Her captor’s scrupulous attention to leading her step by step to Gaia began to wear on Rhita early in the journey. Nothing, not even the scale of what she was seeing, was familiar or comprehensible.
First, she was taken from her chamber—actually quite a small room, nowhere near the cavern she had imagined—and placed inside a protective oval bubble, where they stood on a flat, railed platform four or five arms wide and as black as lamp soot. The escort accompanied her in the bubble, which seemed to be made of exquisitely thin glass.
Or perhaps soap. She was not willing to place any limits on what her captors could do.
“Where are my companions?” she asked. The image of Demetrios had been left behind; they were alone in the bubble.
“They are taking a much quicker route. What I am doing with you is, if I may borrow a word, expensive; it consumes energy. I am given only so much energy for my tasks.”
The bubble hung suspended in blackness. Ahead of them, at the far end of the blackness, a brilliant triangle of white light grew as large as her outstretched hand, and then stopped. For a moment there was no further action; the escort stood in silence, staring at the light ahead.
Rhita shivered. Something animal in her looked for a way out, hoping that some magic had suspended all this reality and provided her with a chance to escape. But she did not try. Left idle with her thoughts, she turned and saw an opaque wall behind them, covered with the sheen of an oil slick on black water, gold and silver and all the colors of the rainbow besides.
The wall stretched off above them in shadowy darkness. It was hauntingly, massively beautiful; it gave her no clues whatsoever as to where she was, or what would happen next. The silence terrified her; she had to speak to keep from screaming.
“I don’t know your name,” she said quietly. The escort turned to her, smooth face all attention, and she was oddly ashamed for even wanting to know such things about her enemy. The shame came in part from realizing that she could not hate this figure standing beside her; she wasn’t even sure what it was. To learn more, she would have to ask questions that might make her seem weak.
“Do you want me to have a name?” the escort asked pleasantly.
“You don’t have a name of your own?”
“My companions address me in a wide variety of ways. In this form, however, since I am to be viewed and accessed only by you, I have no name.”
His seeming obtuseness renewed her irritation. “Please choose a name,” she said, turning away from him.
“Then I will be Kimōn. Is this a suitable name?”
She had had a third school paidagōgos named Kimōn. He had been a round, pleasant man, gentle and persistent but not quick. She had felt deep affection for Kimōn as a young girl. Perhaps the escort hoped to play on that. And perhaps he doesn’t need to use any such obvious subterfuge. “No,” she said. “That isn’t your name.”
“Then what should my name be?”
“I will call you Typhōn,” she said. From Hēsiodos: the horrible being who fought with Zeus, son of Gaia (hence the escort’s human appearance) and Tartaros; a deeply buried monster of limitless evil…. That name might keep her on her guard.
The escort nodded. “Typhōn it is.”
Without warning, the bubble sped away from the rear wall. There was no way she could judge their speed; she felt no motion. All around, the darkness seemed filled with subliminal rainbows. Glancing up, she saw a myriad faint beams of light traveling in parallel from the triangular whiteness ahead, over and behind them, into the wall, where they vanished. The triangle grew larger and brighter; they were obviously approaching something, but what she could not be sure.
Hypnotized, Rhita stared until the whiteness filled her vision, a brilliant, almost dazzling luminosity with a pearly quality that both awed and soothed her. This was the light in which a god might come clothed. Those gods I don’t really believe in, she thought. They’re still inside me, though. Athene and Astarte and Isis and Aser and Aserapis and Zeus…and now Typhōn.
Suddenly the light surrounded her, and the blackness became a yawning wall or hole behind. With a sudden reorientation, she realized that she had emerged from a huge triangular prism into a surrounding bath of pearly light. She turned and saw the dark equilateral mouth receding. It was framed by a thin line of sullen red of a richness and elegance hard to describe—a color that seemed to carry within it the qualities of serene dignity, vibrant life and horrendous violence all at once.
“Where am I?” she asked, her voice no more than a whisper.
“Behind us is a vessel. We are in a vacuum, within a tube of glowing gases. We will descend through this tube momentarily.”
She still had no clear idea where they were. Her stomach had knotted; so much strangeness, she decided, was not good for her. How had the sophē reacted, seeing so many strange things? There was a time when Gaia herself must have seemed strange and perhaps awful to Rhita’s grandmother.
She held her fists to her eyes and rubbed them. They hurt. Her neck hurt from so much tense craning. Her head hurt; she felt miserable again, and yet there was a beauty to the light…. She was ashamed to be in pain.
I’m not reacting well, am I? Perhaps I should be grateful to still be sane.
The glow intensified and she felt a momentary tingle. They passed through the boundary of the tube of pearly light. Below lay something incomprehensible, intricate like an enormous map, pale green in color, covered with white and brown lines, dotted at rhythmic intervals with processions of cone-shaped towers made up of stacked disks with rounded edges.
Again she felt a reorientation, and saw with understanding instead of just coordinated sensation.
They were within a closed, elongated surface round like a cylinder or a pipe, but enormous. The surface of the cylinder spread out like a Krētan textile design, all pale greens and browns and whites, or like…she quickly ran out of comparisons.
Rhita knew where she was now. Patrikia had described many of these things—though not these patterns or colors. Above their bubble stretched the wide band of the plasma tube, much fainter now, and the impossible region called the flaw, the singularity. Perhaps the prism rode the flaw, like the Hexamon’s flawships.
She was seeing the Way.