This is, for me, somewhat unexpected.
The gryphon keeps swatting the cocoon, and the narrow visor isn’t enough to show me where we are going, plus the view darts about crazily. Its screech-roars are deafening.
“Mum?” says Junior.
I see her intermittently, same as Nike. I know what I have to do.
“I’m going out there,” I say.
Nike scoffs. “You’re not going out there.”
The cocoon stops with a bang. One side of it dents inwards, which I think is where we have made impact and got stuck. Outside, I see some rocky projections, and the sky is grey, but that’s it. I still hear the gryphon. I scramble over and feel around beneath the dummy control panel. What I’m looking for is there: a shotgun. It’s all I know how to use when it comes to weapons. I load it.
I kiss Junior on the head, Nike on the lips, and prepare to open the door.
“I know you’ll never listen to me, but be careful,” says Nike.
“I’ll try.”
I open the cocoon, exit, and seal it behind myself. The gryphon is larger than an elephant. It’s so large I can hear its breathing and the beat of its heart. It isn’t looking at me, it’s busy eating the terrain. It cracks rock with its beak, then crunches down. It lifts its head to swallow with the aid of gravity. I only this minute notice that the raptor part is a martial eagle, with white feathers underneath and darker on top.
This eating, what remains… People speak of nothingness but they mean a specific absence of a thing, or darkness. This place where the gryphon bites, what remains is a true void, a true absence of being. The rock is torn free and in its place… nothing. No colour, no light, and looking at it brings discomfort to the eyes as one strains to perceive, and nausea to the gut as it tells you something is very wrong here.
I would rather hide in my metal cocoon and wait this out, but my family is in there, so my fear must wait. The creature sees me now, and although it does not stop its activity, its eye stays locked on. The cocoon is in an elevated position, wedged between two rock projections and the mountainside. I climb down to a ledge, look down at the gryphon, which is maybe three hundred yards from me. It can’t be hungry for me–I am a morsel compared to what it is eating. Yet there is something in that yellow eye that tells me it prefers a meal with sentience, and that this is not just a random destructive rampage.
You can kill anything with a shotgun.
My father said that, and it was true in his time. It is not true now.
My plan is to jump, aim for the eyes, hope for the best. It is not to be, however, because I hear a shout like an extended battle charge from above me, and someone darts past in a tangle of limbs and metal.
Before I can fully process what I’m seeing, Junior has landed on the gryphon’s back and buried two spears deep into its feathers.
“What? Junior, get your narrow ass back here!” I feel my voice go, but that little strip of flesh and bone keeps fighting and it seems she hurts the gryphon.
“Let her,” says Nike. I look up and see her head watching from a new hole in my cocoon.
“She’s a child,” I say.
Nike shakes her head. “Neither you nor I nor Junior are alive. Try to remember that, Oyin Da. Most importantly, Junior is pure xenosphere, has never been human like you and me. She is an idea made flesh and knows how to survive in this place better than we ever will. This isn’t real, but our minds make it into a facsimile of the life we knew on Earth, so we come along with the same rules that we lived with, rules that don’t have to obtain here. We know that intellectually, but our minds still rail against what does not fit ontologically. Junior, on the other hand, has no such restrictions. Observe.”
Junior picks weapons from her tattoos and hurls them at the gryphon, which is both in pain and confused from the attacks. With each swing of the arm, she throws a spear that always hits home. She strokes her arms and the weapons come into being around her, following her. She simply picks them out of the air and attacks the gryphon. It decides it has had enough, but is still gentle in the way it deals with Junior. It beats its wings and tries to blow her away. She struggles against it, but can’t walk forward. Her legs grow projections, like strands of flesh that dig into the rock, anchoring her. She looks like a meat plant. When the wind cannot blow her away, Junior opens her mouth and a beam of purple light comes out and burns half of the gryphon’s head. It screeches, folds in its wings, and dives down the mountain into mists, and we no longer see it. Burned feathers float to the ground where it used to be.
My daughter holds a morning star in each hand and is surrounded by the knives, clubs, hammers and scythes that her tattoos depict. She sees me.
“Hello, Mum.”
I don’t know if I should hug her or scold her.
Nike, Junior and I have all come down to the edge of the gryphon’s bites to take a look.
“Oyi n’ko mi,” says Junior. I’m dizzy.
“Then don’t look,” says Nike. “But that does look and feel strange.”
“The gryphon hasn’t destroyed the idea of the mountain that keeps this representation intact. You can’t truly eliminate an idea. It’s extirpated the basis on which we imagine it.”
“I don’t understand,” says Nike.
“Look at me,” says Junior. “Cool!”
Every time she moves an arm, tiny stars strobe across the path. Not cool.
“I think he’s found a way to damage the xenosphere,” I say.
“Was Kaaro ever this feral? Do we know for sure that it’s Kaaro?” asks Nike.
“It wasn’t feral,” I say.
“Junior just had to fight it.”
“Yes, and it was controlled, considered in its response to her onslaught. It was careful not to harm her, even though it could,” I say.
“No, it couldn’t,” says Junior.
“Yes, it really could,” I say. “I think it is Kaaro, and the gryphon is feigning this whole display as a cover-up for what it’s doing.”
“And what is that? Besides destroying our home?”
I don’t know the answer. This whole space is a product of our imagination, shaped by memories that we agree on, taught to our little girl over time so that she comes to consensus. I have been so deeply ingrained that I thought I was real, real in the Earth physical way. If I am just a pattern of thought and memory, Huginn and Muninn, then I should be able to see the underlayers if I try. And I do. I close my eyes. It’s what we did, Nike and I, before I went to America.
I see the thought pathways. I see the strands of reticulate xenoforms binding together. But I see defects, places where the strands have snapped, repair globules trying to fix damaged xenoforms, or absorbing ones that are too far gone. There seem to be a lot of these, unlike before. I see the gryphon like a ball of lightning travelling up and down the thoughtways, damaging the cells. Each cell, like Hamlet, carries the germ of its own destruction in lysosomes, suicide bags. The gryphon is telling the cells to become one with the lysosomes, releasing over thirty substances that dissolve xenoform to goop.
But the xenosphere is vast, and there is just one gryphon.
I see the damage propagated even without the gryphon-thing directly causing it. It spreads like a disease. I see my daughter punched through with minute holes that even she isn’t aware of. She is kneeling at the edge and gesturing, effecting some repair, pushing back the void. This is remarkable, but too little, too late, and it is taking all of her power to bring back a square inch of the xenosphere at a time.
I have to get back to Owen Gray, to find out the rest of what he knows. I try, but cannot time-travel no matter what. Whatever Kaaro is doing is blocking me.
Fine. Let’s try something else.