INTO SIRATHEN
Scene 44
Denzari touched the Sirathen symbol of the pedestal.
The chamber’s walls and floors shuddered. He looked down at the panel, now with the Sirathen symbol glowing. “We’ve arrived. Let’s get outside and away from here.” The chamber was circular, its ceiling gently arched, with a great tree-root penetrating the center above the pedestal and branching out and down the wall on all sides.
“There.” Daryuz pointed to a door in the wall facing the tilted pedestal. The glow from the Sirathen symbol gave just enough light to show a metal door and frame, with a large lever across it. Ajina held up a glowstick. Some vinelike roots had curled over the frame and onto the door’s hinges and lever.
“Let’s take our time,” Denzari said. “We don’t know what’s out there.”
“Yes, but we know what’s coming after us,” Selech replied.
“Ooh!” Piotras had his hands at his temples.
“What is it?” Derizan turned to him.
“Inside… I don’t know. It’s nothing… where you are. Inside me.” He slumped to the floor near the wall.
“Innerspace,” Guinban said, going over to sit by him. Astina joined the two, opening a waterskin.
“This is different,” Piotras breathed. “Not… one of the aliens I know. Something… bigger.”
Tellina held Samantine close, bending to her little baby, listening intently, “She’s saying… words! Oh! She’s singing something.” She stroked the little face looking up at her with wide eyes.
Derizan’s body jolted. Gasping, he sat down next to the pedestal. “We’d better get going! My partner is…” and he pulled himself to his feet again. In him, Fiarsinhilh’s image seemed to vibrate, with a green glow that flared and faded in a cycle of change. “Something’s happening!”
Daryuz, Selech, Denzari, and Alumaras were at the door, quickly stripping away roots and trying the lever. Straining, they raised it, pulling on the door. It opened toward them to show some paved steps leading upward, curving gently left out of sight.
“Come on!” Selech called out. Astina and Ajina took Derizan’s arms, and they all headed through the door, up the steps, to another door. It was larger and heavier than the first, slanted back sharply towards them at its top like an outside cellar entrance. Its lever was knotted in thick roots. With beams and muscles, they cleared the way, pulled on the lever, and with a mighty effort shoved the door upward and out, throwing off a cavalcade of dirt, debris, and gravel, to climb out into deep, mold-scented gloom on an uneven, barren forest floor.
In a high, sweet voice, little Samantine sang.
“There!” Piotras pointed. Off past the towering growth of a tree great beyond possibility, a body lay sprawled. They gathered around it.
“Is he dead?” Selech.
Astina knelt by the figure. “No. He’s asleep or unconscious. I don’t see any wounds.”
Everyone gathered around. The man was dressed for travel. His face seemed at peace.
# # #
He dreams.
A maze of rivers and roots runs beneath me. I hang suspended in a cloudy sky. The maze fills with reflected sunlight, sparkling in currents of brilliance back and forth along the water until they seem wires carrying messages back and forth in a pulsing network of meaning. The sky buoys me without touch; I bob up and down a little in the undulant winds.
I spread my arms and begin to move forward like an arrow. Lower my arms forward, and I climb; raise my arms back, and I dive. A shadow flicks over my vision.
As I turn my head to see above me, huge dagger claws stab my sides, and my heart stops.
Blackness. No heartbeat. No breath. I try, but I’m paralyzed. I hear the hiss of the forest again. It begins to rise into an edged ultrasonic shriek so strong that pain stabs my head. Here and there, blackness lightens to charcoal.
The shriek fades upward. Shadows in my staring field of vision begin to move as if the day is passing more and more quickly. The movement accelerates into a flicker of light and dark, which soon gets so rapid that I sense only a continuing grayness. Is this a dream? I relax and let the grayness fill me.
My sense of now is gone.
Thousands of years of history flood me. These trees are sentient, no, not the wood or the bark or the leaves, but the heart, no, that's not right. I'm missing the language and the ideas for it. My arms and legs still twitch from – what was it – the dream? No. From the infusion, the teaching, the sharing, I don't know.
The whole forest is a mind, or at least occupied by a mind, that works in uncountable numbers of fibers or threads, all very slowly, reaching very far. Humans and other sentiences buzz frantically like flies on the hide of some vast grazing intelligence.
It sees me.
