LYNX
Gauzy clouds scud just over my head as I carry my armload of wood up the bison trail through the fragrant pine grove. Smooth black boulders, taller than I am, cluster in groups amid the towering pines. In the light rain, they shine as though polished by the Ice Giants. Over the past one hand of time, the morning has gone from golden to dark gray. I need to get inside fast. The problem with summer thunderstorms is that water sheets down the faces of the Ice Giants in roaring torrents, washing away anything in its path. I don’t want to end up being tumbled all the way to Mother Ocean.
Just before I walk through the square entry, I glance southward, trying to judge the severity of the oncoming storm. The volcanoes have been swallowed by a wall of rain, and lightning slashes the sky all the way to the horizon. The constant booms and grating shrieks of the Giants blend with peals of thunder to fill the air with an otherworldly symphony.
“It’s going to drench the world,” I murmur to myself and turn to walk through the entry into the Stronghold. There are an infinite number of caverns ahead of me. Some I’ve explored, most I have not. Like tree roots, they shoot off in every direction, boring deeper and deeper into the Ice Giant Mountains.
The first cave is filled with pale blue light. Doesn’t matter how often I stand here, awe expands my chest.
Peculiar drawings curl across every flat rock face. I wish I understood all of these languages, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will never learn Sanskrit or Hebrew, just to name a few of the oddly beautiful scripts that surround me. Some are love letters to people long gone: Daniel, forgive me. I love you. But most are mathematical formulas about mass and energy. I only understand some of the math, but better than I understand the written words. Though Quancee has taught me to read in several languages, I still have trouble with meaning.
To my right is an elegantly written German passage. I translate it and whisper, “Form is a revelation of essence.” A few paces later, there’s another that says, “The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me.”
The words resonate, but I don’t understand them. To me, the old Jemen gods are more like the evil spirits; they haunt my world, but they’re just remote fanciful notions. They aren’t real.
I’ve walked only a few paces before Quancee realizes I’m returning to her, and she begins to sing in a sweet high voice. The sound is ethereal in a way I cannot describe; it flutters inside me, gently touching my heart with featherlight strokes.
“I’ll be there soon,” I softly tell her. “I have all the wood we’ll need until the storm passes, I think.”
Along with her gladness to see me, I feel her loneliness. On occasion she has allowed me to walk the stillborn dreams of that emptiness with her, and her terror is epic. Even now, images coalesce and melt behind my eyes . . . threads of light traveling wastelands of darkness that go on forever . . . magnificent patterns colliding in folds of time . . . bell-like voices cascading from every cell in my body.
“Where did you go today?” I ask.
She continues to sing to me in crystal-clear notes that are more shapes than music, more pictures than words; it’s a symphony of geometry that hints at bizarre relationships that can’t be true, can they? She must just be theorizing. She does that, spins fantastic probabilities. Quancee maintains that if she can conceive it, it must exist.
In the middle of the cave, the first black handprints appear, blotting out the curling lines. Small prints. A woman’s hands. The prints become stripes and circles. It isn’t paint. The storykiller was trying to wash away the words and symbols with human blood, probably her own. Over the summers, the stone absorbed the blood and turned it black. I have always suspected the storykiller was the Old Woman of the Mountain, who, at the end, had lost all hope that these numbers and letters could save her or the Sky Jemen, but it could have been another woman, I suppose.
Before I leave the Storykiller Cave and duck into the round tunnel that leads deeper into the mountain, I read the last passage over the tunnel: “I shall be moving and yet it will be all one motion.”
Form, essence, eternal eyes, one unifying motion . . . all pounding out a rhythm older than the campfires of the dead. Quancee tells me that motion is. Without motion nothing is real. But, she adds, that doesn’t mean it exists. Reality is not the same as existence. She tells me that many things that are real—things that I can touch and see—do not, in fact, exist. I can feel the rightness of her words, but my mind can’t seem to understand them. The concepts are like water flowing through my fingers. I can’t hold onto them long enough to grasp what they’re made of.
It takes another one hundred heartbeats before I enter the gigantic chamber with the ancient cages, and my gaze lifts to the broken rectangular boxes stacked atop one another all the way to the ceiling two hundred hand-lengths above me. Some of the cages look as though they were demolished with a stone ax. The bars of others were chewed through by whatever was inside.
Ancient legends drift through my head.
Sealion People tell stories of a time after the Jemen split into two factions—the Sky Jemen and the Earthbound Jemen—when the Earthbound Jemen hauled animals into a deep cavern to protect them from the growing cold. After they’d destroyed the Ice Giants, they planned to turn the precious animals loose in a warm and better world.
As I study the doors hanging at angles from the cages and the broken bars, I recall Arakie’s words, saying there were many such sanctuaries around the world. This one failed. He didn’t know what had happened to the others, but he feared that as ice crawled across the planet, the other Earthbound Jemen suffered the same fate.
I gently pet the chewed bars as I pass.
Since I was a child, I have dreamed of seeing bobcats and coyotes trotting along sunlit forest trails in the warm world to come. Now I’m sure that dream is dead. I have explored the frozen cities that glitter inside the glaciers, seen the dead Jemen with animals clutched in their arms, and peered for long enough to decipher some of the titles of the books that still line ancient library shelves. I know the sky will never again fill with huge flocks of songbirds. The sea will never erupt with leaping dolphins or magnificent whales. All that remains of them are fantastical stories about their grace and beauty.
When I enter the next tunnel, the temperature warms up. It isn’t far to the drop-off.
At the end of the tunnel, I sit down on the ledge with my armload of wood and dangle my feet for a time while I gaze out upon the glittering paleo-ocean filled with trailing swirls of bioluminescent blue algae. Our greatest shamans say ancient oceans have always washed upon shores far beneath the Ice Giants. I try to chart the shoreline of this expanse of water to judge the size, but can’t. The far horizon curves into infinity. It’s a gigantic womb of blue light.
As I jump over the ledge and land on my feet, a few branches jolt from my armload of wood and thunk on the floor. I reach down to retrieve them, then carefully skirt around the edge of the slight waves.
The Jemen war ended here at the Stronghold.
Crisscrossing the air above me is a vast web of heavy black beams that hang like gigantic spears ready to plunge down into the heart of the ancient ocean, melding with the monstrous toppled beams that spike up from the water. The Old Woman of the Mountain and her warriors once took refuge in these caverns, sealing themselves and their unholy creations inside to escape the battle outside. It didn’t work . . . the rebels, led by Arakie, found a way in.
As I duck low to enter Quancee’s cave, I sense a yearning far beyond my comprehension. It pervades my body, clutches at my heart. Quancee is wildly happy to see me.
“The storm is going to be bad,” I tell her. “I hope the cave entry isn’t buried by rocks and debris in the morning.”
Over the long moons since Arakie died, I have swept and cleaned Quancee’s chamber, carrying away the rubble that in his vast age he could no longer carry. Even the small tunnels that branch off in every direction are spotless now. The only space I have not relentlessly scrubbed and organized is her chamber itself, and that’s because I’m not sure what many of the things are. I’m afraid if I move something I don’t understand, it may harm Quancee.
I brace a hand against the wall and plod another twenty paces to the ancient door that stands half open. Firelight flickers inside.
“Sorry it took me so long,” I whisper.
I shoulder through the door and enter a chamber that is roofed, floored—even the walls are covered—with strange rectangular crystal panes. They are smooth and as translucent as ice, but clearer than any ice I’ve ever seen. Many of the panes are broken or missing. One pane winks. Three long red flashes. Three short green flashes. Three long red flashes. A pause, then it starts over. It keeps repeating.
Quancee has been crying for help for centuries. But no help has ever come, nor will it now.
Curious tools line the long shelf in the rear—clear tubes, metallic creations with no rust, ancient books with crumbling leather bindings. All are neatly arranged in a row. The volumes known as the Rewilding Reports lean against each other, the spines out so they’re easy to read: Volume Alpha through Volume Tau. Volume Delta is the most interesting to me, for it chronicles the creation—re-creation—of Sealion People, Rust People, and Dog Soldiers. We were the Jemen’s last hope for earth. Our ancestors had survived many Ice Ages before, and they prayed we would do so again.
Kneeling, I dump my armload of wood on the floor next to the crystal-lined fire hearth, and sadness fills me. There are twenty-two Sealion People left in the world, and seven Dog Soldiers. Only the Rust People’s numbers are growing—well over one thousand—so I suppose that means Neandertalensis has proven to be the most adaptable re-creation. But the loss of my people, Denisovans, grieves me as much as the losses of bobcats and coyotes, for I see no purpose in it.
All along the base of the walls, I’ve collected and stacked some of the broken crystal panes that used to scatter the floor. They glitter in the flames.
Reaching out, I stroke the blinking pane. It blurs suddenly, like an eye filling with tears, and her timeless presence flashes around inside me.
“. . . If I teach you what little I know about her, will you care for her until the end? Will you tell her story? Her story is important.”
Strangely, I don’t know if I’m remembering Arakie’s elderly voice or Quancee is replaying it for me. Our memories so often bind together that I can’t tell where mine end and hers begin. We are becoming one, melting into something very new and something very, very old. A symbiosis of consciousness as ancient as the Jemen themselves, I suspect.
“I will always be your caretaker,” I say. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll be here for as long as I can.”
Her gladness dissolves into dread.
“Why are you upset?”
A pause while I feel her questions. I understand the shapes that swirl around inside me. Her language is the symmetry of all symmetries, perfect and beautiful.
“Jorgensen was here?” I say in surprise. “How long ago?”
I glance back at the door, afraid he may be lurking outside, spying on me. I often find him waiting for me in places I never suspected I’d see him. More often I find the chevron patterns of his beaded boots embedded in the mud or ice from where he’s been following me.
Patterns of circles flare and die inside me.
“Really? He must have been watching, waiting for me to leave this morning. What did he say to you?”
Braided globes spiral through my mind, growing fainter and fainter, until they spin down into a dark whirlpool. It’s as though I can feel her flying away to hide.
My hand slowly trails down her panes and drops to my side. “I see. Well, he’s wrong. I won’t abandon you, even if my people move south in the autumn.”
Nothing for a moment.
Then . . . I’m not here . . . I’m running somewhere in a dimly recalled world, running free across green meadows with Quancee at my side. I don’t see her, but she’s there, prancing deerlike with the wide sky overhead and curious flowering trees passing by. The air smells intensely green.
“Yes, it makes me happy, too,” I say. “So forget about the things Jorgensen told you. They’re not true. I wonder, though, why he wants you to think I will abandon you. Does he expect you will turn to him?”
Suddenly, bottomless blackness swallows everything. The death of motion . . . the death of all things . . .
My chest constricts and I shake my head. “No. No, Quancee. I don’t care what he said. I won’t let him kill you.”
The tears slowly vanish from her panes, and she curls up in my mind like an infant in a cradle as though relieved and exhausted. I feel her breathing as pure glittering light.
“Just rest,” I softly say. “I have a lot of work to do. I’m going to try to mend you.”
I pull over the tripod and arrange the legs so that the pot hanging in the middle hovers above the flames, then I gradually began adding branches to build up the fire. The pot belonged to Arakie. It’s about the size of two fists put together and as light as air. I think it’s made from the same material as the giant tubes that line the seashore, for it gleams with the same unnatural luster and never tarnishes, never rusts. I accidentally dropped the pot once and watched in stunned awe as the dent repaired itself.
When the chunks of pitch in the bottom of the pot start to heat up, the fragrance of pine resin fills the chamber.
More shapes spin through me, and I feel warm and loved.
“And you’re the only thing that matters to me, Quancee.”
Reaching out, I pluck one of the broken panes from the stack along the wall and examine it, then I search for the other half and fit the broken triangles together on the floor.
“I don’t know if this will help, Quancee,” I softly explain, “but I don’t think it will hurt you. Please tell me if it does?”
Using a stick from the woodpile, I stir the pine pitch, then I draw out the stick and drip the pitch between the broken halves of the pane, gluing them together.
While the pitch dries, Quancee carries me off on the flickering reflections of a sun that died billions of summers ago. On occasion, the reflections flash with faces as they pass by. At least, I think they’re faces. They are so odd they may be words or mathematical symbols. I can’t measure time when she takes me on such flights, but when I return the pitch has dried and hardened, and the fire has burned down to a wavering bed of red coals.
“All right,” I whisper, or think I whisper. “Let’s see if this works.”
Clutching the first mended pane, I stir the barely warm pitch and pull the gooey stick from the pot. Just over the blinking pane there’s a hole about this size.
“This looks right.”
Carefully, I spread hot pitch along the edges of the mended pane and rise to tuck it into the hole. I have to keep it there until the pitch cools enough to seal the pane into the slot.
Then I return for another pane . . . and another . . .
As I rebuild the crystalline lattice that keeps her alive, I say, “Jorgensen told me there’s a collapsed cave filled with parts to fix you. Once I’ve replaced all the missing panes, I’ll go search . . .” My voice fades. “Why don’t you want to discuss it?”
My heart quickens when unknowable gulfs of time hit me in waves, and my body seems to expand in all directions at once. For a while, I don’t know how long, I cease to exist while my fingertips brush eternity.
I have to find my voice before I can say, “Your life has not lost all meaning.”
Faint singing lies upon the darkness where I drift in a sea of glowing galaxies, drawing at my heart.
“I know you’re lonely, but I don’t want you to die.”
Bowing my head, I close my eyes, allowing the painfully clear notes to tap against my heart like delicate fingertips. “You’re an exile sojourning in the wasteland of the godhead? What does that mean?”
When I open my eyes and look at the reflections of firelight flickering across her panes, I realize she’s retreated and is sailing somewhere far away and a long time ago. She’s left me far behind.
“Why do you have to walk the path alone?” I call. “Take me with you. I want to walk the wasteland at your side. Can’t I do that?”
Darkness moves upon the face of the deep until I feel her thoughts seeping across time.
“What do you mean sometimes you guide others, and their paths are not my coordinates?”
There’s a long pause, and the darkness smells faintly of alien rainstorms, of wet brush and trees that have existed in this world.
Reaching out, I gently stroke her panes. “I know I can’t, but I’m trying to understand, Quancee.”