Chama (Part 2)
Note: This story contains some themes that may not be suitable for younger readers.
It was strange when I finally met with Nortac because we spoke in a place time had bent in all directions at once, at least for the two of us.
When I returned home to Tierra, the ship roused me from my sleep with its pre-programmed gentleness. Then I walked the streets of my onicev, pushed my still night-black bangs out of my face, and looked at the broken shacks with eyes just five years older than they'd been at my departure.
But everyone I'd known was gone. Everyone with whom I'd shared the saltbread of a hundred Memory Days was gone. The people I saw slumping against walls and playing lethargic stick games in the street were their echoes, their descendants. They were my descendants, and I knew them not. Nonetheless, I loved them with a fierce passion.
With an equally fierce curiosity they gawked at me. So many years had passed for them. They didn't know who I was (ancestor or stranger?). Some did not even know what I was (man or ghost?) because my face passing them on the street was the same face smiling down from atop a funeral pole at the edge of town.
The people of my onicev saw me walking by, but they knew my grave sat in its proper place among the numbered generations of Chama. My portrait on my funeral pole had hung in its place since before any of them had been born, since before any of them had begun their own personal struggle to stay afloat in the Nortac's ever-expanding, blood-red sea.
My pilgrimage to Stella had been undertaken for love of these people and for love of SOID, but it had been kept a secret – not from SOID, but from my people, and from Nortac too. In fact, it had been SOID's idea to create a tale of death to cover my pilgrimage from all eyes but mine and hers.
She had come to me as I slept and told me things I didn’t know about Nortac's refuse recyclers and how their heat incinerated everything – even bodycode – as it stripped any biological material down to the primal elements needed to make feed additives for livestock.
SOID told me that if I would dare to feign a wild attack upon Nortac's recycler, she would veil the eyes of the Hairless guards and make them believe I’d fallen into the cauldron (a lie made holy in its service of truth).
I dared to believe the dream, I acted, and I trusted SOID would keep up her end of our game. So I made plans to journey secretly to Stella under the cover of my pretended death (a cowardice made brave in its service to justice).
SOID kept her word, Nortac’s guards believed I was dead, and so I have returned five pilgrim years and eighty-five Tierran years later. I have returned in success with a True Scroll of Writ Wisdom in my pocket. I have returned to see my people gawking at me. I have returned to face Nortac.
As I walked the street of my onicev and sensed eyes reaching out from every doorway, I felt young but weak simply because everything around me except for me had become frail and old. A man with wrinkles so deep they collected dust within their folds, pointed a finger at me and asked, "Do you still live?"
I nodded and continued my walk to Nortac's palace. High up on a hill far ahead his palace hung over me, attracting me and repulsing me all at once. This confused feeling I identified as the sensation of destiny and, knowing this, I was at peace.
When I was shown into his sitting room, Nortac was already there, leaning against the mantle of his fireplace, flames reflecting in ripples across the skin of his scalp. His right hand held a half-drunk glass of cactus rum. The fluorescent greenness of the liquid seemed all the more otherworldly in the reddish firelight of the room.
Like me, Nortac appeared unaged. In my case, pilgrimage and the odd intricacies of time and physics were to blame. In Nortac's case, it had to do with unlimited resources and every bodycode therapy money could buy.
He nodded to me in recognition without betraying any surprise at my being alive. I bowed deeply and so kept the typical rules of etiquette which seemed especially absurd in our circumstances. Nortac drained his cup of rum and placed the glass on the mantle.
"Chama, you look good. Has Resurrection Day come and everyone forget to tell me?"
"You look well too, Nortac. Do Father Time and the Reaper now accept bribes?"
Nortac laughed. His laugh seemed deep, in the belly, not mocking or ironic.
"Chama, do you bring me anything interesting from your little junket to Stella?"
Gently, I took my copy of ancient Stellan Writ from my waistcoat, its gilded edges hand-painted and its letters hand-copied. The scroll was an expensive rarity in the age of compuscreens and meanderings between planets, but, according to Stellan custom, it was the only accepted way Ancient Faith Writ could be transmitted with authority among the far-flung worlds.
Nortac unrolled the entirety of the scroll from its center tube, a piece of solid platinum the span of a hand with a fat, red jewel capping each end. "This I will most certainly keep," he said of the tube. With his left hand he tossed it once in the air, caught it, and placed it on his mantle beside the rum glass.
With his right hand Nortac held the unrolled text which was as long as he was tall. He took it in both hands and began to read it slowly. As the parts he finished folded back over his hands toward me, I saw in the firelight the artistically illuminated letters adorning the beginning of each section – dark-skinned angelic figures crowned with rich, black curls reclining in the hearts of fanciful Ds and vaulting over the crosspieces of ornate Hs.
Save for the pops from the fire and the occasional, quiet "hmmm" or "aahhh" from Nortac, the room was silent for a long time.
At last he finished his reading and folded the Writ into a precise, thick square. Then he looked at me with a mood of expectation.
"Chama, what do you say?"
"Nortac, it is all there in the Writ, which is greater than us both," I said.
"Indeed. I have read it. But, do you, Chama, have anything to add to the wisdom of the ancients?"
"Just this tale, Nortac," I said.
“OK. Go on, Chama.”
"There once was a great lord who owned so many shalon that – if shalon could fly – they would have blacked out the sky with the blanket of their feathers. Now just beyond the borders of the lord's estate there was a poor man who had but one pair of shalon.
"However, the poor man's shalon were remarkable; in a certain way they were without compare. Unlike the typical shrill squeaking of their kind, these two shalon sang beautifully because of the love they had for one another and for the poor man who owned them and gave them shelter.
"The shalon belonging to the great lord, plentiful as they were, could not sing. So, the lord decided he must have the poor man's two shalon as well. The lord went to the poor man and demanded them. The poor man said no.
"Unaccustomed to being denied, the great lord killed the man, had his body ground into feed for livestock, and took the two orphaned shalon for himself. But the pair never sang again."
Nortac stared at the floor, nodded once, and puckered his lips as if he were tasting something questionable. "Is that all, Chama?" he said.
"Does there need to be anything more, Nortac?"
"I suppose not, Chama. And I, of course, am the greedy lord here before you in the flesh. That is the part you left out, of course. I'm surprised, Chama, because you disappoint me. I ask you to add something of yourself to the Writ, and all you give me is some weak free-styling based on an Ancient Writ Tale about a lusty king and his trusty prophet.
"All of this has no impact on me, Chama. It has no impact on anyone or anything so far from Stella. And, truly, does it even have any impact on Stella itself anymore? No, and you must know that it doesn't. You've been there. To Stella. You've seen the endless towers of glass and stone and steel, their tops lost in beige clouds. You've seen the vast number of buildings – endless, bristling the horizon as if the whole planet were a single yerka brush. And, Chama, you've seen the people there; you've seen them walking the streets like cloaked phantoms, their faces hidden in masks studded with filters colored according to personal status and wealth.
"Chama, that world cares nothing for the Writ it itself birthed long ago. And I care even less about it out here. Out here there is an N in the center of the galaxy, not a W for Writ or an S for Stella."
"What of an S for SOID?" I said.
Nortac gave me a flat smile which barely turned up the corners of his mouth. Then he bowed to me deeply and said, "You have said this, Chama. Not I."
With that Nortac took the square of Writ he’d been holding, and he blew his nose into it three times, wetly and with a rasping, honking noise. Then he balled it up and pitched it into the flames.
I saw years of time, immeasurable miles of travel, and the life savings of my clan curling and burning away in the fire with the figures of curly-headed angels. But I did not flinch. I did not blink. I did not react in any way that would give Nortac pleasure.
He watched the fire burn for a moment, and then he turned to me and dismissed me with a wave, his fingers rippling quickly in the air like he were playing some sort of invisible flute.
"You may go now, Chama," he said.
I turned and began walking to the door. When I reached it, I stopped. I did not yet open it and pass through, but I didn't turn back to Nortac either. I decided I had something else to say to him, something that was not clearly based on Writ, but something that burned within me like Writ. I did not need to honor him and look him in the face to say it. I was tired of etiquette’s pointless gymnastics.
"Nortac, I have something else to add, if I may."
"Of course, Chama."
"Once there was a powerful man who had a small kitten. He held it in his arms and posed it and made it do whatever he thought amusing. But the cat had a ruach and will of its own, and it became angry. It nipped and scratched the powerful man with its milk teeth and tiny claws. The man was not amused. He smacked the kitten on the top of its head and tossed it on the floor at his feet. He made it whimper and whine."
"But there were powers in the universe even more powerful and mysterious than the great man. And the next time the great man blinked, those powers had come to play. When the powerful man opened his eyes, the cat before him was a kitten no longer. It was a full-grown, full-hearted adult, and it was no domestic cat.
"It was a tiger, a king tiger, a beautiful beast now so large and fierce the great man could never again hope to wrap his arms around it and corral it. Had the cat been transformed, or had the man underestimated from the first what he’d tried to control? It didn't matter. What mattered was no man can control a king tiger tired of being posed as a spoiled, hairless baby's toy."
After a moment of silence I spent staring at the wood frame of the door, Nortac’s voice drifted around my shoulders and slithered into my ears: "Perhaps, Chama. Perhaps. But I doubt it. Now I have had enough for today. Leave me."
I left. It had been enough for one day. Many more days were to come.
Thinking back on them all, I notice my curls have at last turned gray. I suppose this represents a loss of vigor washed away by the flow of Time. But I do not miss this extra years of vigor bought me by my wanderings to Stella and back. Over the years since my return, whatever has been lost to Time has been more than made up by what Land has given me.
I feel Land’s energy flowing into me this very second as I lie flat, face-first upon the naked dirt far from town and from what passes for civilization on Nortac's stolen Tierra. I taste the energy in the dust tickling my lips and crunching between my teeth as I speak with SOID in the first moments of morning on the first day of a new Era.
It is more than energy, more than vigor. I also receive scope and vision, my eyes and ears witnessing events far from where my flesh and blood lie prostrate. My ruach shoots, a quicksilver shaft of soul firing through the ground, and my closed eyes see the town square miles to the east; my ears fill with the sounds of my crowd gathered there.
Midos and Rafael, my closest confidants and my lieutenants, stand at the head of the crowd. The people are rowed and ranked like the warriors they have been forced to become. With his left hand Midos rakes his bangs from his face. With his right hand he holds a gun pointed toward a hairless gendarme who is on his knees and under the control of Rafael.
The hairless is named Jaramillo. He is not a bad man. I actually quite like him and am sorry he is bloody around the mouth. It is strange to have to bloody someone you care for. It is all so strange, really, but, nonetheless, it all is, and it all has to be.
Rafael presses a small compuscreen into Jaramillo's hand and tells him to read from it, and when Jaramillo begins to do so at a whisper, Midos commands him to start over and read the text again, this time at the top of his voice. Midos threatens to bloody him further if Jaramillo doesn’t do as he is asked. Jaramillo complies.
"Under the gaze of Family Chama and all of Tierra's originating families, before the steps of Nortac's Council Hall, under the never-sleeping eye and ears of SOID, it is declared that Stellan Writ reestablishes just claim on Tierra from this point forward. We will no longer leave. We will no longer depart from our dignity. We named these mountains, steams, and mesas. We will have them again."
Then with one voice, the crowd screams once. It is a long, shrill piercing of the air, a fair approximation and magnification of a shalon’s call. I am sure Nortac has heard it. SOID tells me this is so.
What will happen next I do not know, but I am not afraid. Nothing can frighten you once you've spent the dreams of ten thousand nights seeing your planet bathed in rocket fire and reborn in blood.
When I returned home to Tierra, the ship roused me from my sleep with its pre-programmed gentleness. Then I walked the streets of my onicev, pushed my still night-black bangs out of my face, and looked at the broken shacks with eyes just five years older than they'd been at my departure.
But everyone I'd known was gone. Everyone with whom I'd shared the saltbread of a hundred Memory Days was gone. The people I saw slumping against walls and playing lethargic stick games in the street were their echoes, their descendants. They were my descendants, and I knew them not. Nonetheless, I loved them with a fierce passion.
With an equally fierce curiosity they gawked at me. So many years had passed for them. They didn't know who I was (ancestor or stranger?). Some did not even know what I was (man or ghost?) because my face passing them on the street was the same face smiling down from atop a funeral pole at the edge of town.
The people of my onicev saw me walking by, but they knew my grave sat in its proper place among the numbered generations of Chama. My portrait on my funeral pole had hung in its place since before any of them had been born, since before any of them had begun their own personal struggle to stay afloat in the Nortac's ever-expanding, blood-red sea.
My pilgrimage to Stella had been undertaken for love of these people and for love of SOID, but it had been kept a secret – not from SOID, but from my people, and from Nortac too. In fact, it had been SOID's idea to create a tale of death to cover my pilgrimage from all eyes but mine and hers.
She had come to me as I slept and told me things I didn’t know about Nortac's refuse recyclers and how their heat incinerated everything – even bodycode – as it stripped any biological material down to the primal elements needed to make feed additives for livestock.
SOID told me that if I would dare to feign a wild attack upon Nortac's recycler, she would veil the eyes of the Hairless guards and make them believe I’d fallen into the cauldron (a lie made holy in its service of truth).
I dared to believe the dream, I acted, and I trusted SOID would keep up her end of our game. So I made plans to journey secretly to Stella under the cover of my pretended death (a cowardice made brave in its service to justice).
SOID kept her word, Nortac’s guards believed I was dead, and so I have returned five pilgrim years and eighty-five Tierran years later. I have returned in success with a True Scroll of Writ Wisdom in my pocket. I have returned to see my people gawking at me. I have returned to face Nortac.
As I walked the street of my onicev and sensed eyes reaching out from every doorway, I felt young but weak simply because everything around me except for me had become frail and old. A man with wrinkles so deep they collected dust within their folds, pointed a finger at me and asked, "Do you still live?"
I nodded and continued my walk to Nortac's palace. High up on a hill far ahead his palace hung over me, attracting me and repulsing me all at once. This confused feeling I identified as the sensation of destiny and, knowing this, I was at peace.
When I was shown into his sitting room, Nortac was already there, leaning against the mantle of his fireplace, flames reflecting in ripples across the skin of his scalp. His right hand held a half-drunk glass of cactus rum. The fluorescent greenness of the liquid seemed all the more otherworldly in the reddish firelight of the room.
Like me, Nortac appeared unaged. In my case, pilgrimage and the odd intricacies of time and physics were to blame. In Nortac's case, it had to do with unlimited resources and every bodycode therapy money could buy.
He nodded to me in recognition without betraying any surprise at my being alive. I bowed deeply and so kept the typical rules of etiquette which seemed especially absurd in our circumstances. Nortac drained his cup of rum and placed the glass on the mantle.
"Chama, you look good. Has Resurrection Day come and everyone forget to tell me?"
"You look well too, Nortac. Do Father Time and the Reaper now accept bribes?"
Nortac laughed. His laugh seemed deep, in the belly, not mocking or ironic.
"Chama, do you bring me anything interesting from your little junket to Stella?"
Gently, I took my copy of ancient Stellan Writ from my waistcoat, its gilded edges hand-painted and its letters hand-copied. The scroll was an expensive rarity in the age of compuscreens and meanderings between planets, but, according to Stellan custom, it was the only accepted way Ancient Faith Writ could be transmitted with authority among the far-flung worlds.
Nortac unrolled the entirety of the scroll from its center tube, a piece of solid platinum the span of a hand with a fat, red jewel capping each end. "This I will most certainly keep," he said of the tube. With his left hand he tossed it once in the air, caught it, and placed it on his mantle beside the rum glass.
With his right hand Nortac held the unrolled text which was as long as he was tall. He took it in both hands and began to read it slowly. As the parts he finished folded back over his hands toward me, I saw in the firelight the artistically illuminated letters adorning the beginning of each section – dark-skinned angelic figures crowned with rich, black curls reclining in the hearts of fanciful Ds and vaulting over the crosspieces of ornate Hs.
Save for the pops from the fire and the occasional, quiet "hmmm" or "aahhh" from Nortac, the room was silent for a long time.
At last he finished his reading and folded the Writ into a precise, thick square. Then he looked at me with a mood of expectation.
"Chama, what do you say?"
"Nortac, it is all there in the Writ, which is greater than us both," I said.
"Indeed. I have read it. But, do you, Chama, have anything to add to the wisdom of the ancients?"
"Just this tale, Nortac," I said.
“OK. Go on, Chama.”
"There once was a great lord who owned so many shalon that – if shalon could fly – they would have blacked out the sky with the blanket of their feathers. Now just beyond the borders of the lord's estate there was a poor man who had but one pair of shalon.
"However, the poor man's shalon were remarkable; in a certain way they were without compare. Unlike the typical shrill squeaking of their kind, these two shalon sang beautifully because of the love they had for one another and for the poor man who owned them and gave them shelter.
"The shalon belonging to the great lord, plentiful as they were, could not sing. So, the lord decided he must have the poor man's two shalon as well. The lord went to the poor man and demanded them. The poor man said no.
"Unaccustomed to being denied, the great lord killed the man, had his body ground into feed for livestock, and took the two orphaned shalon for himself. But the pair never sang again."
Nortac stared at the floor, nodded once, and puckered his lips as if he were tasting something questionable. "Is that all, Chama?" he said.
"Does there need to be anything more, Nortac?"
"I suppose not, Chama. And I, of course, am the greedy lord here before you in the flesh. That is the part you left out, of course. I'm surprised, Chama, because you disappoint me. I ask you to add something of yourself to the Writ, and all you give me is some weak free-styling based on an Ancient Writ Tale about a lusty king and his trusty prophet.
"All of this has no impact on me, Chama. It has no impact on anyone or anything so far from Stella. And, truly, does it even have any impact on Stella itself anymore? No, and you must know that it doesn't. You've been there. To Stella. You've seen the endless towers of glass and stone and steel, their tops lost in beige clouds. You've seen the vast number of buildings – endless, bristling the horizon as if the whole planet were a single yerka brush. And, Chama, you've seen the people there; you've seen them walking the streets like cloaked phantoms, their faces hidden in masks studded with filters colored according to personal status and wealth.
"Chama, that world cares nothing for the Writ it itself birthed long ago. And I care even less about it out here. Out here there is an N in the center of the galaxy, not a W for Writ or an S for Stella."
"What of an S for SOID?" I said.
Nortac gave me a flat smile which barely turned up the corners of his mouth. Then he bowed to me deeply and said, "You have said this, Chama. Not I."
With that Nortac took the square of Writ he’d been holding, and he blew his nose into it three times, wetly and with a rasping, honking noise. Then he balled it up and pitched it into the flames.
I saw years of time, immeasurable miles of travel, and the life savings of my clan curling and burning away in the fire with the figures of curly-headed angels. But I did not flinch. I did not blink. I did not react in any way that would give Nortac pleasure.
He watched the fire burn for a moment, and then he turned to me and dismissed me with a wave, his fingers rippling quickly in the air like he were playing some sort of invisible flute.
"You may go now, Chama," he said.
I turned and began walking to the door. When I reached it, I stopped. I did not yet open it and pass through, but I didn't turn back to Nortac either. I decided I had something else to say to him, something that was not clearly based on Writ, but something that burned within me like Writ. I did not need to honor him and look him in the face to say it. I was tired of etiquette’s pointless gymnastics.
"Nortac, I have something else to add, if I may."
"Of course, Chama."
"Once there was a powerful man who had a small kitten. He held it in his arms and posed it and made it do whatever he thought amusing. But the cat had a ruach and will of its own, and it became angry. It nipped and scratched the powerful man with its milk teeth and tiny claws. The man was not amused. He smacked the kitten on the top of its head and tossed it on the floor at his feet. He made it whimper and whine."
"But there were powers in the universe even more powerful and mysterious than the great man. And the next time the great man blinked, those powers had come to play. When the powerful man opened his eyes, the cat before him was a kitten no longer. It was a full-grown, full-hearted adult, and it was no domestic cat.
"It was a tiger, a king tiger, a beautiful beast now so large and fierce the great man could never again hope to wrap his arms around it and corral it. Had the cat been transformed, or had the man underestimated from the first what he’d tried to control? It didn't matter. What mattered was no man can control a king tiger tired of being posed as a spoiled, hairless baby's toy."
After a moment of silence I spent staring at the wood frame of the door, Nortac’s voice drifted around my shoulders and slithered into my ears: "Perhaps, Chama. Perhaps. But I doubt it. Now I have had enough for today. Leave me."
I left. It had been enough for one day. Many more days were to come.
Thinking back on them all, I notice my curls have at last turned gray. I suppose this represents a loss of vigor washed away by the flow of Time. But I do not miss this extra years of vigor bought me by my wanderings to Stella and back. Over the years since my return, whatever has been lost to Time has been more than made up by what Land has given me.
I feel Land’s energy flowing into me this very second as I lie flat, face-first upon the naked dirt far from town and from what passes for civilization on Nortac's stolen Tierra. I taste the energy in the dust tickling my lips and crunching between my teeth as I speak with SOID in the first moments of morning on the first day of a new Era.
It is more than energy, more than vigor. I also receive scope and vision, my eyes and ears witnessing events far from where my flesh and blood lie prostrate. My ruach shoots, a quicksilver shaft of soul firing through the ground, and my closed eyes see the town square miles to the east; my ears fill with the sounds of my crowd gathered there.
Midos and Rafael, my closest confidants and my lieutenants, stand at the head of the crowd. The people are rowed and ranked like the warriors they have been forced to become. With his left hand Midos rakes his bangs from his face. With his right hand he holds a gun pointed toward a hairless gendarme who is on his knees and under the control of Rafael.
The hairless is named Jaramillo. He is not a bad man. I actually quite like him and am sorry he is bloody around the mouth. It is strange to have to bloody someone you care for. It is all so strange, really, but, nonetheless, it all is, and it all has to be.
Rafael presses a small compuscreen into Jaramillo's hand and tells him to read from it, and when Jaramillo begins to do so at a whisper, Midos commands him to start over and read the text again, this time at the top of his voice. Midos threatens to bloody him further if Jaramillo doesn’t do as he is asked. Jaramillo complies.
"Under the gaze of Family Chama and all of Tierra's originating families, before the steps of Nortac's Council Hall, under the never-sleeping eye and ears of SOID, it is declared that Stellan Writ reestablishes just claim on Tierra from this point forward. We will no longer leave. We will no longer depart from our dignity. We named these mountains, steams, and mesas. We will have them again."
Then with one voice, the crowd screams once. It is a long, shrill piercing of the air, a fair approximation and magnification of a shalon’s call. I am sure Nortac has heard it. SOID tells me this is so.
What will happen next I do not know, but I am not afraid. Nothing can frighten you once you've spent the dreams of ten thousand nights seeing your planet bathed in rocket fire and reborn in blood.