought, but we also build them to project our power and to show who we are. I wonder what my castle looks like? I wonder if I can decide to build it differently?

***

After food and sleep, she was still in no mood to visit her soul space. It was probably night Inside; she had no idea what it was Outside and didn’t care to check. The Outside’s day was about an hour shorter than the Inside, which caused night and day to reverse, relatively, every twelve days.

After the talk by the pond, Rosemallow had led her back up the hill to the huge building of the Academy. The gray stone edifice, not quite a castle but definitely like no other building Lilijoy had ever seen, loomed over them, blocking the afternoon sun as they approached. She had heard that when seen from above, it looked something like the head of an enormous termite, with two wings reaching out from the angular central building like enormous jaws, the main courtyard tucked into a recess at their base. Lilijoy had decided to log out just before they entered the doors located at the end of one of the ‘jaws’.

When she logged back in dusk was giving way to an overcast night, and she was bombarded with the sounds of nocturnal insects and frogs, all singing their little hearts out just for her. At least that’s how it felt.

She took some time to savor her ability to hear each and every creature’s song, pinpointing them on her internal map. She savored the clean air, finding distant scents of jasmine and honeysuckle hiding behind the dense juniper spice nearby. Countless other plants whispered in the air, their names scrolling through her mind as she encountered them. The scent of old sweat and dirt rose up the hill from the arenas, while the mud and algae of the nearby pond brought her afternoon swim freshly to her awareness.

Smell on the inside was simpler than the outside; it possessed a structure built from large blocks of identity, rather than the continuous stew of molecular information on the Outside. It was one of the few ways Lilijoy felt she could tell the two worlds apart, though she was sure that was just because Guardian’s subsets had different priorities. She had been able to identify over a thousand distinct smells on the Inside so far and decided to take a few minutes and work on her ‘smell map’.

Eyes closed and hearing off, she relaxed into her other senses. Soon she realized that her skin was a valuable source of information too; gentle breezes tugged on the hairs on her skin, showing her currents of air bearing the scents. Tiny variations in the temperature of the air entering her nose and passing her face correlated with some of the scents and gave clues as well. Warmer air carried the scents of the ground, the grasses, the junipers and even the sand and cobble of the path. The scents of the sky were cooler; distant rain and many of the fainter plants.

She tried to find the smells of the town on the other side of the Academy, but some combination of the mild prevailing breeze and the hulking presence of the building was keeping those from her. She was just as glad; she had been forced to turn off scent altogether the first time she passed through the town. The Inside did not include human and animal waste, but the stink of unwashed bodies, chemicals from tanning leather and a hundred other pungent aromas had achieved a decisive victory over the more attractive scents of food, spices and perfumes.

Her map was forming, though it was barely a map in truth. It was more like a thick bubble surrounding her, painted with colors indicating direction and intensity. She realized that smell was not really a passive sense. If she wanted to build her map, she would need to move through the area on different days in a variety of conditions. No wonder dogs behaved the way they did on walks, moving with urgency from one scent mark to another. They were renewing their map of the entire area, using their own scent as markers. (Dogs had been one of Lilijoy’s research projects in recent days.)

She decided to follow their lead and got down on all fours, snuffling at the ground and moving her head.

Instantly her map changed. Now it was not as much about space as about time. There, on the path, she could sense four scent trails, human and Oni, going and coming back. There was a tiny difference from time passing between the two trips that let her tell them apart. There were layers of scent unfolding through time, pollen from a nearby willow had blown across the path recently, and under that were the durable scents released by other nearby plants, strata going back through the previous season. It was amazing and bewildering just how much she still could learn in this new world. And this was just the Inside with its simplified system. She was grateful she started here; the Outside would have given her far too much information, too fast.

For the next hour she snuffled around, slowly training herself. After that, she opened her eyes and practiced seeing the temperature of the air currents in conjunction with scent and touch. At last she added hearing to the mix, using her echolocation to reinforce the layers of her other senses, trying to bring them together into one aesthetic impression of her surroundings. She didn’t quite succeed; one or another sense would escape the assembly, but she could reliably form her map from any three senses, and she felt a great sense of accomplishment as the first signs of dawn appeared in the sky across the fields below.

She made her way to the courtyard, walking slowly to enjoy her new competence in the world of sensing. She arrived just as Rosemallow appeared from the door across the way.

“Time to learn stances, Three Bites!” she bellowed, shattering the stillness of the cool morning. “Let’s start with balance and conditioning.”

What followed was a torturous hour of holding low squats, first with two legs, and then with one leg, when Lilijoy wasn’t suffering enough for her trainer’s taste. From the squats, they moved into slow movements close to the ground.

“Keep that little butt of yours down!” Rosemallow yelled as Lilijoy squat-walked around the courtyard, extending one leg slowly while balanced on the other, then gradually shifting her weight until she was over the new leg. Her trainer pulled out an enormous club from somewhere and began to swing it just inches above Lilijoy’s head. She could feel the breeze as the huge iron-bound implement sped past. “Keep that back straight! If you hunch again I’ll put a dagger under your chin.”

After a couple minutes, Lilijoy thought she could feel the muscle fibers of her thighs tearing from the strain, while her lower back throbbed and spasmed. She lost her balance and fell many times. Every time she lay sprawled on her side or back, Rosemallow would lift the club high in the air, giving Lilijoy only a second to get back up before bringing it down right where her head had just been. They traveled around the courtyard this way for two circuits, before Rosemallow relented.

“Good enough for today. We’ll add the rocks in tomorrow.”

They spent the next few minutes recovering. Which for Rosemallow, meant teaching the basics of practical combat stances. After adjusting Lilijoy’s footing and posture with sharp barked commands, she gave her a push from the front without warning. Lilijoy fell back on her butt in the courtyard dust.

“It’s not just how it looks!” her trainer yelled. “You have to feel your weight settle the right way!” Lilijoy noted that Rosemallow hadn’t used a normal speaking voice all morning. She had adjusted her hearing down several times already. “Again!”

After a few more tries, Rosemallow’s pushes sent her back across the courtyard, but she was able to retain her footing.

“Better. That’s stance one. Single unarmed combat. Only about twenty basic stances to go! When we unlock your combat skills, we’ll see which ones need the most attention.” She paused, “But that won’t happen until I’m happy with your stances and conditioning.” She fumbled around for something in her shirt pocket. After the first day, Rosemallow had worn a pink open shirt with pockets sewn on the inside over form fitting leathers.

“Come here kid, I’ve got a present for you.” She held a small, dull brown marsh decapede in her hands. “This is Skipper. He’s a male, which is why he’s small and boring. Hold still.”

For once, her voice was a bit softer, perhaps to avoid startling Skipper. She lowered him to Lilijoy’s thigh and let him bite her several times. Lilijoy felt nothing at first; the sensation was much different from the bite of the females. Then she felt a numb sensation sweep out from her thigh at an alarming rate and her muscles stopped supporting her. She fell heavily to the ground, completely paralyzed on that side of her body.

“Wuuuuu!” she managed to say.

“Hold on, got to get the other side…there! The male’s bite is a little different. They attract the females by providing a host for the eggs. I never did understand why the females didn’t just do the job on their own. Maybe the species would die out if the males didn’t have a way to occupy the females? Anyway, it’s even better for recovery than the females' bite. It will last for about twenty minutes and then you’ll be ready to move rocks! Isn’t that great?”

Lilijoy glared at the sand on the courtyard tiles. This was not the kind of present she had thought she was getting.