“When you are restored, what will you do?”
“Then I shall be who I am, and see what is to be seen and do what is to be done. I am of the Involucra, and as I understand things I am the last, and all that we ever thought to do is either fully done or no longer worth doing. I shall have to determine what my correct actions ought to be. I can only be what I always was. I would hope to see what remains of our great work, the Shellworlds, and see what is to be seen in the galaxy and beyond, while acknowledging that the need for the Shellworlds themselves has passed now. I must accept that all has changed and I can be but a curio, a throwback, an exhibit. Perhaps an example, a warning.”
“Why warning?”
“Where are the rest of my people now?”
“Gone. Unless we are injuriously mistaken. Quite gone.”
“So, a warning.”
“But all peoples go,” Oramen said gently, as though explaining something to a child. “No one remains in full play for long, not taking the life of a star or a world as one’s measure. Life persists by always changing its form, and to stay in the pattern of one particular species or people is unnatural, and always deleterious. There is a normal and natural trajectory for peoples, civilisations, and it ends where it starts, back in the ground. Even we, the Sarl, know this, and we are but barbarians by the standards of most.”
“Then I need know more of the manner of our going, and mine. Was our end natural, was it normal, was it — if it was not natural — deserved? I do not yet even know why I am within here. Why so preserved? Was I special, and so glorified? Or excessively ordinary, and so chosen to represent all due to my very averageness? I recall no vice or glory of my own, so cannot think I was specified for great achievement or committed depravity. And yet I am here. I would know why. I hope to discover this shortly.”
“What if you discover you are not what you think you are?”
“Why should I not be?”
“I don’t know. If so much is in doubt…”
“Let me show you what I do know,” the quiet voice murmured. “May I?”
“Show me?”
“Step again into the place where we may better communicate, if you would.”
Oramen hesitated. “Very well,” he said. He stepped backwards, found the square daubed on the planking. He glanced back, saw Savidius Savide floating nearby, then faced forward towards the light grey patch on the Sarcophagus surface.
The effect appeared to take less time than it had before. Very soon, it seemed, he experienced that curious dizziness again. Following the momentary feeling of imbalance came the sensation of weightlessness and carelessness, then that of dislocation, wondering where he was or when he was.
Then he knew who he was and where and when.
He felt that he was in that strange sunlit room again, the one where he had seemed to be earlier when he’d had the sensation of all his memories whirling past outside. He seemed to be sitting on a small, crudely fashioned wooden chair while sunlight blazed brightly outside, too bright for him to be able to make out any details of whatever landscape lay beyond the doorway.
A strange lassitude filled him. He felt that he ought to be able to get up from the little chair but at the same time had no desire to do so. It was far more pleasant to simply sit here, doing nothing.
There was somebody else in the room, behind him. He wasn’t concerned about this; the person felt like a benign presence. It was browsing through books on the shelves behind him. Now he looked carefully about the room, or just remembered it better, he realised that it was entirely lined with books. It was like a tiny library, with him in the middle. He wanted to look round and see who his guest actually was, but still somehow could not bring himself to do so. Whoever they were, they were dropping the books to the floor when they were finished with them. This did concern him. That was not very tidy. That was disrespectful. How would they or anybody else find the books again if they just dumped them on the floor?
He tried very hard indeed to turn round, but could not. He threw every part of his being into the effort just to move his head, but it proved impossible. What had seemed like a kind of laziness, a feeling of not being able to be bothered which had been perfectly acceptable only moments earlier because it was something that was coming from within himself, was now revealed as an imposition, something forced upon him from outside. He was not being allowed to move. He was being kept paralysed by whoever this was searching through the books behind him.
This was an image, he realised. The room was his mind, the library his memory, the books specific recollections.
The person behind him was rifling through his memories!
Could this be because…?
He had had a thought, earlier. It had barely registered, scarcely been worth thinking further about because it had seemed both so irrational and so needlessly horrendous and alarming. Was that thought, that word somehow connected to what was happening now?
He had been tricked, trapped. Whoever was searching the room, the library, the shelves, the books, the chapters and sentences and words that made up who he was and what his memories were must have suspected something. He almost didn’t know what it was, certainly didn’t want to know what it was, and felt a terrible compulsion, comical in another context, utterly terrifying here and now, not to think of—
Then he remembered, and the being behind him which was searching his thoughts and memories found it at the same time.
The very act of remembering that one fleeting thought, of exposing that single buried word, confirmed the horror of what this thing might really be.
You’re not, he thought, you’re—
He felt something detonate in his head; a flash of light more brilliant and blinding than that outside the door of the little room, more incandescent than any passing Rollstar, brighter than anything he had ever seen or known.
He was flying backwards, as though he’d thrown himself. A strange creature sailed past — he only glimpsed it; an Oct, of course, with a blue body and red limbs, its filmy surfaces all glittering — then something whacked into the small of his back and he was spinning, somersaulting, falling away into space, falling over and over…
He hit something very hard and things broke and hurt and all the light went away again and this time took him with it.
There was no awakening, not in any sudden, now-here-I-am sense. Instead, life — if life it could be called — seemed to seep back into him, slowly, sluggishly, in tiny increments, like silse rain dripping from a tree, all accompanied by pain and a terrible, crushing weight upon him that prevented him from moving.
He was in that book-lined room again, stricken, immobile in that little seat. He had imagined that he was free of it, that he could rise from it, but after a brief, vivid sensation of sudden, unwanted movement, here he was again, paralysed, laid out, spread prone across the ground, helpless. He was a baby once more. He had no control, no movement, could not even support his own head. He knew there were people around him and was aware of movement and yet more pain, but nothing showed its true shape, nothing made sense. He opened his mouth to say something, even if it was just to beg for help, for an end to this grinding, fractured pain, but only a mewl escaped.