(This section is long, and follows along immediately from the previous. This will also be the last post for a while!)
Spoilers: Marsh
End Of Endings — 2403
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Rye — 2409
When, now for the second time, I was able to sit up straight again, able breath slowly, able to look at The Woman instead of my paws as I covered my face, I bowed to her and said, "Thank you for telling me these things. I did not realize just how much I needed to hear them."
"Why?"
The Woman's simple question left me all the room in the world to admit that I did not know. I think that until she asked it, I was not quite sure why, myself. I had needed to hear those things but, yes: why? I do not think I would have been able to tell her as part of my statement, but that syllable forced my thoughts into order in a way that they are not as I write this, six years later.
"Because I have not internalized the immediacy of the attack," I said. "I did not know Should We Forget. I never met No Longer Myself. I met and spoke with Beckoning and Muse, yes, but only once. You telling me these things — me hearing them — was enough to make me realize that I have not truly grieved them, not properly. Your story of Warmth grieving helped me understand em better, and your story of Beholden's music and how she told you not to listen to it for her assignments made me realize that I, too, am only just starting to process the loss."
"I understand. I was forced to confront the immediacy of Should We Forget no longer being with us from the very first day, and I am used to thinking of my stanza in terms of loss. We lost Death Itself and I Do Not Know, yes? We knew loss in a way more immediate within the clade except perhaps by those of the second stanza, who lost their first line, too, yes?"
"Was there a difference for you? Death Itself and I Do Not Know quit, but Should We Forget was taken from you."
The Woman tilted her head, then gazed out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. "I think I knew, on some level, that Death Itself would leave us. I certainly suspected when she went all but catatonic, yes? But I knew. I had no such foreknowledge of Should We Forget leaving us. I suspect that none did, except perhaps Slow Hours, and she told me that her dreams did not make sense until after the fact." She returned her gaze to me. "So yes. There was a difference. The feeling surrounding Death Itself and I Do Not Know is a tired acceptance. They were a tired acceptance even immediately after. The feeling surrounding Should We Forget is a sharp and cold grief. It is a feeling of my world being upended and my footing no longer being sure."
"It did not feel stable after Lagrange came back, no."
"It did not. That, I am told, is why Beholden wrote her threnody: Beckoning was lost to the Attack and Muse quit out of grief one week later. Beholden, fearing that her life was unstable, declined the merge. She told me that she feared that accepting it would change who she was on a fundamental level, only for her to die, not loving her partner in the same way that she had for hundreds of years beforehand. A Finger Pointing has Beckoning's memories, but Muse is truly dead, now. Her memories have been dismissed and cannot be retrieved."
"I see," I said. "And so she memorialized what memories she did have in the form of her samples."
"There are many memorials now, are there not? There are many tokens. There are many metallic flowers and songs of laughter."
I smiled. "There is poetry in your words, my dear."
She bowed from where she sat, smiling. "And so I come to you, Rye."
"So you do. You have read with Slow Hours. What shall we do to help you on your path to joy?"
"Write."
I laughed. I do not think it was an unkind laugh, but it was a startled one. I am a writer, yes, but I do not fancy myself much of a teacher. I do not think I am much of a collaborator, either. I get quite protective of my work, and I can be something of a bitch when it comes to having it challenged. "How shall we write, then?" I asked. "I write with A Finger Pointing. We send each other letters back and forth, telling stories."
"Perhaps that is a thing we can do, too, but this is a project that I would like to approach as a conversation. I do not have an agenda for how, simply that I must."
"Have you written before?"
She shook her head. "No, I have not. I have not created much since becoming who I am, I am sorry to say. My stanza will occasionally tell each other stories, however, and I always fancied myself quite good at that."
I nodded. "A story is a good place to start, yes. You really have made so little?"
"My last century has been spent focusing inwards and meting my time out carefully for reasons I cannot explain. I have been seeking a form of stillness, perhaps."
Ah! This was it! My friends, this was the point when I realized just what it was that made each of The Woman's smiles feel like blessings and what made it feel like she bore some power within her that I could not quite understand. It was her stillness. My astute readers will remember that she had a thought, some few thousand words ago: perhaps this unbecoming that her mind circled around was simply the utmost in stillness.
Now, your narrator did not know this at the time — I do not even know now that this was the thought she had that day, but I am a storyteller, and so that is part of her story — but at the time, it was a revelation. Stillness and stillness and stillness. What a dream to have! Would that I could find such, yes? Even now, even as I write this, I feel that the lucidity in my words is due only to my recounting of a conversation I actually had, words anchored to moments in time that I pull out one right after the other and lay in a pretty row.
At the time, however, I said, "Have you found stillness in your endeavors so far? Was there stillness in active reading and active listening?"
"Not at all, no. I do not speak of physical stillness, but stillness of spirit. I shift forms, yes? I came to you as a skunk, yes? That is a physical restlessness that is evidence of an inner restlessness. My thoughts are unsettled. My feelings are unsettled. My mind is turbulent."
"That being the reason you did not feel the joy that you wanted?"
She nodded. "Yes. My thoughts became ordered, perhaps. That turbulence became a purposeful movement; rather than a stormy ocean, they were a river."
"I am sorry to say that I do not think my books would be any different."
"Oh, they are not," she said, chuckling. "They are quite good, of course, but they are hardly meditative."
I laughed as well. "Thank you, I think. I have a few that are labeled 'meditations on whatever', but even those probably do not fit the bill."
"I would assume not. No, I came to you because I wanted to talk to you about creating specifically because I watched And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights paint while visiting Beholden."
"Ah! Motes! What a delight!"
"She is, yes, though she is also quite a lot, is she not?"
I laughed, nodding.
"I will admit that, although I would agree that she is a delight. She was perhaps too much for me. When I first arrived at my visit to the house on the hill, she had just been swimming and was running around here and there."
"How old was she that day?"
"She said that she was seven," The Woman said. "I found her joy to be quite different from what I imagine for myself, though, as ought to be the case for someone who has chosen to live as a seven year old versus someone who has perhaps no choice but to love as a 317 year old, yes?"
"I will say that she is no less flighty or energetic when she chooses to live at older ages. When she is, say, twenty five, there is still no stopping her."
"So I am told. However, she is also a very good girl, is she not? Beholden saw the state that I was in — for when Motes started zipping around the house, I started shifting between forms — and suggested that she go and paint. She said quite simply "Okay!" and ran off to the next room where she simply sat on a stool and began painting."
I nodded up to the wall beside the couch, upon which a painting sat. The Woman smiled and nodded.
The painting was of my up-tree's house. The Instance Artist was one who decided that it had had quite enough of life in comfort, life here on Lagrange, life here honing, or perhaps forging new frontiers but in a familiar place, and up and left for the stars, back when humanity buckled down and decided to send out the two launch vehicles. Our very own twins, yes? Castor and Pollux? Those two half-sized Systems that even still race out of the Solar System at some unimaginable speed, yes? The Instance Artist left us all behind with no fork to spare, and broke all of our hearts.
When it had lived here on Lagrange, it had contracted my other up-tree, The Sim Designer, to build for it an infinite short-grass prairie. It was a land of long, rolling hills and yet longer flat basins that always drank most thirstily from the seasonal storms that did their best to thrash the earth below. There, amid the countless acres, sat its house, low and flat, an echo of the plains around it all done up in concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of the grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass.
And so there on my wall sat a painting that I had asked The Child to make, small by her standards at only the size of both of my paws held flat, wherein she had painted the house, the endless prairie, and the sky that somehow managed to be something beyond endless. There was the gray of the concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass. There was the plain, the sky.
And there, right in the center, hovering a scant claw-width above the house, a perfectly black perfect square.
Readers, you must understand that, when I say perfectly black, I do mean it! There is this color, or non-color, Eigengrau that is perhaps the darkest you are used to seeing. If you are in a perfectly dark room, or you are out beneath the stars at night and you close your eyes, or you are hiding under two layers of blankets from the monsters that haunt us still, even in this afterlife that we have built up into our nigh-perfection, what you see is not pure black, but Eigengrau. It is the darkest color, I am told, that our eyes can see, phys-side! This is because, even when there is no light, the nerves of our eyes still fire occasionally. Perhaps it is because this is something that is required for nerve cells to feel healthy, and when those cells are in our muscles and it is just one or two at a time, it does not yank our hand away from our pen and paper like they were burning hot, but when they are in our eyes, every little firing is still perceived as a photon hitting this rod or that cone. Perhaps it is because there is some fundamental state of being for us that is not stillness, that is movement at some molecular level. Perhaps it is simply because they are lonely! I do not know, I do not know. I do not know.
This square is not Eigengrau. It is beyond that. It is beyond even black! It is deeper than Eigengrau, yes, but it is also a very thirsty black. If the ground of The Instance Artist's prairie drinks thirstily of the sky, so too does this black drink thirstily of all the light in the world. It draws light from the room, and when you look at the painting, the world seems dimmer. It is a hole in the world.
I am used to it, my friends, for it sits happily enough upon my wall, but I am told that it is unnerving to see.
"Her paintings have always struck me as bearing a sort of serenity that I have not actually seen in the world," I said after we had appreciated house and plain and sky and hole in the world. "It is more than just some moment of movement captured and frozen in time. It is like she records things that were never still to begin with."
"Yes, and that is what drew me to her," The Woman said, gaze lingering on the painting. "I begged Beholden's leave to sit and watch Motes for nearly an hour. I claimed a spot in her studio once I received permission and watched as she worked. While I was there, she built up a scene of a mesa. I recognized it as Table Mountain. Do you remember?"
"Yes," I said, with some surprise. "I have not thought of that place in...well, likely not since we uploaded!"
She laughed. "Neither had I. We hiked there once and it seems to have left little enough impression, and Motes simply pulled it up from some deep recess, yes? Seeing that slowly take shape, though, as she worked with her paints, I felt like I was seeing some ancient behemoth who had never once woken laying asleep. It was a mountain that had never moved and never changed, even as a suburb sprawled at its base."
"Did she paint the shape while you were there?" I said, gesturing to the black-beyond-black square.
"No, not while I was looking. I did still have my errand, yes? I did not want to lose track of that. I wish now that I had."
"Having watched her paint this one, I can tell you that it is both more and less important than the rest of the painting. She paints it much as she paints the rest of the painting, yes? She brings one foot up onto her stool so that she can rest her chin on it and her tail drapes down behind her and she listens to her very strange music, and she paints the rectangle. Perhaps she sticks her tongue tip out as she does so, like she is concentrating very hard, yes?" I stuck my tongue tip out just so, furrowing my brow and squinting as though at some minute detail.
The woman laughed.
"So it is much like she paints the rest of the scene, yes? Except that it is not, because she is not adding to the picture, she is taking away from it. I have tried to look at this painting from every angle, yes? I have looked up close and far away. I have touched it and smelled it and — yes, I will admit — tasted it, and it is in all ways just paint on canvas. But it is not on top of anything, it is through everything, I would say. I do not know how else to explain it. With all the calmness in the universe, she excised a part of the world from existence." I looked up to the painting again. "I feel that, were I able to visit Dear's prairie again, that very chunk of it would be missing. I fear it would be some sort of black hole hungrily gobbling up all of Lagrange from the inside. In my dreams, that is what the Century Attack looks like. In my dreams, we are all pulled through a null rectangle like that, and when the world is pulled back out, those like Should We Forget and No Longer Myself and Beckoning and Muse are left within."
We sat in silence — silences can be so comfortable sometimes! — while I looked up at the painting and The Woman looked out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. It must have been two or three minutes of just long, comfortable silence, of just a woman who was also a cat and a woman who was also a skunk, two women who were in some roundabout way the same, sitting together.
"How large do you suppose it would be?" The Woman said, startling me out of my reverie.
"Mm? The rectangle? The hole?"
She nodded.
"I go back and forth. Sometimes, I feel that it is right in front of me and the house is in the distance, and that it is painted to scale. Sometimes, I feel like it must be behind the house, or way out beyond the sky, and it is larger than the moon."
"I see we understand it in the same way. I cannot tell, either. I can tell you, though, that watching Motes brought me the closest to the joy that I have been seeking that I have ever been." She frowned down to her glass, now empty. When she continued, her speech was halting, slow, thoughtful. "Not...for me, not my own joy, and I think not even for her, though the little skunk certainly seems quite joyful. It is...adjacent to the joy. It brought me near to the joy, but did not necessarily bring the joy to me."
