The Mantooth

by Christopher Leadem

Chapter 31

It was evening before Kalus said anything to Sylviana of the morning's adventures. First there had been work to do, then he felt reluctant to worry her. Finally, as they sat side by side on a flat stone before the diminishing fire, she asked him.

'Where did Avatar take you?' For an answer he reached into his pouch and took out the cactus buds, and laid them on the stone between. 'Did you ever see these, or hear of them? They come from a desert plant that is like but unlike others I have seen. He was very intent on my eating them—-he risked much—-but I wanted to talk to you first.'

She took one in her fingers, and held it up against the light. 'If I didn't know better….. They look like peyote buttons.'

'What are they?'

'A hallucinogenic cactus, used by the Native Americans in dances and religious ceremonies. It's a kind of drug, if that's the right word for something found in Nature. It's supposed to open the mind, and let you see things beyond the physical reality.'

'Is it a kind of magic, then?' He was fascinated and intrigued that the tiger had experienced this elevated state, and wanted him to feel it, too.

'I guess you could call it that. But one very dangerous to the young, or to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.'

'Have you ever eaten them?'

'No. I've smoked marijuana, which is safer….. But Kalus, these can't possibly be peyote.'

'Why not?'

'Because if the tiger had eaten them he'd have gone crazy: he wouldn't have understood. He wouldn't have been able to think it through.'

'And maybe for that same reason he wasn't afraid. You still don't see it, do you? An animal's mind isn't less than ours, only different. He lives in his world as clearly, and understands it as well, as you and I. He is not a half-wakened child.'

'Well, assuming all that's true, and that this is peyote. Do you think you're ready for it? Because I promise you, it would take your mind to places it's never been. It could be very frightening….. Now you're scaring me.'

Indeed, he had all but stopped listening, gazing instead with fixed intensity upon the mystical substance before him.

'I want to try, Sylviana, if only for the pains it cost me to bring it here.' He looked at her intently. 'Where Avatar leads, I want to follow if I can.'

'I can't stop you, but….. Oh, Kalus. I'm so afraid you'll hurt yourself. And after all we've been through.'

He saw the wisdom of this, and her deep concern. 'What if eat just one, and you are here with me?'

The endless conflict between safety and wild freedom once more presented itself. Both felt it clearly. She hesitated, then said.

'If we do it, we do it together.'

'All right.'

Kalus put a bud in his mouth. Sylviana did the same.

***

'This is amazing.'

Roughly an hour had passed, and these words so broke the stillness that it seemed as if Kalus had then and there invented speech. And indeed, so far as concerned the virgin sea on which they now sailed, eternal and boundless, these were the first words, and he and the woman-child, the true Adam and Eve.

For some time now he had remained as a near statue, only his eyes and forehead working, studying in alternate wonder his hand, the circle of stones, then the altar and mirror behind it. Sylviana watched him, feeling the same awe of the experience, and perhaps to a greater degree, the accompanying danger. She answered simply.

'Yes.'

Her voice, like a pebble in a pool, touched the glassy waters of his spirit, sending out ripples of thought and feeling which seemed as endless as the pool itself. Regaining his center, he became placid with the wisdom of silence, until the shoots that stirred within him were ready to blossom once more in true speech. Sylviana was becoming concerned, but he had not forgotten her.

'All my days,' he said finally, 'I've judged life by the pale shadow of it in which I've often been forced to live, never guessing that the heart. . .the very bones of it. . .are ALIVE.' He paused.

'It seems to me now, as it did when I was a child, that no hope, no dream is ever fully lost, so long as the least fragment remains alive inside you. It becomes like a seed—-sleeping, dormant. But not dead. Until, if we can endure, and fight our way to a better place where sun and water yet flow, it is called gently back to life.'

He looked at her, tears streaming down his face. 'I am alive! And you, my endless miracle. Are alive, and here with me.'

She took his hand, so close, and pressed it to her lips.

'Be gentle, my loving Kalus. Be gentle. There are still so many wounds.'

Never, it seemed to him, had she spoken more truly. For he now felt in the wrenching of his heart, as surely as if the flesh itself ached and bled, the many scars that lay across him. He became quiet, and put his head against her, knowing that for all his yearning, patience alone would heal him, and make those forgotten dreams possible.

Time passed.

At length Kalus raised himself, understanding, and better able to handle the heightened state of his senses, feeling once more like a peaceful sea from which the gale has passed, softened and grateful.

'Thank you,' he said to her. He took a deep breath.

'Are you all right?'

There was something more than womanly concern in her voice. An intense curiosity had taken hold of her, as if she too pondered some great riddle of her past. The questions twirled like serpents about the object she now surveyed.

'Yes. What are you thinking?'

'I've been looking at the mirror,' she said, gazing at it still. 'All this time we've taken the altar, and the visions of that night, for granted, perhaps because the questions were too deep, and they frightened us….. But what does it all mean, Kalus? What's BEHIND it?'

Turning toward the singular apparatus, which like her he had left aside until this night as simply too much to contemplate, he was again drawn by its silent mystery. But in his more earthy, less ethereal way, he took the question literally. What lay BEHIND it? And stirred at last to physical action, he took from his pouch the round hammer-stone and approached the blue-black mirror, which seemed to waver in strange patterns before him.

As the woman watched, he tapped first along the rock immediately surrounding the glass, then above, and around the altar. There could be no doubt: the sounds were hollow. Some hidden chamber lay beyond. He turned to his companion.

'Shall I break the glass?'

Again she felt an inner turmoil. But her need to know was so great…..
'Yes.'

He shielded his eyes with his arm, much as he had on the night when together they heard the Voice. . .and hurled his stone into the heart of it.

With a crash the mirror burst. And when she dared to open her eyes again, her first reaction was disappointment. Only a hole remained, lined about the edges with jagged bits of glass. But forbidding and tooth-like as these appeared, they could with care be removed, and the passage rendered safe. This Kalus set out to do, protecting his hand with a small skin and pulling out the pieces one by one, unable yet to penetrate the gloom of what lay beyond.

'Bring me the torch,' he said to her.

But now the girl became suddenly timid. Seeing the result of her handiwork, she wondered if in her restless curiosity she had not tempted the undoing of all Faith.

'It's all right,' he said, somehow knowing her thoughts. 'If a belief can be so easily destroyed, by the least physical reality, it is not worthy of the hope we place in it. I would rather put my faith in something that can be trusted.'

Her eyes pleaded.

'I know,' he said more quietly. 'Nothing is that simple. But the miracle of the Voice is not banished yet. Bring me the torch, and we'll see what lies beyond.'

Slowly she calmed the surge of religious fear, and took from its mount on the wall the torch that they had made. She handed it to him as he continued to reach across the polished granite, removing or brushing aside the broken glass that remained. He then moved the torch from side to side, trying to see…..

'There is a room, about the same size of the upper cave. But it is higher, and filled with objects I don't know.' Taking the fur canopy from his bed, he folded it and used it to line the edges, still rough, of the opening. Then tossing the light in gently ahead of him, he mounted the altar. And passed within.

'I'm coming, too,' came the woman's voice after him. Perceiving no immediate danger, he wedged the torch into an opening, and helped her through the empty, oval space. Upon regaining her feet, the girl looked around her. . .and gave voice to her dismay.

'Computers.' And so it was. One entire wall of the square-cut chamber consisted of nothing but the sterile MACHINES: voice and thought analyzers, communications and memory, species, mythology, and logic sequencers. The woman felt used, betrayed.

'All that time in the cave, alone and afraid. My only hope was the voice that spoke to me through the glass. To know that it was reading my thoughts and secret hopes, and telling me to remain there….. Just MACHINES. All a terrible hoax.'

'Not all, my sweet Sylvie, and not terrible. The warnings they spoke were true, and may have saved your life. And in the end, I did come to you.' He put his arm around her.

'And is it not a miracle after all? Think of it. I was born fully human, on a night when stars fell from the sky. Then Akar comes to me in Barabbas' cave: I see a terrible vision, and am made an outcast. The Mantis finds you in the mountains of the North and brings you here. We are brought together.' He turned towards her. 'Even if machines could accomplish all or part of that, so many miracles had to come first. Life on Earth. The Universe itself, rather than a great, formless void.

'What are the odds of it?' he continued. 'That you and I should be standing here now, alive and still young, with love and hope, and the chance to make a better life. Is that not miracle enough?'

'I know what you're saying. And of course you're right. It just felt better. . .I don't know. . .to think that God was watching me. That He loved and cared about ME….. I'm going to miss that.'

'When I was a child, I thought as a child,' he quoted. 'When we are young we need such illusions, such security. And who is to say what does and does not exist in the world beyond our sight? Not I. Here I stand, surrounded by wonders I could not dream of. To think that a light from a machine could reach inside my mind, and give me the power to speak.'

At this the woman suddenly stirred, and drew away from him. She examined the machinery more closely, confounded, overwhelmed. It wasn't possible.

'What is it, Sylviana?' Still for a time she could not speak, trying to follow the rapid, and incredible chain of thought.

'My father was a scientist,' she said finally. 'And I knew something of on-going research. This technology: the fire that burned from nothing, the ability to read my thoughts….. And the violet beam, GIVING YOU THE POWER OF SPEECH. Kalus, unless I'm dead wrong. This equipment, and the altar. . .weren't left here by men! We haven't advanced nearly this far.'

With this her weary despondency left her. She was consumed instead by the eager, questioning thought that her father had passed on to her almost without her knowing it: Science, the study of the visible God.

Examining the back of the chamber, she found a steep passage carved into the rock, after a single bend to the left, leading in a straight line upward and eastward. But surely carved' was not the right word. The walls were smooth as glass, the floor rippled, as if to accommodate some creature which had used the uneven surface to enter and return….. The slanting tube rose far out of sight—-to the top, she imagined, of Skither's fifteen-hundred foot mountain. A score of masons couldn't have done the fine work in twenty years.

'What does it mean?' asked Kalus, lost in the wake of her discovery and unable to follow.

'The oldest question of all, Kalus. Is there life among the stars? But here, let's follow the passage and see where it leads. I'll tell you more when I know more.'

Now it was he who became trepid, not understanding. She couldn't help herself. She laughed.

'Oh, did I look as foolish when you broke the mirror? There's no reason to be afraid. I'm sure there's no one here now. Machinery this advanced could have been working completely on its own for centuries.'

She took his hand, and together they made their way up the long, arrow-straight passageway, pacing their steps and resting often, so as not to exhaust themselves in the climb and have nothing left. And yet at each pause their sense of wonder, as well as the now tenable magic of the peyote, only seemed to increase.

For so, too, do Science and the indescribable beauty Nature walk—-the study and living manifestation, respectively, of the enigmatic Spirit of the Universe.

And as they stepped out at last onto a high platform open to the stars, both felt it so clearly. The sabled dome of sky, scattered with living diamonds, throbbed and pulsed, undeniable: Eternity's Breath.

And though they found nothing more alien or fantastic than a smooth, half-crater floor, opening unbarriered on the East, still, this was more than enough. The vastness of the sky reached like a limitless ocean, islanded by countless suns and unseen planets.

And on the nearer, more tangible horizon, its pounding surf just audible in the distance….. Kalus' heart caught in his throat. How it called to him! Earth-mystical, everlasting, unvanquished by the follies of men. . .he saw it as for the first time. Endlessly living.

The Sea.

*

They remained there until morning, speaking or in silence, taking in the enormity of life, and thinking things they'd never thought before.

While the silent stars watched.