LYNX
I have my eyes closed as I massage my aching temples. It’s been a long five hands of time. We’ve gone back and forth with questions, suppositions, and answers that are, more or less, merely deeper questions. The elder Dog Soldier is by no means half-human, nor is he ignorant. In fact, the nuances of his understanding of consciousness seem to far exceed mine.
“I don’t think I’m able to answer that question, elder. No one really knows where personality comes from. Is it simple illusion spun by the observer, as you ask? Probably.”
I hear Thanissara stand up, and I open my eyes. His face, flickering with firelight, seems particularly dark in contrast to his silver cape. He’s frowning, but his gaze is far away, seeing into some distance inside him that I cannot fathom.
After a lengthy interval, he looks down at me where I sit cross-legged before the low flames. “For many summers, I have known that there was no objective world out there, Lynx. My only question was about myself. Am I the observer spinning this illusion, as many philosophers have hypothesized in the past? Or am I merely part of another observer’s created world? Which would mean my consciousness is contingent. Like the flame, without some basic fuel, I could not burn.”
“My Jemen teacher, Arakie, told me the only thing I could be certain of was that there is one observer: me.”
“Ah!” Thanissara says and waggles a finger in my direction. “I disagree.”
Pulling up my knees, I lock my arms around them. He’s started to pace back and forth. “Why?”
“Because the waves upon the water do not exist only when we look at them. Just as Quancee can be in two places at once, or suspended between places, this . . . superposition . . . implies that the waves follow two paths at once. That means there are at least two objects. Perhaps two observers. The wave and me. I myself may produce the results of my measurement, but I must be measuring something.”
“I don’t think so, elder. If there is no objective reality, then your ‘something’ is mere illusion.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” He blinks, and his eyes narrow. “In fact, I suspect the only reason I exist is that the wave is observing me. The wave knows not just if I am looking at it, but if I’m planning to look. The wave experiences all of time at once. It can create me only because it knows I will see.”
My head feels cottony, like it’s stuffed with bison wool. I massage my aching temples again. “There are times,” I say in frustration, “that I fear Jorgensen is right. I’m not smart enough to understand these things.”
“Nonsense. My point,” Thanissara says with glittering eyes, “is Quancee.”
I have a powerful headache building, so I open one eye and squint up at him. “Yes?”
The Dog Soldier gazes down at me for so long his halo of white hair resembles a bonfire of cobwebs. He folds his arms, and his silver cape flashes. “Can human consciousness act as a quantum wave?”
“As I understand it, yes, in certain circumstances.”
“Then we are not that different from Quancee, are we?”
“No.” I shake my head. “On that score, we are the same. But I think we are different in other—”
“I do not.”
Thanissara walks back to stand in front of the Rewilding Reports. He stares at the ancient spines for a long time. “We have a library, you know. Dog Soldiers, I mean.”
“I didn’t,” I say in surprise. “Sticks never mentioned your library.”
“Yes,” he answers in a soft contemplative voice. “Seventeen precious books. We guard them with our lives.”
Curiosity fills me. Since the moment I learned to read, my need for books has been insatiable. “I would like to see your library sometime, if it’s allowed.”
“No. Only initiates can look upon the sacred artifacts. Besides, they are not kept in one place. Each initiate has a special talent. Two are healers, one builds lodges, two have dedicated themselves to feeding the hungry. Each is given volumes relevant to his talents to read and memorize, and each is required to hide and protect those volumes. That way, if we are attacked, we hope a few of the books will escape destruction.”
I prod the fire with a branch and sink back to rest my shoulders against Quancee. It comforts me to touch her. “And what is your talent, elder?”
“Me?” Thanissara touches his chest with three fingers and smiles. “I speak with the dead.”
“You mean that you send your soul flying to the Land of the Dead to speak with the ancestors?”
“Sometimes. More often I find the lost souls wandering along the Road of Light and sit down to ask them questions about their lives.” His gaze moves to Quancee. “When the time comes, I hope I will find her. Perhaps she will allow me to ask her questions about myself and why I exist.”
Thanissara raises a hand and traces the edges of the glued pane with his finger, following the pitch as it zigzags across Quancee’s faintly luminous face.
“Lynx, you mustn’t be sad that she’s dying.”
“She’s my whole world, elder.” I pull over the water cup and watch the waves glitter as they collide. As they decohere. “I can’t help it.”
Thanissara gracefully walks to stand and peer down at me. “You have told me that decoherence is like a bubble bursting.”
“Yes.”
“When it bursts where does it go?”
“I . . . what?”
“I’m trying to tell you that Quancee knows you’re looking.”
I shake my head in confusion, wondering why he said that. “But if she dies—”
“Death, my young friend, is in the eye of the observer.”
A smile flicks at the corner of his lips, then he steps into the corridor outside and is gone, his steps as silent as a hunting lion’s.