“But what’s all this reading of all of us for?” Rimgia laughed. (Naä’s notions could sometimes be odder than the questions that prompted them.) “Is it to learn something? To learn what life is about — the lives of gnats and people and flowers and hens and bugs and goats and trees?”
“That’s where the theory gets rather strange,” Naä explained. “What that great single consciousness-that-is-the-here-and-now-consciousness-of-all-of-us is trying to learn is what life…isn’t: the greater Life that is its own complete totality. You see, after it’s finished reading you, it knows that, however important and interesting and involving the various parts of your life were, that is not really what Life is about. But only after it’s finished reading through the whole of your life, only after it’s actually become you and experienced the length of your years, can it know that for certain. And only after it’s finished reading me does it know that my life was not the essence either. And so it goes, with every wise old hermit and every mindless mosquito and every great king who rules a nation. And when it’s completely finished with all the things it could possibly read, from the life of every sickly infant dead an hour after birth to every hundred-year-old hag who finally drops into death, from every minnow eaten by a frog to every elk springing from a mountain peak and every eagle soaring above them, to every chick dead in the egg three days before it hatches, only then will it be released from its reading to be its wondrous and glorious self, with the great and universal simplicity that it’s learned. That’s what those elders thought — and that’s what they told their people.”
The two young women walked silently.
Then Naä went on: “I must say, though I found it an interesting idea, I’m not sure I believe it. I think I’d rather take the nothing.”
“Really?” Rimgia asked, surprised; for as an idea to turn over and consider, like the petals of a black-eyed Susan, it had intrigued her. “Why?”
“Well, when I was a little girl, playing in the yard of my parents’ hut in Calvicon, and I’d think about such things — death, I mean — the idea of all that nothing after my little bit of a life used to frighten me — terribly, so that my mouth would dry, my heart would hammer, and I’d sweat like I’d just run a race. From time to time I’d almost collapse with my fear of it; there it waited, at the end of my life, to swallow me into it. Nothing. Nothing for millions of billions of years more than the millions of billions of years that are no part at all of all the years there are. Really, when such thoughts were in my head, I couldn’t sing a note! But then a little later, when I heard this other idea, it occurred to me that really, it was much more frightening! If I — and you — really are that great consciousness and really are one, that means ‘I’—the great consciousness that I am — must go through everyone’s pain, everyone’s agonies, everyone’s dying and death, animal as well as human, bird and fish, beast and plant, and all the unfairness and cruelty and pain in the universe: not only yours and mine, but the pain of every bug anyone ever squashed and every worm that comes out of the ground in the rain to dry up on a rock.” Naä chuckled. “Well, it’s all I can do to get through my own life. I mean, doesn’t it sound exhausting?”
They walked in the dust a while. Finally Rimgia said (because this was something she had thought about many times before): “I wish I could change places with thee, Naä—could just put my feet into the prints thy feet leave on the path and from there go where thou goest, see what thou seest. I wish I could become thee! And give up being me.”
“Whatever for?” Naä knew how much the youngsters were in awe of her; but whenever it came out in some open way, it still surprised her.
“Once every three years,” Rimgia said, “I’ll go on a wander for a week — maybe tramp far enough to find a village so much like Çiron that I might as well not have started out. Or I’ll sit in the woods and dream. And the most exciting thing that’ll actually happen will be that I see a Winged One from Hi-Vator pass overhead. But thou hast been to dozens of lands, Naä. And thou wilt go to dozens more. Thou hast learned the songs of peoples all over the world and thou hast come to sing them here to us — and thou makest us, for the moments of thy song, soar like men and women with wings — while all I do is go home from the fields to cook for my brother and father.” She laughed a little, because she was a good girl, who loved her father and brother even as she complained of them. “So now thou knowst why, for a while at any rate, I would be thee!”
“Well,” Naä said, “I must cook for myself, and though most days I like it, some days are lonely. Nor is the lean-to I live in all that comfortable.” Even saying it, Naä was thinking that she wouldn’t change her life with a king’s. For the friendly, gregarious, and curious folk of Çiron made real loneliness a difficult state to maintain. “Right now, though, I’ve got to see Ienbar in his shack at the burial meadow. I told him I would come by today, once the water cart passed. But I shall see you tomorrow — and who knows, maybe make a song about a wonderfully interesting redheaded woman who, while she cooks for her brother and father, takes her questions to…the very edge of death and back!”
“Thou’rt the one going to the burial field,” Rimgia said, pretending not to be desperately pleased at the prospect of being the subject of a song. “And thou’rt the one who has heard all the strange ideas of the world — not I. Yes, I would change places with thee if I could, Naä—though if those foreign elders’ strange idea is right, it means that someday I may have to live your life, and you mine — that we might change places yet!”