SHE SINGS
Scene 51
“Derizan! Deri! Are you all right?” Lines of stress in Astina’s face. Derizan blinked.
“I’m all right,” he said slowly. “A being was there with me and Piotras and Fiarsinhilh. A time being.” He stirred and sat up.
“But you’ve been out for hours! We couldn’t wake you or him either.” She pointed to Piotras, now supported by Guinban and Ajina. “And that sleeper over there, the one we found when we came here, he hasn’t moved.”
Denzari said, “What happened to you? What is a time being?”
So Derizan stood. Fiarsinhilh whispered into him, “Don’t say too much at once.”
“I don’t know what it was. It said to call it Ben. It showed me Samantine. She was like pure light. She was singing. I couldn’t understand.” Derizan paused. “It was beautiful.”
Piotras nodded vigorously. “It was glorious! Her voice had many tones. She created this amazing living thing! It spread huge wings of pure flame and soared away through time, shedding sun-feather birds! It…” he fell speechless.
Abruptly, a deep voice spoke around them, and every one of the travelers started in surprise. “Ingailanai!” and they all found themselves in innerspace in soft fog of light. Ben was singing to all of them, and his melodies shaped meaning.
“I am Ben. To draw you together, and to fuel your hope, I tell you what has happened. Listen to me with all your hearts.”
The light around them shaded and danced grace.
“A great and terrible breach has vanished from time forever. When you mistakenly transported yourselves to another world, in that place you awakened a creature of devouring. It had consumed all life on its planet, and it was hungry. It sensed your brief presence. It created a Sending of itself to pursue you to your world – this one, full of life. If that creature had found its way here, it would consume all life here.
“This Sending came, smelling life and following after you. But a collision took place. The Sending arrived amid your pursuers, two for the andro and two for the deserter. They fought, and the Sending was destroyed. Only one of the others survived, an ordinary human.”
“The Hounds died!” Piotras, murmuring in wonder.
Ben continued without pause. “In the greater world, your Samantine felt the quake of this convergence. When the Sending first appeared here, she knew it through time, she knew its source and its world, and she knew its meaning. The Sending returned to its home world to bring news to the creature that spawned it, but she sang to a few molecules of the message it left for its summoner. The summoner, with no name I will speak, devoured the message, and was infected with change. Watch now.”
In an inner vision everyone shared, a dark planet appeared, so dark that even its sun-star could not brighten it beyond dim grayness. One blackened point expanded to fill the vision. A sweet, rich tone sounded, another followed, and a spark appeared, nothing more than a pinpoint in the great image. It cast out faint, thin threads of light weaving all around itself, silver and gold and copper traces accelerating, thickening, brightening; it sang, a mighty tree growing at fever-speed from a minuscule curled-back shell.
From rotted, thick, forgotten scabs of black and petrified bark, shivers of movement split the stony shards apart, bearing forth pale green and olive and ochre shoots and feelers, setting the dark petroglyphs of wooden death afire with cerulean resurrection.
The dead planet wakes. Runners surge across shadows, lighting the resurging rebellion of life, spanning lands and continents and forgotten seas, kindling efflorescence; creatures rise out of nothingness to add their notes and musics to the now-mounting symphony of the Creator’s love.
The vision draws away; the tree expands, shines, blooms, its roots delving, its limbs soaring, its fruits enriching in explosions of crimson and orange and sky and sea and cyan and vermilion, its musics celebrating its seeding, its sending, its raining of great hosts of holy delight.
“You see now the universal Tree of Life, sprung from the few seeding-notes of the Revealer’s singing,” Ben said. “Now it is all the revitalized trees of its Home World, now all healed and cured, woven together root and branch, its creature possessor now dissolved, transformed into the sacred energies of its life and the world.”
Silence. The luminous fog around them coalesced into living pearl.
“How can this all happen in moments?” asked Selech. “And she – Samantine – is just a baby!”
Ben laughed so deeply that the ground beneath them undulated. “These are MY moments, not yours, little one. You are bound in a smooth-flowing river of events, but I am a master of the rivers of time, their leaps, their eddies, their vortices, their curls and plunges. No way is there for you to name a time for the things I have shown you. But when Samantine comes of age in your stream, she may choose to tell you more. Ianaliagni…”
And then they emerged from innerspace to the dim forest again, its hiss pulsing slightly. The unconscious man they found on the forest floor now sat looking at them, his eyes wide,
