The rain is back again. I would rather wait inside the cottage but instead I am sitting with Dovrich Galda on the edge of the sea again. I’m just being sociable, I tell myself, but I lie to myself now as a matter of course. I’m after information. Obviously.
“We’re quite lucky you know,” Galda says conversationally. “When the Amnyine built the temple, it wasn’t on the coast at all. In another fifty thousand years or so the sea will break through the last of these granite cliffs and it will all be reduced to rubble, transdimensional blueprints or no transdimensional blueprints. There’s a limit to the changes those Amnyine systems can resist.”
“Not my problem,” I respond with good humour.
She smiles darkly.
“Avva never stood a chance, did he?”
“The colour was an exact match,” I say. “The Indigo was the indigo of the Congress of Shadows on Issulon. It was bound to trigger a crisis for him. That’s how it works. He wanted to learn something about the heresy of his old pupil, and he thought this pilgrimage would help him. Now he’s met his chromatic need like all the others. I can’t say whether it has helped him or not. Only he can tell you that.”
“Hmmm… Convenient, for us though. Since we both intend to proceed to the end.”
I nod. There is no reason to deny it now. Which means that Galada will need to fail this next meditation before I can proceed. That could be a problem. I don’t have any handle on what’s going on inside her head. I have no idea where the currents of the Violet meditation might take us both and who will be dragged under first.
“You’re the one we keep hearing about in those news stories. The one causing all the trouble. You’re AchmedShankar!” she says suddenly and without warning.
It must be a lucky guess. “Yes,” I answer simply. There is no point in lying now. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t,” she says. “Your coin and your accent betrayed your origins and I keep track of what’s happening on Earth. Your reaction to the priest’s story made me wonder.”
The news from Earth - even here on Silusia-Alpha they’ve heard of me. Wasn’t I reading about myself in that article from Rillyon on the day of the yellow mediation? It was an interesting piece. It’s always fascinating to read about oneself in the third person, especially when the information might be coloured by one’s enemies. I say as much to Galda.
“So, tell me,” she asks, obviously intrigued. “What’s the truth of it, and how did you end up here?”
I hesitate for a second, but I sense it is time for confession. Sometimes you have to give a little to get a little and it is my turn for a story. Perhaps it will free my mind for this final coloured meditation.
“Very well,” I say. “You’ve only heard the propaganda and the rumours so let me give you my side of it. How about we start with Inuwarmah. Have you heard of it? I was there at the end.”
“I vaguely remember the name coming up a few years ago, but I can’t recall the details,” Galda muses.
I give her a simplified version of the tale I’ve already told you. “Then suddenly, Inuwarmah was declared to be off limits and all the alien embassies were withdrawn,” I conclude. “It turned out that the native sophonts were using writing, an astonishing discovery which happened not long after I arrived on the planet.”
“More importantly, from my personal perspective it was where I made friends with three useful contacts, Ochre Jones, Fitararye Wilson and Lia Tan Yew Leong. They would become the first three spokes in my wheel, giving me an insight into the society of the Void Priests, access to the councils of human interstellar commerce and a tenuous tendril into the worlds of the thinderin.”
I don’t give Galda the interesting details of exactly how we all became friends. That’s none of her business and the habit of keeping secrets is not one I break easily, so I’m deliberately a bit vague about it. I don’t explain that the “discovery” of writing at Inuwarmah was no accident; that we four had conspired to achieve the declaration from the thinderin grove that placed Inuwarmah off limits. I’ll tell you now though, for the benefit of this account.
Once the thinderin were convinced that writing systems had been achieved, then under the rules of the Society of Contemporary Races, all alien presence had to be removed from the planet. Ochre Jones role in the plan was to provide “evidence” that the abstract patterns in the art of the Grandarick Roost were more than simple abstractions and were true writing. Lia’s role was to communicate this to the thinderin and persuade them to act. Wilson’s role was to delay the plans of the BXR; to hamper their transports with convenient breakdowns and prevent Chen’s manufactured conflict from wrecking the Roost before our own scheme could come to fruition. My role was to subvert the BXR from within; to act as a spy and subtle saboteur without revealing my BEA affiliation.
Finally, the thinderin solved the problem for us by making the whole issue of how the BXR operated irrelevant because they would no longer be allowed to operate on the planet at all. Werm monitoring sites, thinderin seedlings, the whole colony of St, Lucien, including the Void Chapel and the entire operation of the Great Commercial League and the BXR - all were shut down. Only the thinderin sessile grove would remain until its members died naturally, since it would have been impossible to transplant them without killing them. This was accepted practice and it was a neat solution. Was the claimed “writing” real? No. The thinderin knew it, but they also disapproved of local human politics, and we’d offered them a reason to step in and change that. That’s what all my allies wanted. Even the priests who had put so much work into their mission, understood that it could all have gone desperately wrong without this radical withdrawal. The BEA just wanted the supplies of Fly halted, which this change achieved. They didn’t care how it was done. So, everyone was content, apart from Louis Chen and the BXR, of course but there was absolutely nothing they could do about it unless they wanted to risk the wrath of the Society of Contemporary Races and they weren’t ready to do that.
Galda doesn’t probe for these details. She’s satisfied with my story and that I am only telling it briefly to explain how I met the people that would start my real career. My secret career. I slow up for the next bit. The good stuff. Why I’m here now.
“You ever heard of the expression ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?’”
She nods.
“It’s an ancient little truism but it might have been invented for the current dynasty of the Resource Management World Government. After Inuwarmah my rise through the ranks was rapid and helped by the relationships I’d made there. I learned important lessons in the keeping of secrets and the acquisition and manipulation of new contacts. I became a little hub in a wheel of my own devising and always, spinning, spinning, and spinning as I added new spokes…
“What a complex and duplicitous little agent I became! Ostensibly I was still working for the BXR since they’d never understood how I’d undermined their Fly operation. Below that I was working for the BEA as a double agent, reporting directly to Mohamed Janjua who was always eager to know what the BXR were planning. Then much later I became a special consultant for the Queen of Earth so that Katarina also commanded my private allegiance whilst I continued my public work with the BXR and continued to feed Janjua with the information he craved. But not all of it. In private, I worked for myself. I ran my own agents, theoretically on behalf of others and always deniable when it mattered. Yet secretly some of them were more loyal to me than they were to their supposed paymasters, and I was the hub at the centre.”
“Quite a step up for a humble functionary,” Galda observes.
“True, but it didn’t happen overnight. This was the work of years, you understand.”
“When I first returned to Earth, the BXR sent me to Pokhara to observe the latest round of the Climate Trials. It wasn’t a promotion, but then they weren’t really too pleased with me.”
“Are those things still going on?” Galda asks. “I really thought they came to a final judgement years ago!”
“Well, they still serve a purpose,” I say, “so they can’t be allowed to finish.”
“Hmmm…”
“It’s an impressive venue, the Great Court of Extinction, even if its glory days are in the past. The Resource Management World Government built it almost four hundred years ago when the first dynasty came to power, and they used it for their big set piece show trials.”
“Ah, yes! Don’t they call it the Kangaroo Court?” Galda asks.
“They do. It sits high on Anadu Hill above the city of Pokhara which was once a part of the old nation of Tibet. It overlooks the beautiful Fewa lake with spectacular views of the Himalayan Mountain range behind it. They built it on the neighbouring summit to an older twentieth century Buddhist pagoda which some call the Peace Stupa. The Temple and the Court are the twin glories of Pokhara – both magnificent examples of architecture. The Court is decorated with a rich variety of statuary, friezes and paintings depicting animals, plants, birds, and fish that were victims of recent historic extinctions in the Christian 20th, 21st, and 22nd centuries.
"Its remit is to 'determine the relative guilt or innocence of those historic rulers and organisations who had presided over the mass extinctions of the 20th and 21st centuries, due to crimes of commission or omission and whose reckless stewardship of the environment had resulted in the dislocations and the long-term climatic damage of the whole Earth.'
"I can quote that only because I had to memorise it. It’s expressed more pithily in the carving above the main portico. 'Justice For The Dead.'
"Two marble kangaroos flank the sweep of steps that lead to the main entrance. That’s one reason why supporters and detractors both call it the Kangaroo Court.
"All the exciting stuff happened long ago. In the first phase it was about consolidating power and taking vengeance on political enemies. Those early denunciations which culminated in the hanging of the last president of the old United States from the top of a skyscraper they called the Empire States were certainly about symbolism, but they were also about cementing the new world government’s authority. Then it all got more technical and boring for a while until they perfected the clone scapegoats about thirty years later when it heated up again just before the invention of the G-lift distracted everybody’s attention.
"Apparently, it made good theatre to have a clonal effigy of a controversial early twenty first century United States president called Trump, go down on his knees and beg for forgiveness before they executed him. Simple and crude and not unlike the man himself I believe, although I understand he came to a pretty nasty end in real life during the intercontinental trade wars long before the indignities of the fake public hate shaming of his clone at the Court. I don’t recall the exact details. I’m not an expert on that period of history.”
Galda frowns and looks out to sea. Is that a break in the clouds? Not an obvious one. “It’s not as if the Trials even made any difference when the time came to avoid making the same mistakes,” she says “We still had the Escaloda extinctions after all.”
“On Escaloda,” I point out. “Not on Earth. And much later.”
“They should have known better, though, if they’d seen the Climate Trials.”
“Yes,” I agree mildly. It’s all old history now. Nothing to be done about the Escaloda Extinctions and the probable consequences. Nothing obvious anyway.
“So, I guess the Trials calmed down, huh? Can’t keep that kind of thing going for four hundred years, surely,” she says.
“No,” I agree. “And that’s not what it’s like now. The affairs of the Court have moved on since the second, third and fourth dynasties of the Resource Management Government took charge. Now it’s all much slower and much drier but it’s still political. Their Majesties use the court to tie their enemies up in supposed historic associations of ancestors with climate change deniers or coal miners, or OPEC leaders, or whatever they can pin on them. The punishments are less dramatic and tend to only involve asset stripping.
"I’m not surprised you assumed the Trials were finished. They rarely make much of a news story even on Earth.”
“Why did they send you there, then?”
“Well, there’s a certain amount of interest in the Trials from our alien neighbours. The Werm and a few Viwodian cluster agents maintain small outposts in Pokhara, and they send observers to the Trials. My job was to observe the observers. The BXR like to keep tabs on them, although nothing much ever happens. It turned out I wasn’t the only one observing the observers, though. That’s where I made another contact. Well, more than a contact. A lover as it happened.”
“Now that sounds more like it,” the old lady cackles. “Tell me more of the gossip!”
“Her name was Alice Xin,” I begin. “She was a freelance translator on secondment from something called the Comparative Language Research centre, based in New Chongqing, which I was given to understand ran one of the few modest independent study programs for alien culture outside the auspices of the BXR. She’d been hired by a small party of politicos and merchants representing the Trusters and her job was to help them establish good relations with the Viwodian observers.
“We shared a professional interest. The BXR hadn’t seen fit to provide me with any kind of translator. It was well known that the Viwodian were highly skilled in performing their own translation and quite happy to speak and write in a local tongue. They had a big advantage, after all. The Society of Contemporary races had certainly been monitoring signals from Earth for a long time before first contact and they’d developed quite a profound understanding of our languages before anyone on Earth knew they existed. Nevertheless, there were obvious advantages to understanding Viwodian native communication. One could, theoretically, pick up on cues and nuances that might otherwise be missed. The Viwodia were reputed to be more sympathetic to those who attempted to bridge the species gap with attempts to converse in their own tongue. A Viwodian linguistic expert was an obvious asset in any important discussion.
"Alice was no expert, although she aspired to become one, but even her basic understanding put her light years ahead of me. My task wasn’t an especially important mission for the BXR and in truth they didn’t care all that much about my level of understanding. I was on probation, whilst the BXR tried to work out whether I had any role in the debacle at Inuwarmah. As for the party of Trusters, well, theirs was something of a speculative minority interest venture and even they weren’t hugely invested in the outcome, so Alice was the most expensive translator they were prepared to hire, and they accepted that she was still gaining language experience herself. In fact, they were just happy she wasn’t working for the BXR.
"Our relationship started because I wanted some extra insight into what was going on in the minds of the trial observers, but it didn’t end there. Alice was pretty, smart, funny, and good company. We were about the same age. She seemed to like me too. The man of mystery, she called me, half joking once when she admitted she’d found me intriguing. I told her I worked for the BXR. That wasn’t a secret.
"Up high over Pokhara with the cool winds from the Himalayas, the clear air, the sunshine and the blue skies that picked out all that detail in the distance it was a good place to think; a good place to walk and enjoy the ascetic beauty of the landscape; a good place to contemplate the serenity of the Peace Stupa and to savour the pleasingly simple and satisfying cuisine; chebureki, chexo, gyatog and momo; a good place to fall in love.”
I stop. The words feel suddenly too large to form in the back of my throat. I swallow them back with difficulty. The wind blasts a flurry of rain into my face, and I rub my forearm fiercely over my cheeks and eyes to dry the sudden moisture. It hasn’t all come from the rain, though. Now how did that happen? I thought I’d come to terms with all this on the long journey to Silusia-Alpha but clearly not. I can’t risk speaking until I have myself under better control, so we pause the story and stare out to sea in silence. Just me and Dovrich Galda, alone on the edge of the cliff, at the edge of the Temple at the edge of the Bubble. So many edges. Not time to fall off yet.
I don’t have the old woman pegged as the sensitive type, but she doesn’t say anything for a long time. When she finally speaks it is softer than usual.
“How, exactly do you speak Viwodian then?”, she ventures.
“With great difficulty,” I joke, “although it depends on which version. Alice was most comfortable in the trade language they call ‘Air Viwodian’, which is used by their robotic and other agents that go out into the atmospheres of terrestrial worlds. ‘Low Viwodian’ is the main language family they speak amongst themselves, always underwater in the low-pressure zones which include their star ships, their embassies on Earth and many of their colonies. ‘High Viwodian’ is spoken only in the places they call the true deep - the high-pressure zones such as the ones where they most likely evolved intelligence long before the first humans had left Africa. Alice was trying to learn Low Viwodian but that soon went beyond anything her teachers knew. Even Air Viwodian is imperfectly understood on Earth but at least it is designed for the kind of vocal apparatus that works where we can breathe. Humans can make the sounds, although some of them are uncommon in our native languages. You have to click your fingers or clap to make the proper percussive syllables. Low Viwodian needs instruments and low frequency modulation to translate it for human hearing - lots of rhythm and bass required to speak it.”
“So, you corrupted innocent young Alice for your nefarious purposes, did you?” Galda says slyly, interrupting me before my account turns into a full blown linguistics lecture.
“My nefarious purposes? My seditious treachery, don’t you mean? Or is it, my treasonous betrayal, or my wilful war of terror? I can’t always keep up on how they label me. But no. I didn’t recruit Alice. She recruited me. Well, perhaps we recruited each other. It’s hard to say exactly.”
“Well do your best,” Dovrich says dryly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She bangs her heels on the cliff face and a substantial stone breaks off and tumbles into the waves below.
“Fifty thousand years before the sea breaks through the cliffs to the Temple, is it?” I smile, recalling her observation of a few minutes ago. “Less if you keep kicking them”.
She laughs and I wait for her to finish.
“They like their dichotomies on Earth,” I continue. “I sometimes think it’s the only tool they have to understand the universe; King of Earth and Queen of Earth, Zed men and Pasteracht, BEA and BXR, Trusters and Doubters, everything in neat little two by two categories. Too, too simple.”
“Alice gave me an education. She was well travelled for her age. Perhaps not quite so well-travelled as me, since she’d never left the Earth, but she’d been to plenty of places I’d never seen. She came from a similar social class to my own with Sino-French ancestry and parents who worked in medicine. Her father was an ophthalmologist, and her mother was an orthopaedic surgeon. They worked for Homelands Care Unlimited, which is a big Earth medical charity, partly funded by the Resource World Management Government and partly funded by five very wealthy donors who make up the board. Their task was to train and develop local health services in deprived regions and they’d typically be posted together to some underdeveloped and under resourced aid centre for three or four years to boost morale and try and lift the quality of the provision.
"That was how Alice had lived in Florida, Middle England, California, Stockholm, and New Victoria all before she was old enough to finish school.
"It’s not that Alice was particularly political and it’s not that she was trying to convert me to any particular point of view, but her stories of the ramshackle, arbitrary and corrupt cruelties that served for regional government resonated with my own experiences since I’d seen the inside of the BEA and the BXR. Earth’s a mess Dovrich. You know that. Everyone knows it hasn’t recovered from the Dislocations, but I don’t mean that. I mean the Resource Management World Government is a mess. It spends so much time and energy on in fighting between the BEA and the BXR, between the Zed men and the Pasteracht and between their majesties the King and Queen of Earth that it has none to spare for looking after its peoples and for walking with earned respect amongst the alien peoples of the galaxy.
"That’s what I feel. And not just me, the Great Commercial League is uneasy. The Solar Group is exasperated and disappointed and the Society of Contemporary Races is worryingly silent. I suppose I knew this already, but Alice was a catalyst. She gave my life a purpose and you know what that is, because it’s out in the open. My little society of agents dedicated themselves to the overthrow of the current government.”
“So, you’re as treasonous as they say?”
“Every bit,” I answered with venom. “And more so every day. I’m the kind of pathogen the Zen men were created to destroy. Might as well admit it now!”
I take a deep breath. There is either a labyrinthine history of details to explain or I can just cut to the chase. Literally. Then in a few moments more we’ll be up to date. But not just now as it happens.
The village bells ring five times in a melodious motif. We both pause to appreciate the silvery beauty of the chimes in the rain. That’s a signal for us to return. It’s almost time for lunch but there’s a formal pattern to life here and lunch is signalled by three different notes. These five mean an announcement.
“Saved by the bells,” Galda says at last. “You can tell me the rest later”.
She rises to her feet, and I join her. We start to walk back. “I didn’t notice any significant colour related themes in your account,” she grumbles in a good-natured manner. “You’re not giving me much to work with!”
I shrug and smile, remembering that I’d started out by wanting to find her weaknesses. Confession may be good for the soul, but I need hard information myself and I won’t get it by telling her my history.
“Perhaps I don’t have any chromatic weaknesses,” I say.
“I find that hard to believe,” Galda says, shrewdly. Naturally, she’s right.
“There will be no meditations today,” Willow addresses us as we walk into the main hall. “Or maybe I should phrase that better. No meditations in the Temple today. You are perfectly free to meditate on your own time in whatever way you see fit, but the Temple must remain closed for to you for a little while longer. We need to work with a new pilgrim party of thinderin from Trepalah. They aren’t so humble as you humans. They think they understand the Light Guards and what we do here, but they have no idea. They need time to absorb some lessons before they can visit the Temple and we must teach them carefully.”
“Is that a complement?” I smile, astonished. The thinderin seldom even hint at any praise.
“No,” Willow replies, briefly, crushingly and to the point. “Since you don’t even speculate on the duties of the Light Guards you make no errors there. You two have other faults but they are faults we may deal with in due course in the Temple if fate prescribes it. Wait your turn.”
I’m suitably crushed.
“And how long will that be?” Galda asks.
“Four days. That should be enough time to resume your work in the Temple”.
I’m pleased Dovrich asked the direct question. Willow is not exactly forthcoming. The initial implication was that it was only for this afternoon that our pilgrimage would be delayed and if the question had been left unasked, we’d just have woken every day expecting the Violet meditation only to be stonewalled each time. Sometimes, and despite everything I owe to them, the Thinderin can be less than helpful.
I sigh. I’m sure they have their reasons and I expect some patience is justified as spiritual preparation. Or something. In any case, it’s better to know we have been put on hold for so long and at least to have some idea when these meditations might be concluded. Is there something else going on, perhaps? Something other than this new thinderin pilgrimage which is keeping them busy. Is there something about our pilgrimage which is making the masters of the Temple hesitate? I wonder.
We have a light lunch served by Hessuru, a shared bowl of boiled eggs which we shell for ourselves, some mashed root vegetable, a spicy side helping of sea fern and a salty silver fish each. There are little hard green apples afterwards. The fusheyea sits and eats with us, seemingly sympathetic to our frustration.
“We could visit with our former companions this afternoon,” Galda offers. We could. Perhaps we should. I don’t really want to today, though. “Perhaps tomorrow,” I suggest.
I think she goes anyway, but I spend the rest of the afternoon in my room reading, or trying to read, the parts of the ‘Legends of the Chromatic Temple’ which have not been translated into Arabic. These were gifted to me on Earth by Lia Leong along with some lessons in the Thinderin Quaternary language in which they are written but I’m not particularly talented when it comes to languages, and I really struggle with the grammar and vocabulary. Alice would have been so much better at understanding it than me.
When the dark blue of the clear evening sky fades to the point where the pool of yellow light from my lamp is only bright enough to see the text and nothing else. I abandon my studies, snuff the oil flame and go to sleep in the dark, listening to the distant waves crashing against the cliffs. I dream of Earth and Alice.
Just the two of us for breakfast again on the following morning. Our pilgrim band was never exactly a throng, but it really feels empty in the dining room now.
Outside, the rain is heavy. It lashes in angry little squalls against the cliff, and it has a somewhat colder and more unpleasant quality than yesterday’s downpour. It’s not the kind of weather to linger in. There’ll be no sitting on the cliff top whilst this continues.
“So, what shall we do today?” I say brightly.
“More stories of course,” Galda says. “Isn’t that the game now? Testing each other out to find a weakness? Looking for a way to get through the Violet meditation to the White? We don’t normally have all this time but since we do now, we might as well use it, eh?”
“Your turn, this time though,” I reply sternly.
She shrugs. “Very well. It’s only fair and it won’t do you any good. I expect you’ve wondered why I seem different from the others in the meditations. Why you can’t work out what I’m thinking in the way you seemed to be able to do with the others. You were going to find out eventually.
"There is a particularly good reason. I have achromatopsia.
"Do you know what that is? It’s a rare form of colour blindness. Total colour blindness, it is sometimes called. I see the world in shades of grey and always have done. This colour nonsense means nothing to me! You’re going to have a bit of a problem finding my chromatic weakness aren’t you Achmed?”
She smiles. Then she puts her hands to her eyes and manipulates the lids, popping out a pair of dark contact lenses which she places on the table. I’ve grown used to the odd red colour in her eyes, which I found so unsettling at first. I had begun to assume it was natural and it’s something of a shock to realise that the colour just comes from tinted lenses.
“Too much light can damage the sight of people with achromatopsia,” Galada explains. “The vision is usually functioning using parts of the eye that are better adapted to low light. Lenses like these help to reduce the intensity in bright daylit environments and protect the rods and cones that receive the signals.
"That’s quite a traditional approach which goes back all the way to pre-emergence medicine and it’s just a form of amelioration. Achromatopsia is a rare condition, but medical science has made a lot of progress since then and there are more modern techniques, including individually crafted genetic in vivo nano packages that attempt to rebuild the damaged sensory capabilities in place. It’s a potential cure but it’s very expensive and my parents were not rich. Aster II didn’t even have the technical capability for this kind of operation anyway, so if it was going to happen, I would have to travel to Earth. That didn’t seem likely when I was growing up.
"It all seems like a long time ago - a lifetime away. I’ve been working in air traffic control over the routes round Gabaline and Jinvo for so long I’ve almost forgotten that I ever did anything else, but I did. I had ambitions to be a marine biologist once. Don’t ask me why but it went as far as higher education which was something the Aster II government could afford to subsidise then. That’s where I met my second boyfriend, Romat Jentral and he was rich - very rich. It was Romat who decided I should go to Earth, and he would pay for my treatment.
"I remember I had mixed feelings. Achromatopsia was my normal state of being. I had grown up learning to accommodate the many annoyances that came with living in a chromatically typical world and whilst I couldn’t say they never bothered me, they didn’t trouble me in the ways you might imagine. But I was still excited and excited further by Romat’s enthusiasm. I let myself go along with it.
"The journey was an adventure in the academic closed season. We took a G-Lifter and a scheduled passenger clipper inbound to Earth via Blue Home. That was already more than I could have afforded without Romat’s help. It was my first trip off world.
"The plan was to combine the treatment with a holiday. ‘First’, Romat told me, ‘we will fix your eyes. Then we’ll see the wonders of Earth together and you’ll see them in colour!’ Our itinerary would cover the Disney cities of Paris and London, the Egyptian pyramids, and a cruise off the coast of West Africa. It was all ridiculously extravagant.
"The clinic was in Lima. It’s a city on the South American continent. Have you been there?”
I shook my head.
“I was amazed by it. The sheer numbers of people but also the scale and force of the Pacific Ocean. It put the three tiny and relatively stagnant seas of Aster II in perspective for me. At that stage I was still getting used to Earth gravity, which despite the training we’d done for it was a constant drain. We needed long sessions in the hotel pools and hot tubs to help us adjust.
"The centre was at the top of a steep slope overlooking the sea, and the short daily walk from our beachfront hotel was a trial in itself. By the time we finished there we were both much fitter! It had an excellent reputation for ophthalmic treatments of all kinds and most of the best eye surgeons and consultants in the Bubble have trained or worked there are at one time or another. We were certain I was going to cured of my condition, but it didn’t happen.
"When the doctors on Earth examined me, they found that there’s something odd about my personal form of achromatopsia. I’m an unusual case of an already unusual condition. Unique maybe. The doctors were unable to find anything physically wrong with the structures in the eyes. They concluded that the problem was neurological, a condition of the brain which lay beyond their ability to treat. Physically, my eyes are receiving all the right signals, but the information processing is filtering the colour out of it somewhere on the way to conscious recognition.
"Of course, I was disappointed after all the build-up for the trip and naturally it soured the rest of the holiday, although we went through the motions of having a good time and there are still memories of Earth from that visit which I will always be grateful to have made. But ultimately it was a failure and there was no getting away from that.
"Romat tried to be nice to me, but it wasn’t working, and we broke up a little later after we returned to Aster II. It turned out that he was the one who couldn’t take the disappointment of the failure to correct my eyesight, not me. The thing is with Romat, he wasn’t used to not getting whatever he wanted. He had that sense of entitlement that comes from never having to think about money. He was charming with it but to be confronted with a problem like mine which he’d thought he could solve and then to find he couldn’t, was unusually frustrating for him.
"I found the breakup with Romat harder to take than the consequences of life long achromatopsia, which I’d pretty much accepted anyway before this unexpected opportunity had ever come along. But I was young, and I got over it. In later years my ex-boyfriend went on to make something of a name for himself in the politics of Aster II and became involved in a famous scandal which is well known to everyone on the planet, although I doubt the story has travelled more widely in the Bubble. It’s an interesting tale but not for now, eh? One thing at a time.
"That visit to Earth also ended my enthusiasm for marine biology. I just didn’t have the same interest in studying the small bodies of water on our little red planet when I’d seen what a huge, dynamic, unfettered world spanning ocean could really look like.
"I got a job working on the sailing blimps that link our planet’s human settlements. They ply the routes over the Big Dry between the shores of the three sisters seas, from Olga to Maria, Maria to Irina and back again, or across the Crescent Bay between Gabaline and Jinvo. Initially it was only going to be a student thing and I started as the most junior deputy co-pilot but then it just settled into a permanent occupation. The instrumentation that was in use doesn’t require any colour processing and it’s an easy job because everything moves slowly. I worked my way up to senior pilot. There’s lots of time to think.
"I kept wearing these red lenses out of habit, but I don’t really need them. Apparently, others find them a bit disconcerting when they meet me. Sometimes that’s useful.
"Eventually I gave up piloting and transferred into air traffic control.
"Air traffic control on Aster II is also an easy job if I’m honest. There aren’t very many airships to manage - just thirty-six on the whole planet at the moment as a matter of fact, so our little team know them all by name and their standard schedules by heart.
"By this time, I was married to an opal trader. I picked him up at dead man’s gulch out beyond the spine back ridge where the Big Dry gets an awful lot drier and more hostile. It was a chartered flight to a small semi-automated mining station and it was originally scheduled after the end of the founders holiday but the weather forecasters were predicting a big sand storm and the flight time was brought forward a whole day. As it happens, I didn’t trust the official forecast. I called in a couple of favours and got the departure time set for an even earlier slot, so I lifted off from Undercliffe in the predawn dark. Turns out my intuition was right. We had to ride ahead of the front on the way back and only just made it to the sea before visibility closed right down and the entire region went into lock down for three days.
"The way Lyron likes to tell it, I was his guardian angel, flying into to save him from oblivion in a trackless desert. So naturally he had to marry me. It wasn’t quite like that. There were enough supplies at the mining station to have kept him safe until the weather calmed down. It makes a good story, though, so he’s embellished it over the years, and I never minded.
"Lyron was always a bit of a fantasist. You have to be a dreamer to think you’ll strike it rich mining the Big Dry, but actually, he and his machines didn’t do too badly from prospecting routine mineral excavations and setting up extraction routes, even if he never dug up the gemstones of his imagination.
"When we weren’t travelling for work, we lived comfortably in a villa in the hills of Jinvo. No children. That never happened for us and Lyron died last year.
"I needed something to challenge me - something to help me move on. I’d always had an interest in the stories of the Temple on Silusia Alpha. Why not? And now I’m here and who better than me to attain the benefits of the fabled inaccessible white meditation? Who better than me, who sees through all this chromatic nonsense along the way? It’s just black and white for me.
"I’ve humoured all the pilgrims and watched you all fall in the chromatic meditations. I’ve watched you, Ramon, with particular interest. I can see you have something special in the way you appear to have developed an understanding of these Amnyine processes and a way to navigate them, but not something special enough to deal with me! I intend to conquer the white meditation and I don’t think you can stop me!”
She might be right, and I say as much. How am I going to deal with Galda?
Almost unbelievably the weather is worse when we leave the refectory, than it was when we came to breakfast. Lightning flashes over the jungle and illuminates the Temple hill, followed by a brutal assault on the eardrums from perilously close thunder. We’ve agreed to return to our quarters. I shall be studying the old books again. I don’t know what Galda plans to do.
We hesitate on the threshold, waiting for a momentary easing in the torrential downpour before making a dash for cover. It’s not far between the village buildings but we’re still going to be soaked.
“The rain should have over by noon. Why don’t we go and see the other pilgrims?” Dovrich suggests. “We can have lunch with them for a change, perhaps? Get out of this empty refectory.”
I had turned down the suggestion of a visit yesterday in favour of more time with the Legends of the Chromatic Temple, but this time I find myself agreeing before we split up and make a run for our separate dwellings. More fun than struggling with Thinderin Quaternary, I think to myself as I dry my hair with a rough black towel before lighting an oil lamp. It’s mid-morning but the warm yellow glow is bright under the gloomy storm shaken sky and the sound of the rain beating against the walls is almost uncomfortably loud. At least it’s pleasantly warm but I’d certainly like a break from the rain and a break from my Thinderin studies. In fact, I am looking forward to it.
The intensity of the morning downpour couldn’t be maintained, and the skies are a damp and windy pastel blue when Dovrich knocks on my door to see if I am ready. I’m happy to be getting away from the village and from obsessing about the meditations. It’s good to see the sun and there really is no point in impatience. The thinderin will admit us again to the temple before long. In the meantime, it feels like a holiday as we make our way to the retreat in the forest where our former companions are undergoing their various chromatic recovery therapies. When we pass through the Light Guards’ check point, I’m somewhat surprised to find two of them are waiting for us at the entrance to the grove; Dywhyiss and Tamsin Larivière.
I make a guess, correct as it turns out, that Dovrich has been here more often than my own single visit and perhaps they are expecting her at least, if not necessarily me as well. Tamsin seems pleased to see me and takes my hand shyly with a smile. I feel guilty that I have neglected her and allow myself to be led deeper into the trees.
Two wooden picnic tables are set back in the shade on a small rise overlooking an open sunny glade near the recuperation centre where the pilgrims are now staying. It’s not thinderin wood, I note. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell how the grove grows to suit itself and its guests, but this isn’t living material anymore, it’s cut from beech and has been set up for our convenience. A barrel of beer sits in a sling behind the tables. Edulon-602 waves to indicate that he’s pouring me a large glass. There’s quite a party atmosphere as the priest brings it over to me. To my astonishment, Edulon-602 hands an equally full glass to Talamon Ka with whom he now seems to be on good terms. Were these two not beating each other up last time I saw them? It looks like some sort of reconciliation has been effected between the main actors in the red and yellow meditations. The former security officer doesn’t seem entirely happy but the restless energy which characterised his time as a temple pilgrim has dropped away. I don’t understand how the counselling operates here but it seems to be working.
There are platters of cold food on the tables, slices of coarse-grained brown bread with deep yellow butter, soft white crumbling cheese, shellfish, sova fruit, tomatoes, diced parsnips, and pitchers of cold jepett water for those that aren’t drinking beer. It’s a “help yourself” affair and remarkably pleasant, overlooking the blowing yellow flowers of giant tormentil and the grey stems of silverwort that dance in the sun in the glade below us.
A small fire is burning in a pit at the end of the tables furthest from the beer barrel. Skewers of peppers, onions and mushrooms are sizzling over the flames. Dywhyiss is tending to the fire, idly turning the coals with a long fork as she drinks beer and chats to Samsin and Ramon Avva. This is the same woman whose suffering we witnessed in the orange meditation, and it is remarkable to see her reacting so calmly now in the presence of open flames. She’s properly cautious of the fire, as is only right, but she seems to have overcome the paralyzing phobia induced by her terrible experiences on Blue Home. It’s a heartening sight.
“What’s your plan?” Talamon Ka suddenly asks me without any warning. Tamsin frowns sharply as though sensing that the good mood is about to be broken.
“My plan?”
“To get back to the war. To win it. Do the Zed men know you’re here? They must be looking for you.”
Edulon-602 leans in to listen. These two share a common interest in security matters.
“Dovrich told us who you really are,” he explains. “Quite a surprise you’d turn up so far from Earth on our pilgrimage!”
My anonymity is over. It couldn’t last after I’d told my story yesterday, but it’s been shared a little more quickly than I’d envisaged.
“I find myself a victim of circumstances, just an exile on this alien shore,” I answer mildly. “It was no plan of mine to join this pilgrimage. It was expedient in an emergency. It was a refuge. I do not know if the Zed men are aware of my location. I hope not. There is no plan for my return to Earth. Not yet anyway.”
“You are intending to complete the white meditation, then?” Ramon Avva asks. The void priest has drifted closer, and I find that all at once, the others are all clustering round my table, eager to hear what I have to say. I nod silently. I don’t really know what to tell them. If I can, I certainly do intend to complete the white meditation, as the Viwodia advised me to do on Earth. They didn’t say why or how. I’ve taken it on trust although I didn’t have a lot of choice. Before we can explore this difficult topic, however, Talamon Ka moves the conversation on.
“Something has to be done about their Majesties,” he opines. “I don’t know if you’re the one to do it but there’s plenty of us, in and out of the Solar Group who want to see changes fast. You’ve stirred up interest on worlds far from Earth and if you knew it, you’d realise you’ve got supporters in many places."
I don’t quite know what to make of this. Talamon Ka may be rehabilitated but he has a questionable past on Zephyr. He used to commit torture for the loyalists before the revolution. I’m not sure his support is the kind I need, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the other pilgrims. There is a murmur of agreement throughout the group. How odd that I’d never given any thought as to what the political persuasions of my fellow pilgrims might be. Me, the secret shadow politician on Earth, always so sensitive to the shifting tides of opinion. You’d think I’d have been curious at least.
The fact is that the meditations have been enough. This intense focus on the personal is very demanding and I’m cut off from my network of friends. It honestly hasn’t occurred to me that strangers throughout the Bubble might actually be sympathetic to my cause. It shouldn’t really be a surprise, though. I know the current Resource Management World Government is not well liked in the human colonies these days and apparently that sentiment is widespread.
“It seems fair to say that none of us would object if your reformation succeeded,” the priest summarises accurately after an interesting little discussion reveals that the pilgrims are all of like mind. I’m amused by his choice of words. A reformation. Well, perhaps. Everyone else is calling it a revolution.
It is late afternoon before Dovrich and I return to our village quarters, climbing through the trees to the coast. It’s sunny and clear still, but a brisk wind is keeping the temperature down as we emerge from the forest. I’ve enjoyed the picnic and the conversation. I don’t feel quite so alone out here now that the truth is out, and I find I have supporters. Not that they can do anything. Not that I can do anything either for that matter. Whilst I try not to worry about what’s happening on Earth, I can’t help it.
As we reach the road north, there is an unexpected display of military muscle in the clear blue sky ahead of us. Light Guard air support vessels are circling the temple and patrolling the coastline. Thinderin seeker ships arch their white wings, organo-metallic muscles flexing easily into the strong wind as they wheel and glide like a flock of giant seagulls. They seem agitated and obviously on alert. Then ten minutes later in the far distance, two sonic booms and two vapour trails paint their marks, coming down from orbit at high speed: G-Lift engine vessels messing with the local laws of gravitational attraction. It’s impossible to tell at this range what their provenance might be but it’s easy to make a nasty guess. I feel a little beat of anxiety at the bottom of my stomach.
“I think there may be Zed Men in Rillyon already,” Galda says, her eyes wandering north along the gently curving line of the coastline to a distant misty view of the great capital of the Rain Cities League. She frowns and purses her lips. “Or if not now, then there will be soon.”
Unfortunately, I think she’s right. That’s a very logical explanation for the thinderin activity. It’s the worst news. I have been traced. Somewhere amongst the bilachai open markets, the thinderin community groves, the high parks and the low parks, the scuttle carts and teaming terrace arches, the steeply pitched dark purple stone roofs and fast flowing gutter streams, I sense that my enemies have landed. We pick up the pace.
“It doesn’t surprise me. They’ll come here soon.”
“What’s keeping them?”
I shrug.
“I imagine that they are at least trying to go through some formal channels. They aren’t in the Solar Group now, so they have to be a bit more circumspect. They have to at least appear to play by Society rules. But the Zed men aren’t made for polite society of any kind. They’ll be here soon whatever happens.”
“And what will you do then?”
“That depends.”
Galda smiles. She knows I mean it depends on how the mediations go.
Willow is waiting at the broken stone archway that marks the entrance to the village from the southern approach. We are honoured. Willow normally only meets us in the main hall.
“You must come with me,” she says without preamble. “The Violet meditation will begin within the hour.”
Now after all these delays we appear to be on an accelerated timetable. We’ve never had a meditation after lunch before and this one has been subject to numerous postponements, so what’s different? I guess it’s obvious.
It’s tiring making the long climb in the darkness of the temple and we were not prepared for this. It feels like it has been a long day already, but the highlight is still to come. The old woman at my side is energised, though. It’s a point of crisis and we both know it. Will these stairs never end? Surely, we cannot be far from the lower precincts of the Melding Minster, the white dome that crowns the summit of the hill.
The chapel, when we reach it, is small. I feel suffocated, longing for the clean sunlight and clear air of the brilliant afternoon that Silusia Alpha was offering us. But we can’t have that. The meditation is upon us.
We are almost back to black. The Violet meditation is intense but dark and I begin to wonder if the altar is correctly tuned before I finally detect a hint of colour. As my eyes adjust the colour grows stronger, an unhealthy fluorescent glow which hints at higher untamed and lethal energies. Now we are two - the hard-bitten old harpy and me. Galda grins with feral pleasure - a welcoming challenge which I will not refuse.
“Ready Achmed?” she hisses.
We will see what we will see.
There is a strange node to be found behind the eyes; perhaps painful once but now quiescent. I understand it instinctively in a way that no brain surgeon would because it feels as if I am on the inside. It is not even physical, but something in the pattern of interpretation. There is a ruthless censor which turns colour into black and white, a blockage which key mental processes are routing themselves around. I do not understand the origin of this blockage and in this sense my experience is not the same as it was for the other meditations. Here I cannot pick memory apart because we are not linked through the colour of the meditation. But I can do something different I have not been able to do before, or perhaps it is better to say I was not able to do it in this direct way. I can influence the pattern of the mind and change the perverse software failure that is denying Galda her colour vision.
How does this work? I guess that it is because colour and language have an inextricable binding in the brain where one reinforces the other. This is uniquely weak for Galda but it still applies because she has been embedded in a culture that uses colour words. She may never have recognised colour, but she knows what we all mean when we talk about the blues, and when we link red to danger and blood. Her brain has wired those words to concepts and that gives me a handle – a way in.
My understanding is only an analogy. Perhaps that’s appropriate. I have an analogy of an understanding of the deep operation of analogy itself under the ministrations of the Temple meditations.
Now I need to draw on the strength of the violet radiation. It is a tool for me. Violet is associated with vibrance and dangerous energies. Ultraviolet elides to ultra-violence. Violet stands at the limit of the spectrum already where the eye cannot move beyond. We fear those harder energies for which it is a herald and a proxy. The x-rays and gamma rays that burn, reveal, and even heal. This is the association I look to exploit. The violet meditation is something I can burn with, can use like a scalpel. I will take what the Temple supplies, conduct it through my brain into the fault lines of associative metaphor in Galda’s brain
I do not know how to explain it any better. I go to work.
This is not a job for the squeamish, or the morally challenged. There certainly was a time when I would have hesitated before performing this form of intimate surgery against the will of the patient. Maybe that time was as recent as the long dark interstellar nights that led me to Silusia-Alpha but I’m here now and the meditations have changed me. I was anxious before and seeking without expectation; with hope and perhaps with some urgent insistence but not with the expectation I feel now. At this moment it is as though destiny has gripped me. Make that Destiny with a capital D – the full-on cliché. There’s no time for hesitation. I see my path instinctively and I act as I need to act.
Make the incision. Now do you see? Really see for the first time? See what colour really is from your world of Black and White? Yes. It’s all there. Obviously, it’s a shock, I understand that. I had no choice though. You hoped to defeat me because of your lack of perception. Because your ignorance gave you a weird strength against us all in these meditations, even as you wondered what we all saw. That’s how you thought you would beat me to become the sole survivor and you were close, so very, very close.
No Galda. I’m not going to grant you the luxury of incomprehension. It’s time for you to finally appreciate the subtleties the rest of the pilgrims take for granted. It’s time for you to learn some painful truths. Ecstatic truths also. Be healed. See Galda. SEE, see!
