124 ::: Tom Orley

Cross-legged on a woven mat of reeds, shaded by a floating wreck, he listened as a muttering volcano slowly sputtered into silence. Contemplating starvation, he listened to the soft, wet sounds of the endless weedscape, and found in them a homely beauty. The squishy, random rhythms blended into a backdrop for his meditation.

On the mat in front of him, like a focus mandala, lay the message bomb he had never set off. The container glistened in the sunlight of north Kithrup’s first fine day in weeks. Highlights shone in dimpled places where the metal had been battered, as he had been. The dented surface gleamed still.

Where are you now?

The subsurface sea-waves made his platform undulate gently. He floated in a trance through levels of awareness, like an old man poking idly through his attic, like an old-time hobo looking with mild curiosity through the slats of a moving boxcar.

Where are you now, my love?

He recalled a Japanese haiku from the eighteenth century, by the great poet Yosa Buson.

As the spring rains fall,

Soaking in them, on the roof,

Is a child’s rag ball.

Watching blank images in the dents on the psi-globe, he listened to the creaking of the flat jungle—its skittering little animal sounds—the wind riffling through the wet, flat leaves.

Where is that part of me that has departed?

He listened to the slow pulse of a world ocean, watched patterns in the metal, and after a while, in the reflections in the dents and creases, an image came to him.

A blunt, bulky, wedge shape approached a place that was a not-place, a shining blackness in space. As he watched, the bulky thing cracked open. The thick carapace slowly split apart, like a hatching egg. The shards fell away, and there remained a slender nubbed cylinder, looking a bit like a caterpillar. Around it glowed a nimbus, a thickening shell of probability that hardened even as he watched.

No illusion, he decided. It cannot be an illusion.

He opened himself to the image, accepting it. And from the caterpillar a thought winged to him.

Blossoms on the pear

and a woman in the moonlight

reads a letter there ... .

His slowly healing lips hurt as he smiled. It was another haiku by Buson. Her message was as unambiguous as could be, under the circumstances. She had somehow picked up his trance-poem, and responded in kind.

“Jill ...” he cast as hard as he could.

The caterpillar shape, sheathed in a cocoon of stasis, approached the great hole in space. It dropped forward toward the not-place, grew transparent as it fell, then vanished.

For a long time Tom sat very still, watching the highlights on the metal globe slowly shift as the morning passed.

Finally, he decided it wouldn’t do him or the universe any harm if he started doing something about survival.