The Borderland

HOW WINTER KILLS.

She awoke. The curve of organoplastic above her face was a plane of cold and sound. Vaulted ribs dripped condensation. The heatbulbs were dim; cold-shocked, dying. A vague lessening of the darkness, so that she could recognise the shapes of her few possessions by edges and boundaries, was the only indication that it was day beyond the skin of the pod-tent. The long howl of the storm, a thousand kilometres long, howling down off the pole, had been a constant for so long now that she had edited it down to subliminal brain-chatter above which she could now distinguish other, smaller, more intimate noises: the clicking of the strips of winter-cured brownmeat jerky she had hung from the tent spine, stirred by little barometric anomalies within the enclosed climate of the tent; the splinter-creak-heave of the dendé tree among the root buttresses of which she had sought refuge from the blizzard; the soft slur of snow falling, snow on snow, flake on flake, the outstretched arms of the ice crystals grasping and locking into an impenetrable dome of ice above her head; the murmuring of the head, swathed in strips of polyweather fabric, quietly dying; the static hiss of the radio, her one, vain luxury, quietly dead. Frequency modulation ghosts.

She leaned over in the body-bag to take the radio in her two hands, twist it apart, roll it into its component plasmals. Her breath steamed, already the cold was infiltrating the warm cocoon of the quilted bag. Quickly, quickly, she rolled the plasmals between her palms into a thin, viscous rope of flesh which broke into fat drops and fell onto the receiving heatbulbs. A dim cherry light defined the two-metre hemisphere of her world within the howling heart of the storm. With the light, an inkling of heat, enough for her to creep from the body bag and try to rub a little warmth into her Grandfather’s frost-glazed rooticles. She breathed on her hands, pressed them around his frost-chapped face. The eyes opened, the lips moved. Nothing more. Already the light was fading, the temperature sliding towards freezing.

A little jerky, torn off, moistened with water from her drip-cup, chewed. Chewed and chewed. Chewed and chewed and chewed. When your world is reduced to a bubble of dark, cold and screaming, you learn to eke out even the tiniest pleasures. Meat she had enough for another three days of blizzard, and more; water was in infinite supply beyond the sphincter door of the pod-tent. Before any of those, the cold would finish her. If she had woken that morning to the unmistakable absence of storm roaring, she reckoned she might have stood a chance of making it to the House of the Listeners. But she had not, and she knew that if she woke one more morning and the storm was still blowing she would not wake to another. The snow would enfold her and bury her and out of the naked earth roots and shoots would come questing, piercing the organoplastic skin of her tent, pushing into her open mouth and eyes, penetrating her flesh in a thousand places, thrusting, with a quick, hard, vegetable darting, into the very pith of her. White tendrils would follow the inside curve of her skull, white threads slip between the folds of her cooling brain, white fibres coil around each synapse and neuron, reach down into her every memory…

Memory.

The storm was a good place for memories. The darkness that blinded her, the screaming wind that deafened her, the cold that numbed her touch, took away the sensible world, left her adrift in an indefinite place where the distinctions between what was actual and what was memory were no longer clear and definite.

Memory.

She had not wanted the money but he gave it to her anyway, by that wintergate on the east side of Camp One with the wind rotor swooping above them. She had been angry that she had needed to take what she knew to be credit of a bad colour. ‘Go on, go on. Take it all, I have plenty,’ he had said, for terrorists, or liberation fighters, can always get money. She took only what she estimated would be necessary to buy her way along the townships and resettlement camps of the borderline. And a little extra. Just in case.

It was much later and many kilometres distant—lulled half to sleep by the soft impact of snowflakes on the wind-shield of the big trux-tractor and the warm glow of the instrument panel—that she understood. The money in the smartcard had been his blessing on her journey. He wanted her to succeed as much as she did.

Through a land irredeemably scarred from the long wound that had been cut across it, she had made her winter passage, scrimping, economising, eating far too little for a traveller in such a season; hitching a ride where she could, saving the price of a bus fare by sleeping in a doorway, in an empty rice barn, under the watch of a saint in a wayside shrine. Everywhere: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE? No, but I will give you thirty enns for that fine jacket of yours, I am sure it is warm, yes? no? forty then; no? fifty, that is my final offer HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE maybe, no, yes, yes? yes, the woman, and the man? a nod, that is right, I think it was them where did they go? east, they went east, this woman and this man.

Where are you going? he had asked and she held up to him her cardboard sign with CAMP THREE in her ugly, loopy, childish ideograms and he had said jump in, that is where I am going too and they drove and they drove and they drove in a mesmerising twining column of tail-lights through the slush and churned red mud and the strict diagonals of the sleet, always always cutting from top left to bottom right, always always and all the time he talked and he talked and he talked as night drivers will and all she could remember from those hours and hours and hours of driving and talk was that he was an officer in the Free State Bureau of Resettlement and that Camp Three had been cut off for a week now by floods further up the valley of the river Ye and the rapidly escalating bushwar between the Warriors of Destiny and the God’s Country Retribution Squads and that all those twisted piles of bone plate and ribbing and jutting spines by the sides of the road were the victims of bioweapon ambushes.

The roots of memory. Going deep, deep, into deep soil, deep under the reach of winter.

She awoke with a cry, unaware that she had been sleeping, disoriented. The air seared her lungs, yet in the snugness of the quilt bag her body trembled and sweated. Chill and fever. Ice and fire. Was she already dead? Was this disorientation, this synaesthesia, the shock of the Dreaming? Dead, sinking alone far from friends, from family, from voices and affections, into the dark humus of the mind.

Ice and fire. She remembered Camp Three. She remembered them coming on the wings of the storm; the helicopters, coming out of the heart of the tempest. She remembered running. She remembered hiding. She remembered the helicopters hanging there, hovering there, all powerful, all mighty, taking their time, taking good aim, releasing their rockets woosh. And the domes going up in gouts of red fire on a winter night. Woosh. The biogas plant arcing up up away on a pillar of flame, like a festival firework, one hundred two hundred three hundred metres, and falling into the swollen waters of the Ye. Woosh the people running, the people hiding, the people burning and dying and the helicopters waiting, waiting, turning their blunt black noses this way, that way, scenting for new things to send raving up woosh with their target-seeking missiles. She remembered the passing trux like a monstrous, lumbering thing from a dream, she remembered reaching out and hands catching hold of her, but after that there was nothing, nothing for a time that seemed no time at all and all the time that ever would be, until her next memory, the memory of hot soup, scalding, salty, sour, at a frost-limned table on a pavement café in Chevye township while the proprietor’s radio brought reports of airstrikes from out of God’s Country at the border camps in reprisal for the deaths of six soldiers in a Warrior of Destiny raid.

She awoke again. It was dark. It was night. The blizzard was still a curved plane of sound twenty centimetres above her face. The cold was intense. Her breath had formed a crackle-glaze of frost on the quilted body bag. She thought about the cold. There was nothing else to think about but the cold. It invaded every thought, every possibility of action, every memory, every dream. She could do nothing without the permission of the cold. Dr Kalimuni had said that Khirr, the Proclaimer hell, was a cold place. A place of eternal screaming, where the spirits of the damned were tormented with needles of ice in the eyes, in the lungs. She had imagined that, given the popularity of sin, hell would have been a populous place. But even the presence of others can be a comfort. The best hells are solitary places. Hell has always been oneself. That was why her father’s Dreaming had been such a pernicious Eden. Enmeshed in the massive grinding solipsisms of the Dreaming, no one could ever be certain what was objective, what was private creation.

Again, she remembered.

With utter disregard for sanity, the border slashed clean through the heart of Lilongwe township. It strode manfully in from the deep woods, delivered most of the Widow Muge’s rice paddies into the hands of the blackhearted Proclaimers, while forcing three rooms and the outlying buildings of Mr Amritraj’s house into the bailiwick of the godless Confessors. The wire then stepped neatly between the Vijrams and the Shigis—good neighbours and good friends—pushing Proclaimers into Free State and Confessors into God’s Country where their presence was not tolerated. With growing satisfaction, it ran straight down the middle of Twelfth Street to the border post at the heart of Founding Tree Square (indeed, the Founding Tree itself had been felled to accommodate the new kiosk) before cutting straight across Third Circular, taking away most of the orchards and gardens on Sixth Street from their owners, neatly bisecting the Galaveya family home into Confessor side and Proclaimer side, then staggering away into the forest once more.

She had waited six hours for a country bus connection eastbound to Jhemba and Camp Ten in this schizophrenic microcosm. Flags of opposing colours faced each other across Founding Tree Square; rival graffitis swaggered and glowered from shop walls and house fronts: hack kill stuff screw burn, differing only in subject. Wind-dried heads grimaced from poles all along the northern side of the square. Ghost-Boy pneuma masks stared back. Wall murals did battle: weeping bare-breasted women (without a care for the chill of the season) dragged bloody swords, combat-suited warriors with neural scramblers held triumphantly over their heads declaimed OUR DAY WILL COME, A LAND DIVIDED CAN NEVER BE FREE, OURSELVES ALONE: 25TH DIVISION WARRIORS OF DESTINY. Across the wire, hearts in hands, Spirit Lodge arcana, the blue and the gold, militiamen overshadowed by vengeful helicopters. WHAT WE HAVE WE HOLD, they proclaimed. NOT ONE CENTIMETRE, UNTO THE LAST.

Yet the Proclaimer streets were deserted; their shops, commerces and cafés shuttered, and the Confessor streets were thronged with people; harassed waiters bustling from table to table, shops full to the doors, the square cluttered with manifestly thriving stalls and booths. Everywhere; the sound of business transacted, deals struck, the chirp of cardreaders.

‘All Proclaimers,’ said a home-bound migratory worker at the country bus station, similarly vibrant with strolling vendors and hot-food concessionaires. ‘All from the other side of town. Been like that since they broke parity. When Ol Tok broke with the Imperial enn, the Free State enn slipped on the international markets. Only ten per cent, but that ten per cent was enough to put every trader on the far side of the wire out of business. That is, until the northern government at Lyankhra decides to stick up some tariff wall.’

In her tent at the heart of winter, she understood the purpose of these memories now. If the Dreaming is what we make it, then these were the raw stuffs from which she was to fashion her afterlife. A cold land, punctuated with dark cancers of inexplicable violence, illuminated here and there by equally inexplicable kindnesses and humanities; a blasted winter land through which she would wander while human idiocy played itself out again and again.

She would not accept it. With what strength the cold had left her, she took the stuff of her dreaming in her hands, stretched it, tore it. It sundered with a sound of many knives. Light poured through the wound in her memories; crystal blue skies fat with cumulus, trees heavy and silent under snow. All brilliant, all glittering, all still. A dark figure described a black cross on the star-filled tear. Entering her personal darkness, it knelt beside her and in the dreaming she felt a hand laid on her head. Images: a warm place, a nest of rooms and chambers and tunnels warmed by the soil beneath the snow; an indefinite, ponderous object swaying from a single hair; silent people moving among low trees, hands stained with the juice of fruits.

She felt the dark man lift her and carry her into the light. Blinding light, blinding white. Utter purity. Her consciousness fluttered; she dreamed of fast, low motion, a gliding, a sliding, a skimming across the frosted surface of snow on a hissing plane of polyweather fabric—somewhere in the superconducting spaces of her brain the impression formed of a sledge—cut with the deft stroke of a sharp blade from the skin of her pod-tent, hissing across firm, new snow, carrying her deep, deeper into the Dreaming. A solid dark mass beside her, pressing uncomfortably; could that be the head? Was he to share this Dreaming too? She struggled to sit upright, found herself immobile. The dark figure had lashed her firmly with plastic thongs. In a moment of lucidity she was certain she saw the dark man astride a white organical to which her sledge was attached, powdered snow pluming up behind him, the dark boles of trees blurring past. Then the whiteness, the pure, holy whiteness of the Dreaming came pouring in through the crack in her skull and swept her consciousness away.

She was on the borderline again.

The woman on the bus to Rungwa had chattered so. Chattered and chattered and chattered. Every day, she took the bus from Camp Twelve to Rungwa on the border, and then the crossborder shuttle to Khuragha where she worked in a dry-cleaning shop removing stubborn and embarrassing stains, an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back, every day, more than mortal flesh can bear: I would tell the bloody Proclaimers to stuff it if it was not there are fifty hands for every job this side of the border. Still, it is easier for us than for the men. There is no work for men. They will not let them in, you see. They think every man from this side of the border is a Warrior of Destiny and wants a reunited land, which of course is nonsense, if you ask me, what they want is jobs and if anything drives men into the Warriors of Destiny it is the boredom of sitting around on their hands idle all day. Making a rod for their own backs, the bloody Proclaimers. Even we have to be back across the border every night. It is not just that they do not trust us—and they do not trust us; if ever anyone gets accused of pilfering or shoddy workmanship, it is always the poor Confessors—the real reason is that they do not want their precious township polluted with Confessorism. Scared stiff of us outbreeding them or worse, interpartnering with them. Would not know their right hands from their lefts, then. Not that I would want to stay there anyway; not after what they did to us; stick to your own, I say. You know your own best. Stick to your own, that is what you got to do, girlie.

And then the bus had stopped and everyone looked very afraid because it was far from any township and there was no scheduled stop and the night was coming on and the only reason a bus would stop in a place like this at a time like this was if it had been stopped. By men. Armed men. They came stomping onto the bus in their muddy boots and polyweather coats, coming up the rows of seats looking at the faces and she and the chattering chattering woman—silent now—looked at them with their black weapons with the Empire-Made stickers still on the handles, row by row by row. All the way to the back of the bus. When they had looked at everyone on the country bus they went back to the third row and the man who seemed to be their leader clicked his fingers and pointed at a young man sitting in a row all by himself. The young man looked around at all the people on the bus, then got up and went with them. The armed men got out onto the empty road in the swirling sleet and the man who seemed to be their leader said to the driver that he could go on now and the bus pulled off leaving them standing there at the side of the road and she looked back out of the window and saw the young man pushed down to his knees in the mud and slush and night. Then the road curved and she saw no more.

She remembered the way the trees had closed in behind the bus, dark shapes closing ranks, shoulder to shoulder, like heavy, stupid louts, and she tried to look at the trees blurring past her but she could not see them, she could not see any trees at all. Instead, it seemed to her that she was in a room, a warm room, comfortable, dimly lit. She imagined faces hovering at the edge of recognition, faces that withdrew as she reached toward them. Were these her ancestors? Were these the generations upon generations of Filelis who would people her Dreaming? Memories, fleshed out, embodied, incarnated? For an instant of lucidity she was certain that they were the faces of her mother and Faradje, and with them a tall, vigorous man, righteous, yet oddly merry, like a vacationing angel.

She remembered arriving in Rungwa on the night of the winter carnival. The lights of the fairground, the rides stubbornly whirling in noise and glare and glee through the windblown sleet, the prayer wands and paper lanterns tugging in the wind, the smell of dirty hot fat from the food stalls, the dogged determination of the people, muffled up in winter clothes, to enjoy, only served to amplify the township’s colossal isolation. Rungwa was the last household of man before the uninterrupted primality of the great north woods. Apart from the Listeners. But they were insane.

So said the fat woman behind the hot bread stall, face shiny with sweat and grease.

‘Pack of crazies, living out there in the middle of nowhere a thousand kilometres from anywhere, Proclaimers and Confessors all together trying to find a way to reconcile one to the other. Bloody waste of time, you ask me. Sure what is bred in the bone cannot be reconciled. Against nature. Your Proclaimer, he is not like us. Different species.’

She had asked with her silver jacket at every stall and bunco booth in the winter carnival but every head shook every shoulder shrugged every lip pursed, no. With a little of what money remained on the card, she had taken a room at a café that abutted the country bus station and watched the lights of the fairground moving through the falling snow. She found the soft, silent sifting down of the infinitely varied flakes distressing. Memories of another room in another cheap hotel, another window, the rainfall of a different season. And the girl with traitor’s hands.

Even in the throbs of carnival, when the outlying homesteaders and foresters came in by trux and even some of the revenant clans from deep inside the forest joined the celebration, Rungwa was still small enough for every face to be known by every other and for the credentials of every passing stranger to be common knowledge.

No, they were not here.

No, they had not passed through recently. No one passed through here, unless they were Listeners, or looking for the Listeners.

Southern faces. Faces like these we would remember. Perhaps…months back…who can be certain, these days, with everything all turned upside down?

Well, if they are not here, and if they are not in any of the places you have been through, then there is nowhere else they can be, is there?

How can you get there?

You cannot.

Not in this weather.

You cannot even consider it.

Lifts? Sister, this is the end of the line. The road runs out here. At the most, the odd truxer, the odd wild fur gatherer, sometimes a food convoy, or some of their missionaries, returning to base. And that is in the good season. In this weather? You Southerners have no idea what it is like when the big storms come down. We have been cut off for weeks at a time. Sister, you would not last ten minutes out there. Not ten minutes.

How far? About five days’ walk.

The tent? The tents start at six hundred enns. That particular model is eight hundred and fifty. You will need a heat unit also. They are two hundred twenty enns. And a body bag; one hundred and fifty enns. And some decent clothes, and proper shoes. You will not get far in that get-up. I will give you eighty enns for the jacket. Leaves seventy enns for the clothes and boots, and as you are buying a job lot, I will throw in two pairs of snow shades. You want to go snow blind? Food? We do not do that here. For that you want Bilimbe’s on Nineteenth Street. About fifty enns should buy you enough. How much does that leave you? That radio? Oh go on, I will throw it in for nothing, I have always had a soft spot for lost causes.

The child is mad, I tell you, mad.

The instructions she had received were simple, clear and thrilling. Walk along the border for four days. When you reach the Jerrever checkpoint, turn and head south a day’s walk and somewhere along that line you will intersect with the Listeners.

That first morning’s trek, away from oily, warty Rungwa, up into its encircling hills and the edgelands of the great northern woods, had been a hymn. Light falling in shafts through fast-moving reefs of cloud turned the winter forest to silver—dazzling, marvellous, the habitation of saints and angels. Fingers of land-coral were capped with white, every cup fungus—twice her height—was full and running over with snow. Sagging balloons, weighed down by ice, shifted in the wind and shed sparkling—crusts of frost. Her breath hung about her in steaming clouds—she hardly noticed the weight of tent, rations, heater, radio, head of her grandfather (muffled up, muted for once), as she toiled over the hummocks of frozen moss domes and sudden sheer valleys where small, dashing brooks ran beneath the ice. Her bootprints behind her seemed like numerous and persistent sins in the purity of the whiteness. Beneath the snow and decomposing forest litter her gloved fingers grubbed out wild brownmeat. She sucked the fleshy buds straight from their barely-open prepuces; what she could not eat she tied to her pack to dry and cure in the cold wind.

She had worried that she might not be able to recognise the borderline. It was unmistakable. A strip of pure white fifty metres wide, shaved bare of trees, fungi, corals, every living thing. Down the precise centre of the dead zone ran the wire. Snow had drifted against the foot of the wire fence that was taller than five people, covering the small cairns of bones and leather that were warnings more eloquent by far than the bilingual notices in vibrant red and white that the fence was electrified.

She did not like to walk under the shadow of that fence. She could feel its charge as a numbness, a deadening of her spirit that was only alleviated by moving under the eaves of the forest. Straight, undeviating as a slit across a throat, the borderline crossed hill and valley, ice-locked river and stream. She had hidden from the guards at the first border post—half a day’s walk from Rungwa, a cluster of helicopter-dropped housepods guarding the pass between nothing and nowhere—afraid of their weapons, their foreignness, their maleness. But as she moved along the borderline, day after day, post after post, she understood that the guards of God’s Country were not her enemy. Here the winter was the enemy of Free Stater and God’s Countryer alike. The guards would hail her and when she mimed a reply, they seemed to mistake her for a Listener—she could not imagine why—and threw cans of food and beer over the fence to her, cheering those that hit the wire and fell back with an impressive shower of sparks.

On the fourth day the borderguard at the Jerrever post sent her southward with a rain of Five Hearts Beer cans (surely an omen of something) and she had never felt more like singing. Then she felt the whole forest shiver, one great, fearful tremor, shaken by a surge of wind from out of the north. Within minutes clouds had covered the sun and she saw that this land she had thought pure and white and holy was the white of teeth and bare bones, that its beauty and divinity had always been deceptions. Big snow coming. The trees were loud and restless as the vanguard of the storm advanced behind a driving wall of ice needles.

The light was gone by the time she had erected the pod-tent and stimulated the heatglobes into life with a libation of chilled Five Hearts Beer. She sealed the sphincter as the blizzard struck the forest like a fist, curled up in her quilt bag warm and snug and excited with the childish delight in being sheltered from vile weather.

And now she was dead, sinking into the matrix of roots that knitted this land together. And in the spring when the snows melted and flowed and dashed in a thousand spated streams running down from a high, hard land to the great river valley those travellers that came nudging cautiously into these forests would find some ghastly travesty of a human being knitted and knotted from shoots and roots and fibres and bones and no one would know and no one would remember and no one would kneel to press their ear to earth still damp from the thaw and listen for a voice crying out from the soil, no one to hear, no voice to cry and she cried out in the Dreaming someone anyone hear me! and the cry broke the empire of the memories, smashed it, sent it spinning away like broken ice on a flooded river.

She lay on a bed in a warm intimate room. Windowless: the only light came from bank upon bank of tiny bioluminescents. A discomfort around her mouth and nose; she raised her hand, saw tubes, slugs, leeches clinging to her arm, felt organicals clustered around her face, made to tear them away.

A hand stayed hers.

A hand. A face. Two faces. Three faces.

The tall, angelic man she had seen in the room when it had been a dream, whom she now realised had driven the sledge, had slit open her tent with his hunting knife, had saved her.

Faradje. Fat. Bleary. Smelling of cooking and bed.

Her mother.

—Yes.

Your voice; how what why do I hear it?

‘In your mind.’ Faradje, a little apart, at the foot of the bed. ‘Everything will be explained, rest. You were a long time away from us.’ It looked like Faradje, but surely Faradje’s voice had never held such a graciousness of tone in the days on Lantern Lane? The tall man moved among the biolamps turning them up a higher illumination.

‘Javander Shasri,’ said Faradje. ‘From the in-moiety. It was he found you, brought you here.’

Here? Where? Grandfather!

—Peace. The old man is being cared for. He is fine; already, he has managed to offend the out-moiety postulant assigned to attend to him.

Javander Shasri. A Proclaimer name. Her Mother, seeming to know her every thought, speaking into her spirit. Faradje; transformed. Everything was here. Nothing made sense.

Her Mother unfastened the high collar of her tunic. Lit by bioluminescence, the scar was livid, shocking, the staple line pursed like lips.

‘The operation is very simple,’ said Faradje. ‘Quick. Painless. The house medicals are very experienced. The vocal chords were cleanly excised.’

That tall one with the Proclaimer name, the fingers of his right hand were resting on a long-healed scar on his throat.

She had deceived herself. This was death. This was unreality.

—No. Again, the voiceless voice formed out of some mental stratum deeper than hearing. —No. No. You could not be more wrong. This is not death. This is true life. Me, Javander, even Faradje, we are Listeners now.

Before the small, quick, clean operation that cut away his voice, before even the call of God to this pure land and the community of the Listeners, Javander Shasri had been an engineer. He had worked on the railways with a huge organical that ate in whole forests at one end and shat parallel ceramic rails and neatly packaged parcels of organic waste out at the other. He and his machine had shat rail enough to reach from him to God and then one day as he was sitting eating his lunch watching the twin ceramic rails squeeze from the big organical’s rectum, God had come sliding down that line out of heaven and shown Javander Shasri the profound truth that he was not to be found in addition, in the endless multiplication of names, titles, words, facts, but in subtraction, in the division of things into themselves so that only the unitary denominator remained, in the stripping-away of all the human paraphernalia of observance and ritual and dogma to reveal the simple divinity within.

Such a mathematical, exact theology appealed to Engineer Javander. It led him past the place where his rails ended, away from the confusions of humans, into the deep woods and the greater contemplation of God. And, in time, to the Listeners in their north woods fastness, among whom he found a practicality of application of this theology that was close to his pragmatic engineer’s spirit. The generators that maintained the ur-space bubble at the heart of the Balance House were tributes to the skill of their dead designer, and indeed, the Balance House itself, the spiritual, metaphorical and actual point of equilibrium of the community, was a delight and wonder to him and sign that the things of God may beat once essentially simple, yet intelligent and sophisticated. In such a spirit, he chose to end his days as a sojourner, take the Vow, and join the in-moiety and be admitted to this fulcrum of mysteries.

Parallel to this mathematical, abstract strand of his theology ran the awareness that an immense and profound spirituality inhabited nature. In the depths of the wildwood dwelled a sense of the immanent, the numinous, that he had been searching for since his earliest childhood. It was not God, but it was the closest to God he could imagine. Whenever excuse could be made, he would take a vehicle from the community pool and drive for hours through the uninterrupted, present solitude of the deep forest. Whatever the season, but most especially after the first snows of winter had fallen and Iain, he found in the woods the expression of the ultimate simplicity of God.

It had been on one such winter patrol that he found, in the wake of the blizzard, the too regular, too incongruous mound of the pod-tent among the snow-drifted buttresses of the dendé tree and the half-dead girl and the more-dead head within. Now he was abroad once more on the community snow-byke—a lovely thing, sleek organoplastics, strong beating motor muscles, shaggy mane with nylon hair (he found himself thinking altogether inappropriately proprietorial thoughts toward it)—ostensibly to check on the welfare of the Jerrever border post, the community’s nearest neighbours, in the wake of the storm.

God’s interests are not renunciation, but recycling. Every old thing is to be made new and reused. Therefore, it was the old engineer in Javander that immediately recognised the distinctive sound of demolition charges. From the north. Towards the border. The spiritual life is worthless unless rooted in concern for one’s fellow humans. He flicked up his anti-glare lenses into maximum polarisation and turned the byke north, toward the dead zone.

Javander Engineer was forced to admit that they had been uncharacteristically thorough. A three-hundred-metre stretch of fence had been neatly felled by shaped charges.

Javander Listener was filled with apprehension as he left the byke purring by the wire and stepped into God’s Country.

Winter is a hungry season. The smell of the blood, the blind touch of the warmth of the bodies even as they cooled, had woken the life sleeping in the soil and sent it burrowing up through the snow. Javander cleared the pulsing, sucking organicals from the first of the figures spreadeagled in the snow. Shot through the left eye. As he had expected. The others would be the same. Strange that he felt no horror, no rising gorge of revulsion. There is a mighty tranquillity in shock. The winter-hungry organicals came swarming back out of the pink snow as he went to check the border post. On the small portable television a happy couple were winning an obscene amount of money on a game show. Plastic-wrapped crates of beer were piled up underneath the desk. On the walls, calendars with big-breasted smiling girls, anachronistically warm and summery. Poor sinful Proclaimers, condemned to Khirr by the vile act of looking upon the human form.

He found the portable communicator, took it outside to check the direction of the byke tracks. North, across the cleared zone into the trees. Engineer Javander knew that the authorities would have been alerted by the power-out in the fence, Listener Javander knew when silence must be given up.

He unfastened the breast pocket of his heavy wintercoat, fumbled open the sealed plastic envelope that contained the vocaliser organical. The heat of his throat activated the device; a tendril went questing into the interface behind his ear and nestled among the synapses of his speech centres. The sector headquarters number would be first in the communicator’s memory.

‘My name is Javander Shasri.’ The artificial words were oddly weighted and poorly inflected, but discernible. ‘I am from the Listener Community. Listen, please. The border post at Jerrever has been attacked and destroyed by the Warriors of Destiny. No survivors. The attackers are headed north, towards the railhead at Jerrever township. Please alert authorities. I shall wait at the border post for your arrival.’

He sat with his feet on the desk surrounded by the beautiful big-breasted smiling calendar girls, drinking beer and watching an incomprehensible soap-opera about the lives of neighbouring families in a suburban cul-de-sac in some eternally sunny and happy Imperial city until the helicopters came.

In those first days at the House of Listening while the out-moiety medicals healed her flesh and the in-moiety counsellors healed her spirit, Mathembe Fileli discovered that an entire spectrum of emotions can be diffracted out of the word love.

Joy: that her Mother, and even fat Faradje, were alive, safe, warm, fed, sane, healthy.

Relief: to be alive after all, to have reached the end of her search, to have had her hunches and instincts and stubbornnesses proved right.

Anger: that her Mother had found a life and purpose complete, whole, without any place considered for her daughter, her son.

Guilt: that she should feel such anger toward her Mother.

Shame: that her search, the reason for her being these past months, should have been concluded in such ignominious failure.

Such complexity of emotions, Mathembe Fileli. And when her mother sat with her on the meditation stools set in one of the community’s fruitful domed gardens, tried to touch her, to communicate through her wordless, tactile communication, Mathembe slapped the hand away; angry, shamed, guilty, relieved, joyful. She feared her Mother’s spirit examining too closely the sores and seepings of her emotions; pains and shames she did not wish opened to anyone.

—Set it down, let it go. Stop being capable. Stop being responsible. Stop giving. Receive. You helped me, once, then, in Karasvathi, when I was driven to desperation by my own need to be capable, to give, to be responsible. Will you consent to be helped, now?

Out. Away. Leave me alone, she shouted at the voice of her Mother in her mind, striking at the touching hand. It was too soon for intimacies. The winter was yet heavy upon the land. There must be time for the roots and shoots to grow under the snow, to go down into the earth and find warmth and strength and security there. Mutual rememberings, the sharing once again of experiences, the explorations of personal changes; all these must pass before Mathembe could allow the intimacy of this silent language.

Her Mother looped a speech synthesiser over her ear, around her lacerated throat, into her brain, and spoke aloud in an artificial voice that shocked Mathembe because it was so alien from the voice she remembered coming from this face. They spoke about peripherals, things on the edges of their lives.

Uncle Faradje? He was well. As she could see. His innate talent for burrowing and nesting had found perfect expression in this warren of burrows and nests beneath the winter woods. The Listener theology—anti-theology, rather, the community fought shy of the sharp-edged, vicious knives of doctrine—was entirely compatible with Faradje’s own personal philosophy. Worship as you can, not as you cannot. Therefore a couple of hours’ paperwork in the out-moiety offices settling the affairs of the community in the outside world, a few minutes on the satellite link and accessing information from the Dreaming-matrix, a morning or so picking fruit in the gardens and closed orchards, a little sleep, a little beer, a little lying-back to watch television were the steps by which he made his way to salvation.

‘Even God,’ Mathembe’s Mother said, ‘needs a civil service.’

And the head? Grandfather?

The scar on her Mother’s throat might be barely healed (Mathembe had gained a ragged understanding that this radical vow of silence the in-moiety took was somehow linked to the relationship between the words ‘Silent’ and ‘Listen’, anagrams of each other), but in that brief time living, moving among the silent, she had learned more of the eloquent communication of the voiceless than in all her life before. Mathembe found it exhilarating to be understood, totally, completely.

If she was here at all, if she was no longer the Mathembe Fileli that had run in the forests of Chepsenyt, but something leaner, fitter, crueller perhaps, more compassionate perhaps, it was in no small part due to the ungentle kindness of her Grandfather. It had been the heart of bone in her will to survive. But the winter passage of the border country had been hard on the head. The peeling, scabbed skin, the hair and beard falling out in handfuls, the dead, dendrified rooticles, the wooden skull misshapen from many a hard knock, blow and fall: testimonies to hardship. The dead do not heal.

‘I have long given up hope of returning to the old Fileli tree in the Ancestor grove in Chepsenyt,’ it had said to Mathembe, when she visited it and its out-moiety minder. ‘I cannot go back to Chepsenyt. None of us can go back to Chepsenyt. All the trees have burned; what Chepsenyt there is is the Chepsenyt you make. This will be Chepsenyt for us now.’

One of the first acts of this newly redefined relationship was for Mathembe and her Mother to return the head to the dreaming of its new Chepsenyt. It seemed a sign and seal of deeper and more painful intimacies to come if they could do this thing together. Mathembe thought of Hradu, determined to cast his shadow over the borderland, make the name of Fileli a synonym for fear and terror. Mathembe thought of her Father, as much a prisoner of his prejudices in the seductive Eden he had created as he was of the tree in the row of thirty-seven outside that regional detention centre. Later. The time for these was later. Their closeness was still too fragile, still crystallising, easily shattered.

The dead of the House of Listening occupied their own dome, a dark, cool beehive filled with whisperings, echo upon echo of remembered lives. Ten, twenty, thirty metres, the interlocked wooden masks of the dreamers arched over Mathembe and her Mother. The Grandfather surveyed the dim, biolit interior of the dome from its cracked and chipped pot.

‘Can any of these farts play fili?’ it said. Then, changing mental tack, ‘You were right, granddaughter of mine. I hate having to tell you so, but you were right to ignore me and go on with the search. If I had not been so selfish, back then at Kilimambasa, so much hurt could have been avoided…’

Mathembe kissed the old, vile, rotting thing on its lips. The head coughed. A small cough, that became a big, then a major cough. The head coughed and coughed and coughed, a huge dreadful racking cough from the very bowels of its being, had it bowels, had it a being more than a memory of a memory spinning through the neural matrix of the rooticles, coughed and coughed and coughed. And spat something onto the ground.

Mathembe picked up the thing it had spat out onto the floor of the chamber.

A smartcard. Crumbed with soil, stained with organical ichors. The signature was still legible: Kolé Fileli. Her Father’s smartcard, that he had hidden in the pot that time, at the checkpoint on the escarpment above Timboroa. Mathembe looked at the card. Before her Mother could glance over to inquire, she flung it away from her, away in a glittering arc through the air. It fell unmarked and unremembered in the darkness.

The Listeners being shy of formalised faith, there was no litany or rubric for the transmigration of the dead. An organical hoist heaved itself through the narrow door, splayed its feet wide and lifted the two living and one quasi-dead to the highest point of the dome.

‘Nice view,’ said the head, its voice almost gone now. ‘Pity it is such a bloody undignified way to go up to heaven.’ It had always understood that its umbral existence was temporary. Death is the empire of every man, where all sleep and many dream. A hard land, maybe, but living may be harder, when you are handless, footless, action-less, deed-less, reduced to a dependent voice that can conveniently be ignored. If the saints had willed that it return from death it was for the purposes of wisdom—for the heart of the will of the saints is not doing but being, not action, but personal maturity—to shape a new dreaming, one that was more than life’s strictures and limitations, that had a hope of being heaven.

Mathembe’s Mother held the cracked pot. Mathembe eased out the mess of decaying, dendrified rooticles, pressed them into the apertures in the dome wall. One by one the sphincters sealed shut, the grafts took.

‘Listen granddaughter of mine, daughter-in-law of mine. I have one last story to tell you; you most of all, Mathembe. As it will be my last, this side of the Dreaming, at least do me the honour of listening well.

‘In my courting days, when I was known around all the townships of Timboroa Prefecture, I was much wont to visit in Tetsenok township, where I was told by the father of the woman who was to become my wife that on the end of the street lived a man who had caught an angel in a hunting snare. Rather than shoot it, he brought it back to Tetsenok and kept it in an empty kennel for prayer-dogs. There was no doubt that it was an angel; the man was a well-known braggart and invited everyone in the township to come and see the angel in his dog-kennel. I myself did not see it, but I was informed on the highest of authorities that it definitely was an angel—a small one, just a handful or two of primal creative energy, but unmistakably divine. Your Grandmother’s father told me he could not see very much in the gloom of the prayer-dog kennel, but that it was about the length of his hand and forearm, silver-coloured and gave the impression of being shaped like a fish. He asked the man what he was going to do with it, and the man said that he was going to feed it on scraps and trux-syrup until it grew big enough for him to tie a chair to its tail so it could whisk him off up through the sky into heaven. He went every day to look at it and feed it this unholy mess of syrup and scraps and it seemed to him as he looked at it that every day it lost a little of its uncertainty, a little of its shimmering fishiness, a little of its silver shine, and became a little darker, a little duller, a little more tarnished and definite in shape. It developed things that looked like legs, little stumpy legs, and a shape like a head on the end of a neck, and a body, and a tail and every day as he came back it seemed less and less and less silver and numinous and more and more solid and dirt-coloured and one day there was no angel there at all, no shining heavenly silver, only a big dumb, prayer-dog wagging its tail and waving its feet and singing in its throat.’

Mathembe cocked an eyebrow. What does that have to do with anything?

‘Damned if I know,’ said the head. ‘You find something for it to mean.’

The eyes closed. Buds sprouted from the ears, became leaves, became a beard of small blood-coloured flowers. The lips parted and turned to wood, and spoke no more.

If there had been any way in which he could have linked him to the killing, Javander Shasri reckoned the northern Defence Force officer would have had him shot there and then. A dumpy, frog-like man, this officer, made more so by multiple layers of winterproof clothing, with the distinctive, amphibian aura of one whose long comfortable hibernation has been unforgivably disturbed. A pulse ticked in his temple to the strict tempo of a Spirit Lodge drum. He was one of those to whom the one thing worse than a Confessor was a turned Proclaimer. He refused to let Javander help tag and bag the bodies, or any of his men to go within three metres of him. He had heard all about these turned Proclaimers. He knew all about their infections. Javander’s statement had been taken on a pocket ceedee recorder, which the officer had then assiduously wiped clean with a paper tissue. When the helicopters flew away with their black cargo strapped to the landing skids, the tissue had remained, a fluttering butterfly of blue blowing across the snow towards the wire.

When they were black dirt in thee ye of God, Javander went back to the empty hut and put a call through to the out-moiety, a brief report of the outrage, his intention to go on to Jerrever to check on the Listener mission house in the township. He removed the vocaliser, turned off the television. A children’s program involving the wholesale destruction of property and the celebration of anarchy (with major prizes) was sucked into the white Schwarzchild radius at the centre of the screen.

Javander met the tape twelve kilometres out from the Jerrever. Yellow plastic tape, swathed and draped and festooned across the white road that ran down the valley to Jerrever, twisting and fluttering in the wind. CAUTION: POLICE INCIDENT CAUTION: POLICE INCIDENT CAUTION: POLICE INCIDENT. Battletrux lounged by the side of the road, childishly blue and yellow against the colder, adult, cynical colours of the heaped, refrozen ice. Blue and yellow, too, the shoulder flashes and insignia of the militia that stood around on the road, ashamed to have been caught looking at the things they had killed. The byke purred and nuzzled against the side of the big, warm battletrux: Javander slipped underneath the plastic tape. Young Proclaimer defenders made to arrest him, black weapons lowered.

Hands raised. One finger touched the scar on his throat.

The officer in charge nodded. Javander might only be a Listener but he was some shape of spiritual authority. Not even a Warrior of Destiny could be denied terminal unction.

The woman and the young, terribly thin girl were past his saving. Brains dead, cooling rapidly toward absolute spiritual zero. Nothing beneath his hand. No pulse of quickening, not even the memory of a memory. Despite wounds that had ripped open his side and spilled his stuff out onto the road where the heat of his life ran into the melted ice, the young man was alive.

Riding riding riding through the great dark winter, through the trees, the endless trees, all of them together riding riding riding brothers and sisters with their weapons on their backs high high on victory, high high on killing riding riding riding into the heart of the enemy all friends all comrades all brothers and sisters together ‘tonight we will strike’ he had said, the small one, the dark one, the leader, ‘tonight we will drive a spike of fear into their hearts that will make the whole world shudder’ and they had come out onto the road and they were waiting for them and the guns had opened up and Silele on your left-hand side she had gone down first and in front of you a wall of bullets lifted Aya off her byke tore her apart before your very eyes sent the stuff of her life spilling and spraying across the white ice road and you looked around where where but you could not see anything and your leader he was shouting but you could not make out the words and you stood up to see him where was he? where was he? and then it hit you, then it ripped into you and you did not feel anything, not anything at all but the strange taste of brass in your mouth and a terrible dark sickness and your byke reared and screamed under you and threw you and as you fell you saw your guts coiling out onto the ice and all you knew was a profound fascination at how densely and intricately packed was the complexity of your inner life…

He tried to croak, to touch fingers but the only movements left were tiny movements, the only sounds small sounds.

Javander kissed him on his open mouth.

The boy-soldiers shifted their weapons, uneasy, uncertain.

The virons took only moments to reach the brain but even as the infection spread the boy was dying.

I…You…Confusion. What? How?

No time for talk. Feel. Experience. Share. I am you and you are me and we are we. We are reconciled. I and thee, be reconciled.

But he was afraid. Afraid of the dark, the cold, spreading through him, afraid of this presence, this identity.

Hold me, stay with me, be with me, go with me…

He held him in his mind until the final neural spark dimmed and guttered into extinction. Javander took his lips from the cooling flesh. The soldiers stood away from him as he walked away and the bag teams came with their plastic zip-lock sacks. The officer pursed his lips, shrugged. So.

So.

Damn it.

Peace for the living, not a kiss for the dying. He had failed God. To send his divine infections burning through the nervous systems of every one of those scared, guiltily proud young militiamen; that would have been success. Success for the Listeners, success for God.

The spirit had flown. The great north woods were empty, mere trees, mere snow, mere whiteness, mere meteorology across which he travelled; the presence that stirred the silence only the wind from the north.

Had he been moving any faster than the pace of a troubled spirit the wire would have cut him in half. As it was, it felt like God had exploded his heart in punishment for disbelief. He sat on the snow, gasping in great knifing lungfuls of winter, legs splayed out before him, dazed, reeling while his field of visions swarmed with shapes that might have been phosphene angels and just as easily might have been the figures of lithe youths, slipping out of light-scatter into corporeality.

There was no rule against it; there was no rule at all, save that simplest and most difficult of spiritual rules: love God and do what you will. However, custom and usage had it that in-moiety and out-moiety kept separate quarters: speech was speech and silence was silence, and while reconciliation of opposites was the purpose of the community, those were two flavours much enhanced by being kept apart from each other. Thus it was uncustomary, but not improper, much less unlawful, for Mathembe’s Mother to move her daughter from the sojourners’ quarters along the outer edge of the community to live with her among the in-moiety.

Before they entered the in-moiety, her Mother made Mathembe wait a moment at the door.

‘There are no words in here,’ she said through the vocaliser. ‘The only speech in this place is the speech of the spirit, you understand. Can you trust it? Can you trust me?’

Mathembe listened to the silence, nodded. Yes, I can, I will, yes.

Her Mother disengaged the organical from her brain and left it sucking from a row of wall-teats. They went in.

The in-moiety house was a dome, larger by several degrees of magnitude than the dome of the heads. As high as the laws of architecture would permit the surface of the dome was sculpted into biopods, each lit bright as an eye with many lamps. Rope ladders and scrambling nets provided access to the individual quarters; the climb to those pods closest to the apex of the dome was vertiginous. Mathembe thought of the hive of some mindless, colonial, web-spinning insect. Translucent membranes covered the entrances of most pods, a few were open, fewer open and occupied. As Mathembe took in the scene a girl, thin and brown as ricestalks in autumn, came bounding down a scramble net, leaped onto a single line and handrail that ran around the circumference of the dome, swung herself into an open pod and sealed the door behind her. Terrifying agility.

Her Mother’s pod was on the twelfth level, a three-metre-long cylinder studded with biolamps.

A pat of the hand on the floor, in any language, means sit.

Her Mother touched her.

She was afraid, at first, when the first flickers of presence quickened in her mind, sent neural lightning into parts of her Mathembeness left dark and fallow all her life. Words surfaced from her dormant speech-centres.

—No magic Mathembe. This miracle is one of biotechnology, not of God.

How?

—The cutting of the vocal chords is the least part of being in-moiety. It is only a symbol, a voluntary silencing of the outward voice to permit the inner voice to speak and be heard. The true covenant of our Vow is the virons with which we choose to be infected. And even this sharing of souls is not the greatest part of what they can do, though reconciliation through true communication is no trivial thing. The reconciliation that comes through an inability to hate one’s neighbour, that comes through the abolition of violent aggression and racial prejudice, that is the true miracle.

Mathembe signalled incomprehension.

Her Mother leaned forward in the biolight, touched her daughter’s face, spoke into her mind.

—What was the central achievement of the Green Wave? Stripped of all the fairytales and nonsense, two breakthroughs: the development of a synthetic polymer that acted in every way as a living organism, and, at the same time, the discovery of a genetically tailored virus that enabled the human nervous system to interact with, and thus manipulate at a molecular level, this stuff we now call plasm.

—Forget the Ahleles, striding across the land sowing chaos from their right hands and changing from their left. Forget Janeel and Oboluwayé creeping from their crèche pods buried deep in the heartrock where the genetic changes could not affect them into a new, strangely transformed world. Those are myths. Legends. Lies. And so is the belief that Confessors and Proclaimers are genetically different. That is a myth. A terrible myth, a damnable lie, which we Listeners will expose and destroy. Destroy it, for it has had a thousand years of destroying us.

The voice in her mind grew passionate now, touched emotional responses from Mathembe.

—Take me into the cells of a Confessor, show me the DNA of the Proclaimer and show me the codon sequence that determines that one will believe in fifteen Saints-Major, six hundred and thirty Saints-Minor, thirty eight thousand nine hundred and twelve angels, and that the other will believe in one God all mighty absolute into whose image all men will be conformed through the lives and examples of nineteen witnesses. Where is it written that one will fast from nightfall to noon on his holy day and sit and wait on the whispered word of God and another will clap hands three times, bow three times before the shrine and place a little slip of paper on a prayer wand?

—I can show you where genetic drift among the Proclaimer settlers a thousand years ago resulted in inherited left-handed-ness, but it is a mighty long road from the way you sign your name to the way you worship God. I can show you where the twist for language is, where the twist lies that ensures that children are born with the same innate capacity for writing as for drawing house and trux and mummy. But I cannot show you, no one can show you, the place where the molecules demand that you are born Confessor or Proclaimer.

—Myths. Lies. Falsehoods.

It is a strange, disturbing thing, the ardour of our parents.

The wave of impressions, illusions, voices continued.

—I suppose it must have seemed like a wave, this explosion of new technology, new thinking, new ways of looking at the world. Very little has survived from those times, but through the heads we have access to worldwide data cores, and what we have gleaned from them is that the transformation of this land, the heart of the biotectural revolution, from mechanical-biological to totally biotectural seems to have been achieved in under eight months. We think we live in fast-moving and traumatic times. They are nothing, nothing compared to the utter revolution of the Green Wave. I cannot even begin to imagine how it must have seemed to those who lived through it. No wonder that it seems to us that the world began, then. In a sense, it did.

—We changed half a planet, but we cannot change ourselves. Yet we have the power to change ourselves beyond all imagining. Any shape, any form, any function. We could fly if we wished. We could live in the dark of the ocean trenches—some may indeed have done so, that may be where the legends of the Nyakabindi come from; we could travel naked through space; we could photo-synthesise. These abilities all lie within the genetic code; yet instead we cling to our cherished myths and fail to see the potential of what we could be if we discarded them.

—But we are the Listeners. We are the challengers of myths, the thinkers of the unthinkable. We have taken the first, tentative step on the road to the transformation of humanity. The science of it is quite simple: a modification to the virons that enable our nervous systems to interact with genetic material now enables them to interact with other human nervous systems, by direct contact. That is how you hear my voice in your mind, see my visions. Simple. Obvious. Something we should have thought of centuries ago, but we were too obsessed with hating each other. But linked to that first viron is a second, more delicate viron, less easily transmittable; that is the one that does the true work of reconciliation, by altering the neurochemistry of the infected person. It attaches itself to the neurons in the brain and responds to certain trigger stimuli—those, specifically, that would cause active or reactive aggression, or the socio-biological process at the heart of tribal discrimination—by stimulating the brain to release dopamines and endorphins that neutralise the reaction before it is even begun.

The science was beyond Mathembe Fileli, flesh-sculptor of Gangerabili, green lady of Unchunkolo. But the implications were clear, and suddenly thrilling. A disease that made its victims incapable of violent aggression towards each other, and simultaneously reconciled them through intimate identity with each other. A love plague.

And the Listeners, the carriers? Into every corner of the world, into every camp and hostel, into every wounded and hurting place, with a message of peace, goodwill to all men, love and reconciliation that, unlike any other creed, required no exercise of faith.

Mathembe drew back from the touching hand.

Her Mother sought her again.

—It cannot be transmitted by hand to hand contact. It is a very delicate organism, it cannot survive isolated outside the human body. It must be passed in the blood, the saliva, or sexual fluids. The wound, the kiss, the sexual act.

Her Mother…

There are two terrible discoveries, after which the world is never the same again. The first is that your parents are mortal. The second is that your parents are sexual beings.

Human souls stolen away with a kiss, an over-playful love-bite, a quickie thrust one two three ah in a back alley. Stolen away without knowledge, without consent, without any realisation of what is being done to you until the day you walk away from the faction fight in Founding Tree Square, the day the wasted boys call you black-heart no-good Emperor-sucking Proclaimer, and you smile, and you nod, and you go on your way, the day you take your Spirit Lodge sash and badge and oath and burn them in your back garden.

And never again fight.

Glorious. Exhilarating. Liberating.

Monstrous. Terrifying. Shattering.

The young woman wanted to hamstring him and drop him twenty kilometres from damnation in the deep forest.

The young man with the ludicrous attempted moustache wanted to strip him naked and leave him to the snow.

The young man with the northern accent wanted to use the knife, working his way around the extremities, snip by snip.

The girl who was the sister of the young man with the northern accent just wanted to shoot the bastard and have done with it.

All the while the boy who was their leader squatted by the heater unit and smiled. Just smiled.

‘The reason that none of you will ever be great leaders of men, let alone great liberation fighters, is that you have no notion of the value of things,’ he said. ‘Not one of you noticed the scar across the throat. A Listener, little flock. And a valuable commodity. This is our way out of the trap the Proclaimers are drawing around us. Disappear within. The Listeners refuse no one. Can you understand what I am saying, little flock? Sanctuary.’

Then they all took turns to threaten Javander with deaths painful and cruel and lingering and bloody and messy and hold knives to his wrists and weapons to his eyesocket and mono-molecule loops to his throat and al the while the boy who was their leader squatted by the warmth in his untidy tent of a wintercoat and shook his head and smiled sorrowfully.

‘Truly, you know nothing. You cannot threaten a man who has no fear of death. In that these Listeners are braver than you and I. Finesse. That is the key. Watch. Learn.’ He rose from his place by the heat, knelt before Javander. ‘Truly, your faith must be a great thing for you to be able to look death in the eyes and say you are not afraid. And I admire that. I honestly admire that. And I admit that there is nothing we can do to you that could force you to act against your will. But I still think that you will bring us to your community. I will tell you why. You see, either you lead us willingly and we come in peace with our weapons turned downward and our hands empty, or we kill you—which, as you have said, is nothing to you—and then turn your byke loose. It is a stupid creature, its homing instinct will lead us right to your House of Listening, I believe that is what you call it? And this time when we come we will come with our hands full and our weapons turned outward and we will slaughter your community down to the very last child. Death may be nothing to you, but have you the divine arrogance to say the same of your brothers and sisters? So. One question, and one question only, will you take us?’

Javander nodded.

Mathembe knew what her Mother was doing even before she was shown the Balance House. It was not just understanding, it was not just forgiveness, nor that new, comfortable relationship that develops between parent and child when they are able to recognise each other as adults and humans. Her Mother wanted transformation. Her Mother wanted evangelism. Every unspoken word, every neural message transmitted through the subtle virons hooked on to her nerve endings, were to one end: you see what I have, I want you to have it too.

Mathembe did not know if she could accept what her Mother wanted her to have. Sacramental virons crawling along her nervous system, encysting themselves in her body cavities: she did not think she could tolerate such an intimate link with the task of reconciliation, however worthy. Joining the new humanity seemed too much like violation of body, spirit and selfhood.

A third terrible revelation—not as common, perhaps as the realisation of one’s parents’ mortality or sexuality, but excruciating: the evangelical zeal of the parent towards the child.

The Balance House, spiritual hub of the Listeners, was housed in yet another dome, by far the largest Mathembe had yet seen. Ten, twenty times Mathembe’s height, lit, as were all the domes and corridors in this snowed-up, troglodytic community that reminded Mathembe of the interior of the human body, by clumps of bioluminescents set into thousands of wall niches. The Balance House itself was a cocoon of biotecture, large enough to hold in-moiety, out-moiety and all the sojourners and more, suspended from the centre of the dome by a single thread of some unimaginably strong material. Access ramps reached down from carefully spaced portals to almost, but not quite, touch the floor; with equally precise care, hard metallic outcrops of machinery were spaced around its circumference.

The entire edifice swayed imperceptibly to the tiny breaths of air that always seemed to be astir in the corridors and chambers of the House of Listening. Mother and daughter circled the Balance House. Her Mother’s hand brushed softly against it. The whole imponderable structure began to turn. Through an open portal Mathembe glimpsed bioluminescent-lit ranks of carved misericords, and a blackness so complete it seemed like annihilation. The ur-space bubble of which she had heard mention? What need had a reclusive, quasi-religious order of the technology by which starships tens of kilometres in diameter crossed the universe?

Mother’s touch.

—Two are balanced, three are balanced, many are balanced, but never one. That is the heart of it, do you see?

She did not. She touched the imperceptibly moving Balance House, felt the drag and rub of its surface under her fingers, felt it slow, felt it stop.

All this, from a single thread?

She had learned a thing about the Listeners’ touch-telepathy. It worked both ways; by touching her mother and focusing the visualisations, the emotions, the experiences that were her personal language into communication, she could make herself be heard. Whether as words, or as amorphous impressions she did not know: for all their technology, the Listeners had still a long road to go to conquer the problem of self and other. She touched her Mother, interrupting her progress around the gently moving Balance House.

Why have you brought me here?

Her Mother turned with the sudden, shocking speed of a forest animal. Before Mathembe could react, she had taken her face in her hands.

—Understand.

Mathembe flinched as memories came darting into her mind, sharp, silver, painful. Not her own memories. Her Mother’s.

The hands slip, the hands part as the flames run along the rooftops of Ol Tok. Boats push out into the flame-red water and she watches from the shore until there are no boats left, no place left to go, all her life, her treasures, taken and burned by the fire of history. She and Faradje turn to the north, follow the river roads through kilometre after kilometre of battle-scarred suburb, hiding out for days in some deserted villa or garden plot until the flow of battle moved elsewhere. On highways thick with armoured troop carriers, beneath the wings of helicopters, they are absorbed into a swelling tide of refugees as effortlessly as two drops of rain into an ocean. Time passes—such a multitude of griefs and pains and struggles can be covered by those two dismissive words; they reach Yorusha on the border of Tannalewé Prefecture, come to the door of an old river trader’s warehouse square in the firing line between Nationalists and Imperialists but which seemed to be respected by both as a kind of sanctuary. It is the mission of the Listeners—the strangely mute, maimed ones come out of seclusion and irrelevance in their north woods with a new vision—working beyond the limits of human capacity to feed and tend and bind and cherish in the name of reconciliation. A relationship grows between her and the old, silent Listener woman who nurses her back to health through the summer months of the war: seeds of fascination and curiosity germinating into shoots and roots of inquiry, budding into a spiritual quest inspired by the presence of this person who embodied saintliness because she claimed for herself no virtue whatsoever. The relationship blossoms in that first sharing of souls, when the old woman opens her memories to her searching spirit, and there, in those memories, she sees the face, once glimpsed, but never forgotten, of her son. She sees Hradu in a group of boys offloaded at some northern port, and the light of rage in his eyes cannot be hidden. She knows that she must save him. She encourages Faradje to go north with her through the rag-end of civil war to the new border that has snapped down across the land and the camps of the stateless and dispossessed that have grown in its shadow. She finds there not Hradu, but his legend; boy-hero, teen liberator, the cold and quiet killer whose name is both Law and curse among the people of the camp. She is careful not to let herself by known by the name of Fileli. Hopelessness at her inability to have prevented her son from becoming what he had made himself consumes her. She contemplates suicide; rejects it as the final abandoning of hope. Instead she seeks out the Listeners. She and Faradjeare accepted among them as sojourners; they help where they can and in their small alleviations of the enormous suffering of the camps she feels her guilt absolved, just a little. She grows close to the small team of missionaries; they share souls as a sign of her acceptance. Among those with whom she shares memories is an old, honourable Proclaimer, an ex-militiaman, troubled by the things he had seen and done in the rebellion—an old incorrigible, he insists on calling it that. Among his memories are thirty-seven man trees standing in a row.

(Here were hurt and pain Mathembe did not dare to probe. A dark place, a night of the soul, a despondent slough.)

Her next memory is of stepping out of a hired jeepney. With her is the old ex-militiaman. Close by, across rain-wet grass, are the ruins of an old detention centre. The walls are black, burned down to the ground, but the trees before it are strong and green and healthy, with many many beautiful leaves. The branches have grown together so that no one may disentangle them and say where one ends and another begins. The people of the township have hung the branches with ribbons, small icons, holy medals, sweetmeats, plastic toys. At the base of each trunk is an untidy shrine of votive lights, prayer wands, offerings, supplications. She walks along under the intertwined branches until she comes to the tenth tree. She claps her hands three times, bows three times, and presses herself to the moss-scabbed trunk.

The old Proclaimer begs her forgiveness.

She forgives him.

On her return to the mission, she says she is certain now. She applies to become a full member of the Listeners, of the in-moiety. She wants to make a difference.

Mathembe sees her come to the House of Listening in the light of late autumn.

Mathembe sees the first snow fall on the rooftops.

Mathembe sees the silver knife descend towards her throat.

And as Mathembe saw, so she was seen. Her memories opened up before her Mother, drew her into her past: Unchunkolo, Dr Kalimuni’s story, the painful revelation of the damned angel, the argument at Kilimambasa, Matinde and her fate, her own failure with Hradu, the journey along the winter border, searching. All seen, accepted. Forgiven.

‘Sisters.’

In a place where silence was enshrined, spoken words were terrifyingly abrupt. The out-moiety messenger hesitated at the sphincter door to Balance House dome. With her was a sister from the in-moiety. Mathembe recognised her as the lithe, gymnastic girl who had moved with such ease through the ropes and ladders of the in-moiety quarters.

‘Please, you must come with us to the community offices. As quickly as you can, please. All community members and sojourners must come to the weather room.’

A tilt of the head, a lift of the eyebrows, says what?

‘The Warriors of Destiny have come. They say they are seeking sanctuary. With them is Javander Shasri. We believe he is being held as hostage.’

The young in-moiety girl extended a hand in the gesture Mathembe had learned was an invitation to sharing of souls. Her Mother took the offered hand.

Despite the wound across the throat, the gasp was clearly audible. Mathembe seized the skinny girl’s arm. Show me too.

The winter, the hard physicality of his life on the borderline, had laid down flat, tight muscle, filled out his frame, sharpened off the last few soft contours of his boyhood. The mental image was fleeting, but the dark, dangerous energy that communicated itself through his every movement was unmistakable. Hradu.

Mathembe sensed it one fraction of an instant after her Mother. Even the tall, well-built woman from the out-moiety felt the tremor in the air.

The Balance House was vibrating at a pitch so slow and low that it was felt rather than heard. Dust motes stirred in the excited air. And then it became a heard thing, distant first, but fast approaching, growing, swelling, mounting in volume until the entire House of Listening trembled before it and Mathembe clamped her hands over her ears to shut out the sound; the thunder of low-flying helicopters.

There were not very many of them. Seven souls, as many snow-bykes. Some luggage, some litter, a few weapons, a handful of all-weather pod-tents. They loitered, they busied themselves with the small necessities of survival, they waited, on the snow. The House of Listening’s sprawl of tunnels and buildings encircled them, excluded them. As the House of Listening itself was encircled, out there at the boundary of the snow-covered paddy fields and the forest, by the waiting helicopters. Caught between the inner and the outer.

The weather room had been grown onto the roof of the refectory as an eye on the outer world by the community’s architects, a four-windowed place of retreat and the contemplation of the divine in nature. Since the arrival of the Warriors of Destiny and the landing of the raiders from God’s Country, there was not a daylight hour when it was not busy. The curious, the concerned, the contemplative. Most, like the sojourner woman who passed the image-intensifier to Mathembe, apprehensive.

The helicopters from God’s Country were beautiful, obscene creatures; gleaming black carapaces to which no crumb of blown snow adhered, rotors folded flat along the sleek sides, weapons pods clutched in an array of claspers and mandibles, lean, carnivorous. They crouched among the trees with no attempt to conceal themselves beneath light-scatter nets. Occasional figures could be seen at large, moving from helicopter to helicopter, never daring to expose themselves on the naked ground.

She turned her attention inward, to the comings and doings of the Warriors of Destiny. By his height and his demeanour—composed and serene in the most stressful of situations—she recognised Javander Shasri. This was the man who had rescued her, now in need of rescue himself. The thought of reciprocating his gallantry pleased Mathembe. With him was Hradu. The lenses and circuitry stripped him of personhood, of brotherhood into just another piece of television, a collection of meaningless actions and movements with no connection to herself.

As if the balance of forces between Listeners, Warriors and northerners was not precarious enough, a fourth force was now approaching that threatened to shatter the equilibrium into chaos. For the past few hours the out-moiety had been picking up radio communications from a large force of Free State troopers advancing from the main road at Rungwa through the north woods to invest and neutralise the incursion of northern soldiers.

Caught between the outer and the inner. And not only between opposing external forces, but internally. The House of Listening was fissured and schismed by internal division. Those northern raiders, those Free State troops, had not chanced upon this place serendipitously. Someone in the community had summoned them.

A house divided. Watch closely, this is how the world ends. Differences of opinion became disagreements became arguments became polarisations and factionalisations and hostile camps. At the convocation of all community members to which the messenger had summoned Mathembe and her Mother from the Balance House, Mathembe had watched Faradje and her Mother argue with each other. A strange argument, when one side does all the shouting and the other is silent. In every word, in every gesture and touch, was the sickening tearing sound a child hears when it wakes in the night to hear its parents fighting in the next room. Like children, the sojourners, Mathembe among them, watched in incomprehension as every principle in which the House of Listening was rooted was torn from the earth. This had all the peace, reconciliation and true communication of two battledogs fighting in an alley.

As the pain of the children may save a partnership, so it was the sojourners who saved the community. Tugged and torn by the opposing gravitations, they might themselves have leaped with a whoop and yell into the fray. Then a young man, a Confessor boy, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen? with the dark skin and eyes of the southernmost prefectures cried out: In the name of God, will you stop it, please stop it? We don’t know what to believe any more. I came to this place believing it could make a difference in the world and you cannot even keep the peace among your own selves.

No child that has seen the shame of his parents will ever forget it, or ever view them again as he did before. This is the fourth and cruellest revelation of the children, for after you have seen it you are a child no more.

In the weather room, the bell chimed. In-moiety, out-moiety, sojourners descended the spiral staircase, passed along the icebound corridors and through the neat gardens and the valve doors into the big dome. One by one the Listeners filed up the ramps into the Balance House and Mathembe understood her Mother’s enigmatic comment that other time by the Balance House. There cannot be one because to be reconciled, there must be a thee, there must be a me. However he approaches, one is always unbalanced. Mathembe stepped onto the ramp, carefully timed her steps to match those on the other ramps. The Balance House trembled, but did not waver. She moved carefully around the tiered interior to the designated seat. The Balance House quivered, but did not waver. The mechanisms that controlled the ur-space bubble at the centre of house had focused it down to a twenty-centimetre sphere so black, so compelling that it hurt the eye. It was a long process for all the community members to go up one at a time and take their places. When all the seats were filled the ramps folded up and away. Doors sealed shut. The Balance House swayed; sojourners and younger out-moiety members looked at each other nervously.

Hands were joined.

Every soul shared with every other soul.

At first Mathembe thought sanity and self would be smashed to powder by the hammer blow of so many lives pouring through her own. Then a voice spoke in her mind and all fear was driven away. The voice of the elder of the in-moiety.

—One hundred years ago a Confessor holy person and a Proclaimer witness went wandering into the great north woods. Each came from an opposite direction, each was trying to find the ultimate truth of God in their respective beliefs. They wandered and they wandered and they wandered, moving inward all the time until they met in the same clearing in the middle of the forest. Recognising each other, each therefore tried to convince the other of the error of his ways and the superiority of his own faith. They debated theology with each other, they argued with each other, they shouted and cursed at each other; they damned and condemned each other, they fought tooth and nail until their clothes were in rags and all their possessions were destroyed and still neither could convince the other that theirs and theirs only was the true and only way to God. They debated and shouted and cursed and fought so long that they had not realised that the winter was upon them and that they were naked and defenceless in the wild north woods and that if they were to survive one night, let alone return to civilisation, they must swallow their pride and their incompatibilities. So they took a vow, each of them, that they would not speak, for it was words and the meanings of words that had set them apart and at each other’s throats. In silence they worked and helped each other, and the strength of the one covered the weakness of the other, and the strength of the other covered the weakness of the one. And as they worked, in silence, they learned that the things that separated them were not as great as the things that united them, and that if they were to return to the world of humans, their peace and unity would once again be torn apart by the hatreds and prejudices of the world. So they remained, in silence, in their clearing in the north woods, and ever since, people who have sought a better way, a realisation that the things that unite are stronger than the things that divide, have come seeking them.

There was silence. The leader of the out-moiety, a small, vigorous woman of fifty-something called Isye, then spoke the case of her people. Her soul-speech was cautious and halting, but compelling.

She said it was she had informed the God’s Country authorities at Kalighash. She had brought the helicopters. For this she begged the community’s forgiveness. Her motivations had been honest and, she had thought, in the best interests of the community. What was noblest and highest in human law was that which stood upon the foundation of God’s Law, notional right and notional wrong that was programmed into the genetic heritage of every human being. It was wrong to kill: God’s Law and human law agreed. It was right that such lawlessness be punished; indeed, to let a violation of God’s Law go unpunished was to violate God’s Law oneself.

These Warriors of Destiny were killers. Offenders against any and every law, they had annihilated the border post and would have carried out unspeakable atrocities against the innocent people of Jerrever. For the House of Listening, however noble its aspirations, to have extended sanctuary to violators of God’s Law would have been to break God’s Law. Natural law demanded that these criminals be turned over to the forces of justice, and expeditiously. Therefore she had telecommed through to the brigade commander at Kalighash and brought him and his warfleet of helicopters hammering in hard and fast and low over the treetops of the border country.

Moral considerations aside, for the community to have taken in the sworn enemies of the people of God’s Country would have been, in their eyes, to identify with their methods and aspirations and irrevocably alienate the Proclaimer population. One course and one course only had been open to her. She had taken it without the slightest qualm of conscience. She hoped her sisters and brothers would understand and forgive her.

There was silence among the tiered rows of the Balance House. The argument was a strong one, and convincing. Then the leader of the other faction spoke; Tulash, a thin, luminous old in-moiety man of sixtysomething. His soul-sharing was suave and limber, and firmamentally sincere.

He begged the forgiveness and understanding of his brother and sister Listeners. He had been guilty of errors of pride and anger against the whole community. The virons did not abolish anger or pride—that was for the angels—they merely prevented their manifestation as violence and aggression.

He did not wish to be thought vain in saying so, but he had been a member of the community longer than any outside the Dreaming. And in all those years, those hard decades when the philosophy of Listening and reconciliation seemed weak and insipid compared to the muscular, brash new philosophies of nationalism and independence and the community in the deep woods had slipped from the minds of all but a few faithful in the surrounding townships who had kept it supplied through the winters, one tenet had held true. None are ever turned away. No matter how foul their crime, how deep their sin, how black and cancerous their guilt. None were ever refused admission. Who among them was without sin? Who among them had not come here with spirits as dark and troubled as these Warriors of Destiny? The difference was one of degree, not of state. If they had come in need of healing, how much more these Warriors of Destiny? God had not appointed the Listeners to be judges. He had appointed them to minister to the needy.

None needier than those whose spirits were scarred and hardened by the way of violence. It had been said that the House could not admit them and retain any credibility. The truth was that the House could not refuse them and retain any credibility.

He finished speaking and there was silence in the Balance House. The arguments of the in-moiety, too, had strength and merit. Mathembe held them one in each hand and weighed them against each other. Their weights were equal. She brought her hands together and tried to fuse them into one thing, one common consensus. She pushed and she pushed and she pushed but they would not mate. They remained isolated, inviolable, incompatible.

After the sharing, the silence.

Mathembe had grown up with silence. Silence had been her chosen companion to run with her in the forests and glens around Chepsenyt. Silence, and solitude. But she had never known silence like this. The silence of soundlessness is not the silence of listening. The difference is as simple and profound as the difference between empty and full, presence and absence. This vibrant, listening silence threatened her. Every moment swelled and swelled and swelled like an enormous water-drop from a rain-soaked leaf until it could not possibly hold any more time; then fell, sparkling, into the past. In this silence she could feel every movement and stirring of the Balance House on its diamond thread, could feel the very planet turn beneath her feet.

On and on and on. Silence. The fat, tear-drop moments fell slower and slower; slower and slower. Time slowed. Time froze. Time ceased. There was only silence.

Out of the silence a voice spoke. It spoke aloud; words that set the Balance House trembling, it spoke also silently in the sharing of spirits through every joined hand in the chain of Listeners.

Seek the more excellent way. Seek reconciliation, wherever she may be found.

The speaker was a young out-moiety woman of thirtysomething, heavily pregnant, suddenly, terribly self-conscious at having shattered the silence. But no one doubted that she had spoken the pure and undiluted word of God, for even as she spoke, the response swam up to the surface of Mathembe’s consciousness, to the surface of every mind in the Balance House:

Yes, we know what we must do, but who will do it?

‘I will,’ said the young sojourner whose outburst of emotion and honesty had caused this meeting to be gathered. Without a moment’s hesitation: ‘I will go.’ Blessed he who knows so surely the will of God.

I will, said the mind-speech of a middle-aged in-moiety woman, pretty in an ugly sort of way, ugly in a pretty sort of way, dressed in a tattered one-piece smeared with paint-stains.

And it came to her. Like a clear voice, like the voice of a jangada poet soaring above the multi-layered complexity of his accompaniment in ecstatic improvisation. Call it God, call it an angel, call it destiny, call it insanity, call it what you want, but call it out, call it out loud. She placed the touching hand of the man on her right on her shoulder so that the circle would not be broken, clenched her right hand into a fist and struck herself with all her strength on her chest.

I will, said Mathembe Fileli. Send me.

The House of Listening had never been more alive, more one body, than in those hours after the people had come, one at a time, out of the Balance House and into history again. In-moiety, out-moiety, sojourners, all worked together with an unhurried yet fruitful unity.

While the Free State troopers in their armoured battletrux ploughed inexorably on through the pure northern snows, and the God’s Country raiders played knuckles and listened to cockle radios in their helicopters and Hradu and his six terrorists ate self-heating rations with plastic spoons and did tricks with throwing knives, Mathembe and her Mother went down a third time to the Balance House.

They say that once is for you, twice is for the one you love; but the third is for the saints.

Mathembe cupped the sphere of ur-space between her hands. Its blackness was so intense that there were no highlights or shadows to suggest it was a sphere. Pure shadow, a flat disc of shadow. A universe between her fingers.

—Of course, the generators will expand it considerably for you to enter. The first, and great reconciliation, is reconciliation to your self. In there (there could be no other ‘there’ than that bubble of non-physicality) is everything you have ever hoped for and everything you have ever dreaded and your every dream and your every nightmare and all good things and all bad things and all that you love and all that you hate and all that you fear and all that you despise about yourself and everything that has brought you joy and everything that has ever hurt you.

How?

—Ur-space, the matrix, the Dreaming, heaven, all are aspects of the same thing, a universe of consciousness that lies beside and within our own, yet is not identical with it. How do the Saintships traverse whole galaxies instantaneously? It is as true to say that they do it by wishing, or by imagination, or by force of will, as by the mathematics and mechanics of a higher dimension. In there is whatever you want there to be, its shape is however you shape it. There all the mental entities that make up your life are made real. You can destroy them, they can destroy you. Or you can be reconciled to them, and they to you.

Mathembe wondered how it had been for her Mother, after the knife, when she had stepped newly wounded through the blackness. What had she found there, and how had she reconciled, or failed to reconcile, herself to that psychic bestiary?

—You should rest now. Sleep. Prepare yourself.

I have been preparing myself all my life, she wanted to say.

—You must choose a partner.

?

—No one goes into the Balance House alone. No one goes into ur-space alone. You cannot infect yourself. It must come from another. It must come by, through, as, an act of love, because it is a kind of love itself.

Through the touching hand came images of a short, squat, ugly grinning man, of flat, broad fingers, like spades, of hard, flat muscles, of hair and breadth and weight and solidity and eyes so deeply slitted you could not tell their colour; and a generous, gentle, humorous spirit. All gone. Months gone, gone away deep into the south, to the mission at Ol Tok.

Names, faces came tumbling through Mathembe’s mind. All the in-moiety, men and women, catwalked before her.

—Who would you have?

She pointed, out, up, through the dome and the earth and the snow.

Him.

Javander was not surprised when Hradu Fileli acceded to the request from the out-moiety that he be released and returned to the community. His usefulness as a hostage, always limited, had been devalued with every piece of news eavesdropped on the Active Service Unit’s radios. Now that the Free State Troopers were within five kilometres of the House of Listening, he was worthless. The balance of forces was changed, dangerously. The entire House of Listening was hostage now. They could let one go with impunity. Javander knew, Hradu Fileli knew, the out-moiety knew that with every minute the Free State forces drew nearer, the greater the probability that the northern raiders would launch a pre-emptive strike against the Warriors of Destiny and escape back across the border before the encirclement was complete.

What did surprise Javander was that he was taken straight away by a delegation of in-moiety brothers to the Balance House. It was only as he saw the ur-space bubble expanded to fill almost all the open centre of the building that he understood.

The things we do for God.

—You do not have to go.

The Balance House swayed slightly as Javander and his assistant moved unseen beyond the all-devouring universe of black.

—You do not have to, Mathembe’s Mother repeated—I would have gone. I should have gone. He is my son.

As Mathembe undressed, her Mother ran through the final checks. Remember, there is no gravity in ur-space. Remember, the space within the bubble is potentially infinite. Remember, the atmosphere is almost pure oxygen, you can very easily overventilate. Remember, you can come back at any time, by merely wishing it so. Remember, the ur-space medium is not so much a physical object as a set of metaphysical concepts. Remember remember remember. And Mathembe Fileli stood naked before her Mother for the first time since childhood and her Mother looked at her and saw what kind of a woman her daughter had become and all the scars that her education had earned her and she hugged her very quickly because anything more would have torn her in pieces.

Mathembe Fileli stepped forward through the black curving wall of ur-space. And was swallowed.

Black nothing lightless soundless touchless scentless tasteless weightless nothing nowhere no time is this death is this annihilation no, cannot be, I think and if I think I cannot be dead, I think therefore I must be and if I am, therefore there must be some physical form to contain this thinking being me and as she thought the thought her body appeared—or was it that she became aware of being aware of her body? but her body it was, long and languid and naked and floating in this lightless soundless touchless scentless tasteless weightless unmedium but if she could see her body there must be light by which to see it and as she thought light so there was light and the lightlessness became a light blue infinite space and if there was vision, must there not also be sound and touch and scent and taste and even as she thought about them so they became; the sound of the wind, the feel of her own corporeality, the scent of fresh clean air, the taste of cold, high altitude on her tongue: she was flying, flying through an infinite blue sky, look, far below her, scuds of clouds, flying, without engines, without wings, without any means of support or propulsion whatsoever except her own imagination, if I doubt for even a moment that I cannot fly, will I fall? no, do not even think it, but is not to not think about it to think about it? well I did not fall then it must not be true.

Flying! She was the angel, the silver angel of the Dreaming but this Dreaming, this heaven, was of her own shaping and the thought of that both thrilled her and frightened her for in this infinite blue sky with its politely scudding clouds might range an infinity of psychic monsters that could destroy her. And even as she thought it, so she noticed that moment by moment this infinity was attaining finitude, the blue endless below her was thickening and curdling into a basement of clouds and she knew this place now, it was the Dreaming of the Filelis, the Dreaming that her Grandfather had promised to remould and if she looked down might she see? yes, islands of riotous brilliant colour on the grey backdrop of clouds. She knew what she would find in the Edenic forests of these cloud-islands, but with a beat of her mind, she bent her body toward them and shivered with the sexual thrill of a million cubic kilometres of air brushing against her naked skin.

There were angels. A multitude of angels, beautiful beautiful angels with bodies of steel and chrome and silver and bronze and white platinum and diamond and jasper and carnelian and every precious metal and mineral, all the Filelis, generation upon generation of them, lounging about in the trees, in warm pools of limpid water, on soft carpets of moss, in the petals of enormous succulent flowers, in the treetops and the branches, atop the umbrellas of the fabulous fungi or immersed in fleshy cups of honeydew.

They were bored. Insufferably, unutterably, eternally bored.

Paradise was boring. Heaven was tedium, unending monotony of splendour and joy and plenty, of ease and pleasure and every wish and whim provided for.

Paradise? A subtle kind of hell, rather.

As Mathembe passed overhead, the angels turned into trees. Sank roots, pushed out shoots, grew branches and leaves.

She had rather imagined they might.

She knew what she would find if she penetrated the cloud layer and dived towards the waters that covered the earth. But Mathembe-space still had a character of its own, still contained a capacity to surprise. The behemoths still trudged across the surface of the planet trailing their wakes of boiling water, paradise borne on their shoulders. But the tread of the monsters was purposeful, determined even. The shoulders did not stoop beneath the weight of past lives, but bore them up proudly; the heads were not bowed, but looked forward, onward, eagerly toward some ineffable destination. Mathembe twisted and tumbled through the air and she saw that the leviathans were changed because the essential nature of their components was changed. The men and the women and the children were still chained and roped into their carcasses of metal strapping, treading on their treadmills, pulling on their levers. But the feet trod with enthusiasm, the arms that pulled the levers pulled for joy, and in the faces of each of the millions of men women and children who made up the bodies of the walking giants there was a resolution, a determination, an idea of a place to go to, a purpose to achieve that would be shared by all if all joined and worked and trod and pulled together with the common goal of achieving it. The men smiled, the women glanced at them and laughed, the children giggled and grinned as they trod their wheels and heaved their levers and moved forward, step by step by step.

Those men and women and children. Of course. Theirs were the faces of the House of Listening.

She headed back to the clouds. But Mathembe-space held new surprises. She looped past the behemoth’s head and suddenly saw what she had not seen from a distance; that it was the head of her Grandfather, fleshed out and sculpted by the arrangements of human bodies. A mouth wide enough to drink down the great river in one swallow opened. Lips, teeth, tongue, were carefully interlocked men and women.

GUILT, said the Grandfather-head, and thunder growled in the perpetual mists of the cloud layer. LOVE.

Impelled by a will not her own, but born of some mind-eddy in ur-space, Mathembe was drawn into that open mouth. Air rushed past her, a cyclonic inhalation, swept her between the cavernous lips, teeth each the size of Unchunkolo, to land lightly upon a tongue fashioned from bowed backs.

There was a tea-set waiting for her, an exquisite, craftsman-made tea-set of the highest refinement.

‘If only you would speak, Mathembe Fileli,’ said Dr Kalimuni, pouring tea into china cups. ‘You and all like you, if only you would speak out and say enough of this, if only you would even once refuse to let us death-haunted, bigoted old people speak your words for you. Go on, speak, say something. What have you to say about this world you have been given by us? Do you like it, do you hate it, do you want it, and if not, what do you want in its place? How will you change things, what will you make better, what will you make worse, what will you make different? Speak. Say it out. Why are we so afraid to ask for the things we truly desire?’

And these were the answers Mathembe Fileli gave.

The world I have been given is the only world there is. And because it is the only world there is, I like it and I hate it and I want to make it better and I want to leave it unchanged.

What I will make better is me.

What I will make worse are the things which were bad to begin with. For then we will see them as they truly are, with no glamorous mask or cosmetics.

What I will make different is the life of everyone who meets me.

We are afraid to ask for the things we truly desire because we are afraid we will not know what to do with them when we get them.

And I did not speak because I had nothing to say and no words to say it with. But now I have the words, Dr Kalimuni, and something to say with them, and I will speak and be heard.

A rising wind lifted her, drove her before it away from Dr Kalimuni, improbably anchored with his Book of Witnesses and his exquisite tea-set in the hurricane breath from deep in the ur-lungs of the behemoth. Lips, tongue shaped the breath into memories of words. GUILT. LOVE.

LOVE.

Guilt no more. The burden of responsibility no more. The freedom to act not out of a sense of having to atone for some sin of failure, but for the joy of acting. Her enormous self-absorbed silence was broken. Others existed. They existed not as markers against which she could measure her own degrees of success or failure or guilt or happiness, but for their own needs and cares and joys and griefs. The realisation of the other was a mighty liberation, a mighty wing-beat that sent her up through the cloud layer into the brilliant blue.

She saw him from afar, a dark freckle on the perfect skin of the sky. She knew who and what he was. Rejoicing, she willed herself toward him, hurtling through the sky to explode against him in a soft detonation of passion, to wrap her legs around his waist, slip her tongue between his teeth, hug him to her with her arms and tangle him up in her. She moaned as she felt him enter her, felt his tongue caress hers; then even the pleasure of his thrusting thrusting thrusting as they tumbled through the sky was swept away by the electric thrill of the virons bursting through her body, multiplying and reproducing through her bloodstream faster than thought, spiralling along her nervous system, in waves of ecstasy breaking through her hind-brain into the twin hemispheres of her Mathembe-Fileliness, infecting every part of her, every organ and gland and hair and cell of her, into the thousands of potential Mathembe Filelis waiting in her ovaries, she cried out as the spurt of his virons invaded her, twice-pierced, twice-penetrated and all the while as they tumbled through space they tumbled through each other, through their memories and experiences and loves and hates and everything that had ever happened to them made visible by the sharing of souls.

Darkness. The imagined world had unravelled and been wound back into her memory as they coupled. Now only they remained, two definitions of reality in the unmedium of ur-space. She lay beside him, touched him, felt him, understood him.

—How long have we been here?

—Never and for ever. Like everything else here, time is an extension of your imagination.

—So we could stay here for ever.

—We have already been here for ever.

Forever passed, and he said.

—Are you ready?

She realised that in thinking that there might be a world she regretted returning to, she was ready. She looked to touch him for just one more personal forever but he was gone. She was alone in enveloping blackness. The blackness intensified until it became a tangible thing, an infinity pressing against her skin in which she was embedded. It might not be blackness after all, she thought, it might be all the colours of the world, blindfolding her, and as the thought came to her, so the unsubstance beneath her fingers grew tangible and fibrous and tore at her touch.

Light shone through the cracks in the firmament.

Like a newborn creature from its birth-sac, she tore her way back to the world.

—How long was I in there?

There. It had dwindled again, to the size of a small fruit. How many angels may dance on the skin of a breadapple? How many universes may you hold between the palms of your hand?

—Two hours and twenty-three minutes.

This soul-speech, it came to her with an ease and clarity she had not known before. As if…as if…it were not the translation of gestures, movements, the inarticulate speech of the heart, but the words themselves. Her head was reeling. She tried to shape air into sound.

Nothing.

Of course. She was in-moiety now.

Two hours twenty-three minutes?

—The Free State troops have surrounded the northerners. The commanders are conferring, via the out-moiety. The Free State commander is offering the God’s Country commander safe passage back across the border if he will leave in peace. The God’s Country commander is uncertain whether to trust the Free State commander, whom he suspects of being in league with Hradu. If he becomes convinced he is in a trap he may try to shoot his way out.

Hot towels, underwear, winter clothes. So soon. How long does it take to become…

—…a carrier. Not long. Less than two hours twenty-three minutes. The virons reproduce at a staggering rate. You are biologically capable of attempting this mission. Spiritually capable?

Yes. No. Maybe. An old Mathembe gesture. Spiritually capable? Who of us may claim spiritual capability? Every step is the step of faith.

Let us go.

The southern boy fingered his new, pink scar, fingered and fingered and fingered it as he waited in the room with the ugly-pretty woman and Mathembe. The pretty-ugly woman touched the boy, Yasda, and Mathembe also, to share the joke.

—If you tear those staples, you will bleed to death before you even get to these Free Staters.

It made Mathembe laugh. The out-moiety brother came in in a gust of cold to announce that the bykes were ready for those that needed them. Yasda stood up and almost sat down immediately. Nerves.

—Courage. The woman Chemde goosed him on the ass. And they were gone and Mathembe was alone in the cold room. She listened to the noise of the engines until the wind swallowed them up. One to the Confessor, one to the Proclaimer. And one other.

Courage. The way of reconciliation was the way of courage. Courage not to accept the world as given to you. Courage to give up your preconceptions, to admit that they were not so sacred after all. Courage to allow yourself to be changed. Courage to change others. What had Faradje said? They know they will change the world, eventually: one soul at a time.

One soul at a time. Out there Chemde and Yasda would be making their own particular converts. They would be surprised, those commanders, shocked even, military people were habitually conservative, by the suddenness of the mouth kiss. They might react violently, they might mistake it for an attack, an assassination attempt. They might kill the ones who were trying to bring them together. This has always been the danger of the peacemaker. If even one failed to become infected, tragedy would ensue. It should have been easier for her. She had known the body she would be infecting with peace all its life. It was that it had grown so far different that made it frightening.

Courage. One soul at a time. Life by life we will end this millennium of ignorance and hatred, one soul at a time we shall bring peace to the broken land. It starts with one life, and one life starts with one step.

She got up, opened the door opposite the one through which Chemde and Yasda had gone out. She stepped out. The Warriors of Destiny stood up, raised their weapons. Hradu came forward. The snow flurried around the House of Listening. One step after another, Mathembe walked out across the snow with unsealed lips to the place where her brother was waiting.