“Bill me, how funny,” Ramchandra said sleepily. “Bill me… Me Bill…”
“Yes. That’s it. I’m Bill, that’s what he meant.”
“Oh,” Ramchandra said, a deep exhalation, and she felt his relaxed body go tense. Since Bob’s death she had not trusted the Ndif, or rather without distrusting any one of them she had lost trust in their world, she feared harm. She raised her head quickly to see if someone had entered the hut. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep. You talked to God.”
“The dream?”
“Yes. He told you his name.”
“Bill?” she said, and because the alarm was past and she was still sleepy and Ramchandra was laughing, she laughed. “God’s name is Bill?”
“Yes, yes. Bill Kopman, or Kopfman, or Cupman.”
“Bik-Kop-Man?”
“The T assimilates to the ‘k,’ as in sikka, the fiber they make fishing lines of—silk.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“Bill Kopman, who made this world.”
“Who what? Who?”
“Who made this world. This world—Yirdo, the poro, the puti bushes, the Ndif. You saw him in your dream. A fifteen-year-old boy, with glasses, probably also acne and weak ankles. You saw him, and so my eyes see for a moment too. A skinny boy, lazy, shy. He reads stories, he daydreams, about the great blond hero who can hunt and fight and make love all day and night. His head is full of the hero, himself, and so it all comes to be.”
“Ram, stop it.”
“But you talked to him, not I! You asked him, ‘What for?’ But he couldn’t tell you. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand desire. He is entirely caught in it, bound by it, he sees and knows nothing but his own immense desire. And so he makes the world. Only one free of desire is free of the worlds, you know.”
Tamara looked, as if over her shoulder, back into her dream. “He speaks English,” she said, unwillingly.
Ramchandra nodded. His tranquillity, his acceptant, playful tone, reassured her; it was interesting to lie looking together at the same silly dream.
“He writes it all down,” she said, “his fantasies about the Ndif. Maps and everything. A lot of kids do that. And some adults…”
“Perhaps he has a notebook of his invented language. It would be interesting to compare with my notebooks.”
“Much easier just to go find him and borrow his.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know Old Ndif.”
“Ramchandra.”
“Beloved.”
“You are saying that because a boy writes nonsense in a notebook in—in Topeka, a planet thirty-one light-years away comes into existence, with all its plants and animals and people. And always has been in existence. Because of the boy and the notebook. And what about the boy with a notebook in Schenectady? or New Delhi?”
“Evidently!”
“Your nonsense is much worse than Bill Kopman’s.”
“Why?”
“Time—And there isn’t room—”
“There is room. There is time. All the galaxies. All the universes. That is infinity. The worlds are infinite, the cycles are endless. There is room. Room for all the dreams, all the desires. No end to it. Worlds without end.”
His voice now was remote.
“Bill Kopman dreams,” he said, “and the God dances. And Bob dies, and we make love.”
She saw the boy’s blind yearning face before her, filling the world, no way around it, no path.
“You’re only joking, Ramchandra,” she said; she was shivering, now.
“I’m only joking, Tamara,” he said.
“If it weren’t a joke I couldn’t bear it. Being caught here, stuck in somebody else’s dream, dream world, alternate world, whatever it is.”
“Why caught? We call Ankara; they send the launch for us; next passage out we can go back to Earth if we like. Nothing has changed.”
“But this idea that it’s somebody else’s world. What if—what if—while we’re still here—Bill Kopman woke up?”
“Once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up,” Ramchandra said, and his voice was sad.
She wondered why that made him sad; she found it comforting. Brooding, she found further comfort. “It wouldn’t all depend on him, even if he started it,” she said. “All the uninhabited places, they’d just be blanks on his maps, but they’re full of life, animals and trees and ferns and little flies… Reality is what works, isn’t it? And the old men and women. They aren’t, they wouldn’t be, part of… of Bill’s wet dreams. He probably doesn’t even know any old people, he isn’t interested. So they get free.”
“Yes. They begin to imagine their world for themselves. To think, to make words. To tell the story.”
“I wonder if he ever thinks of death.”
“Can anyone think of death?” Ramchandra asked. “One can only do it. As Bob did it… Can one dream of sleep?”
The soft, dust-grey light was more intense, as the clouds thinned, drifting silent to the east.
“He looked anxious, in the dream,” Tamara murmured. “Frightened. As if… ‘Bill me…’ As if Bob paid… the debt.”
“Tamara, Tamara, you go before me, always before me.” His forehead was against her breasts; she touched his hair lightly.“Ramchandra,” she said, “I want to go home, I think. Away from this place. Back to the real world.”
“You go before, I follow you.”
“Oh, humble you are, liar, hoaxer, dancer, you’re so humble, but you don’t really care, do you? You’re not frightened.”
“Not any more,” he said, in a breath, barely audible.
“How long have you understood about this place? Since you danced with Bro-Kap and the others, that first time?”
“No, no. Only now, since your dream, this night, now. You saw. All I can do is say. But yes, if you like, I can say it because I have always known it. I speak my native tongue, because you have brought me home. The house under the trees behind the temple of Shiva in a suburb of Calcutta, is that my home? Is this? The world, the real world, which one? What does it matter? Who dreamed the Earth? A greater dreamer than you or I, but we are the dreamer, Shakti, and the worlds will endure as long as our desire.”
West
Gwilan’s Harp
The harp had come to Gwilan from her mother, and so had her mastery of it, people said. “Ah,” they said when Gwilan played, “you can tell, that’s Diera’s touch,” just as their parents had said when Diera played, “Ah, that’s the true Penlin touch!” Gwilan’s mother had had the harp from Penlin, a musician’s dying gift to the worthiest of pupils. From a musician’s hands Penlin too had received it; never had it been sold or bartered for, nor any value put upon it that can be said in numbers. A princely and most incredible instrument it was for a poor harper to own. The shape of it was perfection, and every part was strong and fine: the wood as hard and smooth as bronze, the fittings of ivory and silver. The grand curves of the frame bore silver mountings chased with long intertwining lines that became waves and the waves became leaves, and the eyes of gods and stags looked out from among the leaves that became waves and the waves became lines again. It was the work of great craftsmen, you could see that at a glance, and the longer you looked the clearer you saw it. But all this beauty was practical, obedient, shaped to the service of sound. The sound of Gwilan’s harp was water running and rain and sunlight on the water, waves breaking and the foam on the brown sands, forests, the leaves and branches of the forest and the shining eyes of gods and stags among the leaves when the wind blows in the valleys. It was all that and none of that. When Gwilan played, the harp made music; and what is music but a little wrinkling of the air?