nano

HOLLOW

By

Susan

Danewitz

Chapter One - A woman by the road 4

Chapter Two - In which I begin to trust my instinct 8

Chapter Three - Sitting at the fire 11

Chapter Four - She starts to reveal her story 13

Chapter Five - Crashed in the mountains 16

Chapter Six - Where she discovers the way in, as retold

for the reader of this Document over the course of a

number of nights 18

Chapter Seven - Sleeping, and crawling 21

Chapter Eight - Horizon 25

Chapter Nine - Waking 27

Chapter Ten - The inner world revealed 43

Chapter Eleven - Quiet in Luluthnia 45

Chapter Twelve - The image-maker 49

Chapter Thirteen - Mary fills in the picture 57

Chapter Fourteen - 61

Chapter Fifteen - 68

Chapter Sixteen - The beast keepers 75

Chapter Seventeen - Eating with Sul 87

Chapter Eighteen - Sul tells the Story of Merl 94

Chapter Nineteen - The Food of the Grthl 97

Chapter Twenty - Leaving this place Error! Bookmark

not defined.101

Chapter Twenty-one - Meeting San & the other tinkers

Error! Bookmark not defined.102

Chapter Twenty-two - The world above and below, as

told by Sul to Mary 104

Chapter Twenty-three - The Quick races evolve 113

Chapter Twenty-four - Others who have traveled

between the surface and interior 115

Chapter Twenty-five - Gardeners 120

Chapter Twenty-six - Inside the Greenhouse 131

Chapter Twenty-seven - Tending the garden 154

Chapter Twenty-eight - Working alone, and the Luluthn

leave 160

Chapter Twenty-nine - Meeting 170

Chapter One - A woman by the road



When I begin my story, I realize that I must caution you. You, my

reader, will have your credulity tested, and you will be quite right to

question my tale. However, do not let your honest evaluation reject

outright the tale that I relate to you, for it contains the stunning truths

that have been concealed from us. There is a dark wall beyond our

knowing, and I can help pierce that wall, to reveal the other side.



Let me introduce myself. I am XXXX, once an innocent, now a

believer, once more agitated than at home in the world, now at peace,

yet filled with longing.



I was born of moderate circumstances, in the easy suburb of Herndon,

Virginia. When I was young, the land was simple, stripped of all but

grass, with cascades of simple houses flowing up and down the rolling

hillside. Now, the trees have grown large, and shade the houses, which

have an air of watching. In the summers, I would play outside most

days, running through the weeds of the nearby creek, making forts, and

pushing the limits of my imagination.



Our moment begins in traffic. It was sunset, on a sweet fall day on the

Beltway - the road that circles Washington, DC. Trees were changing

from a pasty, used-up green, to a marbled red and yellow not unlike a

shot silk from some Moroccan lounge. I was in a turn lane, inching

towards an exit towards a destination of food, and drink, and revelry,

that I dreaded. I am not entirely social, you see, and the bar I felt

obligated to approach on this Friday was filled with jolly people not

cautious about their words, not complex about their thoughts. I felt

hunted, approaching the exit, and was trying to store up great swallows

of the air and beauty around me, to power me through this engagement.

I was thinking through the list of people I knew that would be there,

while feeling that I'd rather spend time with the brilliant trees.



What caught my eye was not so unusual, I think. There was a tree, a

red maple, glorious to behold. The maple was wreathed in a color

deeper than flame, deeper than ochre, brighter than blood, like a tree a

phoenix could burst from at the moment of birth. The reds and

burgundies of the leaves were shot with brilliant yellows that only

served to make this tree more vivid. I sat, the roar of traffic going the

other way hissing white noise, and pressed my foot hard onto the brake

pedal as I gawked at the maple.



I traced its contours with my eyes, lovingly. The trunk was canted a bit,

so that it leaned out into the space left by the forest edge, and the trunk

thus traveled backwards, into the deeper woods. It is only my sincere

desire to lose myself in that forest rather than attain my destination that

caused me to notice the colors at the foot of the tree.



The priMary color was blue – a turquoise blue found primarily in stores

of a lower class of clothing, such as TJ Maxx and Marshalls. A course,

loud color, that nevertheless was quite distinct amongst the reds and

yellows of the season, and even the asphalt and concrete of the road.

This turquoise, in a material that suggested a sweat shirt or some other

clothing of someone without much taste, was muddied by dirt and by

damp. But as my eye was caught by it, another flash took its place.



For there is little we humans process faster than the evidence of a face,

and my body jolted as I realized the blue lump was in fact a woman,

raising her head up and reaching her hand towards our march of cars.

Her head was not held very high, and she seemed hurt, or so I assumed

since she was not even crawling.

Three counts of my heart passed as I went through the arrogant ugliness

of a suburbanite: Should I waste my time on this person? Can I afford

the time from my schedule? Will I be hurt? And I pulled my car on the

gravel of the shoulder. I told myself the line of cars could not fail to

notice me should this be some sort of strange hobo trap.



The sounds of the highway died off quickly, as I crunched gravel to the

edge of a small gully, and walked towards the hurt woman. I have

always been one to run to help – the car accident victims, the coworkers

in muffled tears, the bicycling child with the skinned knee, the vomiting

boyfriend. Everything I did before for those around me led to this

moment.



"Somewhere warm, please, please…" she said, as I jogged up.



Professionally, brusquely, with a tone I thought of as like a nurse's, I

said, "Are you hurt? What happened?"



"Cold, please, somewhere warm" she said, with a weight that was much

more solemn than I expected. She sounded sane – I never expected

that. Her voice was serious, not maniacal. Her eyes scanned my face

with the same regard of skepticism that I focused on her.



"What happened? Are you hurt?" I repeated, still coasting on the

assumption that I was dealing with an indigent whose sanity was

suspect. Small words are often the response I give to small minds, and I

had not considered that a woman, wounded, dirty, and dressed in a

garish sweatshirt could possibly offer anything but a history of narrow

experience and primitive commentary.



"No. I am not hurt, I think. Except… No. I need warmth, please," she

said, speaking with analytical precision. She was pushed up by her

elbows, one leg trying to crawl, the other dragging behind. I looked

back at the traffic, which had begun to move, so that a gentle rolling

stream of tires and muted paints were passing my parked car. The

twilight was deepening. We were perhaps ten feet from the edge of the

woods, and my caution increased as I realized that I was less protected

than I was in brighter light.



"Let's get you to the hospital, then," I said. I had reevaluated the danger

and decided this stranger was still my charge, suspicious though it all

might be. I squatted down, and reached for her face, to check her

forehead. Her fever nearly burned me.



"My god! You're really sick," I said, as she began to protest.



"No, just warmth. Please. I know it strange. Don't take me to the

authorities."



"What's wrong? Who are you running from?" I said, looking with

emphatic sympathy into her eyes.



"I must first recover, please," she said, pushing herself from the ground

with massive effort, to a crouched sitting position with knees bent and

arms on her knees.

Chapter Two - In which I begin to trust my instinct



Somehow Mary convinced me to take her, not to a bright and

welcoming hospital, with those that know expertly how to calm a

feverish brow, and what injections restore strength to weakened limbs.

Instead, I got her into the passenger seat without learning much more

than she initially said. She was cold, not hurt, please no authorities.



"How can I not take you to the hospital?" I said, as I pulled the car from

the gravel shoulder back into a gap in traffic. A smell filled the car that

was not expected. I continued to expect her to be homeless, smelling of

urine and unwashed parts. Instead, the smell in the car was more like

warm leaves, an organic smell that was rich, yet simple.



"I don't need a hospital. I need someone to tell my story," she said, her

body leaning into the seat as if she was unaccustomed to sitting – as if

the full force of her back was tried to keep the seat upright.



No better sentence could she have said to convince me. For while I

pride myself on emergency responses that are quick and common sense

that is strong, I have one other affectation. I think myself a listener. A

shrink, an interviewer, a conversationalist – whatever you might call it,

I feel proud of my ability to draw out a story from one who has a story

to tell. This intuitive ability is not dampened by my cynical nature – in

fact, my cynical attitude toward society augments my determination to

find the authentic and the unusual in every person I speak with.



"Like a journalist?" I hesitated, becoming jealous of her assumed

intention, of the newspaper or tv reporter she seemed to be demanding.



"I just need to think it all through…" she said, her voice fading as she

dropped into a thought.

"Are you running from someone?" I asked, determined to figure this out

and place this woman into any box that would fit, any assumptions that

would order this strange experience.



She gazed at me, seriously, and seemed to process the situation – seeing

me, the car, the landscape – and said, solemnly, , "I have seen and

experienced things that you could not imagine, and I have just now

returned to this," here she gestured towards the exit ramp, the

automobiles around us, the 7-11 store gleaming in the night, "this place,

and I need a warm room, and a chair, and time to think it all through."



How do we know when someone is lying to us? Most scientists will tell

us that we don't. We humans are laughably incapable of determining

the authenticity of the shades of meaning we are handed each day. We

trust in the seamless flow of assumptions that knit our reality together

from the offered stories of our compatriots. We take a statement as it is

given, and use it to judge our actions. Only a few stolid ones of us can

read the eyes, the twitch, the smirk, the hesitation of a lie and know it.

We live on borrowed reality, handed to us merely because it is so much

easier, oftentimes, to tell the truth. So we humans bob along, floating

on our river of trust, and hope that the water we are in isn't actually air

or rocks.



When I looked at her, a stranger, and saw her eyes deepen with what

she was saying, I didn't consciously make a choice, but I might as well

have. Because hearing her vague story, and seeing her far-away look

decided for me – switched a belief switch in my head, and collapsed my

doubts. My heart was quickened with excitement and expectation. My

hand slid further down the steering wheel, and gripped the outsides to

prepare to go straight down the road we were on, not turning off at the

next light.

"Fine. Okay. Let's get you somewhere safe," I sputtered, from the

impetus of the decision I had just made. We drove in silence the rest of

the way, while she stared at all we passed, and eventually I turned on

some quiet radio to some squawking old jazz.

Chapter Three - Sitting at the fire



My house is down a quiet lane, and as we drove in, the dogs barked

from the back yard. She seemed stunned by the idea of dogs, shying

away from the fence as we walked to the front of the house. Our feet

crackled in the early leaves, and the door sounded so heavy when it

swung open.



"There's a couch there. Chamomile tea?" I asked.



"Please. Yes," she said.



I lit a fire, gestured her to the sofa, and handed her an auburn afghan

that my mother knitted, decades ago. I busied myself in the kitchen,

occasionally glancing at this quiet woman who nested herself into the

afghan so that only her hands and face could really be seen. Her eyes

reflected the flames of the fire, and her gaze fixed on the curling,

licking tongues. As I watched, she seemed to visibly shrink, as if

compressing into the couch, or becoming denser, like a woman made of

lead.



Clanking around the kitchen, filling the pot, opening the tea, waiting for

the comforting whistle of the teapot, gathering a little tray with a silver

spoon and a saucer and a cup, I thought how good it was to be a lonely

woman, so that I could react so carelessly to a vagabond by the side of

the road, so I could endanger none but myself as I let this enigma into

my sanctum.



I handed her the tea cup, and set the little tray beside her on the couch.

I pulled the rocking chair close to her, gathered my own purple throw

around my shoulders gently, and sat down between her and the fire, a

little off to the side so that she could still see it.

"Tell me what has happened," I coaxed, trying to pour every ounce of

curiosity out of my voice and replace it with comfort. "Who has – what

has – "



"Can you bear to hear it, I wonder?" she said, half to herself, half to me.



"Of course, anything" I quickly replied, "I don't shrink from the world."

I felt compelled to prove myself to this woman, in order to unlock her

tale.



She stared into my eyes. I felt my face become awkward as her gaze

did not shrink.



"I have fallen through the earth, and lived to tell the tale."

Chapter Four - She starts to reveal her story



"I am a geologist by trade, and a pilot by desire. I have worked for

various governmental agencies for much of my life, and lived a playful

existence in the serious field of Geology. My coworkers have been fun

and earnest, and my work has been only hard enough to be rewarding. I

know my terra firma, is what I wish to confirm to you, and I am well

informed about the textures of our natural world.



For several years I have been studying silt build-up in the Chesapeake

Bay, in fact, and providing data for policy decisions in that realm.



Recreationally, I love more than almost anything to fly my Cessna, and

get above the earth I owe my livelihood to. I am always careful when I

take that little plane up, and have slowly progressed from a rank novice

a few years ago to someone who truly knows the ways of planes. My

caution has paid off several times. Twice now, people I knew have died

by their risks, when I would not join them on a flight path.



I tell you this so that you can see that I am a cautious person, and would

not place myself into a situation known to be dangerous in the air.



Night flights, for pilots, are an advanced skill, and require that they be

comfortable flying by controls instead of sight, and plotting their path

with understanding of the other planes potentially all around.



After work on the NNNth of XXXX, "



Here I gave a sharp gasp, as the passage of time was hugely

unexpected.

"On the NNNth of XXXX, I took off in daylight to fly down to a

facility beyond Charlottesville, Virginia. I had, of course, checked the

weather and the flight conditions, and found them all favorable and

usual.



I was going to be in the air for a long enough time that I had dressed

warmly, and with me I had the clothes and materials for the two day

business trip I would be on. I also had several soil samples that

relevant to the discussions we would be having.



My course took me south and west, into the rolling hillsides and then

climbing mountains of the Shennandoah. The land is preternaturally

beautiful. Farms dot the lowlands and the valleys sparkle with the tiny

white buildings of old homes, ringed by shade trees planted long ago.

The mountains slope gently ever upward, so much more graceful than

the Rockies and the other upstart Western mountains.



The undulations of the landscape are soothing, and as the sun backed

slowly off the land, to settle itself beyond reproach for the night, I was

quite happy and not at all distracted. So, when my gauges began to

register strangely, I was quickly aware. My reactions were swift.



One thing that many non-pilots do not know is that many parts of flying

are quite boring. One can get the book, and look up a gauge, if the

reading seems incorrect, and one can debug the situation often, quite

slowly.



I had no such luxury on this trip. The gauges all began to register their

strange readings at once. It was as if north was moving, while the plane

kept on its course. The wind, the cardinal points, and the altitude all

began to vary wildly according to my instruments.

A rapid decompression raced through the plane, and a howling wind

began to buffet me. I became truly afraid only once I realized I could

barely clutch the controls because my hands weren't working properly.



We were a little above Charlottesville, I thought, by my calculations,

and yet I could tell the plane was getting blown far off course, to the

West. Every ounce of my training was brought to bear on the flight, as

I recovered first one, then another buffet. The noise in the plane was

immense and howling.



I lost control of the plane when a light began to shine below me – far

larger than any light of any city, even seen through fog, and far brighter.

It was a reddish glow, as if the embers of a stove were being blown on,

and it expanded outward towards me. My plane could not hold course

or altitude, and I knew my best hope would be to crash land gracefully.

I saw ground, and trees, rushing close, and a break that seemed enough

like field to tempt me to try my hand at landing there.



In a catastrophe like this, a plane crash of such immense surprise, I

remember taking some small corner of time to congratulate myself as I

came down, thinking that, even if I didn't live, my flying was really

improved from what it used to be.

Chapter Five - Crashed in the mountains



When I found myself alive and on the earth – or rather, in a fragmented

airplane, with water pouring on my face through several broken pieces

– I was not very concerned about what blood might be pouring from

what parts of me. I was not concerned because I was captivated by the

light that continued to rumble around me.



If you have ever seen the Aurora Borealis, you will recall how the light

seems to skip and hop across the sky, in edges that fill the sky with an

ethereal sheet music. The light I saw was on the earth, but it danced

and skipped like the aurora. This fire was accompanied, as it never is in

the sky, with heat abounding. Some massive outgassing was taking

place, it seemed.



Analysis hummed through me regarding this strange phenomenon that

had almost taken my life. Was it volcanic? Volcanos have been long

asleep on the East coast. Was it mechanical? Had I stumbled into

some unexpected mining operation, whose extreme techniques were

felling a mountain?



The outpouring of heat and dancing lights continued unabated, and I

realized the perimeter to the light was nearby. I moved and realized I

wasn't dead, and thus must decide, as we all do every hour of the day,

what I wanted to command my body to do.



Wet pines unloaded heavy drops of rain. I couldn't think for long

without being distracted by the cold rivulets that were winding their

way into my shirt and into all my things. The irritation of the rain was

my main motivation for shaking the wetness free as much as I could,

and seeing if I could pull free from my little plane.

Finding myself able to move, I clumsily shook the small door free from

its crumpled state and slammed it against the farthest reach of the hinge.

I slid a bit on my feet as exiting the compartment, and as I clung a

moment to regain balance, I noticed my little purse, and grabbed it.



Once on the ground, I moved toward the sheet of light.

Chapter Six - Where she discovers the way in, as retold for

the reader of this Document over the course of a number of

nights



Mary walked on the soggy mountain floor towards the light. Her

shadow stretched behind her, scribing a cursive of forms against the

dark pines. The light did not recede or dwindle as she approached, in

spite of her expectation. It stayed bright and constant.



She walked within twenty yards of the great crevasse and stopped,

stunned. We all quail when facing the unknown, but no one more than

those who know a great deal about the subject that has subtracted itself

from our understanding. Mary's training in Geology meant that she

knew far than most about what rocks and what formations offer

themselves for display in the Shenandoah. She knew far too well what

curves the earth takes, and what regions have valleys. Nothing on her

charts or maps had anything resembling this.



…





She began crawling in the steam and heat. The earth beneath her was a

ruddy clay, in dry clumps that smashed into pieces as she bumped them.

The slope of the earth was very gentle, and though she could not walk,

or even walked hunched over, she did not feel trapped. Her hand sank

into the dirt and pulling them up from the ground was slightly sensual,

as the pull of the clay lovingly caressed her palm and the heel of her

hand.



Mortal humans on this earth are rarely faced with situations outside of

our ken. In a world where media has described every possibility in

gruesome detail, we are prepared to control many manner of

unexpectable events with aplomb that minor deities could not be

expected to have in older times. We know the look of the bogeyman

down to the tilt of his eyes and the slant of his nose, as he has been

handcuffed on the evening news with spot illumination and pushy

reporters jostling to ask him questions. We know the nasty effects of

hauntings: the smashed pottery, the thumps in the night, the writing in

the dust. On daytime television, we see the perversions and the

poignancy of families turned from the light of compassion, and twisted

by ugly needs.



We are given regular updates as to the proper emergency response to

choking (grab one fist with the other approximately a thumbs-length

above the victims bellybutton, and sharply press up), to attempted rape

(scream, fall down limp, and pee on yourself), to chest pain (chew an

aspirin and call 911), even to zombie attacks (attain higher ground,

behind a strong door, and make sure you have enough food). We know

where to take the lost child, the lost grandparent, the lost dog, and how

to lose ourselves, should we need a vacation from all this finding.



Mary, in her life of scientific pursuit and governmental bureaucracy,

was never far from a procedure. Hypothesis formation may be

adventuresome, but the rest of science is largely following the step-by-

step and being honest about what results. As she crawled, she thought

through what points in her life she didn't have a network of answers to

choose from. In spite of her adventuresome spirit, she realized that this

was quite possibly the first time in her entire life when she could think

of no one else's advice. Yet she was crawling, along a tunnel leading

down into the earth, without hesitation. It made her glad.



It should comfort us that there lies a spirit, underneath all the

instruction. That core of wisdom is not dead, merely dormant. It lives,

and it waits. And when the earth opens up and hot red air pours

through, we can decide without guidance. We can desire to know, and

we can follow our wonder. It is as natural as the pulse of the earth.



And another wash of time passed, and Mary began to wonder if she was

being as scientific as she should be in this situation. Her wrists ached,

and she was avoiding thinking about the hint of fire that might well be

the onset of blisters in her knees. She had been caving, and knew quite

well that this was not the way to do it – one should wear knee pads, and

forgo cotton clothing which can become quite damp, and gloves of

course, and travel in groups of threes, and have plenty of light.



Her heart raced with the possibility that the light she was comfortably

approaching could fade. She collapsed, and then brought herself to a

seated position, hands on her knees. She was breathing harder than she

realized, and the sound of her breath cut a tear in the roar of the

emitting rumble of heat. She looked behind her, and quickly saw the

marks her path had made fade into blackness. She drew her head

around to look to her future, and the colors of the strange light she had

followed.



A plane crash, the rogue thunderstorm, the impossible hole, and the

exhausting crawl all contributed to her shock. A moment of total

surrender washed over her, and her eyes stopped focusing, and gravity

pulled her with an embrace that is often described as a clasp. The good

earth clasped her to it, and the rushing hot wind blew a laminar flow

over her still body.

Chapter Seven - Sleeping, and crawling



It was not many hours that she was asleep. Her dreams were feverish,

with climbings and fallings in Esheresque repetition. She dreamt she

was in a hot tunnel, climbing downward forever. She dreamt of her

mother, scolding her for not putting the rocking horse away. She

dreamt quick, startled dreams that collapsed under any inquest, giving

rise to other unjustifiable dreams that spun in and out of her, whirlwinds

of refused meaning. Everything in her dreams was light-bleached and

aggressive, as if the sun was eating through the film of her visions.



She was already awake before she woke – the pressing urgency of what

she was doing before she slept was pushing her awake. She opened her

eyes, saw the dirt she expected, and got up on her elbows to look down

the long passage. It had not changed, except perhaps a gentling of the

color of the light, though she could have imagined it.



With a scientist's determination, she rose again onto her wrists, and

continued to crawl. She mused about the lack of crystal deposits, and

though about which types of extremophiles were likely to be found in

such a passage. She thought about the creatures that lived in saturated

salt water and how they managed to survive toxic levels of salinity. She

thought about the strange forms of life that never saw the sun, nor

nourished themselves on anything that did – the unexpected creatures

that sucked on the ocean vents, peeling nutrients from the gashes in the

earth that seeped into the deep. Yet nothing on these walls! Strange in

such a rich, warm environment. This was no dark seabed, no toxic

broth.



Cataloging her knowledge of extreme creatures passed the time while

she moved forward. She took two steps beyond the ring before she

realized what she had touched, and reversed course. Numbness gave

way to new pounding in her chest, as she scraped her hand across the

clean surface of the steel.



The ring of steel circled the tunnel. She could see vague evidence of

the ring in the ceiling, but her hands scuttled to shove dirt off the part

on the floor, uncovering a roughly poured band about a foot wide. As

she dug deeper around the edge of the band, she determined that the

band of steel hand sides that went as deep as she felt she could dig

without tools.



Her breathing was gasping, and irregular. She pushed the damp clumps

of hair out of her eyes, which she felt tearing up. Why was she crying,

you ask? She was overwhelmed by this silent note of humanity in the

lonely trek she was taking, yes. That is some part of it. But more

importantly, she was discovering that the world she expected was not

just stranger than she thought. No, not just stranger, but more clearly

intelligent. The evidence of the seam in the earth stopped everything.



Her hands tracing the poured edge of the strip of metal. Pondering

brought her both melancholy and sublime thoughts. For it enlarged her

universe, to sit here caressing bright steel where none should be.

Something far beyond her ken was proven here, and it told her that the

small perimeters of life she had been caged in were never again going

to wall her. Her hand could not stop touching the band of steel, staring

at the patches of color that reflected in it. A euphoria best known to

scientists and poets – those that seek the vast expanse of the poignant

unknown – was part of what gripped her.



But at the same time, this great gasket of steel was lonely. For she was

the only one, and she was lost on the face of the earth, and the face of

the earth was far behind her. She was far more alone than even those

on desert islands. They can dream of rescue, of the sail or smoke trail

of a ship, but she had no such illusions.

She shrugged her hair out of her eyes again. She pressed her eyes

against her biceps to wipe her face free of the struggle of tears that

itched against her face. The patch of dark water surprised her.



You might think that she would be assembling all the science fiction

stories that she had seen on the Sci-Fi channel, and going through them

for plots that matched her situation. You would think that every Star

Trek episode since she was old enough to watch would be revisited.

You would recover your memory of the Phillip K. Dick novels that you

found so hopeless and lonely, and check them for inspiration. Below

the surface, there were hints of this sort of thought.



But largely, she was not looking to fiction to tell this tale to her. Some

of her thoughts wondered to religion, but wandered back. This seam in

the earth revolved along an axis of experience that she felt was no better

processed by stories than by observation, and she was observing with

all the strength she had, with wide open, though moist, eyes.



When she remembered that her hand hurt, she stopped touching the

steel and moved forward again. She might have been fatalistic at this

point. Her drive, her will, was untarnished, amongst all these emotions

that brimmed through her and threw her. Her motive force was

hungrily interceding in the psyche lashed by humbling experience, and

would not let her stop or turn around.



At some point in her climb she realized that the ground was not

descending. It happened when? She could not place the point at which

her hands did not have to brake her progress, or her knees grip the

earth. At some point, she was moving level.



And further on, the ceiling began to open up. She felt the space above

her head more than saw it, as her eyes were often down. Her focus was

on the near earth she would cover, and only rarely did she lift her gaze

to the endless tunnels she was traversing. The tunnel was expanding.

The rage of wind had gentled to a soft breeze. She noted, though she

did not take advantage of it, that she could stand, hunched over, should

she wish.



Eventually her grinding progress brought her a tunnel that was wide,

and tall, tall enough to walk. She considered. Her hunched form had

served her so far, and she was not sure she had the strength not to

stumble. The ground was still a mess of dirt clods. She continued on

her way on knee until curiosity about whether she could stand

overwhelmed her momentum.



Walking in the tunnel was not hard, though she still had to watch her

step. She pondered the shape of the tube she was in. No longer was in

a tunnel to her. It was a tube, some sort of sentient design had put a

tube deep into the earth.



When the horizon brimmed, she did not notice it. She did not know it.

Chapter Eight - Horizon



It was not daylight that she saw on the horizon. Rather, it was a redder

glow, like that from an ailing table lamp with a thick shade. It warmed

the ground around her, she thought, and thought briefly that she had

tunneled all the way to the equator.



She kept walking towards it. Now, the tunnel was quite large, and there

was no air at all that she could feel as a wind. Something was strange

about this horizon, something that was standing in between her vision

and the things she wanted to focus on. But there was a great golden

world that she had attained through this long passage, so she squinted

hard, trying to discern it. It was like looking through glass bricks – she

could tell something was there, but the beams of light broke and

scattered irregularly, shifting what should be solid sense into a nearly

random neural firing sequence.



Her feet kept walking, compelled, and they sank into the dirt quietly.

A runner's high occurs when the runner has moved into their body's

reserve energy – when they have relinquished all the shoddy wrappers

of thought that guide them, and acquiesced to the process they have

commanded their bodies to do. Euphoria courses through on the wings

of endorphins, and nothing is more perfect than to be moving, foot

beyond foot.



Walking is a state of controlled fall, where our bodies lean us ever

forward and we move our feet to catch ourselves. In a walk, more than

a run, we tune the associations between all of our limbs and heart and

trust that where there is pavement, it will be met with foot, and where

the foot finds itself left behind, it will be called for, returning again and

again.

In this state of controlled fall, she was able to silence the agitation and

for the first time feel not as if she were pursing something, but that she

was somewhere. She was here. Here she was.



In that moment of Zen clarity, she walked. Once she let go the

questions, she recognized that the distortion she had noticed had

moved. It was closer. She was approaching it.



She had a headache by the time she was entirely near the fog that

clouded her eyes. Something was quite wrong with the way light

moved here, and the air was full of little clogs of turbulence that

squirmed around her. Turning behind her to see that her eyes were still

working, she was saddened by the long dark tunnel she came from. She

turned back to the emitter field.



Obviously, something was here, something she hadn't seen, something

that was blocking her way out of this tunnel to the world above. Was it

dangerous? What sewer or aqueduct was she arriving from? It was

time to find out. She stretched out the palm of her hand, and walked

calmly forward. Her eyes had a fraction of a second to ponder the pain

before she lost consciousness.

Chapter Nine - Waking



(In which she meets her first Hollow residents, workers who have found

her outside the heatpush)



Her arms were being pricked by cactus. She shrieked in displeasure

and heard a croaking "hhghghg." She flung open her eyes. Liquid

brown eyes like a cow's stared back at her.



This time her shriek was not the cranky discomfort of waking from a

nap. Her throat broke free of its disuse and she heard her voice scream

"HGHGHAHHH!"



One, then another, membrane came from the top and side of each of the

huge brown eyes to blink at her.



"Lulalulielu, kth!" she heard, and tried to turn her head towards the

voice. It hurt to do, but she stared when she had succeeded.



Black boxy robes in various layers and wraps clothed a creature lean

and possibly six and half feet tall, with swarthy skin and the giant gentle

eyes she had woken up to. "Kth, kth, lu" it said, and she noticed the

frog-like fleshy mouth, with no teeth inside that she could see. She

turned up her eyes again and stared into another face with the same

fleshy mouth, and giant eyes.



Her body seemed bound, and she struggled against something that she

could not see. As she struggled, she felt the bonds that pinned her body

relaxing, beginning at the head and working down her body. She

craned her head to look, but did not see any bindings. She was still

dressed in her warm flying clothes – an old sweatshirt, some thick jeans

– but her shoes were gone.

"Kthk." She felt her body tipping, and whatever she lay on moved like

a fulcrum and deposited her on the floor, standing. She crumpled

immediately into a heap on the ground, her feet unable to support her.



"Oh, God," she said, as she raised her head like a two-month baby to

watch what happened.



Both the lean dark creatures swooped in to gather her back up, robes

billowing around them as they leaned down, their terrifying eyes devoid

of any emotion, making chitinous noises. Soon she was lying on her

back again, staring at the ceiling, feeling as if all her energy had been

used up in that one attempt to stand.



" Where am I? I think I'm ill. I remember a wall – or, it wasn't a wall,

but it walled me from anything. I had been walking so long, I didn't

want to believe in it. I wanted it to be a mirage." It felt good to talk, as

she felt her frailty, and her voice was something that worked.



"Lulailulalei, th thk. Thkth, k kth," one of the creatures was snapping

open and closed his frog mouth to make the noises. They were

certainly speaking a language.



Above her, a shimmering arched ceiling twinkled. Geode-like minerals

where crystallized up there, hanging down towards her. She flipped her

head right, and left. The arch of the ceiling descended to the floor. She

was perhaps two feet above the floor, more when her pallet was moving

to be set upright. The floor was shimmering slightly as well, but not as

much, and it looked smooth, though not of any sort of tile or rock that

she could identify.



The creatures were not as terrifying upon a second glance. Their bodies

were graceful and lithe, and very like that of a long, thin human. Their

faces, dusky like an ashen cup of coffee, were small, and their upturned

giant lips and huge eyes were gentle. What had they helped her to this

pallet with? Their arms were long, and ended in a mass of tendril-like

fingers, eight or nine per hand, thin reeds of fingers that nevertheless

were very strong. One of those crowded hands was resting on her wrist.

She tried to feel the count of the multitudinous fingers against her wrist,

but could not discriminate the sensation into each of the long twining

tendrils.



"I guess I'm weak. Did the gate burn me? Was it meant to keep me

out? How long will I take to recover?" The sound of her voice was so

comforting, she let it ring out. The creatures looked deeply at her as

she spoke, with a fixation she had rarely seen from lovers, much less

strangers, in her life. Their nictitating eyes would slide shut

occasionally.



"Tkthhhhhh. Tkthhhh." They seemed to be prompting her to speak

more.



"My name is Mary. I guess I could start there." She jerked her head,

trying to point at herself with her chin. "I was flying. My plane

crashed. I crawled down the long tunnel. I touched the wall, that

painful wall. It probably burned my hand. I'll have to check that out.

Probably no Neosporin in this place."



She let the words babble out of her, narrating the weather she had

encountered, the strange orange light, the ring in the tunnel that kept her

from turning around, and the way the strange field had looked that had

clouded her vision. Through her performance, the creatures watched

her. Finally, one nodded.



"Kthkthkthk kik kik kthk." It spoke, and the other creature moved away

behind her. She heard nothing of it, soon, and tried to crane her head to

peer at the feet of the one that was left. She couldn't see low enough to

examine whether the feet were as equally prolific in terms of

extensions.



It took her smallest finger in its hand, and she felt the crisp smoothness

of the fingers envelop hers. After a long minute of time, it moved on to

her ringer finger, and moved along all the fingers in both her hands,

moving very slowly as it changed from her left to right hands. When it

finished with the first hand, she moved her fingers, slowly flexing them,

It hurt. They felt like they had been deep fried – delicate as if they

could crumble off in crisp flakes. She made a fist. She opened her

hand back out.



Next, it grabbed and held her left shoulder. Nothing seemed to be

happening, but she was able to shrug it up towards her ear once it was

done.



"You are some sort of cosmic masseuse, I guess," she said, positive at

this point that no words she used mattered too much. "I've crawled to a

force field left by aliens, and you are the ship's medical officer. Wait,

where did the ship come? That won't work right, darn!"



She was giddy in exchange for not being terrified. Perhaps the long

tunnel, or perhaps Star Trek, or perhaps she just enjoyed talking to a

creature unlike herself that would not have any judgement as to what

she said. This was an easy conversation, a rarity in her life.



By the time the creature had pressed its hands on her hips, she felt

recovered enough to try to stand. Sitting up, she pressed her feet

against the floor, not finding it warm or cool, gripped the side of the

plank (noting how smooth and devoid of temperature it seemed), and

swung her feet over the edge.

The creature backed up, and watched her wiggle her toes against the

floor. Its gaze dwelled on her feet, and she wondered about her shoes

when she noticed. Eventually she spotted them far off on the floor.

There were structures around the enclosure that suggested furniture, or

some sort of sculpture garden.



Again she thought to check on the feet of her companion. Its legs

ended in fat, rippled pads, somewhat like giant Ginko leaves that

needed ironing. No toes. It watched her look down, even following

where her gaze led. The two of them froze there, observing each other's

feet.



*



The other creature returned from behind her, almost silent until she

heard the wet slap of its feet. She turned her head to look. It was

carrying a small hemisphere of a sort of dull metal. The top of the bowl

glowed wetly black, but did not move. Behind it, a third creature, with

a rust-colored stripe on its black robes, also walked. She felt the air in

the room get more sparse with the entrance of a third one of these

creatures.



The returning creature reached forward, and curled its dark fingers

away from the surface. She noticed it did not have fingernails, just

long, stiff fingers in abundance. It pushed the object towards her

stomach, and held it there, allowing her to look at it easily.



Then, an image appeared on the blackness. The image spun up from a

tiny point, rotating until it nearly filled the blackness. It was an image

of her, as she sat on the platform. She said, "Oh!" in a small voice.



"Oth," the rust-clothed creature said, hissing the end of the syllable.

She looked up in realization.



"Oh, no, no, not that. Um, this is me. I'm a human. My name is

Mary." The creatures did not show emotion as much as they seemed to

pause much longer.



"Oth," the translator said, again.



"No, Mary," she said, slowly.



"Noh, MaryNth," it said.



"No, there isn't a no at the start of my name. Wait," she said, realizing

how poorly she was communicating. She took a deep breath.



Startled, she watched all three of them draw deep breaths, their chests

bulging up like balloons. As she exhaled, they all did as well.



Her first smile broke at this copycatting. As she felt her face crackle

with pleasure, she saw their eyes on her, and their own heavy jowls

moving into slow smiles, as well. They showed no teeth, but there was

a true smile on each of their faces, a real communication. Her smile

lasted longer. Trying to keep from laughing, so as not to confuse the

issue of language further, she pointed at the bowl.



"Mary."



"Maryth." The translator was watching her face



"Mary." She pointed to herself, and then the bowl. She patted her

chest. "Mary."

"Mary." It imitated her name nearly perfectly, putting only a tiny hiss

at the end.



"Good!" she said, then realized she had muddied the water again. She

pointed again at the bowl, and at herself. "Mary."



"Mary." It seemed comfortable with the word.



Next another image expanded up, and she was looking at a creature like

the ones in front of her. This creature, however, was clad all in a dark

red. She wondered if she was supposed to name it something. She

paused, and they paused as well, as she studied the image.



"Luluthn," it said.



"Luluthn," she said, looking up at the translator creature.



"Luluthn," it said, a bit slower.



"Luluthn," she said, trying hard to mimic the strange variants to the

hisses and gurgles.



Its enormous eyes looked deep into her face, blinked both sideways and

top-to-bottom slowly, then turned its attention back to the bowl.





*



She was exhausted. For hours, she had named things that she

recognized in the little bowl. The Luluthn had begun with her name,

their name, parts of her body, then numbers. One finger, of their type,

then two, then three. Finally she realized they did not want the

difference in "finger" and "fingers" but numbers. Once she realized,

she mimicked the fingers displayed with her own. When the sixth

spindly finger was displayed, she saw their eyes fix on her strongly, as

she moved to her second hand to display "Six."



Once they reached ten, there was some quiet susurration between the

two non-translators. They seemed to think she might not know what

came next. She smiled again, and counted eleven, twelve, and onward.

To emphasize the point, she pointed at all of her toes. "Eleven."

Suddenly her language was very strange. Why not oneteen? How

strange her common English was.



After numbers, they covered some concepts. They showed her

sleeping, and one of them sleeping. "Sleep. Sleeping," she said,

wondering if she was missing some difference between unconsciousness

and sleep. Walking, and running. Smiling. By the fifth word with "-

ing" in it, there was hissing chatter between the three of them. They

tried another action word.



Thus the hours progressed. Many things on the screen she did not

recognize. As she looked at those things, she realized that it would

prepare her for wherever she was, whatever world she was now in.



Eventually, the translator said "Breathe." And they all took giant sighs

together, and she joined them with their communal inhale and exhale.

She smiled, they smiled, and then they all walked away from her plank.



She watched them depart, getting no sense that she should follow. The

curved wall they walked towards seemed to suck towards them, moving

to cover them before they would run into it. She was alone.



Alone where? The motion of the day slowed, and she was left alone

with her thoughts. She slipped off the platform and padded through the

room. Objects scattered here and there seemed purposeful, so she

examined them. There was a long object that would fit one of these tall

Luluthn, somewhat like a chaise lounge. She tried to sit on it, and once

she inserted her body into it, felt it adjusting slightly, compressing

under her in order to fit more perfectly her curves, although it didn't

caress her feet in the same way it curved in to meet her back. Her neck

felt deliciously relaxed. She drifted off into a light sleep.



She woke, having turned in the chaise but still cradled by it. Nothing

had changed in the room, except there was a disc of a similar dull metal

to the bowl she had studied all day. On it was piled a mush that must be

food. There was little texture to the goo, but it somehow retained its

form, in a spiral on the plate. She left it, and kept walking around the

room. There were other structures that seemed to be furniture. There

was her platform that she first gained consciousness on – a thin slab of

nearly invisible material, she realized. It hovered alone in half the

room.



One creamy white cube turned out to be a container – when she touched

it, it sprang open to reveal one of the metal hemispheres inside. When

she touched the hemisphere, it spun up a picture of her face, looking

down to it, as if it was mirror. When she took her hand away, it spun

back down. She left the box open, but at some point when she looked

back, it had closed itself.



She could not tell where the light in this place came from. It was a

diffuse light, reddish, warm and thick. When she approached the walls,

as they curved gently down to meet the floor, she was delighted to look

at the carpet of crystals. She touched them gently, with reverance for

the perfection of their form. Tiny rows of marching gray crystal. Was

it quartz? She did not want to break off a piece, but she was driven to

know. She reached her watch up, an old digital that said it was 5:07pm

and the crystal did scratch the faceplate. Her watch – what a wonderful

reminder of home. Home, where it might be a new day, a day where the

conference organizers in Charlottesville might expect her, but a day

where no one at her work would. A strange day to get lost. Would the

search party find her plane? What evidence of her crawling decent

would there be? Small planes are notoriously hard to find in the

mountains.



She stared bleakly at her hands, sitting on another piece of absorbing

furniture. She was nowhere. Erased from her earth. Kept caged by

creatures in some bubble. What did she think of it all? How did she

feel?



Her expectations could not help her here. Nothing was the same. No

stories matched this quiet room, these gentle Luluthn, the simple room.



She was swept into memories of her childhood daydreams, and her

teenage wistful planet-watching. A scientist ever dreams of a

breakthrough, but she could not bring herself to entirely visualize her

situation that way. Who could she tell? What human was waiting for

her discovery? She did not feel like an adventurer. She felt lost.



Looking for something to quiet the circles her mind was running, she

took the plate of food. As she did, the bland color lit, shimmering while

it darkened until it was a deep blue. It was beautiful, a spiral on the

plate. With nothing to eat with, she touched the substance with her

finger.



It was warm.



She scooped some up, and popped it in her mouth. The taste was

somewhat meaty, and metallic. Not particularly pleasant, but Mary was

always one that cleaned her plate – a mother-requirement – so she

managed to swallow it and scoop up some more. It burned her tongue

slightly on the way down, prickling a bit on her tongue, and the metallic

effect died off quickly. Her stomach growled loudly at the food as it

worked its way down, and she felt the hunger that she had not noticed

before.



When she was done with the food (along with telling herself amusing

horror scenarios about perhaps it being alien axle-grease instead of

food) she placed the plate on one of the furniture items. It shimmered

again, and then each bit of the goo that was left disappeared. What a

tidy society, she thought. Everything so careful, each item waking

when needed and taking care of itself. The glob she had eaten was

doing her well – it filled her with a feeling of contentment. She smiled

to herself. What a fool she had been, sad at being handed this

adventure! She was experiencing things her colleagues would kill for!

Merely this ceiling alone could be someone's lifetime accomplishment

if discovered, and instead she was talking to these humanoid creatures!



She inspected the room with increased vigor, finding a muddy brown

tube that blew air when held parallel to the ground, and a side-table that

opened up to reveal robes like these creatures wore in a deep auburn

color. She held them against her, but decided not to put them on when

she realized how much too long they would be. When she put them

back, they seemed to arrange themselves, neatening their lines as they

folded back into their container.



She inspected her shoes, and once she found them dry and clean (and

dustless, so something must have happened to them to return them to

this state, for the tunnel had covered them), she took stock of the items

she had on her person, to better prepare herself.



She had her watch – digital, with the phases of the moon, sunrise and

sunset, and an alarm function. It set to the atomic clock, and was

displaying a "could not find base time" message. She had her favorite

blue sweatshirt (a sentimental item), and her shirt underneath. Her t-

shirt induced a sort of aphasia as she realized how strange its 'World

Wildlife Corps 2007 Centennial challenge' title and panorama of

scrambled animals (habitats evoked by a single plant for each) seemed

in this simple room.



Two dollars in her back left pocket. Twenty seven cents in her front

left pocket. A Chapstik tube and a folded piece of paper in her front

right, which turned out to be a printout of a bus schedule from the

computer. Her wallet in her back pocket. Her mother always told her it

was too mannish to keep her wallet in her back pocket like that. She

opened the wallet. Two credit cards, another seven dollars in ones, a

hundred dollar bill in the back section, her drivers license, car

insurance, voting registration card. Three ticket stubs, a tiny sewing kit,

six stamps. A picture of her parents. A picture of her old dog, a Lab

named Sampy. A tiny "Quick Reference Periodic Table" (a novelty

from a conference). One more penny, a wheat ear penny, stashed in the

back of the wallet.



She took the sewing kit apart. Two needles, a pin, a needle threader,

six colors of thread, a tiny paper ruler, and a pair of scissors that she

had taken the plastic finger holsters off, leaving only the blades. Not

bad.



Her socks were thick and wooly, placed next to her shoes. Her jeans

were nearly new, of a thick weave that was warm but unsexy. She

never wore these jeans except to fly. Again, not bad. As clothes could

go, she was well equipped.



She felt her bra to confirm it was one of the comfortable ones. Her

underwear was not particularly comfortable – a soft thong but aging

poorly, with threads that tickled, especially when washed without fabric

softener, as they were this time. Finally, her necklace. She took it off,

catching a piece of hair in the clasp. It was a soft gold chain, thicker

than the cheapest ones but delicate, with a very dark ruby hanging from

it. She put the necklace into her pocket for safekeeping, then fretted

about it until she put it back on around her neck.



Her clothes had somehow been cleaned from the dirt of her voyage.

She wished they hadn't - she would have been reassured by the

evidence of her journey. The cleanliness of the room comforted her in

that regard, though, and the plate that evaporated the remains of her

dinner away. These creatures were pretty anal about tidying. A wistful

smile as she thought of how her father would approve. He was always

whisking away glasses and plates before they were finished with.



Once she had explored her possessions, and explored the room, she

began to be a bit tired again. She checked her watch before lowering

herself back on the chaise and closing her eyes, as the chair flowed into

her.



She woke because one of the Luluthn was holding her hand. The

fingers felt stiff as the enveloped her fingers. Her eyes peeled open.



"Seeing hand," it said. "Mary five hand."



"Yes, my five fingers," Mary said. "Yes," the Luluthn replied. It was

wearing the rust and black robes.



"Luluthn have nine fingers on each hand," she said. "Yes," the Luluthn

replied.



She marveled at how quickly this creature had learned her vocabulary.



"Mary humans five hands, yes," it said, and she sat patiently before she

realized it was a question.

"Yes, we all have five fingers on our hands. We all have five toes on

each foot, too," she said.



"Yes, two foot," it said. She wondered how in hell she was going to

explain homonyms. It released her hand, which felt marvelous. How

nice that she had arrived at a tribe of masseuses.



"I have something to show you," she said, and reached for her wallet. It

stepped back, and watched her, blinking twice. She unfolded the

wallet, and took out the drivers license.



"This is me. Mary," she smiled.



It pointed its long third finger at her picture on the license. "Yes,

Mary." It smiled, gently.



"See here? It says Mary NNNN here," she traced her finger underneath

her name.



The Luluthn's eyes widened. "Mary? Yes?" She read it out again,

slowly sounding out the syllables as she traced under them.



She thought of the magic that writing is, and marveled, thinking of

humanity's complete adaptation to it. She read the rest of the license

out to the Luluthn, even the back with the statements about Virginia

law. The Luluthn smiled at the end, when she turned the card back

over. They were smiling more and more to her, which she liked. The

universality of the smile was a warming thing.



"Mary, sleeping?"



"I slept. Mary slept." She closed her eyes and pantomimed sleeping.

"Yes. Mary slept." It seemed more comfortable with the speaking.



"Mary walk, I walk." It turned towards the wall where the creatures had

exited before.



"OK," she said, and followed, catching up to it. She thought of putting

on her shoes but relinquished the tempting desire to have all of her

possessions on her. "I hope we can come back here for my shoes."



"Yes, shoes." They had covered the feet/toes/shoes vocabulary early

on. "Shoes sleep, Mary feet walk."



As they neared the wall, she felt a pricking sensation on her skin,

especially on her face, tongue, and hands and (she realized with a

scientist's detachment) in her panties. She turned to look behind her

and discovered the wall had passed through her, and she could no

longer see the room she walked from.



In front of her was an arched corridor, where rust stripes implied a

colonnade. The walls were much simpler than the geode she had been

in. As she stepped along slightly behind and to the right of the

translator, and watched as many Luluthn passed into the corridor where

she was walking, her nerves made her clutch her hands together. The

padding strides the Luluthn made as they appeared out of their walls

were calm, but timely, so that they had time to be exposed by their

boundary for half a minute before she walked past them. She kept

herself from the urge to look behind her, and tried to keep her eyes far

down the corridor, where no citizens had appeared yet.



The translator, whose name she best pronounced "LeiuThnThn" but

knew she mightily mangled, kept a moderate pace through this crowd,

which eventually numbered more than a hundred. The Luluthn were in

various robes, many of them the black robes of her initial visitors but

mixed with rust, a dark silver, a muddy gray-green, and various

combinations of color blocks and stripes. She saw no others with the

rust stripes of LeiuThnThn.



She had traveled through about fifty individuals, spaced ten or twenty

feet apart on both sides of the hallway, when she realized they were all

matching her breathing. She could see their chests rise and fall along

with hers. Since she had not been monitoring her breath, she concluded

they were mimicking her. It flattered her. Breathing was a big deal in

Luluthn land. Her cheeks dimpled as she smiled slightly. She pulled in

her abdominal muscles to improve her posture, and watched the

creatures stare at her face, and then her feet.



They approached the end of the passage, and she prepared herself for

another transition. Her skin began prickling again.

Chapter Ten - The inner world revealed



Warm light rained down on her, and the sky above was bright. She was

stopped next to LieuThnThn. The platform they were on was raised

slightly above most of the land around her, which was covered in

hemispheric domes and other platforms, where other Luluthns stood,

most of them looking towards her. She estimated she could see several

miles, or perhaps even forty. As she looked further, she realized the

horizon wasn't where she expected, and her eyes traveled up further and

further as she tried to see where the planet's curve dropped off. It never

did. There was no blue horizon. Her eyes traveled further and further

up, until she was staring into the sky, where a orangy sun took up a

quarter of the sky, making her squint.



Her eyes traveled further, beyond the sun, until she turned behind her to

look back at the section of the city she was on. It, too, expanded

upward with no horizon. She looked left, and right, and found no

horizon. Everything just expanded out and up forever, forever filling

in, climbing up, then being blotted out by the sun.



LieuThnThn and she stood, quietly, on this platform for a while, as her

jaw slacked open and her hands twisted against one another. Her eyes

kept turning up and up, but she gazed back down with burned

afterimages each time. The blots of light kept her from clearly seeing

the world around her for a while. Finally she resolved to focus on the

houses nearby and stopped craning her neck. She stared at the dome to

her left.



Two balconies were cut into it. On the left balcony stood three Luluthn,

all in dull silver robes. On the right, a vibrant red clothed a single

citizen. Its vivid robes were stark in contrast to the quiet tones the rest

of the people had worn, and she gazed at it for a while. It stood next to

a short column, perhaps the size of a children's drum, above which was

projected a complex image, similar in look to the images that arose

from her little language-bowl, but unanchored. Instead, the image

floated. It had many Luluthn, sitting in a wide area that resembled a

court. The red-robed creature seemed to be speaking, to the image, or

perhaps to the score of creatures there. She wondered impishly what

teleconferencing etiquette was involved in projected image breathing.

Her gaze was drawn by this one Luluthn that wasn't focusing on her,

and she quickly ignored the three others who were hissing to each other

while blinking slowly towards her.



"Luluthn ka," her guide said. "three two hundred two hundred

Luluthn."

Chapter Eleven - Quiet in Luluthnia



That day, she walked through the city with her guide. The outdoor

streets were unused for traffic, at least as she passed, and everywhere

she was taken, the gentle staring crowds were there to watch. She

started to see slight variations in the faces of the creatures she

encountered. This one had a crease in his lips, this one was more slight

and this one's eyes more spaced. She tried to watch LieuThnThn to

remember that one face, but found herself unable to memorize the

subtle deviations that she was certainly observing.



After standing at the platform for a while in silence, LieuThnThn had

begun naming things. She found herself quickly overwhelmed, and so

they returned to her naming the things she saw, giving LieuThnThn

words like "house" and "street" instead. In their walk, they eventually

went up to a watching resident, and LieuThnThn spoke some words,

upon which the Luluthn faded into the house and returned with a

translator dish like the one they used before. As things were

encountered, LieuThnThn gave her small clips to expand her

knowledge. For a while, she viewed different citizens in their robes of

many colors but was unable to remember any of the different words

they were assigned. Instead, she was quickly corrected into looking at

colors themselves.



"Red luluthn?" she asked, as they went around a curving corner. "The

one talking to the group of them?"



The image of the one she had watched before appeared in her little

bowl. She was now carrying it, so as better to examine the things she

was naming. "Yes, red." It seemed to struggle to phrase a concept.

"Red Luluthn dead Luluthn. No sleeping. Red Luluthn no eating, no

sleeping, no breathing."

She peered into the translator's eyes, her brows wrinkled into a cluster

of confusion. "Dead? He doesn't sleep or eat or breathe? I saw him

talking, though."



"Yes, talking. Force talking. Red dead." They had covered "dead" the

day before when she had identified the tiny image of her touching the

wall. They had covered crying, as well, and pain, and stopping

breathing. This definition it was using did not make sense to her, and

her face stayed wrinkled.



"Is he important?" she was frustrated with the lack of cultural concepts

she could communicate. How did one define importance in terms of

objects? Her geology would be better served if it was linguistics, now.



"Red dead, see sun." They had decided on the sky, and the sun, a while

back. She had no idea what that meant. They talked back and forth for

a while, then gave up.



She was looking for children at first, and then gave up on searching for

them. It seemed like all these creatures were between six and seven feet

tall.



"I was small once. Where are the small Luluthn?" she asked,

wondering how she was going to fill her life across such immense

barriers.



"Small Luluthn dead in bowl," came the reply, "Small Luluthn no

breathing, small blue in bowl." It spun up a picture that shook her

poise, so that she came to a standstill. The picture showed rows of

small Luluthn, not the swarthy color of their parents, but a pure blue,

curled like pieces of macaroni in containers that did look somewhat like

bowls, but which she thought were probably tanks or pods. The image

moved, and panned down a hall where the Luluthn grew, becoming

more developed, until in one section they uncurled and climbed out of

their pods, changed to the dusky dark color like their elders. Naked,

they had no hair, and nearly uniform breast areas. She stared at their

groins, where stylized penis lumps rose from some of the creatures, and

nothing at all showed on the others.



"Children!" she said. "Boys and girls!"



LieuThnThn blinked slowly at her, and soon he had her naming genders

and ages. There were no aged amongst these creatures, she supposed,

or they were not spoken of.



"I am a woman. I was once a girl. Mary woman." Each concept was

such a hurdle.



"Yes, Mary woman." The Luluthn did not seem to share her excitement

about this. "LieuThnThn woman." The continued on.



Mary was happy to know how to address this creature, and felt a little

sheepish for her interest in gender separations.



During their slow walk, occasionally LieuThnThn would speak to those

they passed. Mary watched the bubbling talk pass between them and

wondered at the introductions that were happening.



Finally they reached a dome that absorbed them. Inside, all was

brilliantly lit by purple crystal on all the walls. She began to think of

the light in the interior as somehow just a translucent passing of the

outside sunlight. There were a circle of eight lounging chairs, with

Luluthn sitting waiting for them. LieuThnThn guided her to a chaise

and sat as well.

Plates passed through the ledges that acted as tables there. Everything

here was so stealthy! She looked around at the food the others had. It

seemed similar to hers, but she felt somehow it was not the same.

These creatures were smart, and they could tell how to manipulate her

bones so that all the soreness left – it didn't seem likely that they would

ignore her differences as they fed her.



Murmuring talk spun through the room, as the handful of strangers in

clay and silver robes exchanged conversation, often directed at

LieuThnThn. She heard her name, stylized into something quite

different, pass around the room.



"Mary, eat blue sun," one of the strangers said to her, and slowly

consumed the last of the paste on their plate with a deliberate finger.

Chapter Twelve - The image-maker

Time passed, as Mary spoke with LeiuThnThn, and LeiuThnThn

learned English. After her meal with the council (for that is what they

were) Mary was taken back to her room, and left until she had slept.

She had insomnia and was irritable, unable to sleep with the auburn

glow of the room around her. Her mind paced over the ideas of these

creatures, the enormous sun, the portal deep in the earth that brought

her here, and why she felt so bored, in the midst of this extraordinary

adventure.



She toyed idly with the white box that had the image-creator inside.

She was not sleepy, even though she felt that she was being told that she

should be. What if a day was only seven hours here? There was no

way she would adjust. She urged the cube open and shut. It began to

clack as she touched it back and forth, enjoying the smacking sound

that she knew was untoward in this land of propriety and quiet

murmurs. Eventually it was making a broken noise, a grinding cough,

and finally it just stayed open, no matter how she stroked its sides.

Barbarian, she thought to herself, pleased. Might as well play a role

that seems unusual here. No need to blend in, since the idea is

impossible!



She took out the image-maker. Holding the hemisphere in the palm of

her hands, she noticed again how evenly warm everything was. In her

world, such an object would be chilly to touch, made of metal or clay.

Here it had such a sheen that it nearly glowed, but no hint of alien

temperature from anything else in her room.



She shifted it back and forth in her hands, peering into the dark

emptiness of the bowl. She noticed how few her fingers looked to her,

now, after all these Luluthn were her mirror all day. She laced her

spare set of fingers together, weaving around the bowl a protective

shield of hand. An image formed deep in the dark center and spun up

to fill the bowl – her own hands, grabbing the bowl. She jerked her

hands as if they had caught fire, but did not drop the instrument, thanks

to them being laced together. She sat down hard onto the ground, next

to a seat, and leaned her head onto it (the chair began to brace her neck

in a comfort-inducing manner).



The image was still there. Hands within hands. The bowl in the image

did not onion off into an infinity of regression – no image in the image-

bowl. The mathematician in her was a little disappointed. Instead, the

image held steady. "Hands on the bowl," she said quietly, almost

automatically. It remained, unwavering.



What had she done? How could she recreate it? She wanted very much

to be able to manipulate this technology. It gave her a feeling of

control, but it also was a challenge that would occupy her mind. She

took a deliberate breath in hopes that it might unlock some Luluthn

magic. No change.



Eventually as she sat there, the image spiraled back away, and she was

faced with the empty bowl. It was very quiet in the room. She wished

she had brought her iPod as she scrambled down that long tunnel –

wouldn't it be nice now? She could listen to her music to make herself

more at home here. She daydreamed of tapping her choices out on the

little machine.



An image of her listening to her iPod spun up from nothingness.



"YES!" she roared. She examined the little image, trying to think how

she had made it happen. Was it the daydreaming? What position were

her fingers in? Had she done a Lamaze choo-choo of a breath? What

was it?

After toying a bit with material changes to what she had been doing at

the moment, she eliminated them as likely reasons for the image. What

had she been doing? Focusing. Her whole mind was filled with the

thought of what she caused to project in this bowl. When her whole

mind was occupied with the idea of the iPod, of listening to the iPod, it

had happened.



Focusing. What image did she want to try? Her heart ached. Longing

for her mother, passed away five years before, crested over her. Mother

could comfort her lonely stay here. Think of the short hair, the sunny

smile, the gentle voice. She held the image her longing offered her,

willing herself to concentrate. Nothing happened.



After a minute of frustrated focus, she gave up. It wouldn't bring her

back, anyway, and she could tell it wasn't working. What next? An

object. She thought of her airplane, crashed in the mountain. Her

plane! As she was swept with worries over the beloved Cessna, she let

herself think of its wing, crumpled against the ground, the supports

snapped. She thought of the way it looked, proud, sitting on the asphalt

the day she went to buy it.



The image spun up easily. There it was, rotating before her eyes. It

even filled in angles she rarely noticed. It was empty, the little plane.

Floating in black space in the bowl. The friendly little plane, her

companion through so much, warmed her heart. Now it was lost

somewhere near Charlottesville. Strange to imagine it being found.

Would the tunnel still be there? What sort of team could explore a

tunnel, and would they bother? Not if they came in the day, she

decided.



She considered how the plane had been evoked. She remembered the

full wash of thought that burst into her mind, and how relaxed and day-

dreamy it felt to think fully about the plane. Somehow it was different

than the way she was thinking of her mother. She wasn't forcing the

thoughts this time. She just thought hard and let her whole mind be

swept by the thought. It was almost relaxing. When she let go and

really let her mind drift, there the image was. Almost like Jenk.



The image of Jenk, an old boyfriend and practitioner of Zen Buddhism,

swam up to her. My, that was quick, she thought, blushing inwardly at

the ease at which her mind curled around the idea of him. Didn't realize

he was so important, oh my, she thought, wondering if he ever thought

of her. What were the things he'd try to teach her about meditating?

She couldn't remember a word of it now when she felt it would help.

She stared at his little lotus-legged sitting posture. How fun to watch

him like this.



Not, of course, that she thought this was a remote camera or anything.

No, this was definitely her mind, interpreted for all to see. She thought

of a piece of paper. She really could use a writing instrument now to

doodle with and teach them written English. She thought of a piece of

nice, solid notebook. A field notebook, like they issue by the hundreds

of thousands at USGS. A nice Government issue ball-point pen, full of

earnestness. Yes, she thought, letting the image travel through her.



When she saw the pen and notebook in the bowl, she was not surprised.

The quality of thought that had coursed through her when she was

thinking about that lovely, craveable, pen was easy to appreciate. It

practically resonated.



She savored the feeling of that thought, enjoying the relaxation into full

absorption that it was made of. What else could she imagine?



She thought of Earth. What about that loving old photo, taken from the

moon? Our little planet, quiet in a cold space that doesn't pass sounds,

so no one, even a hundred miles above our earth can tell what a

garrulous, musical, car-honking, laughing place we are. Sweetly

spinning its way around our pragmatic sun. Home.



She felt the idea shimmy a bit before coming to rest in her mind's eye.

A bit of awkward nudging towards the idea, as if parts of her brain

weren't quite committed, before the idea fully filled her. Then she was

staring at it as much as if she herself was on the moon herself.

Beautiful.



This was one she had to remember to show LieuThnThn, she thought.

This is the one she had to give a name to, and hope that they would give

her a word back for what planet she was on. It occurred to her now that

the portal was only one-way.



She continued to practice her visualization. Soon she learned that her

contact with the bowl didn't seem to matter. She set it on the chair's

ledge and placed herself in the chair's cozy embrace again. It was her

favorite part of this place, so far. She kept practicing until she could

bring an image up quickly. Some of them took more effort than others,

strangely. It had to do with her willingness to think fully about them.

Trying to visualize "Congress" was a lot harder than thinking of a

toothbrush or a butterfly.



She drifted off to sleep easily, once she felt agile with assigning herself

an object and then evoking it. Once again the fever dreams, a bit more

gentle than before. Tossing in her sleep she was stuck in a pattern of

growing images from seed. First one then the next thing she looked at

would shrink, then spiral, then split apart into tiny images that would

spring up, like weeds on a humid late spring day. She would scythe

them down, and the scythe would spiral out of her hands down into

nothing. Finally the concentration she had used all day dwindled off,

and she could not remember any more dreams, and rested deeply.

When she opened her eyes again in the morning she was disoriented,

and saw LieuThnThn sitting in a chair nearby. She stretched, and

smiled towards the visitor.



"Happy sleep in chair? Yes, I see Mary smile." LieuThnThn's

spreading mouth wedged into a crescent as well. "Mary touch image

make?"



"I can! Yes, let me show you!" She stretched again, squirming against

the accommodating chair and standing. She probably smelled at this

point, but didn't feel grubby. Her jeans would probably need to be

peeled off her eventually.



She reached for the bowl, and realized it wasn't on the ledge any more.

LieuThnThn touched the white box at the other small table, and opened

it to bring out the projection bowl. With a moment of contemplation,

thinking of the broken box she had traumatized last night, Mary took

the item.



"I'm not sure how quickly I will be able to get this thing going, with you

around," she said, earnestly, to the Luluthn. "We'll see." She gazed

down into it, and tried to relax.



At first she felt her thoughts scattering from her, like squirrels before

her car on the driveway at home. Nothing would stick in her head long

enough for her to concentrate on it. Finally in exasperation she focused

on herself and LeiuThnThn, looking at the bowl. The image uncorked

and expanded quickly once she overcame her hesitations.



"LeiuThnThn and Mary," the Luluthn said. "Yes. You make image."



"That's us," Mary said. "We're there."

"Two, us," LieuThnThn said.



"Yes. Now let me try a harder one," she said. LieuThnThn was silent,

in a restful waiting.



She sat still, and watched the bowl, thinking about that image of Earth

she had illuminated the night before. Three paces of her heart ended

with her relaxing her nerves and gazing at the picture in her minds eye.

The blue and white world rotated, sweetly, as she watched it in the

display. What a beautiful planet.



"Earth." LieuThnThn was quiet, blinking four, then five times.



"Earthhhh."



"My home. My planet. I live there. Or, rather, I did, I guess." She

watched the Luluthn's eyes gaze down at the picture. "What planet is

Luluthn in?"



"Yes, Earth." Still, questions were not translating very well. Somehow

the question concept, with its upward trends in English, was not

transferring to her translator yet.



"No, what planet," she made a frustrated gesture around her, "what

planet are we on now?"



"Yes, Earth." LieuThnThn took the bowl from her, and held it herself.

Come. LieuThnThn moved to a different wall area from the previous

exit, and she could do nothing but follow through the gleaming gems

again.



They stood on another balcony. LieuThnThn looked down into the

bowl, and hand then handed it to her. The scene around them was

repeated in the little dish. "Yes, one. Earth." LieuThnThn pointed at

the sun, pressing heavily down on them. "Middle earth, yes."



At which point Mary looked around her, as her heart clutched at her

throat, said, "Here?" and fainted.

Chapter Thirteen - Mary fills in the picture



Her recovery to consciousness was swift, it felt like, but she still

returned to it from the sleeping chair. She imagined the brittle-looking

translator carrying her and worried about the effort. When she woke,

she knew exactly what had temporarily felled her. The middle of the

earth, beaming like a huge brooding sun above them.



The middle of the earth. Inside it all, a warmly emanating core. None

of it was believable to her. She would more easily believe in Star Trek

aliens picking up their laundry at the local drycleaners than accept that

she was in the inside of the earth, pressed against its surface. She

waved at some far off annoyance before fully opening her eyes, as if to

brush off the clouds of confusion.



"LieuThnThn, why? What," she stammered. "What made it this way?"

Her geologist's mind was sorting through all the crackpot theories she

read as a young student. Which of them had a note of truth? How

could she not have seen? How could they all not know?



"Twenties of time, Mary, saying words of middle. More words one,

two saying words of middle." This kind of childish time-ranking

irritated her as well. Why was she to wait to understand?



"It's unbelievable. A radiant core. Really unexpected. Wow." She

wondered what it was made of. No sunburn at least from walking

around yesterday. She wondered what she looked like, and glanced

around for a mirror, which was not to be found. "And how much of the

sky does it take? A good quarter, I'd say. Gosh, no wonder it makes

everything so cozy here. Not sure how it all passes upstairs. Could get

hot without reclaiming the power."

She was babbling again. The Luluthn looked simply at her, waiting for

her to finish.



"Hollow," she wondered. "Hollow."



The translator bent over her and brought an image back to the screen. It

was the same earth, seen from the middle of a messed-up continent that

she could not place the numbers of years BC on. Sunlight shone on the

content. Then the view moved, and burrowed through darkness, until

emerging in the center. The ruddy glow of the core shone on clay-

colored emptiness. As she watched the image, however, it changed,

getting more and more desert-colored and less clay. In patches it turned

green, and blue. Finally a haze settled on the little hollow inside, as if

clouds were passing. It was a beautiful thing to watch.



"Time. We need to talk about time." She pondered how to make this

happen. She touched the bowl, and sank into memory of a day.

Sunrise, day, sunset, night. Sunrise.



"One day," she said.



"Yes, one day."



Now the hard part, for she was a geologist, not an astronomer. Relax

into the earth spinning around the sun. Think the earth and the sun.

Dwell on it, let it immerse. She struggled a while, and then thought of

those who made Stonehenge so long ago. They were able to note the

motion of the sun, so this must be fundamental. Finally she brought up

just the sun.



"Sun. This is different from your sun. This is a star." LieuThnThn

blinked without obvious repeating, without her signal of

comprehension.

"Stars. Yes, we need stars." She dwelled on the idea. She remembered

a trip camping in the mountains, when she got up to pee during the

frosty night. Brilliance expanded amongst brilliance. The sky was

filled with them all – celestial bodies squeezed tight next to each other,

crowding the sky with their pure gleam. Her breath had fogged out,

billowing from her, and she had stood, panting hot mist into the night,

head upraised. Starlight had a purity like snow, and a similar quietness.



She had tried to identify constellations, that night, but the entire sky that

night was a piece, a filled hemisphere with a ridge running through it –

the milky way – as its spine.



Stars, thick as the ones she saw that night, filled her little container.

Her breath came heavily through the word as she said it. "Sstarsss."



LieuThnThn blinked, softly, and repeated her. "Sstarss."



"My sun is a star, too." She needed this fact to be acknowledged, that

this earth core that was warming this land here was not equivalent to her

sun and universe above.



"Yes, sun sstar. Small sstar." The casual comfort with the concept

surprised her. There was no struggle to analyze a new reality –

LieuThnThn already knew this information.



"When the earth circles the sun once, that's a year. Earth circle sun, one

year."



"Earth, sun, circles, yes."



"No, when the earth goes around the sun." Mary gestured with her

hands, making an orbit. "One year."

LieuThnThn nodded. "Yes, one year, earth around sun."



Mary found herself on the cusp of understanding this whole society

with her next question.



"Three hundred sixty five days is one year. One hundred years is one

century." She spoke slowly. "How many centuries have the Luluthn

been here?"



The Luluthn translator was quick to reply. "Twenty twenty century."



She converted in her head. Forty thousand years. Before the dawn of

history.



"A long time," she said, weakly. All her knowledge was so false, her

understanding of tectonic movement and the earth's molten core. How

could she ever comfort herself about her life's work? How could she

understand her world ever again?



"Yes, many time. Mary sees."

Chapter Fourteen - Living in Luluthnia

Mary learned quickly of the civilization after that. She grew to

understand their cycles of waking and sleeping, which seemed set on an

approximately 24 hour cycle, though she was never certain why they

would expect her to sleep at some times, not at others. She saw the vats

where they grew their food – giant glimmering tubs watched over by a

Luluthn with tiny blue pinstripes down his robes. Blue, being the color

of birth, and a rarity otherwise, was a nearly sacred color.



She saw the nursery, where the little children slept, waiting breathless to

be born and heard the humming whispers of information that always

sang around them.



She learned to breathe like they did – somewhat. She learned the honor

of matched breaths, and the solemnity of counting breaths. She

celebrated with them with giant lungfulls of air.



She asked about water. She could not understand why she was not

thirsty, not lacking the fundamental substance to all humans.



They showed her big tanks of it, stored in gleaming transparent

containers embedded into the earth. It was a national treasure, it

seemed. Stored awaiting further necessity.



She finally learned that the goo she was eating was very complex

particles, almost machinery, extracted perfect nutrients that could not be

wasted.



When the talk rolled around to the food and how it worked, the subject

of bodily waste was also brought up. Why had she not needed to

urinate or defecate since she arrived in the hollow world? Weren't there

things her body needed to rid itself of, even if there weren't food

byproducts?



The answer was slow in coming. LieuThnThn had to contact another,

who was the expert in these matters. Apparently the cleaning

technology was so fundamental to the Luluthn that no one needed to

understand it. When she slept, the same permeable transformations that

brought her through walls by rearranging the edges of the houses, or

shifted objects she no longer was using away into their storage were at

work. Her chaise cleaned her clothing as well as herself, absorbing off

the impure products her body culled from her other systems and stored

in her intestine and bladder. Mary's curiosity pressed the sanitation

expert further. Where did it go? What point in the process did the

chair decide she was done with her urine and feces?



The chatter back and forth between the two Luluthn went on for a

while. They seemed to be unconcerned about not knowing the details

of the process, and fascinated at her interest. They had no more clear

details than that the materials were reused for other objects that were

needed, and that the system only removed that for which it was time to

remove. Their faith in whatever managed their world seemed almost

foolish to her, so she pressed them on it, never seeming to get closer to

any answers.



It took her weeks to understand what the Luluthn all did with

themselves. Their roles were so clearly defined, and yet she never

seemed to see anyone working. They were all just watching as she

passed by them, it seemed, staring. What did they fill their hours with?



Their roles were designated by their robes, as she understood early on.

Her translator, with the rust-colored stripes on her black cloak, was a

communication specialist. LeiuThnThn mixed the role of counselor

with the role of poet – mastering the experience of language, and

available to those who wished to experience the perfection of language.



The two who were there at first when she woke in Luluthn were

mechanics and guards, of a sort. They went to investigate the tunnel

when her falling into it disrupted it. The field she had touched was a

barrier that vented heat from the center of the earth out to the surface,

and had been in place for eons. All over the world, these tunnels ran up

and down, but their openings were governed by systems that even the

expert tunnel-keepers were not able to explain to her. The black robed

workers were just ready to investigate and correct should something

disrupt the field, as her collapsed form did that day. Their usual job

was manipulating the permeable vent fields when their directions were

reversed. It seemed to relate to polarity in the earth above, something

she had studied in school quite a bit. There was a shift going on in the

planet recently with the poles, and the surface effects were nothing

compared to the maintenance that was required below to keep the

systems of exchange balanced.



She came with them to reverse one of the tunnel membranes. They

walked her to it over the course of a long day, and slept in a sparsely

decorated sphere before they ambled to the tunnel. She stood in front

of a great wall of bending light, feeling the puffing gentle wind as she

did those many weeks before, the clunky turbulence skittering along her

skin. The same visual dissipation, though darker, appeared on this side,

as well. She waited to see their work done, and stood next to them

when they went silent, and observed the gate for a while. Then they

began walking away from it, calmly.



She was almost angry at how lacking in physical gestures the "fixing"

had been. "That's it?" she burst out. "That's all it is? Standing in front

of it? No tools, no buttons?" Her aggravation was all out of proportion

with the experience, but it had been rising to the surface for weeks.

"Don't you touch things ever? Don't you get to work those spindly little

hands at all, for anything except spooning goo into your mouths? It's

like a grave here!"



The Luluthn engineers stared at her, mouths slightly agape, in an

expression that actually meant something to her. They were shocked at

her outburst.



"Mary," one said. Then he was silent.



"Yes," said the other. "Yes, Mary." The slow-moving engineer blinked

her huge eyes.



She turned from them. Running away from where they stood, she felt

her disused muscles sing with the adrenaline pumping through them.

She ran through empty streets, pounding the ground with her bare feet.

No obstacles were blocking the sterile expanse of the lanes between

houses, and she ran towards the curved, upward horizon as much as she

could. Nothing seemed to change. The horizon never got any nearer.

The houses were all similar.



Eventually, a figure in rust stripes waved at her as she ran closer. She

slowed, trying to tell if it was LieuThnThn and decided it was not. Had

they put out an all points bulletin for her? She slowed, sucking air out

of her surroundings into her lungs. She came to a stop in front of the

waiting Luluthn translator.



"Mary. We do touch things. We are very great at touching things, and

every day learn more. Perhaps you want to learn this, too?"



"Of course I do, of course! I don't get it." She sighed, surrendering to

follow the communicator into the house.

The communicator's name was Thth. She took Mary to a soft pillow

form on the floor in the middle of a room.



"Sit here." She did.



"Now, touch me with one of your fingers." Mary stared at the Luluthn

woman staring back at her.



"Anywhere?" she asked.



"Yes," said Thth.



Mary considered, and then reached out to touch Thth's shoulder.



At the instant her hand touched the robes, experience expanded into

her, pouring through her. What was it she experienced? It was hard for

her to find words to describe it, and while it happened she had no

words.



Yet this linguist was giving her an experience that was made of words,

constructed in the very penetration of language itself. Mary felt the

links of her mind that join words to ideas activating, and she felt the

raw experience of learning words grow in her mind. It was a pure form

of growing, her whole being occupied with assembling audio symbolic

representation into meaning. Cut off from her senses, focused down to

one note, she experienced the very textures of thought knitting into

language, a euphoria of its own, and as she touched Thth's shoulder, her

grasp of what it was to use words grew mountainous and brilliant.



Gasping, she stared at Thth across the room, who was holding a gray

box and looking at her.



"That was amazing!"

"Yes, Mary. You are amazed at the thing I think of as essential. I am

glad for your pleasure." Thth smiled.



"How long, or, wait, what did you do?" How could she have been so

purely in the acquisition of language just now, and stammering so

awkwardly few seconds later?



"I am a linguist, and my art is to help you touch that part of our world.

I evoked an elevated language response in you in a guided way, and

enhanced the raw connections made in your mind as you assemble into

language."



"You're talking clearly!" Mary interrupted. "You can speak to me

normally now!"



"Yes, I shared space in your mind and acquired your language directly."

Thth was calm.



"That was so easy! Why didn't you people do it before?" Mary asked.



"You said it yourself. It was easy. The reward of the experience of

learning your language, step by step, was treasured. We Luluthn pride

ourselves on experiences, savoring the challenges our lives offer us.

We did not want to rush the process and extinguish opportunities for the

beauty such as the day you showed us stars."



Mary was dumbfounded. Through this struggle, these creatures had

chosen to be silent, while she has sought clarity. Yet she was not angry

now that she understood. It took artistry to move within this long dance

of her education.

"We also know that when you are finished with the communication

barrier, you will leave to explore this hollow earth, Mary," Thth said.

"We treasure you, and will consider your departure something to make

great experiences from.



"I will leave?" Mary did not know why she would leave.



"Yes, to meet the others." Thth blinked at her.



"Others?" asked Mary



"Yes, beyond Luluthn, Mary. You will go soon."



And she was right.

Chapter Fifteen - Leaving the Luluthn

There was a discussion of who to send with her. LieuThnThn was the

obvious choice, but Mary learned that LieuThnThn desired to be

generous, and so a different linguist she had never met was sent to take

her, along with a geographist, to other lands.



The linguist was Thll, and the geographer was Llul. Llul was willing to

speak with her endlessly as they walked, and Thll watched them with an

intensity that made Mary almost nervous. Llul shared the agility in

speaking with her that they all did after her transforming day.



"I have traveled to the West quite a ways, Mary, but this land to the

East is somewhat unknown to me. I know that death exists here."



"Death? Do you mean death does not exist in Luluthn?"



"Of course not! We do not die. Not a single one has died since we

were sent to guide this core, forty thousand years ago."



"Sent? Who sent you?" Mary was eager to flush out the knowledge of

this chirping resource.



Llul smiled and raised a finger. "When we all went below, Mary. We

are the ones that were charged to maintain this place. The others were

given no charge. That is why we wear the robes. We are sculpted as

tools."



"But who?" Mary wondered.



Llul said, "Slowly, slowly. Your discoveries are savory. Make them

taste through."

They walked along streets that seemed like all the other streets

she had seen. Clay-colored buildings shaped in domes, and blinking

Luluthn who stood waiting for her to pass, all breathing in sync

with her. She tried to meet their eyes, each one, as she walked.

It was like staring into the stars. Her heart was filled with gratitude.



Each time it was time to sleep they stayed in an empty home. Each time

it was time to sleep, they ate the blue porridge she knew from her every

day here. On the third such cycle, the houses that were heretofore

closely spaced began to spread thinner in the landscape, and she could

see further between them. Through that day, they saw fewer and fewer

waiting citizens to see them off.



On the fourth day, there was a point where there were no shelters. The

land became textured, imperfections in the earth demarking a line

between Luluthn and beyond. Thll stood silent for a long time at the

edge, looking out towards the diverging colors on the horizon. Llul

said quietly to her, "It is always like this the moment they first leave. I

too was like this on my first travel." Mary nodded.



When they stepped forward again, she watched Thll breathe more

quickly for a while, and was silently grateful that she was able to see a

Luluthn express something other than perfect equanimity in the face of

strange events.



The first plant that they passed crawled along the ground like lichen.

Gray and covered with tiny scales, the spreading mound was perhaps

three inches high, but a yard in diameter. They all three stopped in

wonder. Mary was the first to touch it, lifting a branch to see if it

anchored in the ground at every point, or just some. Then each of them

touched it, with a spindly finger, stroking the top of the leaves. Their

eyes narrowed in pleasure, fingers moving incredible slowness moving

against the flora.

Far on the horizon they saw structures jutting up, not Luluthn rounded

homes, but strange spiky castles. Llul quickened her pace slightly. It

would have been imperceptible to Mary had they not maintained a

perfect rhythm the last three days.



She wondered if she would get hungry. The ground was crumbling to

earth now, and she considered the lack of water in this warm hollow

earth. When the Luluthn slowed as they passed into a dark, more

powdery section of earth (more akin to the dirt she crawled through) she

wondered what they were searching for. Llul croaked out, "Mary...."

before she turned to see dark shape spring out from the ground towards

them.



The beast was a mottled brown, with spiny ridges running the length of

its body.



It had massive, grotesque teeth like a saber-toothed animal from the Ice

Age, which seemed to be rotting in place, or perhaps covered in a film

of black algae. Its warty lips were pulled back to expose the fetid,

cratered surfaces. There was no sentience in the eyes, and yet Mary

noted that its shape was not unlike a human's. It had the high haunches,

the dragging knuckles of a great ape when it runs on all fours, a loping,

pendulum-sashay, where the arms swing free for most

of each gallop. The arms were tumorous looking - boiled and bubbled

in gastly columns that would be structurally unsound if evaluated when

the creature was not in motion. On the shoulders, great lop-sided lumps

emerged, each only a bit smaller than its misshapen head, and oozing a

tar-like liquid. More distorted boils and lumps traveled the length of the

triceps and biceps, and ended in a leprous assemblage of claws that was

fused between some of the fingers and shining with more liquid from

parts where the fingers split.

Her reaction was split between revulsion, fear, and pity. Even in this

mutant form, her longing for her own kind expressed itself. Not having

any weapon and not knowing what power the Luluthn brought with

them, she knew she had to stop this beast before it reached them. She

threw wide her arms, and gestured wildly with them as if she was trying

to sweep giant sections of air towards the creature. She contorted her

face into as terrifying an expression as she could, and roared as loudly

as she could at this creature bounding towards them, forcing air in a

resonant "Hrrryyyaaaaaaaa". She stomped her feet as if she was

incredibly heavy, and slowly moved forward with her legs splayed as if

she was carrying hundreds of pounds of weight. Each step she took she

screamed louder than the last breath, moving her face about in any

extreme fashion she could create. She shook her head, causing her hair

to slash the air from side to side.



She watched it falter, then slow, and finally halt thirty yards from her,

perhaps fifty yards from the point she had started from, and pace from

side to side as if it was barred by its fear from going further. She

stopped as well, and continued to scream at it, pacing herself back and

forth with a stomp, raising her arms and hollering first at the creature

then at the sky, then back at the creature.



It looked aside for a moment, as if looking for a signal from

somewhere, and she rushed forward at it during that pause, hoping to

spook it during its moment of indecision. The idea worked - it swung its

stump of neck back to see her approach, and then whipped around,

galloped, occasionally looking over its shoulder, the way it came. It got

to a point about half a mile off when it dropped into a cavern or ditch or

hole, and disappeared. She continued to roar until it was well away

from them, and then let the hoarse screams die off.



The Luluthn were next to her, and as she turned to them, looked

quizzically at her. For a while they all three were silent, looking at the

beast as it galloped away. After a bit, the adrenaline in her jangled in

her blood and she uncomfortably broke the silence.



"Well, no death this time, right Llul?" her foolhardy words died off on

her lips, embarrassed. She felt young and stupid for her posturing attack

from this thing. She should have let these ancient robed geniuses deal

with the threat.



"If not for you, Mary, yes, death would be," Thll said. They both stood

facing her, blinking quickly. She wondered how she had not thought to

time their blinks to know what level of agitation they were at, and

looked from one to the other. Her breath was preposterously fast and

she tried to calm it but could not control herself, racked by the exertion

she had just spent.



"We would have died? From that thing?" She couldn't believe these

innocents, marching off to an unknown land, with nothing to keep them

from being killed by a wild animal. "You didn't have anything!"



"We knew death could come, Mary. We wished not, so we stayed in

Luluthn for much time with you."



Such fatalism was not expected. These creatures! Throwing themselves

on the mercy of their experiences! They were incomprehensible to her.

Their willingness to submit to the destructive force in the outside world

seemed very foolhardy. She looked from face to face try to understand,

and did not gain understanding. She sighed, in a disappointed manner,

and began walking again. She inwardly hoped such a sign would

convey her exasperation to them, while wondering if it would mean

something utterly silly to them.



They continued to walk, but her eyes were fixed on the directions

around them, looking for danger, and she occupied her mind with

thoughts of constructing weapons from the things she had on her and

the things she could have brought from Luluthn.



They approached the spiky clusters of buildings that they had seen on

the horizon. The spikes and columns reminded her of the spine on the

creature that had attacked us. They did not slow from their pace, but

walked straight towards the structures.



As they got closer, the earth turned to a chocolate dried mud. They left

distinct footprints in the surface, three people wide, where none were

before. Mary wondered what rains had fallen to wet this dirt. None of

Luluthn could tell her about rain. Could it be that no one had passed

this way for eons? Glancing about, she did not see any other footprints

in the surface, but saw gouges, as if some non-footed creature had

slashed at it.



The city began abruptly, with a moat-like ditch filled with refuse.

Metals covered in rust made bars and lumps, like an old salvage yard.

She felt almost at home in this junk, for though its forms were

somewhat alien, the familiarity of things, discarded, in chaos, and out of

place, was in many ways more comfortable than the crisp unspoiled

conditions of the Luluthn.



They had to descend down a steep slope, then picked their way through

the mess. She was glad of her shoes, which were brown with dust

again, and was concerned how the Luluthn were fairing with their lumps

of crenulated flesh.



As she passed a rusted bar, about her own length, she hefted it, and

judging herself able to carry it with not too much trouble, carried it as

they went, thinking of weapons.

As they climbed back up the other side of the ditch, Llul slipped, and

Mary caught Llul's reedy hand to steady her. She was filled for

affection for this chatty being, who had without quailing plodded on

alongside her. As she pulled Llul over the lip of the ditch, she gave an

extra squeeze to Llul's hand.



They were in the new city. Now, to see what it held for them.

Chapter Sixteen - The beast keepers



The spiky houses here were covered with oxidized rust, thick red caking

that barely showed the black iron of the walls. Mary pressed on ahead

of the Luluthn, who continued to plod with exactitude and pause

constantly to observe, heavily blinking. There was paving on the street,

a coating of small tar colored stones fixed in place by obsidian sludge.

It clinked loudly against her pole as she used it to steady her walk.



The Luluthn walked with nearly levitating care, ebbing towards her

over the black rocks as if they had activated some stabilization routine

in their esoteric brains.



There was a roar of sound coming from around a corner. Mary picked

up her pace. As she came into view the roar grew louder.



A crowd was assembled. There were easily a thousand, ranked ten

deep. They were circled around a pit. A motley group of the tall

creatures of this inner planet, their gaze was on the center of the pit.

Her eyes scanned the gathering.



Four Luluthn in long silver robes stood two on either side of the ring.

Their still, solemn forms were anchors of steadiness within a writhing

sea of watchers. The area around them was empty, as if a protective

field, or a fierce aversion, kept the crowd away. The pair on the left

stood side by side, and the pair on the right stood back to back, so that

one of them could see the three travelers approach. The face of the

Luluthn who faced them was impassive, but its blinking was quick and

its eyes followed them.



Silver robed Luluthn wore indicated that they were part of the workers

of this world, but also that they were generalists of sorts, rather than

highly specialized. Each of them was specialized, of course, but in

order to wear the silver robes, they must not loose sight of the other

things that needed doing in the world, and they must be ready to solve

many problems not within their domain of specialty. In this way, the

least expert of the Luluthn was also the most respected, as they were

most likely to be useful in times of need. Specializing made one

unique, but the silver robes of the Luluthn received the most clamor

when they were seen in the other lands of the hollow earth.



These Luluthn seemed to have an effect on the crowd that indicated

they were not just watchers. The perimeter around them remained in

spite of any jostling that the emotions of the crowd invoked. As with a

packed crowd in the earth above, expressions of joy resonated in

gestures throughout the crowd, as action progressed through limited

space and each creature moved their bodies to accommodate the effects

they were crowded by. The space around the Luluthn did not seem

physically delimited, and yet the circles remained empty in spite of any

cresting wave of motion.



The others in the crowd wore elaborate clothing. Observing them,

Mary thought they might well be all of a race. Their skins were pale

and seemed icy, glistening through their clothes. Their faces gleamed

with a sheen that she remembered from childhood, the sheen of a

slippery frog caught down by the creek.



Their shapes, however, were each very different. The heights of those

in the crowd ranged from creatures only her own height to some eight

feet tall. They were all very dangerous looking. One of the first that

caught her eye was one of the tallest. It had a black shell like an

armadillo, and a chest and belly that spread the shell so the resemblance

was even more clear.

The beady bumps of the sections of the shell were each crafted, and she

could see designs on each of them that winked flares of light toward

her, like topaz, sapphire and aquamarine stones made into mosaics.

The combined effect of the the shell's patterns was chaotic but

lusterous, shining with the myrad of flaring designs. The tall creature

was not simply made except for the shell, though. Obviously, the shell

was not a sufficient indicator for this creature, for its skin was studded

with the tiny mosaics as well. Meaty arms as wide as her thighs

expanded out of the gleaming shell, and were covered in beads of light

that were larger than the others, but all shone with a rusty red. Against

the shining blackness of the chitinous shell, these meaty pale arms,

wound with red, looked threatening and powerful.



It did not have legs. Instead, a black metallic column as wide as the

chest expanded obliquely towards the ground. She was reminded of the

fishtail of a mermaid to some extent, because the segmented rings of the

heavy post flashed like fish scales in the light. The face of this

monsterously powerful humanoid was shielded by a heavy black cowl

or helmet. To Mary, such a hooded figure could only remind her of an

executioner, and she wondered how the people of this hollow earth

viewed it.



Next to the massive executioner, a smaller beast stood and reached to

touch its shoulder. Shouting something above the din of the roaring

crowd, it gestured at the pit. This produced a fit of motion from the

armored one, who seemed to react. The smaller creature was easily six

feet tall, but seemed small in its shadow. Its mustard robes were

mottled with a chocolate brown design. What made the creature look

powerful was the disks that jutted out from every part of its body.

Twelve inch plates of thin blue attached to its shoulders, arms, legs,

back, and chest. Like dormant saw blades, they were avoidable when

still, but Mary could easily imagine the unavoidable impass they would

be when set into motion. This one's face was also invisible, for a high

collar of metallic blue emerged from its robes to protect most of its

face.



Through the crowd, Mary spotted a creature not unlike that which

attacked us on the plain, though it was not so festering, and larger. The

long saber teeth were familiar, but these teeth were undecayed, and this

creature stood upright in the crowd.



Mary touched Llul's arm, and pointed casually at it as they walked. Llul

nodded, and did not speak a word.



As they got closer, some of the crowd had turned to look at them. The

presence of the two Luluthn with her seemed like a protective shield,

for there was not agression in the eyes of the denizens of this pit town

here, but heavy curiosity. Most of the attention in the crowd remained

on the pit, though some fixated on their approach, or kept glancing back

at them.



There was space on the outer rank of this pit, and the slope allowed all

of them to observe, as it would be in a stadium. There were no seats

here, only a graduated earth in shelves of circles down to the pit, and all

stood. Thll, Llul, and Mary walked to the edge, and looked down into

the enclosure. The noise of the crowd was not much louder than it had

been at a distance – each creature murmurring and occasionally calling

something out. The calm sounds amid the gestures of excitement

matched what Mary had learned of the Luluthn people. All here were

so much more contained than those on the surface!



On the floor of the pit stood a citizen with the same pale gleaming skin

of the others in the crowd. Elaborately clothed in streamers of flowing

red satin, the beast stood on three legs that were covered in gleaming

brown scales, and ended in predatory claws, like that of a giant bird,

with six giant talons on each foot.

The talons did not look like they were made of normal animal nail

material. Instead of such a material, each talon gleamed and sparkled in

the light lusterously, and pressed deeply into the soil. The three legs

seemed to imbue the creature with a very solid balance, and the talons

gripping the soil seemed even more rock-sure.



Six small eyes ringed the creature's hairless globe of a skull, spaced

evenly around its head. Each eye was positioned vertically, and the

creature blinked only three of them at any time. Three tendrils or tails

emerged from its waist, with ten foot reaches that whipped around it.

The tendrils were made of a jointed ceramic or metal, and waved

around the birdman in a bragging dance of power.



It was a sight to put fear into her, especially since they were so recently

attacked by another of these viscious creatures. The brute in the ring

was strong and agile, made for power and made to move fast when

needed. She wondered why it was standing there alone. "The crowd

tells that the creature's name is Kubn," Llul reported to her.



She did not need to wonder long. In a flash, buried doors in the ground

snapped open, and deposited four large spheres into the ring. The

spheres were spinning, perhaps four feet wide each. They hovered

above the ground at eye level. Layers of blades snapped out and cut

through the air near the birdman. The audience murmured louder, and a

quiet gasp arose when one of the spheres moved towards the birdman.



It crouched low on its three legs, squatting low by bending its double-

kneed legs into collapsing zigzags, and when one of the spheres moved

down toward it, Kubn reached out and clamped the spinning sphere in

two of its claws, grabbing the poles of the whirring machine. The

machine spun faster, and smoke emitted from the pinchered globe, and

static crackled in the air. Impassive, the birdman unblinkingly watched

the other three globes, and the audience cheered when another of the

spheres moved in towards its only free arm.



Lightening fast, its arm shot out and back in. A glinting fluid began to

pour out of the underside of the sphere that had approached it. The

sphere recoiled from the punch, moving up into the air further away

from the fighter before returning to the fray.



The sphere in his hands gushed smoke, and wobbled on its orbit like a

toy top spun out of a child's hand. The spinning blades tried to cut into

the arms that held it, jabbing first up, then down. Each time it spun, the

arms bent out of the way, and the fighter held it tighter. Visible

deformation had occurred, and the sphere was now oval, collapsing in

on itself.



All three of the other globes commensed an attack together. The

leaking globe moved slower than the other two, but they attacked from

all sides, and skidded at Kubn quickly. Like a samauri staff, his free

arm swung in a wide arc, clanking against each of the spheres, and

causing two of them to recoil. He caught the third as it was cutting into

him, and made his first noise as it was shoved away, leaving a long

gouge of oozing flesh on his neck. The sound of Kubn screaming was a

choking hiss that shivered down the spine. Mary thought she saw bone

through the cut, and felt faint.



Finally the sphere in its hand was still, pinched through until it was

nearly a donut. Wasting no time, Kubn released his arms and dropped

the shell of metal, and held the freed arms up to meet the spheres.



They flew faster than she could see, moving with a humming whine that

would be familiar to any whose vacuum cleaner picked up a clump of

carpet and cycled faster and faster, unwilling to let go. The whine of

the machines finally made Kubn blink. Untwisting his coiled legs, he

leapt from the crouch he had been squatting in, and sailed high into the

air. One problem not known by the spheres was that of gravity. They

could accelerate and deaccelerate in any direction, when they wished.

Once Kubn was in the air, the story was different. He was forced to fall

only as fast as gravity would let him, in a parabola he could only

slightly control. So the spheres took that moment to place themselves

for the attack.



Working together, they zipped to where he would be coming down,

then moved outward and upward to meet Kubn in the air. When they

were about to collide with his flailing arms, the arms contracted

slightly, like muscles flexing. Instead of the arms seeming loose

anymore, they were stiffened and heavy. Like hammers. The spheres

saw what was happening too late, and each of them were slammed by

the massive spinnning arms, and each of them shot away different

directions, slammed by a force so huge they could not defeat it.



The first spiked to the ground like a vollyball, a cavernous hole spewing

metal goo on its top, and its bottom flattened as if it had lost inflation.

The second, blade broken on one area, skipped off to the left hand area

of the arena, pausing where it lay. The third, caught more lightly than

the others because it was further upwhen Kubn connected with it went

sailing like a baseball for a moment before its thrusters recovered and it

boomeranged back at Kubn.



The two spheres that were still functioning (the second one screeching

like fingers down a blackboard from the whine of its unstable blades)

came back to Kubn nearly at the same time, one above, the other below,

from the same side.



This seemed a good move, because Kubn did not instantly counter it.

As they got closer, his arms changed again, back to their more flexible

texture, and they whipped far out very quickly. In a flash, each of the

spheres was grabbed in one of the tendrils, while the third arm spun

wildly as a protective shield, and the two spheres were smashed

together. Screaming noises poured loudly out of the two spheres as

they cut into each other. One was stuck in the other, both were

collapsed and dented, and with the third arm that had been spinning,

Kubn flexed into a mallet-heavy post and pounded them both into the

ground. The dust on the ground hissed away from the machines for a

second, and then the crowd burst into noise.



The sound of the hollow earth residents cheering was not like a crowd

at a sports event, Mary thought. It was too contained – not quiet

excactly, but certainly not loud – and the sounds were too varied. One

creature would screech while the next would hoot. There was a general

attempt at loudness, but little consistency, like a vocabulary that was not

shared sufficiently.



Kubn stood in the dust of the ring, head slightly lowered to gaze at the

defeated spheres. For many minutes, the crowd cheered. Mary

wondered if it would stop, after a while. There seemed to be no

disappation of the cheering, but also no creshendo as she expected from

a normal human crowd up top.



Finally another creature stepped into the ring. Covered in real gold, or

at least a metal that gleamed like it, she stood out even amongst the

yellow dust and the intense costuming all around her.



She began to shout something. Mary leaned her head in to Thll. "What

is he saying?" she whispered, "I don't understand."



Thll looked at her, quizzically, and impassively. Thll blinked twice,

then touched her shoulder, near the joint of her neck, with one of the

long reedy fingers there were so many of. As she was touched, Mary

felt understanding flow into her as if slipping under still water. The

water line of knowing passed from her feet all the way up her body until

it was over her head, and when it passed over her head, she could

understand the speaker.



The gold-covered woman was reciting the facts of the fight! "With two

great arms, Kubn" (Mary now felt the texture of this name and its

complexity, individuating those consonants to be different than any

other) "took the two spheres, and brought them together! As his arms

pressed them, the air around them pulsed, and his arms ached with the

exertion! Each jointed segment raged against the next as Kubn pressed

the two sawglobes together! When he felt the first resistance of the two

sawglobes touching, he was invigorated! Each tooth of the blades cut a

new segement into the other sphere!"



As the woman chanted the details of the fight she had just witnessed,

Mary looked around the ring. The viscious crowd was listening

intently, gleaning every last drop from the story being retold. Kubn still

stood, eyes slightly down, very aware, but unmoving, as his story was

recited to the crowd. His many eyes moved only to touch each of the

parts of the machines dead on the ground. There was no expression on

his face.



"The screaming noise was rattling his arm, and he felt the quivering

vibration shake through him! He accessed more power where he had

not been completely sure of finding it. This unexpected reserve

allowed him to crush more thouroughly the second sphere with the

impact of the third, and disabled it so he could be sure it would not rise

for the moment. The third sphere was fighting back on his arm, pushing

against him with a persistence that he was not sure he could overcome,

so he bent his arm more to direct the force in an angle more toward the

ground!"

Even the Luluthn that had been guarding the ring had turned to face the

speaking woman. Her pale skin was similar to the others around the pit,

but the pit held none who caught the light as much as she did. She was

tall but not as tall as Kubn, standing near her, and her face was

distorted. It was far wider and taller than a normal face would be,

tapering back to a normal sized head. Mary thought it was almost as if

all of her features had been expanded by a beesting or another allergic

reaction, so that too much of her face was created. It had a monsterous

effect, yet the effect was also to emphasize the woman's story telling.



Her lips, indeed her face, was gleaming and wet like the others in the

crowd. Her shouted oration was capturing the entire audience to her

cause. They were waiting on every syllable. Mary thought of how

intent her old dog had been, waiting by the kitchen as she filled his

bowl, so serious, so ravenous. There was a similar blend of restraint

and breathless obcession in this crowd.



When her final words rang out, "a sheet of hissing crept along the

ground and Kubn knew that he had won the match!" she stepped away

from Kubn, gesturing elaborately at him, at his three arms, his clawed

legs, his universally pointing face. The crowd began making their mix

of noises again, although at this time, Mary could, thanks to Thll's

powerful melding touch, understand some of the screamed phrases.



"For your glory! Kubn, yes!"



"Ever more strong!"



"Yes for your arms of strength and yes for your fast eyes, Kubn!"



and so forth. Mary thought how funny cheers sounded when they were

picked apart as language. She was pleased that these revelers seemed

so awkwardly human as they cheered, no more insightful or meaningful

than the ones on the surface would be, really, as they were swept up in

the victory.



It was as she stood there analyzing the cheers that Llul suggested that

they walk. Shocked that she, for once, was more transfixed than the

Luluthn, she looked into the crowd to realize that more than half the

people had left from the pit or were leaving.



"Where will we be going?" she asked, and Thll dropped his hand,

returning her to the world of meaningless noises that she had emerged

from a few minutes before.



"To eat with others, if you would acquiese, Mary," said Thll, and

looked at her face solidly.



"Others? Here?" Mary shivered slightly, thinking of the strength of the

fighter in the ring, and the viscious strength advertised by all those

around her. "Um. Yeah, of course." She looked between the silent

faces of Llul and Thll. They turned from her to begin walking, giving

her no more information about where they were going.



They walked through several streets, past many houses. The onyx of

the houses was very threatening, but beautiful, as it reflected them as

they passed. Some of the architecture seemed to intentionally distort

their reflected images to specifically large or small shapes, or to

repetitions. It struck her as a strange sort of outward architecture, since

those that made it were rarely around to see the response to it. Once

again, the level of artistry in this land was far greater than she had ever

experienced up above.



Mary though about her small world up above the ground. How often

did she go to an art museum, a concert? Not often enough. It was so

easy not to. Like exercize, easier to avoid than to do, even though it

was so pleasurable once she was there, looking at the works on the

walls. And she remembered it all so vividly! The giant sculptures,

huddled in the corner, lifelike or abstract hulks. The long paintings that

took up so much of a giant wall, so that they had to be read left-to-right

or right-to-left in order to take even a fraction of them in. The mobiles

– oh, how she loved the mobiles in the great hall of the gallery

downtown.



Why was it so delightful and yet so hard for her to do? It wasn't just her

that found it so. Something in the broken gap between being these

creatures and being her short, distracted self, things changed. The

beautiful things got harder to pursue. These Luluthn knew, but they

couldn't explain it to her, she fretted. What were they waiting for?



She was only partially noticing where they were going, as they padded

silently along. Her shoes were dirty now, dusty from the walk to this

city. The frayed hems of her jeans were dusty, too. She glanced over at

the foot pads of the Luluthn. They seemed perfectly clean. How

expected, that they would have no particle of dust on them. They must

know how to step between the dust, she sighed. Somewhat

sarcastically.

Chapter Seventeen - Meeting Sul



They reached a building with a courtyard entrance made of vertically

spaced bars twisted around each other like mating snakes, and the

Luluthn stopped. Mary stopped then, as well, and raised her eyes again

to the city around her. She had been too busy thinking about her dirty

feet. Now she was about to bring that dust into this home.



They paused there for a moment, and Mary could swear she saw the

glassine surface of the onyx go matte for a second near the gate. Some

sort of elaborately beautiful and perfect doorbell, she wisecracked to

herself.



The bars bent upward, untwisting to re-twist around each other to form

an ornate arch. Llul stepped through first, and Thll waited for Mary to

move forward. She looked up at the porticulis as she passed under it,

wondering she should ever fear these people under the hollow earth, or

only the ones who lunged at her unexpectedly, like the poor brute

outside.



The courtyard rounded to a large square, hung with a gentle canopy that

sagged soft catenaries over the area. Underneath were surfaces – she

didn't want to call them furniture, exactly, Mary thought – that various

of the city's inhabitants were sitting on. Clusters of these sections of

soft but firm areas were strewn through the courtyard, but Llul walked

them straight to a specific one.



Llul sat down, finding an angle of the sofa-like object that suited her,

and gestured at Mary. Standing back, Mary let Thll place himself first,

then gingerly stepped into the mass of undulation.

It wasn't as bad as she thought. The curve of the back of the section she

was on cradled her lumbar quite happily, and the soft substance that

coated the pillowy mass – not fabric, exactly, more like a surface with

textile-like qualities of softness and sheen – was enjoyable to her wrists

and hands, and to feel slipping underneath her as she sat.



From behind her, one of the people of this city came forward to speak

with them. He had a similarly huge face to the woman at the pit that

spoke earlier, but was more masculine, with craggy face and chiseled

chin. He turned towards them, and began talking, in particular to Mary,

but looking at all of them. Mary hadn't noticed the eye contact in the

woman announcer at the pit, but here his intense gaze was very

noticable as he peered at her, especially since his words meant nothing.



Thll reached over and held her hand, and the same emmersion came

over her. Thll was really earning his keep, she thought, then tried to

tamp the thought down, embaressed, in case Thll could hear her through

this link they were in.



"…aren't tired, I know many things that can help make your sitting

more enjoyable. It isn't too far from Grthl to Luluthn but few visit from

there to here. We enjoy to see you, and are pleased when we can offer

things to align with the value you always bring."



Though she thought of them as English words, the flow of sentences

that Thll's touch gave her wasn't really English at all. It just felt as clear

and as familiar as English, while she was still hearing the other sounds

and feel in her mouth of the alien pronunciation. It was some kind of

trick, that's for sure.



Could she talk in this creatures language, or was this connection of

Thll's one way only? "It was a good fight, today," Mary said,

wondering if her speech would sound so unusual and awkward as theirs

did to her. "I enjoyed watching it." Complimenting the entertainment

of the town seemed like something sure to be a conversation starter, and

she really wanted to know whether her speaking would translate. It did!

Thll looked at her, blinking once at her initiation of conversation. It

was so easy she wanted to try again. Did she have an accent, she

wondered? No way to tell except by learning the language they really

spoke here. The short-cut way had its drawbacks.



"We of Grthl are pleased at your enjoyment," he said. "Kubn will be a

good fighter."



"Will be?" Mary asked, leaping into the question with no adornment.

"He isn't yet?"



"No, miss. He is confirming that he is ready to fight. The pit today was

him against machinery, not a real fight." Her stomach winced at the

idea of getting more into a fight than Kubn had already been.



"He fought four spheres today. Tomorrow the challenge will be

different, and in our minds, a bit greater. For five days more Kubn

must battle the constructions like those that he conquered today."



"That's quite a challenge," Mary said.



There was silence. Obviously, these cultures didn't have the same

issues with silence that her's did. Words would flow back and forth and

then it was as if they fell off a cliff into a collapse. Like an alien

Quakerism, where the spirit had to move, not just words exchange. She

didn't like the silence, and it always seemed to fall when she was least

expecting it. What had she said this time? She considered how trivial

her response had been, and wondered if it showed something about her

that displeased this huge faced man, or if it was just time for everyone

to breath quietly for a while. Like nap time in Kindergarten. Perhaps it

was good for them to pause for a while before continuing.



Llul spoke fairly quickly, with authority in her voice. "We might not

have visited if we had come without this one," here she pointed a

spindly finger at Mary, slowly, and curled it back into her hand before

continuing. "We had an encounter with a creature that wished death for

us."



There was instant concern in the man's pale, veined face. "A creature

on the travel? Animal, or Slow?"



Mary's attention caught the capitalization of that word. "Slow? As in,

not fast? What is Slow?" She felt herself capitalize it, too, and

considered how convenient it was, that she could say things with Thll's

help that she couldn't even really say in English.



The man looked down at her, as if seeing more deeply for the first time,

not just providing the right amount of entertainment eye contact. His

eyes rolled down and up her body, and fixed back on her face. She felt

naked in his gaze. He wasn't undressing her in his mind as taking her

apart and putting her back together in his mind – a decidedly more

uncomfortable sensation, Mary decided.



He looked at the touch Thll connected to her and looked at her

companions. He took a huge breath, and sighed deeply at what he had

learned. Thll and Llul sighed with him, extravagantly, and Mary joined

in towards the end, as she realized what was happening.



"Tell me first of your attack, and I will then tell you a very long story,

strange woman. It seems you have not had a storyteller to tell you yet."

Mary looked at Thll, who nodded at her. Not sure where to begin, she

started with the exit from Luluthn.



"Well, we walked for a long time across the sand. That was the fourth

day. You know, the fourth waking time, after we had slept. The fourth

time we walked for a long time." An awkward aphasia crept in amongst

her words, whatever language they were in. The whole concept of days

was frustrating to her. Shouldn't they have tides or something in here to

tell days from? What about seasons? Wouldn't the tilt of the earth

affect something down here?



"We found a plant. It was a lichen, I think. We kept walking. We

could see the city of…Grthl," the word came to her faster than she

expected, and made her wonder what exactly the most useful effects of

this translation service were. Not being tongue-tied for words was a

nice one. "We could see Grthl in the distance. Suddenly a creature

rose out of the ground, and ran towards us."



"It looked like you." She said it flatly, because it felt too much like an

accusation to her. "Or some of the people here. One person at the pit

today looked very much like it. It had giant lumps on it here" she

pointed on herself, "and here, and smaller lumps all over."



The man stared at her impassively, not changing his expression as she

told him the story. His great eyes and cheeks squinted at her story.



"…So I just roared and roared, as it ran away, and I hoped that I had

scared it enough to keep it from returning, but we weren't sure."



The huge eyes were still looking straight at her. Finally, they shifted, to

look at Thll and Llul, who had the same blank faces as he did. "She did

save your life," he said. It needed no further embellishment.

She felt silly, hearing this solemn pronouncement. She had yelled at a

bear-thing. Spooked it. Not done any real fighting. It wasn't as if she

wrestled with spinning discus that could chop her up and come out

victorious.



"I'm Mary, by the way," she fell into polite manners to distract the

solemn thinkers here with her. "Nice to meet you."



"I am Sul, Mary," the man said. "I did not realize you had not heard me

before." He made a gesture here that she concluded was obcene before

she realized that she didn't know it. She was amused at the stuff that

was hard wired into her brain at this point. Were all sudden unknown

gestures rude in her world? Quickly, she thougth of at least two she had

dealt with up above, and traced the route of her assumption.



"I hadn't gotten my translator going," she said ironically. She was

going to be very lucky to drag Thll all over the place to translate for

her, she thought. It wouldn’t' really be the job Thll would pick on his

own, she felt. He was so quiet.



"I understand," Sul said. He took a simple breath, slow but not very

deep.



"That creature out there was a Slow, I'm afraid," he said. "We haven't

been able to decide what to do yet."



"As you have seen, we are a city that has many warriors and warriors in

training. We strive for strength and agility, so that we can perfect the

battling instinct in us. Since the beginning, it has been important to

sculpt our fighting styles, and one of the most beautiful aspects of the

fight is always the arousal of the animal instinct. We savor that

bloodlust, as all of have through time, for it is a pleasure to feel, and a

wonder to behold. Kubn, for instance, will need to expand his repertoir

of that rage in order to advance to real fighting.



"Warriors in training use many techniques to access their bloodlust

when they are learning. Some can find it naturally within them, but

many of them cannot. For it is a rare thing for a Slow to have had it to

begin with.



"To create an intoxicated rage, the kind that allows a fighter to see more

clearly and slows down time so that the fighter can decide more

perfectly how to attack or defend, some have used meditation or

thoughts. Some have used drinks with the critical components, and

some push injections into their stomach through a tiny tube.



A needle? Mary thought, and wondered about the difference between

the Luluthn's perfect food and evacuation systems, and the

primativeness of a needle injecting an endorphin or whatever into the

fighters. Perhaps technology here was just sporatic.

Chapter Eighteen - Sul tells the Story of Merl



"One of the ones who wanted a more permanent solution was Merl.

Merl did not have any inherent bloodlust, and she did not feel it when

she meditated.



"She was working on some aspects of motivation within her fighting,

with her teacher at the same time, and she was also working with a man

named Grenthn to alter her chemistry to be able to evoke bloodlust

when she could.



"As you must know by now, it is not likely that one of us should fail.

Merl did not fail as she came up with the solution to alter her body.

Grenthn did not fail as he helped her. They both were very aware of

what they were doing – but it was a pleasure for them to alter Merl and

accept the consequences. It was a pleasure for them to help Merl go

further than mere bloodlust.



She bathed herself in it for a long time. She did not exit the container

she was bathing in until she felt the changes in her. They felt

wonderful.



Merl was a strong willed woman, and she could feel changes but she

could no longer understand how to interpret those changes. When she

looked in the mirror, she was fiercer looking than she had been, but her

eyes did not notice the boils on her skin and think them bad. She

assumed they would give her advantage in a fight.



She was aching to fight. The competition hovered in her mind like a

fog, and she was not able to tell how it had consumed her. She

emerged from her residence and walked down to the pit, but by the time

she had walked there, she no longer knew what the pit meant. She was

consumed with the urgent sleep of rage, and as she walked she fell

further into it, until there was nothing left over her but the mind of a

wild animal.



Grenthn was chasing after her, having seen her leave her residence, but

she did not turn around to see him, for her eyes were low and she was

eyeing the horizon for a conflict she could no longer imagine until it

presented itself. She attacked and killed one man on the way out of

town, and Grenthn was the only one who watched as her instantaneous

attack tore the man into two pieces, without consideration.



Grenthn was able to see Merl lope out of town before he screamed out

for help. Nothing could save the dead man, which he knew, but he

called out for help anyway.



We mourned the loss of life of our dead citizen. After the mourning,

we began to discuss what acts were appropriate for Merl. It has been a

very interesting thing to decide amongst us. There are some who

believe she has reached a pleasurable place, and should be left to

experience the raw life of bloodlust that has been one of our chief

pleasures. Yet others complain that she may kill again, and still others

complain that Merl must be returned to the city, so that we can share in

the knowledges she has obtained.



"You have changed much by arriving here and seeing her. We did not

know that she was so near, but we also did not calculate correctly how

many more lives are at stake if we do not solve the problem of her rage.



"Perhaps, at last, our city has a battle that many can discover the

pleasure of pursuit in. I will suggest that we form a group to collect

Merl. Your description of her hesitation when she looked you in the

face and paused, gives me hope that she is returning to a more measured

approach, and can be coaxed back away from her rage. For in all

things to be experienced in life, a moderate amount will not eliminate or

overshadow the other things, which are also good."



"Moderation in moderation," Mary said, and smiled. Sul paused a short

moment, and then smiled at her. The power of his face and his

expressions cascaded over her.



"Moderation in moderation, Mary." He chuckled, a full bubbling laugh

as she might hear on earth. "Perhaps we can practice that."



"Let me get you soon food."



Sul walked away from them, and exited through a high arch in the back

of the courtyard.

Chapter Nineteen - The Food of the Grthl

"Sul has very gracious acts for us," Thll said, slowly turning his head to

follow Sul's path away from them. "I have heard before of his ability to

say the things which others are glad to hear."



"How do you speak his language,Thll?" Mary asked, as Thll dropped

his long finger away from her. "Do you just know it? How does Llul

know it?"



"We all speak the common language that Shab had all learn," Llul said,

"if we did not know it already."



"Shab?" Mary questioned, and then Sul had already returned, and was

bearing a great container.



Mary thought the thing looked like a bowl made of a wreckage of one

of those spheres. He began handing smaller containers out of the large

one – a long narrow plate, with a slight depression, almost the shape

and texture of a tongue (though warm like clay), a bowl filled with blue

goo that was nearly the same as the stuff she had eaten in Luluthn land,

an emerald-shaped bowl made of cold steel that contained a slow

moving creamy liquid (it made Mary a bit queasy to look at, as it was

almost the same color as the skin of the people of Grthl).



There were easily twenty bowls in the big container, and he handed

them all out, so that they put some bowls on the big cushion, and some

in their lap, and some in their hands. Then Sul turned, to Mary's

surprise, and left again.



"This is too much!" Mary said, shocked. "We'll never be able to eat

this. Why, this stuff," she gestured to the bowl of blue goo, "feeds fine

with no other food necessary. We'll waste it all!"

Thll nodded approvingly. "You are correct, and perceptive, Mary. But

we are not the only ones who will be eating this."



She pondered Thll's answer. "Does he eat that much, then? He is a

large creature, and not like us in form." She ignored the cracking of

Thll's smile as she grouped herself in the same category as the Luluthn.

It was how she felt at this point, and she knew how foolish it might

sound but it was true. She and the Luluthn needed the same things.



"I wish I knew the common language," Mary murmurred, "I can't

without you anywhere, Tll. I'm so grateful," she quickly corrected

herself, "that you have come, and for your skills. But your words make

me wish they were mine, as well."



Thll nodded. "It has become something that inhibits you, yes. We

should change that now, so that you can walk where you want to."



"Change it? More magic from you guys?"



"It is not magic, Mary. If there was magic we not have much pleasure

in the interactions with you, because it would all be done before. You

are unique, and cannot be invented."



"That's comforting. What help can you give me with language? I'm not

ready for you to permanently alter my brain, I think."



"Everything you do permanently alters you, Mary. Time cannot be

turned back. " The tone of the Thll's voice was instructive, as if he was

teaching a child.

"What, you haven't figured that out yet?" she asked, sarcastically. "I'm

unimpressed."



"There is no point to go backwards in time, unlearning, unless you seek

oblivion. We are not of those who seek oblivion, none of us here. But

let me offer you this, Mary, so that you can hear Sul without me holding

your hand."



"I can offer some learning to your mind of the common language, and

when you wish for me to take it away, I will help you unwind the idea

of it in your mind."



She thought about it. Why was she hesitating? What foolish mysticism

was she holding on to about who she was, or what she was? "Okay."

She breathed out nervously. "Sock it to me."



Thll paused, processing her strange wording. "Just take my hand, when

you are ready, Mary."



She hesitated, thinking of the beauty of her experience with the

translator Thth, when rawest language had washed over her. She felt at

the edge of a precipice. This was no novelty. This would change her.



Practically pulling her own hand to Thll, she said, "Ready," and

grabbed him.



It was not exactly like the other time had been, after she had run

through the Luluthn streets and exhausted herself. This time as the

experience of language rose up to her, reaching up along her body,

constricting her neck, she willed herself to fall back into it. She need

not have willed anything – nothing she knew could have changed the

experience that she had.

It was like thinking a symphony. Sounds and ideas collided in her, and

built into a fugue of expanding notes. Scilicate, crystalline colors spun

to anchor the concepts, and burst brightly into her. It was not visual as

much as total – the idea of each thing in the world pressing outwards

from it to hold a new way of naming it. She grew up, into the words

she was being given. She brimmed up and over the ideas, exploding in

fireworks from so many ideas expanding at once. The sounds of the

words, the idea of the words, pressed at her. A hissing started quieter

and expanded louder, until she was under a waterfall of white noise that

was the language she was learning. The waterfall lasted for a long time.



Llul and Thll were looking at her. Standing back from her, they did not

seem surprised, and she wondered what she had looked like, as she was

going through the ecstasy of learning. Her face felt clenched, and she

relaxed it. Someone touched her arm, and Sul was sitting next to her.

He said to her, "Now then, I think we should eat." He gestured at

others in the courtyard.



She understood him completely, and yet she knew he was speaking

another language. It felt familiar and comfortable to hear, and she

wondered if they all felt this enjoyment in their communal language as

she did. She felt the weight of the word "eat" and realized how

important a concept it was, weighty and meaningful. "It's impossible to

imagine you taking this away, Thll." She spoke their language. It was

not the lisping hiss of the Luluthn, that she could tell, when she said

Thll's name. Some things were the same, but it was decidedly different.



"Yes, knowledge is hard to release, Mary."



Other Grthl citizens were gathering in the courtyard. Mary noticed that

more containers of food had appeared, and various of the containers

were large, and spread around the courtyard's sitting groups. It seemed

like the entire crowd that had come to see Kubn in his battle against the

spheres were all gathered here, and though the space was full, it did not

feel crowded.



Llul pressed Sul on the shoulder gently. "Sul, would you speak for us?

You can tell the crowd what is appropriate." He nodded, his huge chin

sinking through the air thoughtfully.



With a flourish, he stood up, and his robes flashed white in the glow of

the orange sun. He tilted his chin up higher, and flashed his eyes. The

obvious showmanship of it was intriguing to Mary. Everyone in

Luluthnia had seemed to be so humble – it was delicious to feel the

glamour in this man. He held up his hands, wide, above his shoulders.



"These three have traveled from Luluthn!" Here he paused, and there

was silence from some in the crowd, but some chattered or even

cheered noisily. Mary watched as he met the eyes of all in the crowd.

"We do not often have visitors come from the long dust plain, and they

walked long to arrive here!" A pattering noise came from the

assembled citizens.



"One has walked still longer. This one," he reached his hands, open,

out to her, "traveled from the outer earth!"



The crowd did not react to this as a crowd might on earth. They

nodded, and processed what he said, and some of them looked as if it

was not unknown to them already.



"All three faced death on the dust plain, from one of our own. Merl ran

to them to attack without cause, while they walked, and they fought her

to a draw." Mary wondered a bit at this phrasing, but the clamor of the

response to this was much louder, a booming whisper. She heard Merl's

name spoken by many voices. "Thus, we know they are not only of the

Luluthn's land, which makes them welcome here, and not only are they

of wisdom and knowledge, which makes them welcome here, but they

are warrior-tested, which makes them our kin!"



This was unexpected, to say the least, for Mary, but the Luluthn of

course showed no shock. They were impassive in the face of the crowd,

which was now chanting a set of verses together in a rhythm.



You are kin / and we choose / you have fought / you we choose



It rumbled through the crowd, and the phrase had a honoring power, a

booming meaning to it, that even Mary could sense through the

language. She bowed her head, looking at the floor and listening to the

chant from the crowd.



"Now, these three will share the meal, and we will celebrate our brave

visitors!" Sul gestured elaborately, and a "Hra!" sparked up from the

crowd, and they all began to eat.



Sul stood a moment, and then squatted back down with them. "It is a

pleasure to welcome our fighter kin to this feast. May your strength

grow." He smiled at the three of them.



"I have never been made kin to another tribe before," said Llul. "It is a

great honor."



"We are pleased when the Luluthn visit us, Llul," he replied. "You are

always the most welcome of guests."



Mary had been saving her questions for a time as this. "What did you

mean by whether Merl was Animal, or Slow, Sul?"

"Mary, that question is so fundemental we rarely tell that tale. For you

today, though, it would be pleasure I would not miss. Thll, Llul – If I

may, I would like to tell Mary the long story. Is that appropriate?"



"Sul, you are correct. It would be very good to tell Mary the long

saga."



He nodded, then bowed his head, eyes closed, for a long while. Mary

looked at his giant features, and waited. He began a toneless hum, head

still bent, and then his face turned back towards them. He fixed his

eyes on her and locked them to him. "This tale begins long ago, Mary."

Chapter Twenty - The world above and below, as told

by Sul to Mary



Long before your peoples wrote their experiences down, great races

filled the earth.



As civilizations spread and learned, the people of earth fought wars

over their beliefs. Shab of the Bula people watched her people recover

after the War of Six Races, and helped nurse her people back to health.

She was a great healer, and a wise, though willful, leader. Shab had

grown in an age where wits could cut the knife's edge between living

and dying, and with her willful urges, she learned how to live better

than any had before.



In her long life (for she lived one thousand seven hundred of your sun

cycle years), she learned how to spend a year in isolation, far away from

any distraction, and eat but a leaf every month to nourish herself, while

expanding the pathways in her mind. She would focus her mind on the

tomorrows that she could feel creeping at the edge of possibility, and

learn what paths would likely lead to them. You will understand if I

call it creativity, or dreaming. She dreamt the choices of the world, and

explored them to their conclusions, and then dreamt more.



One of the things Shab learned in a visit to her thoughts was that there

always were groups of humans unwilling to fight or work for higher

motives. The Bula council had rewarded these groups with wealth or

opportunity if they needed strength of numbers or effort or compliance,

but throughout time, there were always those who were moved towards

a better future, and those that stayed behind, unwilling to advance. It

seemed there was a thread of the glorious and a thread of the pedestrian

that wound through humanity, and Bula wished to untie them.

To a human from the surface earth, such conclusions about those that

wish to plod stay behind will seem obvious, for you see it often. But

Shab was of a time where only a small wedge of her civilization had

such traits. Yet, it seemed that every time destruction of war, or

carelessness, or defeat occurred, she could trace the cause back to these

who rejected higher instinct.



Shab emerged to watch the world from her meditation, certain she had

understood a crucial cutting. When she emerged, an ugly thread of

thought had blossomed in her absence.



First one, then another younger Bula was enacting a act of destructio

that shocked their clan. Hrab was the first, and he one day refused to

eat. Then the next, and as months passed, he reveled in the horror he

evoked in watchers and visitors. Shab at first thought this was art, and

was unsure how to respond. Then, Hrab lashed out in hunger and

venom, and ate his close companion, who he killed in the night.



Shab and the Bula council executed Hrab after six surface days of

council contemplation. Never before had the charge of death against

one of their own been pronounced. Many had died in the wars over

higher mind, tribal wars, but never had the Bula decided to execute a

Bula. After a wave of chatter among the people, memory of Hrab

softened and was set on a shelf.



Only three surface years later, a fad emerged in old Bula that paled the

memory of Hrab. Weary Bula ancients, three or four hundred years old,

would cut off their own limbs out of boredom.



The fad of self-destruction led to waves of suicide. Perhaps one in

every hundred of the Bula killed themselves within a generation, and

the rest of society was brought to a standstill. No invention of any

significance, no art or science, no grand learning moved forward in that

century, as we spun into ourselves to try to understand. A melancholy

swept many of us, and a dull anger sank on the others.



Shab went away to think. What tied these acts of ugly senselessness

together? She spent two surface years in a cave, tracing the origin of

the catastrophes. No other era had so brutalized themselves, but it

seemed this one could not stop.



She thought of Hrab, and who he was. A young man, less than one

hundred years old, he would not hold his own in discussion with those

around him, but burned with a frustration she did not recognize. She

thought of the others –the cripples with their pale faces and festering

wound, found still angry in the forest edge, in spite of their attempt to

correct what ailed them. And the suicides! What brought them to the

point where living was worse than dying?



As she inventoried the shattered ones she began to place them into two

categories – those that desired on short scales, and were willing to risk

their future for the excitement in the present, and those that were drawn

into the death cult for aesthetic reasons.



Shrenba, for instance, was incapable, in spite of her brilliant mind, to

wait until her lover's partner had grown tired of their fading union, and

killed herself rather than pass time until her lover was free to union with

Srenba.



Bukarel, exasperated when a war between the Bula and two nearby

tribes broke out, set himself on fire in the square.



But Anklay – Shab poured water from her eyes to think of Anklay's

death. Anklay grew from Shab's belly, in an experiment in propagation

that few of the Bula considered necessary any more. There were many

ways to grow close to others, and some Bula joined their flesh for years,

pursing unions of extreme partnership where they shared skin or bone,

to better learn what it was to be other. But Anklay was born, Shab's

flesh feeding her for three years while she was inside, and her breasts

feeding Anklay for five more when she was outside.



Shab thought of the moment when Anklay told her of the plan. The

elaborate rains Anklay must channel seemed Shab's only hope of

stopping it, and so Shab raced to find a way to halt the weather. But

Anklay had studied many years, and when the systems of mist, then

delicate rain began, Shab did not have a way to halt them. Anklay had

chained herself in a grove of trees in the shallow valley she grew up in.

And as the systems of downpour and hail broke Anklay's body and

filled her lungs, Shab watched from the higher ground, still pleading

with her daughter to let Shab break the chains and save her.



The sweet dissolution of her daughter, more perfect and beautiful than

the entire life of others, was a different category of destruction than the

others. And there were some others like Anklay – artists of the process

of emotion, crafters of monumental movements in the hearts of the

Bula.



Shab thought of how the suicides and murders wound their way into her

daughter's mind, and how Anklay loved to ponder their meaning. The

idea passed from the brutes that could not control their world, to her

precious scion, and in Anklay the idea was transformed, yet it still

executed.



Shab knew that somehow, in that line between the frustrations of Hrab

and the sweet celebration of Anklay, her answer was waiting. As she

thought of the line, whose different sides became more clear the more

she thought of it, the more her thoughts inclined towards a solution.

When Shab emerged, a new century of evils had persisted, and some

four hundred of the Bula were enslaved. Rules on life's choices had

been made, and those who would not obey the impulsive whims of the

rules were caged. It was a horror the Bula had not seen since they

learned to live in houses. Ugly was the time.



Shab met with the rule-makers. Why were these citizens encarcerated?

Eyes wide, she heard the saw-edged passion quake the lawmakers.

Angry with their compatriot's decisions, they outlawed arts that

swallowed more than two hexes of land. Dissatisfied with the relations

between the warring tribes, they outlawed aggression of sdcertain types,

long ritualized. Consequences were decided for those that did not

agree.



Shab was revered among all the Bula, and was able to gain release of

the sorry legion. She wondered at the laws, and their self-

righteousness. Before she left, the rule of the land was joint discussion

of any acts that caused agrievement. When she returned, agrievement

had been transformed into law. Over decades, her wisdom and actions

reversed the transformation.



Still, she had learned the lesson all too well. Ever would there be this

short-sighted and small-souled war in the world, except were she to

finish the conflict forever.



Shab and her companion at the time, an engineer named Brul, agreed

that no world should be built on the wholescale elimination of unfitting

pieces. So their design had to hatch within the possibilities limited by

that belief.



Brul began his great works of digging and reinforcement while Shab

traveled to all the other civilizations of the earth. Each race of humans

had the same division Shab had seen among the Bula – most, of

forward hearts and growing mind, and a minority of each tribe standing

still, unable to see past tomorrow to see to the next millennia. The

breakpoint between the Slow and the Quick, as she respectfully called

them, was even more dramatic among the other tribes.



Each city she entered she spoke of the plan to all who would listen – the

great gate to the perfect world, opening to bring them all in who would

go. Shab's plan was beautiful to all that beheld it, for they too had felt

the ache of the dissention of their tribes. The fracture was unpleasant to

all.



The great migration was more subtle than it would seem – once Brul

had moved the great masses of the earth, and altered their combinations

so the proper gravity was ensured, he sealed the gaping poles, and left

only tunnels of a smaller size to travel inward. His artistry was

breathtaking to all.



The path inward was different for each. Some came in groups, or

families of kinds not found in Bula. Some dug their own ways in.

Some walked, some crawled, and some made magnificent chariots to

ride into the center.



The work of many forms of genius contributed to the tasks of carving

out the earth, and you have seen a few examples of the locations the

races chose to populate. There are a myriad more uncharted, by you or

by any of us. Ever they become more magnificent.



Then there were the ones left behind. The stumps of the race, we

turned our back on them, and finally, sealed up the tunnels, and set

guards to mind the shafts that were must remain open for mechanical

reasons, or camouflaged the shafts, or a combination of both. The work

of many engineers were put to the task of managing the effects to the

outer earth, so that lush verdant continents would remain and drift, that

the exiles left behind could still prosper.



Of course, there were contestations of the designations of "slow" or

"quick". A few slow remained up top, romantically tied to rescuing or

converting those above. And a few quick came with us – we did not try

too hard to stop them – but did not last.



You know a bit of genetics, I imagine. You think to yourself what gene

pool shift occurred? Think now of reversion to the mean.



The mean, the average, is the expected center of the cluster of

probability, and in genetics it is the center of an expressed trait. For

height, for instance, some may be quite short or quite tall, but there is a

mean height that falls between those likely quantities, an average size.

Reversion to the mean means that when an outlier is created – a very

tall person, perhaps – even should you pair two tall people to

reproduce, their children will be more likely to move towards the mean

than be even taller than their parents.



Careful crossing results in breeds that are extraordinary, that will not

meet the means of their ancestors. But this is rare. All dogs will

eventually breed back to a sand-color mutt of medium size, with narrow

tail and simple face, if left to their own devices. A Pomeranian will not

emerge from a shipyard mutt mix.



What had we done by shifting our gene pool so far from the mean, from

eliminating so many from one section of trait?



What had we done to those above?



Inside, the human race bloomed and diversified. The Luluthn you met

were the first to link their goals with that of the world as a whole, and

committed to Shab to ever watch, guard, and maintain. They are the

gears and heart of this inner earth, the quotidian experts who allow us

all to grow ever greater. Their great joy is in their tasks, and ever have

they trained themselves more perfectly to render those tasks. Their

robes and their quiet watching are the apex of a race of generosity.



The Luluthn are special for another reason – they have so perfected

their work that continually they are reducing the need for themselves.

To answer a call from the inner earth, be it to repair a drain pipe or

calm a storm front, is a joy they only rarely expect to receive anymore.

So refined, they have moved on to isolate and enjoy the process of

preparing to serve. Even the construction of a lesson has become an art

– and the process of learning is a religious experience. Ever more

inward they look to find their meaning, and ever more exactly they tune

the systems of this inner world.



The history of the outside is far more complex.



As I said, a few Slow remained behind. Some disagreed with Shab's

conclusions. Some hoped to coax more Quick to come below. Perhaps

two hundred Slow stayed behind. Long kisses and long staring silences

marked the goodbyes all over the world.



In a century, the process was complete.



What no one could predict was how altered the race above would be. A

host of qualities were in coalition in those we left behind, they that

snatched at tomorrow for fear of the future. One in ten stayed above,

and they had much to celebrate. Their lives were easy. Resources in

abundance had been pulled from the earth. Food was plentiful, and

energy flowed from the earth to power whatever recreations they

desired. When a Quick snatched at glory, he could construct a castle,

or a gem-pile, or a zebra-pulled chariot with little exertion. When a

Quick sought to multiply, they were midwifed by ancient healing

programs of great wisdom.



Finally, though, the wisdom left by the Slow dwindled. As the great

tribes of the inner world grew in creativity and stature, the tribes of the

outer world grew in population. Soon, only a handful within each city

remembered the splitting of the worlds.



When food failed – granaries emptied or wells pumped dry – great

wailings and swearings poured from the mouths of the Quick. Often,

they would migrate to another town, where the structures of their

civilization still functioned. Like a locust swarm, the Quick devoured

the resources of the earth, sweeping swaths of unreplaced vitality from

it. In five hundred years, the races above faced starvation. They must

change or die if they did not.

Chapter Twenty-one - The Quick races evolve



Many did die – of starvation, of war, of disease, of earthquake and

tornado and hurricane. Some died of thirst, and a few who saw what

their choices had left to them died of shame.



The strongest of them learned again how to make the world support

them. They learned to hunt animals for meat, and farm for grain. They

learned out of necessity, not discernment. When a granary to store their

maize was built, it was because they had dug grass roots from the

permafrost the winter before. When a pond was dammed, their chief

had watched her people drop behind their caravan, and die of thirst on

the side of the road. Each step rebuilding what had been lost was a

bloody marker of disaster.



Short lives became the norm. As generations slipped past, more and

more memories of those who had left the earth to move inside were

erased.



In the tribes of the undivided earth, individuality and innovation were

observed to extreme degree. When the Quick were left above with lives

that barely lasted long enough to raise their children to puberty, much

that was thoughtful and discursive became a danger. Firm rules were

written in planks of wood and gouges of stone, that one leader's death

would not rob the tribe of its knowledge. These rules became laws, and

the laws were policed by a guard of the righteous, who knew the

dangers of death that hovered beside their narrow paths.



The same Quickened spirit that was poison to the tribes of inner earth

adapted quickly to the challenge of survival. Quick in love, their

children were born more quickly than they died. Quick in decision,

they made do with tents or turf huts or igloos as the need commanded,

and threw up their villages helter-skelter around a fire. Quick to judge,

they ruled their societies with iron fist



They didn't stay together, of course. Resources were scarce, and

coalitions formed to hoard a food or water source. Tribes roamed the

earth, learning to arm themselves with increasingly sophisticated tools

for conflict. Weapons of tuned complexity were built, refined each

lifetime a bit more as failure demanded.



So the civilizations that you see today evolved, fighting against chance

and mayhem, acquiring and dividing the good green earth. Their

memories of us below are long gone, and theories they have constructed

about the core of the earth shield us from their knowledge.



We know someday there will be a venture that discovers us all inside.

The technology of outer earth, though primitive, will uncover the silent

secrets of the earth soon enough. You yourself are an excellent

example of the swarm of curious humans that blanket the earth. No

longer locusts, you are bees, investigating every dimple in the ground

and curve of dust in the Gulf Stream. Very quickly, you will realize

your solemn cousins are below you, and Shab's long experiment in

division will conclude.

Chapter Twenty-two - Others who have traveled

between the surface and interior



We have always had explorers among the Slow. When the shafts were

sealed, the explorers vowed to return to the surface to check on their

friends and neighbors. Often they would travel the lands above for

centuries before returning with updates for we below. Some would die

above and never return. Though horror initially colored our thoughts

on the dissolution and chaos above, through the ages we began to

accept it as we would the laws of physics.



Glab, an explorer, was of the same meditative stock as Shab, and passed

through Mesopotamia for a century, watching the rivers flood and

watching the farmers learn. He loved to walk in the green fields around

the world, and spent many winters in small caves, eating only a leaf

every month for nourishment. He talked with the Quick, describing

himself as a traveler, and found that they were more interested in

talking about themselves than asking him many questions about where

he was from.



Gres, a honey-voiced artist, could not forget the giant forests of outer

earth and lived in trees above a swamp for three millennia.



Trickster Len taught chemistry to the Quick, and helped them derive

iron from ribboned rock.



A few have always been born in the Quick that are Slow in their ways.

Shab suggested that they stay apart from us below, for they will revert

to the mean of Quick in only one generation of their tribe. Also, the

Slow humans above are a great boon to the Quick, who need their

thoughtfulness and perspective.

One great love story has emerged between our worlds above and below

– the story of Ashkamel and Bakul.



Bakul was a warrior lord on the high steppes before those people had

words to call themselves anything. His small tribe was never more at

home than when they were thieving, and never more comfortable than

when they were leaving a ravaged town where all who defied them had

been slaughtered. He could run as fast as a horse, and used to sport

with the equine herds that spread through the land.



He had a laugh like thunder and a smile that disarmed all. Many foolish

tribes lost all when they laid down their weapons to return his

welcoming grin. Nearly all the children in his tribe were his, though he

welcomed all the young that survived, his or not.



Bakul had lived forty lively years when he learned of a rich land to the

south where he might plunder wealth far greater than his scrawny tribe

had ever seen.



On the journey south, his warriors spotted a dying woman by a stream.

It was their practice to rape, and thus they thought good recreation

would be theirs that day. The strange looking woman had gone down

by a source of water, though, and so they did not know whether the

water had been bad, or whether she herself was sick with demons. As

such, they used caution, and left her by the stream that night – she was

not going anywhere, and her state in the morning would tell her all they

needed to know. It would be good to fill their water bags, and fill her

loins. They bound her queer feet and hands, and left her.



During the evening, they lit a fire, and sang songs. One song, a

particularly detailed description of the act of having sex with a horse,

had them alternately roaring with laughter and belting the chorus. In

the midst of a double-bent laughter session, the woman they had

abandoned to fate walked to the fire ring, eyes merry and smile wide,

and put a blade to their leader's throat.



Ashkamel (for so she was known) had traveled from her people far

below, along a known route that she thought would take her to a

civilization. Instead, the land that greeted her above was cold and

empty. She had wandered for some time, alone. She had paced the

path of several rivers, following them until they intersected, and then

diverging to another branch. In time, she had seen much of the steppes,

but only twice had she seen humans, each time from a distance.



She was not on the surface for the usual reasons. Ashkamel traveled for

reasons she kept to herself, but she was not motivated by charity or

curiosity. Something had driven her above. She had been restless

below, unable to sate her heart with lovers or with hatred. She had

shared work with many tribes below, and always she moved on.



Impatience is largely found in those who live on the surface, but

Ashkamel was different – she challenged herself to learn reaction, not

right action, and her impatience as strange to experience. Her

excoriations fell on those who did not trust themselves to recover from

an incorrect decision. She preferred to learn how to adapt, and fix

whatever mess her sudden movements created.



Luluthn folk have sometimes hinted that they pushed Ashkamel to go

above. Some negotiation, trade, or confrontation seems likely, as she

was going to continue to spin through the societies below, and the

Luluthn have wise responses to threats to the inner world. Always, we

have reasons to appreciate them.



So she went above. She caught small animals for food, in queer traps

unlike any ever designed before or after. She sheltered in caves. She

walked the steppes. Ashkamel was seven feet tall. Her hair was black,

straight and long, sheeting past her face and shoulders to her waist. Her

eyes were closed when they saw her, but when open they were red as

just spilled blood, giant eyes with double membranes that closed

horizontal and vertical. She had four fingers on each hand, and a shiny

claw for the fifth, in opposition. She had black shiny metal forms for

her lower legs and feet, and three joints in each of her eighteen long

toes that splayed when she ran.



When she put her blade to Bakul's neck, she was happy. So she

laughed and smiled wide, and said to him in repeated words from the

bawdy song, "Gripped it from behind, and prepared to take!" The echo

of the gestures from the song filled the minds of the tribe. Their leader

surely was about to die.



Her accent was unknown to Bakul, and her form terrifying. Her speed,

illustrated by her sudden appearance, was breathtaking. He had one

split second to decide how to react, and in that moment he could easily

have died. The moment flashed between their eyes as it does in

chaining reactions of certain atoms. Bakul paused, and then smiled

back at her. His teeth exposed, he buckled out a laugh. His pleasure at

her strangeness and her strength was evident to Ashkamel's experienced

read, and so she held her blade instead of using it. He remembered this

always, and savored the moment for all his life.



They were a pair, Bakul and Ashkamel, from that second forthwith.

She learned to speak his language. They slept together, killed together,

raced the long-haired ponies through the plains together. Her presence

at the edge of a victim village was a boon to their tribe's well being, as

the villagers passed tales of her terrifying form from clan to clan, and

knew her as an agent better acquiesced to than challenged.

They were a pair in late nights under the sheets, but also around the

campfire. He learned of her past, and they talked of the wonders in the

deep earth. In their conversations, Bakul grew wise. The Quickest one

from below was sage compared to those young fools of the upper earth.

She guarded him, and though all the tribe members aged, she did not let

Bakul die. He lived eighty years on the earth, and when he was

enfeebled in his body but not his mind, she left the snow carved steppes

and carried him below to the ever warming inner sun.



Her return after fifty years was not unexpected, but her strange partner

was unheard of. In her lust for this Bakul was Ashkamel persistent, and

she healed his body with instruments and deep meditation. His form

repaired, they traveled through the inner world. Wisdom had tempered

Bakul, but not harmed his spirit, and they were joyful.



One day Bakul did not wake. A hungry experiment from the farming

tribe Glendorglere had chewed through his skin and sailed through

every vein in his body, taking residence in his brain. Each day, his skin

grew greener and greener, and though he still breathed, and his heart

still beat, he was no longer there.



Ashkamel, unhinged by the loss of her only anchor, turned mad. She

constructed a machine that converted herself to water for his drinking,

and transformed all non-useful byproducts to a scattered ash around his

form. His body withered later, and they were found by a Glendorglere

citizen.



This romance between below and above would be seen only as an

unfortunate loss by a woman being true to herself, had not a wordsmith

tribe, the Yqun, spent a century writing a saga lyric of their story. So

sweet were the internal syllabances and canted rhymes of the saga of

Ashkamel and her Bakul! Ever they will be remembered, rash and

rough though they were.

Chapter Twenty-three - Gardeners



Sul lapsed into a memory-laden silence, and then turned from them, and

lay down on the ground.



Batrix, another citizen, nodded sideways and also turned away. Mary

stayed awake longer, watching the black stone around them emit

opalescent rays and feeling the texture it lent to the air around it. Her

heart sang with the hot blooded tale of Bakul She reviewed what she

had seen, and she wondered where her loyalties lay – with the boiling

blood of the Quick, or with the beautiful lives of these peoples here

below. She felt some shame at the impulsive vigor that flowed through

her from the tale, as if she was a child being told to sit still and only

partly managing, kicking her heels against a pew.



In the morning, Sul had no more stories to tell her. Batrix pointed to

one horizon, and the Luluthn and she gathered their things and began to

walk again. The sudden departure was strange, but she understood that

she was done in that place.



Mary's eyes had begun to adjust to the strange glow of the inner sun,

and she could now see color fields in the smear of lands above her. In

front of them the land was green. "Is it living?" she asked the Luluthn,

and her heart thrilled at the thought of being among plants again.



As they walked towards the shining green, a shuttle came out to meet

them. It zoomed up from the green edge that they walked to, moving

slower than a car, but faster than they walked. Its little platform was

ovoid, with a squishy green body. Thick rods of a pale green, like

bamboo, ringed the platform, and it seemed to sit on air. Thick cords of

vine at all sides snaked out and pulled them, arm over arm, through the

territory. She felt a tiny rush of air as she stepped on, and wondered if

it was some sort of hovercraft.



The shuttle did not proceed directly back the way it arrived. Instead

they circled the city from the perimeter. Mary wasn't entirely

comfortable sitting on the green mat after Sul's tale of Bakul last night,

so she shifted uncomfortably as they circumnavigated the city. It

seemed they were being presented an experience, a stage set, and she

tried to prepare herself it.



When they were nearly round the city, their counterclockwise

progression stopped, and reversed course, and began to spiral in

clockwise. Llul said, "It is very thoughtful of them to let us see all sides

of the city. It offers safety before we even arrive." A ridge of moist

green had swollen up a few inches from the platform around Thll,

making a tiny rampart around her. Mary winced to see it and lifted her

feet to check for telltale signs of green infecting her.



Braking against the inertia of the shuttle, several of the vine cords

kicked up dust as they dug in. The tiny clouds of dirt acted as a curtain,

drawing back to present the city as they settled back to earth.



Softly quaking fountains of giant grasses rose three times Llul's height

of seven feet. The tufted stalks clacked as the seed heads brushed each

other. She felt calmed by the great grasses, columns of the temple of

the world she stood in, caryatids holding back the sky. The clumps of

grasses were as thick around as a room.



Once the shuttle passed between the grasses, they were in the city.

Mary looked behind them at the keyhole entrance to the dust plain they

had come through. It seemed tiny.

They were in a low, young forest. All the trees were the same – giant

leaves and pendulous racemes of saffron flowers that chained, three

racemes to a leaf, twenty or thirty trumpet shaped flowers to each

raceme, nearly to the ground. The waists of the trees were about two

feet in diameter, and their limbs were intricately pruned up so that they

fractaled up into the sky jaggedly, but ended there in a smooth cluster

of uppermost branches. The canopy of trees above them shielded the

inner sun, so it was dusky below. Mary felt her shoulders further relax,

and she noticed how tense she had been.



Interplanted to the forest trees were winding streams of small spiky

shrubs. Meeting and twisting, they mimicked a stream flowing through

the forest, and like the giant grasses, the wispy leaves of the shrubs

moved as if by an unseen wind. The effect was like water coursing

down past rocks. Their little shuttle floated a bit higher, and they began

to follow the course of this growing stream. Mary reached out to touch

one of the little plants and found it soft to touch, and cool.



Llul said to her, "These plants help us with the oxygen."



Thll said, "That was why this city was first founded," and jutted his chin

towards the center.



Eyes devouring all the plants, Mary scanned the forest around them. In

the sections not overlaid with the stream of shrubs, a little groundcover

shaded the earth. She saw motion amongst the bluish egg-shaped

leaves, and was rewarded with the sight of a little mammal scurrying

through the sprawling plants. She grabbed Sul and pointed, but too

late, for the motion stopped and she was unable to describe very well

what she had seen.



They moved inward, and the trees filled closer together, except in the

widening streams of plants, which had become a river of shrubs.

Conifers of different shapes and colors wove together on the "banks" of

the river,



some tall as the trees. Tiny pincushions of yellow and gray scattered at

the edge of their path, and drooping hollies sometimes arched over their

shuttle.



The transition from the demesne to the city was hedged in yew, and

they entered through the arch in the trunk of a massive redwood. As

they passed through it, Mary noted that it did not seem decayed but

rather shaped, as a woman styles her hair. The rings on the inside

showed smooth lines, clear as a tabletop grain.



Past the mighty redwood, their shuttle set itself down on the ground.

They were in a lawn of grass, and a path to a glass house was paved

with tiny plants with microscopic leaves. None of them moved, while

they drank in the scene. Finally Batrix stepped off the vehicle, and was

gently stroked by one of the vines that had pulled them along, as if to

say goodbye.



Mary followed obediently after Batrix, and when her feet touched the

tiny plants on the path, she felt each leaf activate, and press gently

against her feet, lifting her slightly so that she bounced, not walked,

after Batrix, lifting higher into the air than she expected. It made her

giggle.



The greenhouse they moved towards echoed some of the structures she

had seen herself. She wondered whether the master gardener here had

traveled to the surface, or if it simply was necessary for gardens to be

produced in the same ways above and below.



The greenhouse was the side of a small house. Set in an ocean of grass,

the tiny walking plants wound them back and forth, undulating them to

the door. At each oxbow that they turned, there were big stone cubes

that served as planters. In each planter was a specimin of a single plant.



The first one they turned at, the ebb of the path brought them past a

stone cube with a crystal case set into it. The case reminded Mary of

the domes that covered old table clocks, to keep them from getting

dirty, or the vacuum jars Ball first demonstrated so long ago. Inside the

rounded case was a plant that had filled every free centimeter of space.

They stopped to look at it, presented so prettily for them in this way.

Even the little groundcover seemed to guide them to it.



As they gazed upon it, Mary realized uncomfortably that each of its

little tendrils did not end in a flower, as they should. The chartruse

plant, porcupine-spiked like a yew or a rosemary, had fractaled through

its little home, but the spines all pointed the same way – out. Each and

every spine that could was pressing against the glass. Her further

inspection of the plant turned to heebie-jeebies as she realized the little

blue bulbettes at the edge of each spine glowed with a reflection of her

– every one of them was a tiny eye.



"Ah!" she expelled. "It's creepy!" She took a step back from the plant,

and watched some of the little bulbettes angle slightly to focus on her

better. This was not the sort of gentle plant she expected to see in a

garden. Realizing what she had said was not very polite, she stopped

herself from further comments. Thll looked at her and blinked. The

blink seemed reproachful to Mary. She closed her mouth up tight and

steered herself along, further down the path.



The next curve, this time to the left of the door of the greenhouse, Mary

approached the next planter cube more gingerly. From a middle

distance, she inspected the plant.

No case enclosed this one. It was larger than the last plant, perhaps six

feet tall. It branched at the surface of the pot into a clump of ten limbs

that did not split for much of the length above the ground. At the tips,

each of the ten limbs had lush clusters of hand-sized leaves, heart

shaped, with silvery tracings reflecting light at them.



"They spell out poems," said Thll. "Each leaf is a verse. Ten songs

capture the beauty of the life of the green things of the world."



Thll's speaking seemed to activate the plant. Each leaf began to move,

first imperceptibly except as a general vibration in the plant, then more

obviously. The leaves began to curl and uncurl, in succession, and a

mumbling sound came from them. "It is reading the poems," Thll said.

His chest was heaving in time with the rhythms of the poems. "Each of

the poems compliments all the others," he released, "Each of them ends

with a call to enter the green world."



At the end of the recitation, buds at the end of the branches could be

seen, slightly pink. They grew larger as they watched. Finally the little

buds burst, to reveal a tiny pink caterpillar. Mary was thrilled,

numbering it only the second non-humanoid she had seen. They

continued to watch, and the little caterpillar wound itself into a cocoon

of red silk. A moment later, the silk shell began to pale and glow

transluscent with some little lit creature inside. Each of the ten cocoons

cracked in a cascade of snapping noises from the bottom most cluster to

the top, and a wrinkled rosy beetle emerged with glowing rumpled

wings. The wings expanded, pumping full of vigor, and shone a

phosperescent light, like a firefly's, against the shady leaves. Once the

butterfly wings expanded to their full size, all of the little butterflies lept

into the air at once, and crept in lilting flaps into the air, then airily

meandered to the greenhouse.

Mary's smile was ear to ear. She followed the chaotic dance of the little

butterflies until they curved around the greenhouse, not to emerge on

the other side. The little flock of insects cheered her immensely, and

assuaged her soul. Where she had been worrying, knitting her brows

into clutches of severe lines, she felt release. The lonely pages of this

light-drenched land seemed sketched with easier ways, more friendly

ways.



She eagerly stepped to the next planter box, feeling the little plants

burst their energy into her feet. Thll and Llul also seemed drawn

quickly to the display. They assembled in a semi-circle around this next

plant, and stared down.



It was tiny. Barely the size of a head of broccoli, the little plant rested

on a field of little cobalt blue chips. Its general color seemed gray-

green, but as Mary peered closer, she determined it was because the

leaves were gray while the stems were green.



They all leaned in closer, as more and more details became clear. It

was a tiny tree, exquisitely sculpted so that every microscopic branch

was shaped as gracefully as possible. It reminded her precisely of the

beautiful Live Oaks of the Carolinas – reaching, spreading trees with

incredible majesty that lined the old plantation entrance roads. As she

looked closer at the tiny tree, the green bark showed the same refined,

smooth texture as those Live Oaks did. She squatted down to look at

the trunk and squinted closer at the leaves. Their hand-shaped leaves

were unmistakable. This was a perfect, exquisite miniature oak.



As they watched, the little tree began to fade – or rather, become more

yellow and less gray. Each leaf was turning color for fall. The green

trunk became every moment more brilliant against the tiny leaves. The

leaves faded orange, and then the tips of each of the thousands of leaves

blushed red, as if made of flame. The vivd branches wound through the

leaves in intricate webs, more obvious now that the colors were so

dramatic. And then, as they watched, a single leaf, small as a poppy

seed, fell from the tree. Its motion echoed that of the butterflies that

had sailed off towards the greenhouse, and Mary felt her heart ache

with happiness. She pressed her fingers to her mouth and sighed. They

watched other tiny leaves fall after the first, creshendoing to a shower of

falling brilliance.



Finally, the little tree was bare, and surrounded by a pile of tiny leaves,

which, as they watched, dissolved into leaf mould and seeped into the

earth. The tree shimmered briefly, then little yellow catcins emerged

and a cloud of pollen filled the planter. Mary felt her nose itch. As

they watched, leaf buds spread back into leaves, and the little tree

swayed as if moved by a gentle breeze. No more change occurred in

the little plant.



Their attention was entirely fixed on the spectacle of the little swaying

tree until the groundcover started leaning them towards motion again.

Reluctantly, they moved on, even Thll glancing back wistfully at the

perfect lifeform they had encountered at that bend in the path.



The final curve and last container contained a strange, ungainly plant,

that they evaluated with their expectations of perfection set

unreasonably high. Pale, almost sickly green, its branches were thick

and lumpy and the collar of the trunk sunk into the ground unpleasantly,

with thick, outgrowing branches errupting from the base clumsily. It

was moving, stretching, and as they watched, it stood. Even once it

stood they could not tell entirely if it was plant or animal.



Its feet dropped deep into the container, with eight toes forking into the

earth on opposite sides of the cube. Its double-jointed squat folded its

legs into a zig-zag of nobby knees. As it stood, these elongated joints

smoothed out. Its chest was segmented into three parts, as if it were

made of the joints of bamboo.



Mary was pleased to see that four little arms rose from its sides alnog a

bilateral symmetry. So many of the strange creatures she had met did

not conform to her basic understanding of mammals. The arms had

smaller repetitions of the bamboo joints, notched into six elbows for

each branch arm. Each arm was held high, and the fingers were not

fingers, but many spread leaves each of an arrowhead shape, like a

barrenwort plant or a collection of little directional signs. All of the

outside leaves pointed prettily outward.



Its neckless face puckishly ended in a taper like an asparagus shoot, and

it had two eyes like violet holly berries and a pert little nose like a

woody bud. She could see no mouth and wondered if it was sentient,

seeing no way that it could talk.



As they paused before it, it reached towards them. Three of the four

arm branches reached towards them, and each of them were caught by a

spindly arm. She felt the brush of Llul's arm and of Thll's robes as they

were brought shuffling closer to the little creature.



Its eyes were unchanging as it held them there, and they felt no reason

to disobey or depart from the pushy little plant. Mary felt her spine

relax, and found her gaze seeking the leafy ring around her wrist that

the creature's grip had bejeweled her with. Her feet sank deep into the

earth and as her back relaxed, she straightened her posture, holding her

head more weightlessly and releasing her concern for where her arms or

head would go.



The emotion began as a simple acceptance in her heart, but as she stood

next to the little plant sprite, the acceptance of the situation mutated into

an alien emotion. In her bloodstream, she felt a vigor flowing, a pulse

of energy bubbling in her veins. The origin of that vigor sang its name,

and the name it sang was ShreeLlulThllEarth, and it was liquid

nurturing. She was experiencing the flow of nutrients that plants share

in a garden, and it was delightful.



In an ecosystem, though the roots compete in the soil, they also help to

wick water and nutrients from an area with more than enough to an area

in need. Thus trees in a forest with a river cutting through can survive a

drought more easily than a tree standing alone in a field, the same

distance from a river.



Mary was living that experience, that shared flow of energy and

nutrition, and sharing of the world. She felt the moment when a particle

of food passed to her, felt her body take it and grow from it. She was

aware of her own body handing off necessities, and of her feet pressing

deep into the soil to find them. She could feel her roots – long,

powerful extentions of herself that moved slowly through the ground –

and could feel them sucking useful materials from the ground. She

found pockets of blank soil, nutrient-empty earth, and felt her roots

avoid the spot, or press through it to another area beyond. Each time

she found a molocule that she wanted, she flushed with success, and

often when she was complete without it, she felt the joyful cheering as

she handed it off to another, sending it through to climb into another. It

was a pleasure to here the harmonic chime as the receiving stock was

grateful.



And she was so grateful, herself. Each missing hunger in her body felt

fullfilled, and each cell strengthened as the building blocks of amino

acids strengthened and flowed. She gloried in the completeness that she

felt, and shone with the radience that was in the air.



Unchaining herself from this exchange was hard to do, but at some

point in the moment she new she had to break away. She felt her roots

wind back up, and receed into her body She felt her connections

withdraw from the others, and felt the joyful singing die down and then

away. Her memories echoed with the sharing, but one by one she broke

all the connections, and pulled herself into herself, curling away from it

all.



When she became aware of vision again, the Luluthn were both still

standing by the creature, and they were all quiet and vital looking. Thll

and Llul both were tinted a slight shade of green.



As she stood, looking around, she felt rested, and willing to wait for the

Luluthn for as long as they wanted to stay there. Eventually as she

watched them, their eyes half-lidded, their breath stopped, their bodies

utterly still except for a slow heartbeat that she saw, once in a great

while, drop through them, the tiny plants beneath her feet moved her

forward again. Wondering if she should leave her friends, she surveyed

their frozen forms. They seemed fine, and she recalled the joyful place

they were in, sharing the earth and each other. She stepped onward.

Chapter Twenty-four - Inside the Greenhouse



The greenhouse was almost Victorian in design. Planes of glass caught

the light like the cuts of a diamond, and thick vines climbed up each

vertex on the inside, outlining the greenhouse as cast iron would outline

the panes in the Crystal Palace of the Victorian World's Fair. The

shape of the building was rectangular, with tapering roof high above,

with bubbles in some places in the ceiling where she could see tall

plants reaching up.



The door was slightly rounded but otherwise conventionally shaped.

The interior of the greenhouse was fogged with moisture, and as she

looked for a door handle to gain entrance to it, she saw droplets of

flowing water slink down the inside of the door. The sight of free-

flowing H2O refreshed her almost as much as the nutrients she had

shared outside with the little plant creature.



Not sure how to enter, she touched the door, and it bounced open,

falling open to let her in. She stepped quickly through the threshold,

hoping to preserve the moisture to some extent, but to another extent

just eager to go inside. The push of humidity enveloped her pleasantly,

and she felt her face prick with a tiny sheen of sweat in a way she had

almost forgotten. She loved the humidity, and wondered if living in

Virginia had conditioned her to prefer the press of sticky, heavy air to

all other.

Once she had traveled to Singapore with her boyfriend at the time

(Jenk, she thought. That's the second time I have thought of him down

here). They had stayed in the city nation through half of June, and

walked the professionally cleaned streets hand in hand, cradled by the

humidity. Ever since that trip long ago, wet air and heat made her

remember the passion of those days and the taste of his tongue.

She glanced around to quickly survey her new frontier. It was less

crowded inside than she expected. There were high tables filled with

tiny plants, but she could see nothing that isolated the soil for the little

plants, other than a mounded table pressing against a slightly raised rim.

The tables were the height of high lab countertops, the kind she worked

at when mixing solutions. Obviously another tall race worked here.



She was examining the way that certain plants along the edges of the

greenhouse grew large and pressed against the walls, when she realized

that most of her principles of sunlight and shade were based on the idea

of a shifting sun, and of seasons that changed the angle of light. Here,

all plants either had reach of the sun, or they did not. There was no

"part shade" here, when the dappled sunlight slanted through the

underside of trees. There was no winter sun hiding behind buildings

and barely breaking the horizon on the deepest days. Since these races

came underground, they must have had to adapt all the plants to survive

the strange constancy of the endless days, just as she had to adapt.

There was more craft in this garden than she realized.



When the giant woman came bustling down the aisle from behind a

giant palm, Mary felt complete acceptance. Everything that was

centered about this Eden city made her comfortable and unflinching as

the giantess approached.



The woman's skin was alge blue-green except in patches, where it

appeared the real skin color might be a pale pink-white. Her pendulous

breasts sagged to her waist, and were green as well. Plants seemed to

be growing from the crevice between her legs, and her head was a mass

of leaves blocking her eyes. She was huge and tall, easily the tallest

creature Mary had seen in her travels, and wide of hip and waist. Her

legs decended straight into flat disks, like records, that would spread

her immense weight out as she walked. Assumably, this would prevent

the ground compacting.

The giantess slid towards Mary with agility that did not match her size.

Like a wooden flute, her voice sang through the air at Mary, and Mary

felt swept up in the sound, and yearned towards this green woman. A

massive hand reached out and grabbed her arm, the one the little sprite

hadn't touched, but in the same region. More noises and whistles

emerged from the gardener's serious face as she held Mary, and Mary

did not pull away.



A few moments passed, and then the giantess boomed out, "Welcome!

Very welcome you are, and you broke away from my little pet quite

quickly, sweet child. I guess you've got better things to do, you think,

don't you? That's fine. I've got plenty for you to see, and I'm aching to

get showing it, in all actuality."



"You understand me?" Mary asked, suspicious of the verbosity and

energy and eubulient flow of English emerging from this woman.



"I just asked you for your language, and you told me, sweet heart. So

I'll talk to you just fine, unless you've told me wrong." Her eyes were

still covered, but her big lips were smiling as she talked. "It's not too

hard to get a language going when there's so much to converse about."



"My friends haven't awoken yet?" Mary said, "Perhaps I should go get

them." She glanced toward the door, and saw no opening.



"Ah, they will come out of that when they desire to. I find the Luluthn

are the slowest to unroot, in fact, my dear. They have such persistance.

Such incredible drive to serve, as they have, motivates them to stay and

pass the time sharing their each an every atom. They might be a while,

my dear."

Mary didn't like the sound of the timescale the giantess described, but

let the worry pass through her quickly. She looked around.



"What do you do here?" she questioned, "Do you grow plants from

earth?"



"The earth grows all plants, little one. Of course. I coax the plants to

grow. But first, shouldn't we introduce ourselves? I am Juniper, at

least in your language."



"You speak so normally," Mary said. "I am Mary. It is almost as if

you're a parody of what I want you to be."



"Well, I am speaking that way, little darling. You told me how you'd

like me to sound. Sweet child, I hope it doesn't bother you?"



"Not much," said Mary. "I miss it, actually. I don't think anyone has

called me 'Child' since my mother died."



The big woman nodded, knowingly. "Nurturing is all the same,

sweetheart. You can't grow plants without knowing how to coax

something out of itself." The giantess smiled again, and her mouth

opened to show a toothless mouth filled with little orchid plants.



Mary shifted uneasily at the sight, picking up dissonance between the

speech and the strangeness. "That's almost absurdly human, Juniper.

You're amazing, how you've picked up my feelings."



"It's not that I picked them up, lamb. It's that I've chosen to use the

little things you told me. The Luluthn have the same knowledge, if

you've let them into your language, but they stay apart more. Me, I'm

into everything as deep as it will let me go." She stepped back and

seemed to gaze on Mary. "I like that you used my name. You seem to

appreciate this place quite a bit."



This conversation was rushing forward faster than any had, in the entire

time she had been inside the hollow earth. Mary felt the need to put

some sort of braking on it, to slow the pell-mell of intimacy that flowed

over her. Juniper was powerful, and her loving effect overwhelmed

Mary, but she wanted to slow that love.



"Um. Yes. It's great. Look, may I take some time to look around? I'll

try to not touch anything. Just like to process all this."



Bemused, the great lady nodded her head. "Oh, yes, dear. Go slow if

you want. I'll still be here. I'm working with the palm over there," she

pointed, "and I'll still be working with it in a year. You can come to me

when you're ready." Her steady legs drifted her away to the back of the

greenhouse where she had come from.



With all sorts of layers of confusion spinning through her mind, Mary

turned from the lady, and walked into a corner. What sort of silly

mother problems could she be experiencing through this encounter?

She rested the heels of her hands on a growing table, curling her fingers

to watch them sink into the soil. She thought about her breathing, and

practiced the sac-by-sac breathing the Luluthn had taught her. She

filled and emptied her lungs twice this way, then sat down on the floor,

with her back leaning against a leg of the counter. It certainly wasn't

any more strange than all the other things she had been doing with

herself lately. Why was she running from this loving woman?



When she finally sorted through her collisions of thoughts, she

unpacked the response she had. It made sense, once she located the

reason for it. It was a matter of authenticity.

The green woman unnerved her because she had so perfectly imbued

Mary's desires. Mary saw the idealized reflection that the

communication was, and craved the integrity of the Luluthn, all of

whom seemed so much more straightforward than Juniper.



Born on the earth in culture not based on clear communication and

often filled with unexpected social traps, Mary had learned to watch any

new acquaintence for the signals of need and desire that underpinned

the surface communication. If all of those needs and desires were

concealed, she knew to be extremely cautious.



Some of Mary's friends considered her a bit cold with strangers. Mary

had a quick way of rejecting those strangers she wasn't prepared to

pursue, so that they knew too clearly that they were rejected. Jenk had

told her, "Ice queen, can't you just smile a bit and play along?" He

would point out her rejections even when she wasn't aware she had

made them.



"Why waste my time, Jenk? I can't help how I feel about people." She

judged so quickly, they said, but she always felt so sure about it.

Something in their faces always betrayed them. Perhaps she read their

eyes, or their posture. She could instantly tell.



It had to do with studying whether they were going to be willing to give

something to the interaction with her. If she saw that all they wanted to

do was take something from her, she looked on them as a thief. She

could tell by the hunger in their eyes, or the lack of caring. When

someone wanted something for nothing, they were calculating. If they

wanted to snatch at something for a poor bargin, they would push her

towards ideas in their conversation, instead of guiding her. They were

thieves, and she didn't like them.

Her idea of a good stranger was one who gave first, and asked for

something later. That was the sort of stranger it was worth continuing

with. Someone who had enough to give that they weren't greedy. She

hated those with the hungry demands. She hated those who were so

obviously starved because they could not share.



She had studied game theory in school, and its precepts were embedded

in her interactions. When she negotiated the delicate dance of human

relationships, all the positives and negatives in the relationship fell into

a trust or a betrayal. Even were it only dishwashing, she would mark

the score one up or one down. Mary told herself everyone kept score,

and everyone does to some extent. She tried to not remember the totals,

but she always marked the exchanges into one category or the other.



Game theory is a scientific method for describing how competing

interests interact. One of the foundational concepts in game theory

evolves from an ancient anecdote called the Prisoners Delimna. The

story begins with two criminals, caught for committing a crime. Each

of the prisoners are held in separate cells, and cannot talk to each

other. They must decide how to act solely on what they know of the

choices, and must act in their own self-interest.



The matter they have been incarcerated for carries a set jail sentence

for them if they are convicted. The length of time is usually a matter of

years. But each of the prisoners is offered a plea bargin.



The plea bargin offers them a reduced sentence if they confess and

implicate their partner. Instead of, for instance, ten years in jail, they

will only have to serve one year if they squeal on their partner. Their

partner, however,will serve the longer full term.



The benefit to squealing on their partner seems obvious, except for a

crucial fact. If they both refuse to confess, there is not enough evidence

to convict either of them of the crime, and so they will be convicted of

something lesser – they get off with only three years each. If they both

confess, they will both get the longer sentence, and their plea bargining

will be for naught. The faith of the two prisoners in each other guides

their actions.



No situation choice is ideal in this delimna. The question has no set

answer. If Prisoner A confesses, she may gain a very short term, or she

might spend the full ten years in jail. She must wrestle with the chance

of her partner, Prisoner B, also confessing.



This choice by Prisoners A and B can be written in a simple matrix.



B Confesses B Doesn't confess

A Confesses 10/10 1/10

A Doesn't confess 10/1 3/3



Usually, the weight of the years in jail is balanced so that the combined

years served by the two prisoners is greater if one squeals than if they

both do not – 11 years in this case in comparison with six. If they

represent a society of two, the greater good of society is served if they

do not confess – if even one of them confesses, the damage to the

collective good is greater.



A more sophisticated interaction occurs if the assumption is that the

prisoners will meet again once they are out of the clink. In fact, as

their profession is still "thief" when they exit the prison, they may need

to work together on a job in the future. Their decisions to support or

betray their partner have repercussions. If they betray, and their

partner does not, in ten years time, their partner may choose to take

revenge. Or, if they go back to work together, the partner may work

fine until they are caught again – and having been betrayed once, is

unlikely to let it happen again.

A simpler matrix is used for a more basic concept of the prisoners

delimna, in which the story of the two prisoners is reduced down to its

essential components.



Helps hinders

Helps 1 -1

Hinders 2 0



This interaction can be reduced down to a handshake between two

parties, where each has the opportunity to contribute something

beneficial to the other. Each time two people meet, they can be kind

and helpful, or they can be unkind and unhelpful. One may be nice

while the other is mean, and the other has the same choice.



Game theory has fixated on this idea of the helpful or backstabbing

individual because it so perfectly matches many of the realities about

societies. In most ventures that a society undertakes, all parties stand

to gain if everyone contributes.



There is the idea of a "zero sum" game. In a zero sum game,

something can be gained only by taking it from another. There are a

set amount of points to be had in a zero sum game, and the points are

distributed amongst the winners. Many card games are "zero sum" to

some extent, especially those that assign points to certain cards.



Scientists feel that in life, however, few activities are zero sum. Most

activities, in fact, are most beneficial when everyone contributes to

them. In farming and in dancing, in taxes and in teaching, everyone

helping is most likely to bring the greatest reward for all over the long

run.

The prisoner's delimna is not a zero-sum game at all. By working

together, the players gaining can augment each other, and everyone

wins. In society, for instance, as in the prisoner's delimna, one

person's wealth does not need to be stolen, it can be earned. Both can

gain if both work. The benefit of one does not detract from the benefit

of the other. Betrayal is not necessary for advancement.



Betrayal works best in societies with short term memory. Strangers are

most likely to walk in, betray, take a quick gain, and leave. In a close

society, however, the group remembers and punishes those that betray

or refused to contribute to the common good.



In Game Theory, there is also the idea of the society of law and the

society of thieves.



In a society of law, betrayal (or, to make the metaphor consistant,

theiving) is rare. Most people are good, and will act honestly in their

day to day interactions. Because most people are good, crime is

uncommmon. In reaction to crime being uncommon, people will not

protect themselves against crime as much. For instance, in a law-

abiding society, people will not need to lock their doors.



In a society of thieves, betrayal and theiving is common. Most people

are criminal to some extent, and know that theiving is common. These

people act to protect themselves against a society that is likely to have

crimes committed. In a society of thieves, people will lock their doors,

bar their windows, and look over their shoulders.



The irony of these two cities, Lawtown and Thiefville, is that it is much

better to be a thief in Lawtown. In a society where there are few locked

doors, a thief walking in can quickly make a killing. Being a thief in

Thiefville is hard! The bars on the windows, the locked doors, the

watchful citizens make crime less easy, and less productive. However,

there is another aspect to being a thief in lawtown. The moment you

steal something in Lawtown, Lawtown becomes a little more like

Thiefville, where there is lots of crime. And every time a barred

window prevents a thief from breaking and entering in Thiefville, it

becomes a little more like Lawtown, where there is little crime.



One final aspect of game theory informed Mary's understanding of

relationships. It was explained to her in school as the concept of tit-

for-tat.



The school MIT has long been interested in game theory as it might

apply to decision-making in machines and computers. A machine that

could judge between two choices to determine the better one would be

a step more refined than most of the robots that currently exist. To

determine how to program a successful program to make decisions,

they set up a challenge.



The challenge was this: people around the world would submit

computer programs that could participate in a series of "Prisoner

Delimna" interactions with other programs. Each program would be

set to run in an environment where each handshake between two

programs would imitate the help/hinder matrix, where each of the two

programs could choose to help or betray the other. The program with

the most points at the end of the game would be declared the winner.

Any strategy that could be programmed into the programs was

allowed.



Many different programs were submitted. One program did nothing

but betray, and slowly grabbed many points from trusting programs.

Another did nothing but help, and gained points as it went. Many of

the programs came up with complicated systems for deciding when to

help and when to betray. One of the most interesting aspects of the

programs was that they could remember individuals (other programs)

that they had previously interacted with. If they had met the "always

betray" program before, they might remember the previous betrayal,

and decide based on that betrayal to hinder the program in their next

handshake. That aspect of the programs gave them a memory.



MIT set all the programs at each other for many hours. Each program

repeatedly interacted with all the other programs, multiple times each.

Each handshake raised or lowered the program's score.



At the end of the experiment, one program stood above the rest in the

number of points. It was an incredibly simple program. The program's

name was Tit-for-Tat.



Tit for tat had one of the simplest algorythms for deciding what to do in

a handshake with another program. If it was the first handshake, Tit-

for-tat helped the program, no matter what. After that first handshake,

Tit-for-tat remembered the other program's last decision, and gave that

decision back to it, tit for tat. If the program betrayed Tit-for-tat, Tit-

for-tat would betray it next time. If the program helped Tit-for-tat, Tit-

for-tat helped it next time.



This incredibly simple program had one simple paradigm that many

found to parallel the real world. In the real world, one of the simplest

moralities that can be pointed to is "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a

tooth." Tit for tat – giving what you get – is the basis for many

moralities worldwide.



The MIT competition was run again another year.



This year, Tit-for-tat was once again at the top of the ranks, surpassed

by only one program.

It was called "Tit-for-tat forgive" and it had a similar simplicity. Like

Tit-for-tat, it began by helping. And it mimiced the last move of the

other program on subsequent interactions. But this program had one

other trick up its sleeve.



Every once in a while, every five or ten rounds, "Tit-for-tat forgive"

would offer a help, even if it had been betrayed in the last round with

the program. This forgiveness was a very productive tactic. If it was

stuck in round after round of betrayal with another program, they both

were suffering from their lack of keeping the faith. If the two programs

had been stuck tit-for-tatting each other, the move to forgive put them

both back to a winning formula. If the forgiveness had not been

offered, neither program would win, but now they both could.



Mary sometimes thought of herself as a living, breathing, tit-for-tat

machine. Whether she wanted to or not, she watched her world and

calculated based on the motives of those around her.



And occasionally, when she was stuck in ill patterns, she tried to

forgive. These moments of forgiveness were deliberate and carefully

thought through, and her instinct screamed warnings against them.

Something in her heart hated to forgive, hated to risk losing another

battle with a naieve choice. She forced herself, and often found her

gains were augmented by the choice, and she was the richer –

emotionally or physically – for it.



When Jenk scolded her coldness to the people she met at parties or at

work, she would explain to him.



"Jenk, I see it in them so clearly. They aren't going to play the game

right at all. They are looking for the quick gain, and they're looking to

snatch a win and run off. Their eyes aren't generous. They're looking

to betray."

"Mary, you and your betrayal. It isn't that complicated. You aren't

going to lose anything more than some sentences," he would say,

shaking his head in frustration.



"I'll lose some of my time on earth and gain nothing. If they have

nothing to trade, I'm not going to put effort into learning their name.

They are empty people and I don't wish to associate!" She would turn

from him, and stare out a window, or at the curtains if they were drawn.



"Quite contrary, my dear Mary," Jenk would say, and pull her to him.



She always melted for him. And that was the third time she'd thought of

him down here, and they'd been broken up for five years. How

embaressing. She needed to get a grip.



Now, why was this big bountiful mother so distressing for her to deal

with? Mary thought she saw motion from the great palm Giantess

Juniper had gone to nurse, and smiled. Even if it were all acting, these

plants were quite real. The plants showed great love. Couldn't they be

trusted to tell her the truth?



Ah, that was it. She had never met a faked niceness that wasn't a

concealed betrayal. In her lifetime, many people had tried to project

love and friendship in order to get close enough to betray. She did not

want to dwell on the idea, but a few instances popped into her mind.



There was Jenk's successor, a suave boyfriend named Carter Inkston,

who had a pedigree a mile long and a coke habit of the same stature.

Like most drug addicts she had known through her life, he was

charismatic and intoxicatingly moody. When her bank account was

drained, she brought him for moral support to the police interview, so

he could sit with her in the industrial yellow hallway and let her lean her

head on his shoulder. He cooed at her, sweet nothings. They were in

the station for several hours, and learned just how to sit to avoid the

cold aluminum armrests that kept the bums from sleeping sprawled

across three seats.



Her aunt Mary, who she was named for, showed plenty of love on the

surface, but had nothing real to back it up. Empty words at unnecessary

times seemed great – until the younger Mary called from the hospital

and Aunt Mary couldn't find the wherewithall to come get her, and said

she would call back but didn't. That was a dark mark in the "betrayal"

side of the bookkeeping, for certain.



Plenty of girls she grew up with played the nice game. It was, after all,

below the Mason-Dixon line and fake smiles were never entirely out of

fashion. But Mary noticed. Scientist from her core, she lived theory

and truth from early on. Each sugared smile that meant nothing, or less

than nothing, was ugly to her in a scientific way – it was an untruth

which she had to unlearn. It stood in the way of her education, it

muddied the enlightment of her expanding knowledge.



Juniper was nice, and it was utterly contrived. The motherly woman

had seen what Mary desired, and was providing it ready-to-serve.

Calling her lamb! Sweet talking her! It was so fake it made her queasy.

Or did it? She recalled the big smile, the giantess opening her

cavernous mouth to a crescent.



Here was one time where her understanding of mutual benefit wasn't

enough to serve her. These inner earth creatures were not looking for

the angles those shallow girls were looking for. Simply living in the

world was an activity of deep pleasure and discovery for these

creatures, and her mere presence as a novelty changed the way those

around her acted, because they enjoyed exploring her weird ways.

Juniper was probably back there, marveling at the novelty of Mary's

awkward rejection, savoring it.



Mary giggled a bit, to think of the mossy woman as enjoying the

awkardness of Mary's ways, the insult of her. Yet it was probably true.

These beings had so little to lose. Mary wondered at it. So focused

were they, these Slow. They sought excellence, not the drama of petty

rivalries as humans were racked by. This woman could afford any

comforting words to Mary, not because they were tricks to use, but

because nothing Mary could do to her would take anything away!

There was no chance of loss, only gain. Juniper was offering something

that she thought Mary wanted, a gift to start them out. The giantess

cared not what the conversation was about, but was free to speek

lovingly, like Mary's mother would, like a garden witch, ready to apply

salve to Mary's aching, traveled soul.

***

She stood, and examined the little seedlings that were growing in the

table nearest her. They were scattered in tesselations that seemed

regular enough. What were these tiny plants going to grow up to be?

She studied them. They were somewhat like Jack-in-the-Pulpits, and

since she saw no flies about, she wondered what they ate down here.

The little pitcher plants were green with burgundy stripes, and their tiny

cowls reached up, and covered their bowls with a marblized white-and-

burgundy umbrella. They were pretty, but not unusual. She was almost

dissapointed, and about to move on when the little plants all yawned

together in unison.



The tiny umbrellas all opened wide, and they all made little sighing

sounds. As the sigh trailed off, their little hats hung open a few

moments longer, then slammed back shut, reopening to show a bit of

the inside of their little maws. It was completely adorable, silly and

sweet.

She smiled, and looked down the aisle to see what other magical plants

this big green lady had designed. Almost all of her hesitation was

charmed away by the reality of the work of this garden wizard, this

canny botanist. She moved to a different table and saw flat green

succulent disks growing in the soil as lilly pads do on water. They

drifted around the table, unrooted islands, bumping into each other. On

another counter, four larger plants were blooming. Bright red flowers

were cycling on the plants, budding, bursting open, holding their colors

a few moments before fading, crumpling, and falling, only to be

replaced by a new flower a moment later. From a distance, the plant

seemed still, but close up, it was a beehive of activity.



Walking through the rows of plants, feeling the heavy humidity, she

wondered about soils here. When she turned the corner of the big palm

tree, she was prepared with several questions for Juniper. The

questions died on her lips as she gazed at the woman.



Her great chin was pressed into the ground near the palm, and she was

lying on her stomach. Tiny plants had surrounded her legs as they

stretched away from the palm, and were twining around them as she lay.

Vines were emerging in every direction, ivyies and tropicals she did not

recognize. Her face was pointing blankly towards the giant palm, with

a slack mouth as if she was not seeing.



The great lady's arms went down from her chest into the ground, as if

they were under water. As Mary's eyes traveled from Juniper to the

palm, she saw two flexing vines growing from the earth next to the

palm, up along its trunk. The great arms that had grasped her wrist

earlier were at work again, spiraling gently up. At some point a little

above Mary's head, the mottled arms joined with the palm itself, fusing

to the column of the trunk, then submerging into it, so they were no

longer visible. High above, the appeared again, and twisted like a

caducus around the top of the palm, pressing upward.

There was nothing to do but stare, dumbfounded. Mary did this, for a

while, until she realized she was doing it. She sat down to watch.



Little plants popped up near her as she sat, though when she brushed

scoldingly at them, they did not twine around her. They made a pretty

tuffet for her to sit, and a couple of ferns emerged behind her and

pressed their scroll-work heads against her spine to make a comfortable

backrest.



Junipers strange tentacles dove back into the top of the plant, and Mary

watched expectantly, wondering what there was to do to a palm to make

it alter its ways. Would it being to flap like a fan? She thought of the

Victorinan Imperial fans in the tropial hotels, woven spades that moved

back and forth. A breeze wouldn't be unpleasant.



As she watched, daydreaming of palm trees around the world,



{something interesting happened}



Junipers arms started retracting. It seemed almost painful, the stopping

and starting of her stretched arms, the compression swelling the vines at

times. Twists and flickers of emotion floated past the giantess' face,

indicating the exertion she was going through. In the end, her hands

looked like hands, and they sank into the ground next to the palm, and

then the woman gave a great grunt, and sat up, pulling her arms gently

from the soil.



Sitting and watching the great woman, Mary did not move, and barely

blinked. It no longer seemed necessary, having shared the experience

that had just occurred. The woman smiled softly at her, and shook her

head to clearn stiffness from her compressed vines. She stared up at the

giant palm, as did Mary.

Finally, she spoke. "Gardens are always slow moving works of artistry.

Sometimes I wonder how much I betray them when I toy with their time

scales. That little tree in the front – it is ancient, it knows. So many

rings inside its trunk. Yet it is so young, even compared to you, little

Quickling."



Mary nodded. She was not ready to speak, and she really had little to

say. What more could one want than to be made of eyes in this magic

park that Juniper had made? There was nothing more soothing than to

sit here, coddled by the warmth and moisture, hearing the quiet popping

crackles of the water and air moving through the soil. She did not

noticed that the ferns were cradling her backwards, and helping her drift

off to sleep.



***

Idly scratching her face, Mary woke lazily. It had been a marvelous

sleep. Green dreams, perhaps. She looked up at a ceiling that was not

the same as the greenhouse, more a deep blue, though a bit more

transparent. It smelled loamy. She sniffed deep, and savored the smell.



She wasn't in the greenhouse anymore. She sat up. She was in a grotto

– tall pillars held the cobolt blue glass in place, and there were no walls,

but the inner sun was dimmed considerably, so it felt very shady and

melancholy. There was a tiny pond in front of her with ferns around its

banks, and a glimmer in the water that might be fish. The space was

enclosed by a tall hedge of yew, and within the yew there were other

dark, simple plants, a couple big leafed shrubs with pale pink flowers

on them, and an autumn clematis vine that was climbing up the side of

one of the yews.



She was lying on a bed of small ferns, and as she stretched, they did as

well. The little ferns provided a bed that began to move, and as she sat

up, she did not feel jolted, but watched in wonder as she glided towards

a curve in the yew hedge. Expecting it to part, she wa almost

disappointed when her chariot and she ducked behind the hedge and

zig-zagged out of the room.



Juniper was waiting outside, sitting in the bow of a large tree, big disk-

feet swinging. She called to Mary as Mary stood, "Hello, darling. You

are such a pleasure to have as a visitor! Such quick responses from

you!" She realized what she had said, and smiled. "I guess I should

have realized." She hopped down from the branch, shuddering into the

ground. "Your friends are still at my doorstep. What would you like to

see today?"



Mary smiled weakly and said, "It is all so marvelous, but. Juniper, I

don't know what I'm doing here, exactly, or where to start. I'm not even

sure why I'm journeying around, or what I hope to find."



Even with her eyes behind the foliage, Juniper's face was sympathetic.

"Lamb, that's understandable. You've been learning since you got here,

and it's in you to learn, but it seems like you're finding it a bit

overwhelming." She nodded helpfully, encouraging Mary to spill out

her thoughts.



It was an obvious ploy, and Mary knew it was carefully chosen, but the

time-tested methods worked on her. Her tongue loosened, and for the

first time since she woke in this reddish land, she felt she could speak

freely.



"Juniper, I've left everyone I know behind. At first, I assumed I was on

another planet, and I was sort of thrilled, thinking I would get to meet

the aliens that there are so many stories about. Then, when I saw the

inner sun, and realized that most of what I learned - I'm a geologist by

trade, I study the earth - was wrong, I was motivated by my desire to

correct my knowledge. The Luluthn were helpful, but they are pushing

me to do things so subtly that I'm walking on the empty earth for miles

before I realized I've made a choice."



"Learning of the split, when you all came down here, it makes me feel

lost. Because you, you're the greatness that we're always striving for up

above, and we can't seem to do it. One or two of us get an idea and

carries it a little way forward, but then we're alone again, or dying too

soon. Meanwhile, that beautiful shrub with the silver poems - it just

waits out there, for anyone who happens by. So exquisite and just one

brick in this eden you've made here."



"So then I'm here, in this world, learning how little I know, and how

much is already known, and sleeping in your beautiful grotto alone,

wondering if I'm going to wake up with my heart broken from too much

beauty, and wondering if I'm of any use, stumbling around down here.

Mind you, I don't want to go back! There's little to go back to. No one

is going to believe me, anyway."



"I'm not much of an artist, and I thought mostly of soil and water flow,

even on my days off. So all the things I'm seeing here, I'm analyzing,

but I know it is at such a paltry level compared to the work you do.

Which leaves me - where? Here, for the moment, but lost."



Somewhere in this speech, her face had filled with tears and her brow

had knitted into contorted lines. She gripped her chin with her hand,

pinching it a bit, trying to keep her eyes looking at this giantess. The

woman was blurry through the tears, and nodding, just the slightest bit.



"Sure," the woman said. "Sure. Of course." And then was silent again.



Mary started speaking, a little slower this time. "I'm not particularly

fussy about religion, but this seems to be a fairly religious experience

and yet I'm even less sure than I was before, which I thought was

impossible, since I was really an agnostic before. Which I was because

it seemed important to hold my judgement for some better answers.

This better answer below us - I don't know if we can take it."



"Sure," Juniper said. "It's a serious question."



"Meanwhile, what about out there? Why are you all inside the earth,

instead of out there in the stars? Isn't it silly to be plugged up in there

since there are all those other planets waiting for you?"



Juniper chuckled. "So many questions, sweet child. I'm sorry you're

torn up by them."



"I can take it," Mary said, "but it would be so much easier to have this

all straightened out, instead of sitting in the back of my head as I walk

around your world."



***



Another chuckle. "Well, that's a pretty good summary. I see your

problem. So what do you want, dear heart? All the answers, right

now? No wonder the Luluthn haven't been able to tell you what you

want to know. Here's what I think," and she pointed down at Mary. "I

think you're not tired from too few answers. I think you're tired from

too little to do."



She clasped her hands together. "You know as well as I do that answers

aren't as solid as we want them to be. You're a scientist. You take an

answer, and you test it, and it changes. Just a small change, most of the

time, a revision to the rule. And so you test that rule. It changes a little.

So you're getting a clearer picture. The picture keeps growing, bit by

bit. That's the way real answers are."

"It must be a problem from up there, the quick ones up there need such

quick answers." Juniper paused on this thought for a couple moments,

and then continued. "Perhaps the myth making comes from that

moment where all the Slow storytellers left." She let that sink in. "You

probably knew that already, actually."



Mary cleared her throat. "Maybe I did, somehow. It doesn't change

how lost I feel, though. I'm still the same wandering ghost."



The giant nodded crisply. "Well, and there we have it. I think you

need something to do with yourself. There's not much fun about a life

all about taking, now is there? We both know that. It isn't living unless

we're sharing or contributing. Which brings us to the question, of

course. What can we have you do?"



"There's not much I'm good for here," Mary's voice cracked. Her

sorrow was too obvious. This world did not need her, and the one

above didn't either.



Juniper scowled at her unhappy sentences. "Don't be a fool. You're

smarter than that. My goodness, you're in a slump right now."



There was no reply from Mary. Now she was being scolded by the

motherly woman! How absurd!



"Perhaps we could start you in the dirt, lamb. Don't you know about

dirt?"

Chapter Twenty-five - Tending the garden



Several days passed. The Luluthn still stood rooted in front of the

greenhouse, growing. But now, Mary had a purpose. She had been

handed a strange tool that day when her frustration had overwhelmed

her. Juniper pulled it from behind nowhere, handed it to her, and set

her to work on a piece of ground.



The earth inside the earth was far different from that above. No topsoil

existed down here, for instance, except what was made. This was

something she knew a bit about. Topsoil wasn't particularly magical

stuff, though it seemed magic when it was talked about on the surface

earth. Up above, it was talked about as if it were discrete - invented

apart from the rest of the ground.



What in fact it was, was the good earth, grown over the ages from all

that the earth had been. When plants and creatures lived and died on

the earth, they mostly returned to it. They broke down, and dust

returned to dust. Over the eons, the crust of that life covered all the

continents, and was the embodiment of the life that had existed on

them.



Topsoil, rather than what was inherently formed when the planet

formed, was rich with all the miscellanea of life - the cell walls and the

nutrients, the organics and even the useless bits that were eliminated. It

was a collection of building blocks that had some of the initial work

done. Mary considered the early alge of the oceans, and the eventual

crawl of plants onto the land. She thought of the ferns and the palms,

the giant simple plants that first covered the earth with forests. They

were still up there, really. Part of the process.

Every microscopic bit of Juniper's plants had to be preserved down here

to keep the garden going. Powering the hunger of this Eden took

careful concentration. Juniper had her start by policing the areas

around the city. She did this by hand, with a sack by her side, primative

and simple. When her sack was full, she'd come back to an area near

the greenhouse. She'd empty it into a bin and go out for more. Finally

she filled the bin. It kept her mind quiet, having this simple task.



Juniper showed her how to crumble the materials. Some of it she did

with her hands. Some of it she used simple grinding machines for.

Eventually the leaves and twigs and roots were mashed into small

pieces. Then Juniper showed her how to work the timing of all of it.

Mary was told to stand near the bin, and guide its aging. She practiced

with a handful of leaves, and Juniper helped her sink into the memory

of time, in a similar way that she had learned to sink into ideas when

she was using the Luluthn tool. As she watched, the materials aged. A

sweet, heavy smell rose out of the bin, and the material became darker,

more crumbled.



Juniper made her work this mixture again with her hands. Each handful

she picked, crumpled between her fingers, then put into a new bin.

Handful by handful, the material broken down, she aerated and set to

working further.



Mary knew that microbes were at work in this process. Simple compost

was a regular part of her life, and in fact her mission. At work they

were always trying to encourage Americans to compost more. No

reason to have things souring in a landfill when instead it could go to

replacing all that topsoil that kept washing into the Chesapeake.



It was amusing to be put to work making dirt. What had she been flying

down to Charlottesville with? Dirt. What did Brul dig through to make

the hollow earth? Dirt. What was it all about? This earth, this vital

dirt. She squeezed the crumbling mixture in her hands.



When it had stewed again, Juniper had her expand the garden. No

fancy miracle tools were given to her. Oh no. Instead of a fancy tool,

she was given a pointed stick.



It was as long as she was, approximately, and it was of a light material,

perhaps a special ceramic that had not been invented on earth yet. The

shaft was utterly smooth. The point to the stick was very sharp. So,

perhaps it was a fancy tool. But she still thought of it as a pointed stick,

space-age materials or no.



The green lady had handed her the stick, told her briefly where to work

the earth, and left her to it. Mary was in the orange glow of the core,

alone in a blank piece of compressed clay dust. She shoved the stick

into the ground. It slipped under the surface easily, and then she

levered the ground up, breaking the soil into crumbled pieces. She

poked the earth again. The process was satisfying. She had worked the

entire edge of the area she was assigned when she remembered the

organic brew she had been making.



The bin the stuff was in clambered out of the ground when she

approached, with bony bamboo-knees trotting towards her. Her

eyebrows up, she gestured for it to follow, and it did. Trotting

alongside her, it unbent its lengthy legs to avoid bumping any plants,

then lowered back down when it was crossing a lower growing area.



When she reached the empty land, she pointed and it squatted, and the

bamboo feet disappeared. All she had was a bin now, and she couldn’t

see where the little biped could secret itself.

She had no cart so she just moved from the bin to the field. She sowed

a handful of the good compost each twelve inches or so. No precision

guided her, no formulas, but there was an inner process that she had to

satsify. Where her stick had turned up more earth, she might drop a bit

more. A bit less if it was on the perimeter of the area. Poking with the

stick to stir it in some places. Using her shoe to shove around some of

the compost here and there.



At some point when she wasn't looking, the bin walked off and got

more compost. She noticed it missing right when it strolled back onto

her turf with a new full container of good nutrients. Mary rolled her

eyes a bit. It was too Disney, she thought. Sorceror's Apprentice and

all that.



Then she considered how strange it was that she was critiquing reality

for being too much like fiction.



She slept heavily the first night, sore of arm and back, and pleased with

herself. The hard work had allowed her two revelations. First, it put an

excellent perspective on the luck she had to be in the middle of this

adventure. Comparing the dull, though satisfying, work of tilling the

soil reminded her of her of how many above there were, and how many

were still subsistence farmers. Secondly, it let her look back without

anxiety at the past weeks, in a disfocused way, not seeking any solution,

but letting her mind wander.



After the second day, she discovered that it had all settled in and

become a bit more normal. Her reality was starting to catch up. In the

blue grotto, she stared up at the blurry glow shining through the blue

roof before dropping to sleep, and thought mostly of the rows she had

turned that day.

The third day she completed her plot of land. A pretty patchwork, as

pretty as the fields she would fly over in her Cessna. The farmers

always seemed like artists to her, their striped lands hued with earth and

plant. Fall was her favorite time, the wheat ripe in one field, and

already cut in another. The corn standing tall and dry here, and the

earth re-dug for alfalfa there. She could really see the farming from

above.



This sector of land satisfied her in the same way. It had five irregular

sides, and abutted a piece of pine forest and a bald cypress clump. She

went to find Juniper to tell her it was ready.



Juniper was in the greenhouse, talking with Llul and Thll. Her big form

loomed over the other two, and she was bending a bit, looking down

towards them. The Luluthn both turned to her as she walked in, and

Thll only blinked, while Llul said, with happiness, "Mary."



"See, these folks decided to see the rest of the place," Juniper boomed.

"We were just discussing your land there. I told them how hard you

have been working, and they didn't understand at first. Then they

barely believed me! Show 'em your callouses, honey."



Mary didn't feel the need. Her face was shining with joy to see the two

Lululthn awake again. They both seemed healthy and comfortable, as if

the experience of growing together and sharing the earth had come and

gone and left them content. "I've been working hard. Juniper here gave

me a stick and some earth and that's it."



Thll nodded. "Yes, she told us about the stick. She said you're quite

agile with it."



It was like being a kindergartner in front of parent and teacher. She felt

giddy and a bit silly, being flattered about her use of a pointy stick.

"I'm working in compost, into the dirt. Organic matter, to enrich the

soil. After that it will be ready to plant, I think. Juniper has the plan,

I'm sure."

"She's got me so tired out I don't think as much," Mary told them. "I

think it is some kind of motherly trick, but it is good to be working

again."



"Oh, sweet child, you're not going to get a plan from me," the gardener

said. "You've turned that soil and you're going to have to figure out

what to put there. I'll help when I can, but I'd much rather have a

garden you created than another acre of my own." Juniper clapped her

huge hands together as if to order the change. "Besides, I'm working on

so much else right now, and we've got to plant that dirt before it moves

off."



Thll seemed pleased with the idea. "Excellent, Mary. We look forward

to your garden."



From Llul, she received encouragement as well. There was no way to

avoid the agreement they all three had about it, really, and the empty

space intrigued her.

Chapter Twenty-six - Working alone, and the Luluthn

leave

They ate for the first time that day. Mary had forgotten that she needed

to eat, and had not felt hunger at all since they set out from Luluthnia.

When Llul suggested that she might be hungry, it was like a faraway

memory of hunger came to her, not actual need.



"You are well served by our food, Mary," said the navigator. "You

must watch yourself in the future. We can all run on reserved in our

body, but we should also eat when we can." Mary wondered if their

magic blue paste somehow silenced her normal signals for hunger. She

had obviously lost weight, as she checked herself. She would be more

careful.



They were served fruits, beans, nuts, and flowers by a beaming Juniper.

She seemed convinced that Mary would be able to eat more than the

Luluthn and would not let her leave without sampling more and more.

The tastes were varied, and the Luluthn were graciously thankful. She

tried to be as well, within the context of having the food forced on her.



That day, she began thinking about her garden. She was not interested

in rebuilding something from the earth above exactly, but she wanted to

bring evidence of her origin into it. Talking with Juniper, she

determined that almost anything she wanted in terms of plants could be

had, or could be made if Juniper didn't have it on hand. Her pallet was

nearly infinite.



The soil concerned her, and she asked Juniper about pH and soil

chemistry. Juniper said she didn't have to worry about it. She

suspected that it was the way the plants were created in the first place –

they weren't exactly the same plants as there were above ground. Each

of them had been sculpted, adapted to this underground world. It would

be interesting to know what exactly those requirements were, but she

would learn that later. At one point Juniper had mentioned a seed

storage area, but she hadn't pursed it.



She inventoried her favorite plants mentally. So many items of modern

agriculture were hybrids very recently developed. Juniper and the

Luluthn were certainly not going to know last year's Rose of the Year

selections, nor the ones from two or three years ago. She wondered

how much she should expect to create from scratch down here.



Her personal favorite of the flowers in the world was the papaver, the

oriental poppy. The foliage, with its hairy, jagged leaves, intrigued her.

She even liked how it grew ugly at the end of the season. She loved

how late in the autumn it would sprout leaves, readying for winter in a

lettucy pile. The tall stalks, craning up in crooked lines, also pleased

her. And the magesty of the giant papaver flowers, their brilliant petals

of wrinkled tissue, their dark hearts.



As much as she loved poppies, she could see planting an entire field of

them here. Their color in the orange sun would be a vision.



She thought of the joys of early spring in Virginia. The little snowbells,

latin name Galanthus, with their tiny heads bowed, like praying nuns in

their habits, against the dull brown earth. Then the crocus, orange and

purple and white. Forsythia plants becoming a brilliant gold. Then the

graceful daffodils, the arrogant tulips, and the witch hazel tree.



She considered the formal gardens she had seen or read about. They

were strange human efforts on timescales that were vast. Louis XIV's

Versailles still stood with grandure, open mazes and long angled views

spreading across the land.

She could create a maze, perhaps, in this earth. Somewhere to test the

visitor. Something to amuse them. She thought of the corn mazes in

the midwest each year, and smirked a bit to herself. It would be fun to

leave such a pedestrian calling card, in case another surface-dweller

ever followed her here.



She considered making water gardens, and learned in her talks with the

Luluthn that such things already existed. She visited those lily ponds,

and marveled at the size of the giant pink flowers, with their giant seed

seats.



Mary loved herb gardens, but a little kitchen garden seemed a bit silly,

and she had a lot of space. Even a vegetable garden would be fun.

What would she grow? She couldn't remember much more beyond the

endless zuccini and the giant leaves of the rhubarb.



In her own yard back in Virginia, she had cleared away junk from an

overgrown backyard to discover deer paths within her forest floor. She

took out all English Ivy that had smothered a shed and replaced it with

bark chips where she wanted the deer paths to remain, and trillium and

other forest plants where she wanted green. Azeleas bloomed beneath

the trees, and viburnum filled the spaces left. In the winter and

summer, there were always birds. She left most of the tree branches to

fall where they would, as habitat for the animals.



She missed animals. The two she had seen here in Juniper's Eden were

a paucity. Animals were so much an integral part of a garden that it

didn't really make sense to her. How could it all grow without the help

of a few pollinators? It was so much extra work to do it alone.



As she toyed over various ideas, she kept coming back to the idea of

rocks. There were no rocks in this inner earth. Everything was created

of all sorts of perfect substances. No wabi, she muttered to herself.

In that one word, she had her question answered about the garden. She

would build something with wabi.



Wabi is a Japenese term used in aesthetics. It applies to the experience

of beauty in the imperfect rather than in the perfect. The experience of

a beautiful object can be enhanced by its wabi. In the view of the

observer, the flaws in a piece of art increase its beauty, as the flawed

nature of the piece unlocks a philosophical and aesthetic experience

itself.



Wabi, Mary thought. How completely human to treasure the flaws in

an item. Yet, how wonderfully mature. To see the crack in the pot,

even under its glaze, shows wabi. To notice a few brown leaves on a

healthy green tree, is to notice wabi. The wrinkles of life are a beauty

to be treasured themselves.



First, though, she would need a rock. The problem was that it needed

to be a real rock, not some rock created by Juniper for the occasion.

There was no wabi in making a fake rock. Where could they find one?



She and Juniper talked back and forth about where the rocks were down

here. They talked about the earth's crust, and the cooking process by

which coal becomes granite, and granite is compressed into diamonds.

Like her, the green lady cared little for diamonds, but she knew granite

and loved its many permutations.



Still, granite wasn't really what Mary was looking for, here. She wanted

something with more shape. Something true. No one had brought

rocks down here, apparently, or those who cared enough to bring them

were not known to the gardener woman. They would have to go fishing

for a rock.

The process was ludicrous, and yet pleasing. They would capture a

rock up above, and pull it down into the land below, where they wanted

it.



Juniper spent a whole day searching for a rock. She seemed to relish

the work, and talked up the process ahead of time, and recounted it

twice after, to her two audiences. Finally, like a dousing rod, she felt a

pull from somewhere deep below them and hooked it.



The "reeling in" process was invisible, but Mary could tell that Juniper

was doing something, because her giant lips would quiver as she sat

there on the ground, as if they had shaken from exhaustion. She sat

with Juniper the whole day, mostly watching the inner struggle but also

trying to make sure she didn't miss the end of the process.



"Won't be long now, honey," Juniper told her, and when the rock

crested the surface near them, it was like a long, dangerous labor had

ended and they had a new relative. The Luluthn cheered the result.



The giant rock emerged from the ground slowly, of a beautiful

parallelogram shape, roughly hewn. It was a creamy color, and jagged,

though smoothed on some pieces by its trip through the ground. It was a

beautiful item.



She had Juniper bring it only half out of the ground, in a off-center

section of her garden. Sore hands greeted each day as Mary built two

berms of soil in small areas shaped like amoebas. She requested a large

tree branch from Juniper, and a blade, and made a long rake.



Wandering through the greenhouse, they found the perfect plants.

Juniper helped her mutate a weeping Japanese maple, so that it

contorted. They changed the leaves, too, coaxing them to be needle-thin

and blushing with red veins under their dark green leaves.

Mary planted the maple herself, using a sledge to move the little tree.

Juniper had eventually produced something vaguely shovel-shaped for

her to use, and Mary told herself with a laugh that it was better than a

spoon or her hands, after all, character-building notwithstanding.



She found a strange climbing jade plant, a faded soft blue. It looked as

if each thick rounded leaf was trying to climb on top of another, and

Mary loved its st ruggle. It would always grow like this, with its

chocolate, segmented stem and endlessly striving clamber.



On the rock she asked the mistress of the garden for a few tiny alpine

plants, and wedged them here in there in the crevices.



Requesting a bench from Juniper, she positioned it to gaze at the

garden, and she was done.



Those who didn't know her well might see it as a love letter to Jenk, her

only link to Zen. After all, it was he who had made her sit Zazen

amongst the rocks. It was not so simple as that. It was not so direct, nor

so loving. No, this was a garden for her audience. This was a gift to

these strange beings that had helped take care of her.



To present the garden to them, she woke, and gathered the three Slow

around her, and handed Llul the rake. They walked without rushing to

the perimeter of her newly cut land, and paused to look at it. As she had

come to expect, it was met first with silence. Even Juniper was silent,

and she hoped that the great lady was silent because she desired to be.



After what seemed like an eternity to her, Mary eventually led a few

more steps into the garden, and gestured the Luluthn to sit down. There

was not room for the green lady, but she seemed to need no bench, and

was so comfortable standing and looking.

As more time passed, Mary turned and went back away. She busied

herself making more compost for a while, and eventually went to sleep.

Since the passage of time was so subtle here, she had learned to sleep

and wake when she felt like it. She found she had more dreams as a

result.



When she woke, she was unsure who might be around, but Juniper did

not fail her. Delightfully positioned in the big tree again, she bounded

down from it with a energetic heave, and leapt over to Mary, scooping

her up in a big hug.



"Honey, you did marvelously! Those two are still stuck there, and I

loved it, too!" she squeezed Mary and then released her. "Thank you,

lamb. It is a garden to treasure."



"It wasn't really my idea…," Mary began to protest, feeling

overwhelmed. She hadn't had arms around her, human or vaguely

human, in so long. It moved her more than she could have predicted.

Choked with uprising tears, she cleared her throat. "It's really just a

copy of a Zen garden, and I don't really even know much about those."



"This is not a copy, lamb. It could never be a copy, not with the

thought you put into it,"



"The rake is for drawing patterns in the soil," Mary interupted, taking

the attention off her role in the garden. "I raked it in some nice spirals

but part of the point is that you can change it when you want to.

Usually, though, the stuff you rake is rocks, about this size," she put her

thumb and forefinger together, "and it shows the patterns a little

differently. Fewer footprints, too, I guess."

Nodding heavily, Juniper listened to her with concentration. "This is a

very wise garden, Mary. You have made a garden of time, not just of

space."



Even trying to remain humble, Mary liked the sound of that.



"Every garden is a garden in time, of course, lamb, you know that just

as I do, studying the growing soil as you have. Everything changes

when it grows, and a garden trades on the unknown future as much as

on the present. This garden is more than that, though, Mary, by being

less than that. So motionless, your three little islands. They have so

much to say."



"Say?" Mary questioned. "What do you think they say?"



"Well, about this hollow earth, of course, that's one of the things. How

we've become so still and Slow down here, and how we live in little

islands of our own specialties. Our own perfect unique islands."

Juniper was staring down at her intently.



"And, of course, that massive rock, that traveled and complicated thing

that the little plants cling to. That's another thing your garden says,

sweetie, talking about our earth, and the things that cling to the outside

of this planet, your kind up top there. Such a big rock for such little

plants. It almost breaks my heart. And they'll just cling their roots as

far in as they can, trying to survive."



"Those two big plants, they're amazing, each of them. The leaves of the

maple are each a perfect work of art, and the shape, too, twisting

intricate. Then the bubbly jade plant, almost too fecund and yet all the

leaves are the same. I think you've been drawn to them because they

are like us, down here, we who get things just so, so perfected, and then

keep doing them."

"But your little plants there on the rock, well, sweetheart, they are

another story. Plain little plants, not too complicated, just enough to

keep them clinging there. "



"Then you put that earth between them all. The earth between that little

colony on the big rock, the earth that is the barrier between your folks

up there and mine down here. So we can stir the space in between, and

trace it with pretty patterns, but the space is still there, waiting."



Juniper finished, and crooked her head onto her fist, and eyed her little

visitor from behind her little plants.



Mary considered this. Was it what she meant? It felt so true to her as

she listened, but there was more.



"Yes, but, Juniper, it is more empty than that. Or rather, it is more

about the empty that you sense between the islands than the islands. Or

it is more about you sensing the empty space, than the empty space.

Um. When you sit in the garden, it is supposed to help you lose, or,

um, gain focus. Jeez. Um. Oh, I don't know. It's just for thinking."



The big woman nodded.



"It's about thinking until you're done with thinking, and then having this

silent place, where you don't have to think anymore. When you don't

have to think anymore, then, you are no longer separate. Right? When

there is no longer just you, and the things that aren't you. When

everything just is. That."



Surprise on her face, she said, "I see. Mary, this is more wise than I

thought you realized. Look how you've made me think so much about

this world, and there's still more to be done! You have made a

wonderful place full of spaces, Mary. A wonderful place."



"Thank you," she replied. "Do you think Thll and Llul will ever come

out to us?" She missed the two of them when they weren't around.



"Soon, dear. In the mean time, I think you should come meet someone

with me."



"Someone new?" Mary asked, "Someone here?"



"Well of course, child. I didn't think you were at the point where you

were bumping in to old friends yet down here. Perhaps in a year or two

you will." Her wide smile beamed down at Mary. "Come with me,

Miss Mary."

Chapter Twenty-seven - The Meeting with the Quick



She led Mary down a path. It was not as pleasant as the paths she had

been on before. Juniper took her through a forest of dark pines, gnarled

and twisted. They had to walk through scrabble that barely let them

through, and clawed at them. At one point Mary found herself sticky

with a tar sap, and pushing herself through between two tightly wound

branches. She wondered at this place she hadn't yet seen. Who went

here?



Then they passed through a simpler place, a sad place where the big-

leafed shrubs ran along the ground, as if they were groveling, and were

graying and unhealthy looking. They were placed in clumps among

dirt that didn't seem to have much color to it. It was a wasted stretch of

hunger, and to see the limp and sorry leaves was somehow mournful to

Mary. There had been so much vitality in the rest of this place, that it

was tanamount to torture to do this to these other plants.



Juniper was unexpectedly silent. She strode forward in the gray land,

occasionally taking Mary sharply around a curve, cutting over the path

that was marked. It was this lawlessnes that shocked Mary most of all –

she had seen so much order in these Slow, and it was eerie to have that

change.



Finally they passed the dying shrubs. They were on the edge of a field

of dry wheat. This was not so sad, but it was haunting to Mary. The

wheat was tall – taller than her chin, and Mary saw it spread further

than the first horizon. Though she could see the second horizon of the

inner curve, she had grown to ignore it, and so she felt alone with

Juniper in the sea of wheat. They stepped into it.

Unlike the fields she flew over on the outer earth, there were no rows to

this wheat. There were no paths through, and Mary learned quickly to

keep her balance by stepping with care. She felt like she might be

losing her direction, and was unnerved. Direction was such a quandry

in this land where the sun was always at noon. Like birds, did these

Slow have some compass that guides them along the magnetic poles?



The hiss of the wheat against her skin was loud, and the hiss of Juniper

passing through the wheat ahead of her was quiet. She relaxed into the

walk, almost at the moment when Juniper stopped. They had come to

the edge of the wheat. It wasn't so long a walk, though her ankles felt

strange from balancing so much.



She stepped forward to stand next to Juniper. The great woman was

hanging her head, almost sorrowfully. It was at this moment, looking

over to the great lady, that Mary first saw what was behind the vines

and plants that covered her eyes. As the vines hung forward, she saw

that Juniper had no eyes – no skin at all above where her nose would

start. Frozen, she stared horrified at the raw, greenish, opalescent

shimmer that Mary recognized as pulsing brain. The brain was pushing

out of the front of Juniper's head, almost pushing the vines forward, and

some of the plants that were rooted in her skull were stretching their

roots down into the gristle of her mind. As she stood transfixed in a

terror that she could not explain, Juniper's brain pulsed, and she saw the

roots move as well, stretching in their own way, and gripping the meat

of the giant gardener even more deeply.



Mary twisted her face away from the sight, feeling her stomach shriek at

her and a draining flush move blood away from her face. It wasn't just

a metaphor – the curtain had been pulled away from this motherly

exterior and now she could see the deeply alien reality that was within.

"Don't be afraid now, Mary, honey." Juniper said, her face still hanging

down.



Of course, thought Mary, since her face had no eyes, she wasn't any less

likely to see Mary's repulsion with her head hanging than she would if

she was facing Mary directly. Even her privacy against the reality of

this woman was broken. How much had she assumed about this

creature when her back was to Mary?



Breathing too quickly, Mary jerked her head away, and flipped her gaze

to what was in front of them. Perhaps what she had just seen was

helpful for this moment, for she was gazing out at another

transformation sure to confuse her stomach.



"You can go forward when you are ready, dear heart," said Juniper, in

her perfectly encouraging voice. "Go and talk when you want."



The field was filled with a tiny leafed groundcover, perhaps Thyme.

Stepping one step forward to get her balance, she smelled the thyme

crush under her foot pungently. The air felt close. In the middle of the

field, there was a great tree, strange and gnarled, like a baobao. The

tree was pulsing with a crackling electricity – a flow of light and spark

that rippled across all its limbs.



Talk to what? Mary did not see anyone to talk to. She stepped closer,

again smelling the heavy, spicy crush of the thyme beneath her feet.

The hum of the electrical put a ozone into the air, like the air after a

lightening bolt, or the biting metallic of a blown fuse. She stared into

the tree, wondering who was sitting inside its hollowed out center. The

old, spreading tree had drooped and expanded until the core inside

rotted dead away.

But the core was not empty. At first glance Mary thought it was only

filled with more thyme, colonizers from the outside of the tree living in

the shade. She was wrong. Peering deeper into it when she saw the

edge of a form, she began to make it out. Something – someone – was

lying in this tree, on the ground, with naked gray flesh and splayed

limbs. Something – someone, she corrected herself again – was twined

in with this tree.



Her revulsion and horror were the first feelings that came to her, but she

felt them drain away as she stood there. Time was so different now, in

this land where the sun didn't move. To so much greater an extent, she

was only in Now. She could wait until she wanted to, when she was

ready. Steadying herself against the ground, she stared, and felt the

adrenaline slub off in her veins.



She stepped closer another step, and peered into the tree. She

understood what she was seeing, now, and how the parts fit together.



An ancient, weathered man's form was discernable. Bloated and

swollen, his stomach was a mass of gray flesh woven with roots, and his

giant torso, with no discernable beginning or end, blended in with the

core of the tree. His arms, scrawny at the joint by his neck, wizened

initially, buckled and swelled until they gushed, elephantine, over the

side of the tree, and plunged, like a huge hose, down into the ground.

His legs were similarly grotesque. His genetalia hung limply down

between his legs, the size of mangos, blackened and marbled with

pulsing white in the varicose veins.



She knew he was still alive because his face was slightly rising and

falling as his breath came and went. She wondered why he bothered to

breath. His face still had eyes, but they were plugs of knotty wood, it

seemed, and his lips were broken bark.

She was supposed to talk with this thing? Crackles of electricity always

unnerved her. She would change sides of the street to avoid walking

next to the humming power plant near her house. The air felt full of

dread.

47785+200=47985

Why was he there? Who was he?



She walked closer. He was more familiar than she expected, even

distorted. He didn't look like Juniper, and he certainly didn't look like

the Luluthn. She looked at him carefully. His face was caucasian. His

cheekbones were gaunt and sunken, and shriveled with bark, but they

reminded her of old men she had known through her life. His skull,

rising above his sunken and overpasted eyes, arched like most men's

heads did. And there was hair.



Thin and bracken, the grey hair wasted back from his forehead. Almost

greasy, in a land where nothing was greasy, it pushed against the wall of

the tree, against his disjoint shoulder, and filled pools of space into the

ground. There, no matter its long journey, it became a puddle of heavy

brown dust.



Somehow, the hair confirmed it for her. This was no Slow. This

gnarled man, this creature, was once like her. His wasted flesh made

more sense to her. For what would she be if the years were to press on

her down here? There might be they that would heal her individual

ailments, but could any preserve her from time?



His withered flesh was not dead, she reminded herself. And this man –

she named him man with hesitation – this man was able to speak, or so

Juniper seemed to think. Out of what? His mouth did not seem

functional. She hesitated.

While she hesitated, a low snaking branch, with a crackle, began to

move towards her. Moving like a snake being electricuted, it jerked

this way and that, and eventually moved until a knotted, stubby end was

pushing towards her. The stub, worn by time, pushed within itself, as if

configuring a shape was not certain but a desire. It pulsed and flickered

but eventually found a shape that echoed that of a face – a mouth and

two vague spots for eyes.



She wasn't sure what to say. With a weak quaver in her voice, and a

stop and start to what she chose to say, she asked, "Who are you?"



The eye spots darkened, as if focusing. Hollow sounds poured from the

mouth hole. "Who am I? I?"



She wrinkled her forehead. This seemed like a test, almost. She started

another way. "I am Mary. I came from above, from the top of the

earth. I think you must have come from there, too."



The face darkened further. The eyes were almost real now, like the

eyes of wooden dolls. "From above? You are a Quickling?" With

that, the face sharpened further, and lids blinked on the eyes. Lips

moistened and parted. Small, grey teeth showed behind the lips as it

talked.



"Yes. I crawled down a vent shaft for a long way. I came here with the

Luluthn from their city.



Then I walked to this place, where Juniper lives. She let me make a

garden here. Today she said I should talk with you." She felt herself

speeding through the explanation, as if she had to justify herself to this

creature.

"I came from above as well." The strange face wrinkled at her in

wonder. "I don't remember how I got here. It was so long ago…

Juniper had something to do with it, I think. Yes. Yes. She was there,

up above. Collecting things."



"Juniper has been to the surface?!" Mary could not believe the great

woman had not mentioned that fact to her.



"Yes, yes. Juniper was a great collector of plants. I had a garden up

above." The strange face looked around, side to side, almost comical in

its exaggeration as it strained to see around it's perimeters. In the same

moment, it remembered its ability to flex, and turned its head around,

first 180 one way, then back, then 180 the other.



"I was a farmer. Are there still farmers on the surface, now?" The face

squinted at her, expressively, and she wondered why it needed to squint.

"Are there still people who grow things up there?"



"Yes, up there, we still grow things. For food, and for pleasure. I grew

flowers. Yes." She felt like she was comforting this strange being,

telling him that the world up above still cared about the plants.



"I wasn't sure that would last. We were so brutal. We'd girdle the trees,

to kill them. Burn it all down. Then begin to grow things. Raze the

world down around us as much as we could, then bring things back up."



"I've heard of that," Mary said. "Farmers in the rain forests do it."



"Juniper was collecting plants. I had one flower that I noticed. A

golden yellow thing, eleven petals, and it lived by the door. She

noticed it."

"I followed her as she walked the earth. I followed her because she

frightened me. I followed her down, and then when I collapsed she

woke me here." The face stared at her. "I have changed since then."



"Really." Sarcasm dripped from Mary's lips. "Changed. You don't

say."



"Years. Those things you count by. Hundreds of those have passed

now. And the transformation that you see here is my own doing. There

are those who taught me how, yes. But it is my doing."



"Hundreds? Of years?"



"Yes, Mary. You cannot see the rings of this tree, for it has grown so

large it abandoned its own center. They were here, though, Mary, and

they were many, and I still am."



"Why? Why did you do this, why this… you are stuck here. Why?"

Tears had begun to well in her cheeks. She brushed at them with the

back of her hand, irritatedly flicking her hand away.



"I chose this as my process, Mary, because I had wandered too much,

on the earth, and I had never known the trees enough. and I wanted to

know with completeness what the growth of pulling from the earth and

standing under the sun is, truly. I wanted to taste the dirt for a thousand

years and remember it all."



"When I began, I only stood for a single day, cradling a young sapling

in my twining arms, and Juniper showed me how to coax it to share its

thoughts – though they are not thoughts, of course. It was a bliss that I

wish I had known before."

"I wanted to know age, Mary, and yet I knew I did not want to know

death. The change that great time spans gave me have given me more

and yet, so little. The most important is the little."



"If Juniper sent you here to me, she must think you need to know who I

am."



"What you are," Mary said, tersely. "What you are."



"Yess. Yes, Mary. For now, the who is no longer important."



"I see." She turned to look at Juniper. Juniper faced her, staring with

her absense of eyes.



"Thank you," Mary said. "I will go now."



"Goodbye."



Mary turned away. She did not look back, and she smelled the

crackling output of the electical fires that wreathed the creature, and it

bore a hole in her chest, or through her heart.



When she reached the perimeter of the wheat field, Juniper stretched

out her giant hand, and put her hand on Mary's back, gently, kindly.

Chapter Twenty-eight - Mary decides she must leave

the garden

Their walk back through the sorrowful fields was not entirely silent.

Juniper pointed to a giant pine in the crowded forest, and told her how

she found the seed it grew from. Mary's eyes were heavy, but she

craned her head to try to see the top of the pine. The branches were too

crowded.



"There is a forest of sequoias here, where some live who never come to

the ground any more, Mary."



A lump formed in her throat, and would not go away. "Never? Why do

they not come down?"



"They have decided not to. They have decided to choose that way.

They could decend if they want, Mary."



"Everything here…so. So lonely."



"Lonely? Child, what is lonely?" Juniper peered at her with

compassion. "They are not lonely."



"It all makes me lonely." The rock in her throat was not moving.

"Each one here is so isolated. So lost."



They did not speak for the rest of the walk. Juniper walked with her to

the area near the greenhouse, and then she said, "Come, honey, and let

us talk about the myriad of choices of this inner world."

She led Mary to a rise of grasses, surrounded by soft crocus.



"Honey, you are so new here, and you have seen only three lands on

this giant surface. You have met the Luluthn, and they have given you

kindness, but they are the guides of the Slow, and they cannot be what

you are, for they have always been strange, and have become strangers

even to their old ways."



"You have met the Grthl, who love to shape their bodies and senses to

fight as if to survive. They are fast but their fury is empty, and their

glamour is harsh to those who do not grow there."



"But, sweetheart, you have not met the tinkers. They live on the other

side of the core, almost, and they are the kindest, sweetest colony of

gear-twisters and box-cranker artists. They hold little windup ducks in

their hand that quack and then walk, and bite your fingers and mate and

raise small gear ducklings. The tinkers wander around, making old

machines with teeth of the most delicate metals."



"You have not met the stillness artists, who do not breathe for years, but

they watch all, high above a city, holding on to the rooftops.



"There is a city of emotion artists. Each one of them picks the most

intimate moment of emotion to pair with another, and they spend their

lives in locked participation in that emotion, one with the other, yelling,

or crying, or kissing, locked together by their love or joy or hate.



"Some live here in the earth that have no bodies at all, Mary. They

have learned to transform themselves into a motive force without

needing the anchor of this clunking hunk of human flesh. They fly

where they will, faster than you or I could move without ripping apart,

and frolic among the photons.

"There are the Builders, Mary. Architects of giant growing homes, they

castle their structures higher and higher and do not accept the gravity

that binds them. Living partly inside their homes and partly as their

homes, they make art of the spaces they shape, and they create stages

for others to live in, stages for the plays of life.



"Mary, and then there are the Core dwellers. Those that first helped

Brul were not finished when they had first transformed the inner earth.

Moving the molten metals and transforming them, they worked the core

in order to balance the needs of the planet, and to power the creatures

that would miss the sun.



"Some were mere mechanics, but after their lives stretched hundreds of

years here in the earth's center, their sensibilities were changed. Stand

next to the fire for a minute – a bonfire, deep in the woods – and you

find the fire gets hotter for you. It begins to cook you, not just

bouncing off and alerting your outermost nerves, but sinking its talons

of heat deeper. Think about this fire and how much fire there was in the

earth – how much fire still powers it today. Think how the heat flowed

from inside the earth, when it exhausted to the mountains above. These

Core engineers were ever marked by the energy.



"For the first years, they thought of themselves as movers. Displacers

of materials. But Brul learned, for he was wise, and he helped them all

discover their true actions must be different. It was then that they began

to consolidate the core. Feats of understanding were generated from

feats of thought, and the core engineers learned to compress the matter

that had long oozed through the inner earth.



Each moment the Core was worked on was another moment where the

engineers must learn to be part of the heat. For years, they had to

protect themselves, but then they learned to adapt. They gave up their

skin for membranes that would not be burned. They transformed their

blood into something that would not boil away. The breath of the air

would turn ash in their mouths, so they learned to breathe of the gases

that outgassed from the core. Their hearts were unneeded to circulate

the molten mercury so they converted it to muscle. Their muscles

became ceramics that would not disintegrate. And their minds – their

minds also transformed, and they became creatures of light and heat,

dancing ever in the core, managing our warm world for us, holding the

center in place, blitzing the balances so that this place will not falter."



"Enough!" cried Mary. She was sobbing. "Enough. My heart is

breaking."



"Darling! No need to cry!" Juniper grabbed her hands, enveloping

them.



"I don't want this. Juniper, I don't. It's too much. It cries to me. Let me

go." She shook her hands free from the motherly grasp. "Let me go."



The look of concern on Juniper's blind face was obvious. "Child, we

will never keep you. You may go as soon as you wish, but we can not

be known up there. You will be alone again when you arise."



"Yes, I know. I won't though. I won't be as alone up there. Help me,

Juniper. Take me there."



"The Luluthn have sealed the vent where you crashed, Mary child. You

will not return there."



"Please. I can't take this land. It is too wide, and too empty. Take me

up to my true home, Juniper!" Tears poured down her cheeks, waves of

silent collapse.



"Hold my hand." She outstretched it. Mary joined her.

The bulb of space that quivered quickly around them was a new

sensation, and Mary gripped Juniper's hand tightly. She faded in and

out of consciousness as they moved through space in a way she did not

understand.



Finally they were on the surface. A roar of sounds she knew filled the

space around her. "This will have to do, sweetheart. I can't stay any

longer," Juniper said. "Bless you, little one. May your life be what you

wish it." She was resting on the ground, and it was colder than she had

ever felt.



"Goodbye, child." Juniper said.



"Wait," said Mary, "perhaps…"



but Juniper had gone.