Just for a moment it succeeded. Nita got a quick flicker-rush of images and sounds: dawns and sunsets, objects shaped roughly like the clown all rushing hither and yon on unfathomable errands, shouting at one another about incomprehensible things. All kinds of pain were tangled up with the rush and roar of perception, but strangest of all, it was pain that the one who experienced it actually welcomed. For the clown, that pain was a lifeline, something it clung to — as a way to temporarily mask out sensations it couldn’t bear, and as something that could sometimes pierce through the muffling blanket of nonfeeling that kept draping itself over the clown’s body and mind. Nita could feel that the clown hoped there might be more to life than hurting… but it was also willing to suffer the hurt if that meant staying alive to get its own job done.
The storm of pictures and feelings faded, leaving Nita staring down into a roiling, scary darkness. But the darkness was oddly ambivalent, as filled with possibility as with terror.
And I’m the one who finds that strange, not him
, Nita thought. Whoever this was, however simplistic or not his view of the universe might be, he was braver about it than she was.
“I didn’t know everything was like this for you,” Nita said.
The clown winced, as if something had pained it. “I? But I did know. There is no other.”
Nita blinked. It was remarks like this that kept making her wonder if she was dealing with a human or an alien — that, and the way the clown seemed able to cope with some concepts one moment, and then would lose them again the next. Yet again she had to remind herself that there was still no guarantee she was dealing with a human. All the imageries so far — the clown, the robot, the knight — were ones this entity could have pulled out of her own head as possible ways to communicate. And she still needed to be careful not to hurt whatever it was.
Well, I wonder if the version of the Speech I’ve been using is too local, too humanoid? I could try one of the broader recensions. Or the broadest one.
She pulled out her manual to make extra sure of the phrasing. The Enactive Recension was the form in which it was said the One did Its business. Nita was a little nervous about using it, because she could, apparently, make serious changes in her local environment if she was careless while speaking in Enactive. According to an old joke, the asteroid belt had been a planet once, until one of the Powers That Be misconjugated a verb—
Well, I can’t blow anything up if I keep the phrasing simple enough
, Nita thought. This phrasing should be real inoffensive.
“There are more than one of us,” she said.
There was the briefest pause — and this time both clowns put their heads up and screamed. While Nita watched, her mouth open, the first one actually shredded away on the air, in torment and shock.
The second one stood there screaming away, and Nita watched, wide-eyed, wondering if it was going to shred, too. But it didn’t. The scream didn’t stop, either. After a few moments, as her own shock wore off, the noise began to remind Nita of her earliest encounters with Dairine… or rather, with Dairine after she’d first become aware that Nita might possibly be in competition with her for their parents’ attention. Dairine’s lung power at the age of two had initially caused Nita some innocent wonder, but this was a phase that had lasted about five minutes, and now, as the scream just kept on going, Nita let out a long breath and invoked the remedy she’d learned way back then. “All right,” she shouted in the Speech. “Shut UP!”
The second clown fell silent in complete amazement.
“There is more than one of us,” Nita said, into the abruptly echoing silence. “Are. Whatever. I’m sorry if this poses some kind of problem for you. But screaming’s not going to make all the rest of us go away.”
There was another of those long, long pauses.
“Tried that before, huh?” Nita said, not without some amusement.
“And ignoring you,” the clown said, looking past her, and looking annoyed. “That didn’t work, either.”
Nita found herself remembering how desperately she had wanted to ignore the preparations for her mother’s funeral, to the point where she had actually partly succeeded and the funeral itself had begun to seem unreal, like a bad dream. It was after that that the remoteness began to sink into her.
That feeling of nothing mattering, of not wanting to deal with anything
, she thought, the filter I’ve been stuck with… that’s what this guy and I have in common. That’s what’s been drawing us together… even when he’s tried to break the link himself. But somehow it seems important for it not to get broken now
. “Why ignore everybody?” she said.
“Because you’re a distraction.”
“As for the first part of that,” Nita said, “sorry, but you’re confused. I’m here, believe me. And as for the second — a distraction from what?”
The clown looked around at the darkness. “This.”
“Meaning what?”
Out of the darkness, ever so softly, came that growl again.
Nita glanced out into the dark, slightly unnerved. But this is still my dream, she thought. If It tries something cute, I can just slip out. I hope
. “Now there are some contradictions in what you’ve been saying,” she said. “I thought you said you were all by yourself.”
“I am.” This time the phrase, in the Speech, was identical with the Self-declaration of Life. Nita, even more unnerved now, half expected to hear thunder, but none came. The One was either otherwise occupied, or not particularly concerned about having Its lines stolen. “But That, out there… That’s different.”
Nita wasn’t sure that the clown was able to perceive the contradictions. Maybe it can’t. Or maybe different and other don’t mean the same thing for it. Certainly they were different words in the Speech.
“All right,” Nita said. “I won’t argue that.” She noted that the clown wasn’t wincing quite so badly now when she said “I.” “But, look, you don’t have to stay here.”
And suddenly there were two clowns again. One of them was back in the middle of the spotlight.
Nita made a silent bet with herself as to which one would shred next. The spotlit clown said, “But this is all there is.” The one standing in shadow said, “If I go there… That’s waiting.”
One more tiger growl sounded from out in the darkness: Nita’s dream-image of the Lone Power, patient, hungry, willing to wait. But still a little tired, Nita thought. Interesting…
“Yeah, well, so is What’s older,” Nita said. “And doesn’t die, no matter what one of Its older kids intended for the rest of creation.”
This time the screaming didn’t surprise Nita when it started. This time it was the clown in the shadows that shredded. The one in the spotlight looked at Nita in genuine shock. “Where’d you come from?” it said.
“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Theoretically, I’m asleep. Look, now that you’re over not being the only thing in existence — for the moment — do you wear that costume all the time?”
The clown looked at her in astonishment. “You can tell it’s a costume?”
“Under the costumes,” Nita said, “even clowns have lives. Outside the circus, anyway.”
The clown was silent again, for even longer than before. Nita waited, untroubled. This far along in her practice, she had learned that a lot of wizardry wasn’t speech, but silence. “It seemed right,” the clown said. “The body I wear usually doesn’t work real well, and that makes people laugh. They may as well laugh for a good reason as for a bad one.”