related by Lora of Many Generations
I was floating in the intense nexus of power that was the interface between the
Harr, Raynah, the Kahlmorah,
Adana, and me. I found myself wishing passionately that I had paid more attention in biology and physics class. I was aware of myself as a set of interlocking patterns emerging from the intersection of an absolute Void with a massive energy field. Somewhere in those patterns were things I thought might be quarks, atoms, molecules, and of course,
the dense micro-universe inside each of my cells.
“Your attention
to those things wouldn’t have mattered all that much,” I heard Raynah comment blandly.
Zir comments, as I was to learn, always seemed bland. “The things the humans of your generation had learned about biology and physics won’t help you much with this.”
“Indeed,” I felt the Kahlmorah agree as one.
If I concentrated really hard I could sense many of them
bobbing together, but their minds had merged so completely that for the most part, they felt like one overwhelming force.
“So, Adana, if you want to know how minds work together to create reality, why not just observe the Kahlmorah?” I wondered. “They seem to have it completely together.”
Adana laughed. “They achieved their union almost 200 million years ago. They can’t remember the time when they were individuals. Humans have yet to agree on the way breakfast should be conducted, much less what the nature of mind or reality consists of, certainly not how our lives should be conducted. The gulf between our fighting over breakfast and Kahlmorah absolute unity of consciousness is rather staggering, don’t you think?”
I saw her point and moved on without comment to my central conundrum – how to help the
Iglendas.
“Where will you start?”
The question came from deep beyond Adana’s mind. In fact, it coalesced from tiny sparks into a fierce stream that tore through my awareness like a firestorm. I could only assume this must be the Harr.
I realized with a start that I had thought of battle plans, of dreaming a way of outsmarting the Purics, taking them by storm, eliminating
their threat in some fashion.
I felt the laughter of the Harr like a searing wind through my
brain.
“What gives you the right to dream such dreams?” they taunted.
“I loved
Pon,” I replied without thinking, “and now
I love them,” but as soon as the notion formed in my nerves, I realized how completely irrational it actually was.
“That might be the first
clear thought you’ve expressed,” they laughed. “Aren’t you even a little interested in the picture beyond Pon
and this moment?” they asked.
“I don’t know anything about the picture beyond Pon
or this moment,” I stammered, my neurons clattering against each other like so
many leaves shaking in the wind. “At first I just accepted his view, that his
people needed saving. Once I was here, I saw things for myself. They need
saving!”
“You poor divided
creature -- all nested compartments barely capable of communicating with each
other from the Field and the Stream up. No wonder you see almost nothing! Did it ever occur to you that what any
such individual wants or sees may have nothing to do with anything but chemical storms
between their own compartments?” the Harr tittered.
Their smugness was infuriating. “Of course it has occurred to me,” I objected.
What did they mean by compartmented creature?
“Did you take the notion seriously?” they
interrupted my confusion.
“Of course!” I spat
reflexively.
“But, not too…” they continued. “What makes you think Pon had a clear view of his people and their needs,” they demanded. “Did you check his facts, his interpretations?”
“I felt his clarity,” I spouted.
“You felt him strongly, but what made you think what he saw was seen clearly?
What makes you think you perceive clearly?”
They might as well have added, “foolish mortal,” for all their superior attitude.
“What makes you think he didn’t see things clearly!” I demanded in return. “He was a product of his time, of necessity, of...” they interrupted me.
“Of mindless
surges of emotion!”
“Emotion is one form of mind,” I countered, “and certainly not the least clear.”
“She is right,” Adana agreed, surprising me greatly. I had just assumed she would be on the Harr’s side.
“Our cells act in concert during
emotion,” she continued, “Often, emotion links us directly to the currents underlying situations in a way that we don’t understand with
our surface minds -- our reason -- until much later, yet, mostly we find we have done the
clear thing as you assess such matters that is. Emotion is our most direct
experience of the Stream.”
I surfaced from my submersion in our interface long enough to
wonder “What is this Stream of which they speak?” But, I was pulled
back under by the force of the Harr. They were silent. I could sense them considering her words.
“You feel Pon did the right things?” they asked.
“I have no idea,” she retorted. “I
am not him, nor did I ever interface with him. I know his actions emerged from his submersion in the life of his people as they experienced it
during the moments of his life.”
In that moment of floating between the immense,
alien perspective of the Harr and the brief lives of Pon and me, I realized I could choose to be their puppet, let them instruct me, or I could choose to, as Adana said, let
emotion flow through me, unite me to the greater reality in which I was, for better or for worse, completely submerged.
“Or you could take a third way,” the voice of Raynah counseled.
I started. I had forgotten Raynah, forgotten everything but the pressure in my mind from the Harr and the pressure that had been building
between my neurons since I had first encountered Pon.
“A third way?” Adana asked.
I could feel the Harr watching, considering. I could feel their interest.
I had to control a flood of emotion just beginning to boil over, control it long
enough to listen to Raynah. Zir comforting blandness helped immeasurably.
“What way is that, Raynah?” I asked,
my neurons trembling.
“Submerge yourself in the intersection of the Harr, Adana, me, the Kahlmorah, and the
lives of the Iglendas. Let your choices emerge from that place.”
“She won’t be able to do that,” the Harr smirked. “She hasn’t the
control or the scope.”
That totally pissed me off.
“You self-righteous, smirking bastards,” all of my neurons yelled. “You sit back from the distance of millennia and make judgments on creatures of flesh and blood, temporal creatures bound by circumstances you will never endure. What could you possibly tell me about anything?”
“We could show you how the Iglendas got themselves into their current predicament,” they snarled, their contempt burning holes in my
reason through which my liberated emotions surged.
“What difference does that make?” I demanded. “That was more than 10,000 years ago. What matters is now, what are they supposed to do now?”
“Alright, enough,” Raynah commanded. “This gets us nowhere.”
“These sorts of conversations never do,” the Harr laughed.
“We are at a temporal impasse,” Raynah continued, “an impasse of perspectives.”
“Indeed,” Adana laughed.
She seemed delighted by our mess.
“Adana, your mind, my mind, the minds of the Iglendas, they are all created by separate
sets of enclosed functional units that have no direct interface,” Raynah said blandly. “Everything
we experience is the result of many layers of transduction. But the minds of the Harr,
the Beni, the Kahlmorah, they are directly linked by their physiology – there is no separation of any note. It is easy for them to act as one,
to fruitfully pool their many perspectives. Besides which, they are extremely long-lived compared even with me. They do not understand us at all.”
“Yet here we are all together in interface,” Adana noted
passionately. She was in love with the experience of this scope, this power.
“Yes,” I felt the Kahlmorah agree, “here we all are. What shall we do?”
Something in my heart hardened. In fact, I felt a fortress of implacable steel forming
inside me.
“This is all pointless,” I finally raged. “I can’t believe I’ve wasted my time with
you. I pick door number 2. I’ll just submerge and follow my gut. The rest of you do whatever it is you think you must.”
With the epic force of
will I had inherited from my parents I stood up, jerked my mind out of
interface, dried off, and dressed. Then I went to find
Xexra and help plan our neutralization of the
threat to the Iglendas.
to be continued...
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The Dark Side of Love series ©2006-2008 by TDunyati-Long (TDHawkes)
