'She'll be my Seal if I sing her, not yours. She's different for each of us.'
Zach doesn't know what to say to this-doesn't even know if they're speaking the same language. In the last century technology had driven most shamanic societies to extinction-occasionally underground. And now Wu's theorems have rendered non-scientific models of consciousness entirely anachronistic: stuff for the historians and cultural anthropologists and odd fringe group (homo sapiens is a notorious recidivist), though the big-time religions have managed to hang on through some curious rationalisations. Bizarre rationalisations, which at the Foundation were always good for a laugh at mealtime-without warning, Axel winks at him in that cocky way he had before Martens and Jiao and that cold bitch Malovich ground away his 'rough edges'. A few kids had shattered beneath the rasp and file of discipline. We're simus, for godsake. Why have we taken it?
Why hasn't he tried to find out what happened to Axel?
Axel, who'd replaced Donald as their roommate. Axel, who played poker like a pro. Axel, who started an investment club-invitation only-with first-year returns which might have been beginner's luck if the second and, sadly, final year hadn't provided Zach with a portfolio he's been smart enough to hang onto. Axel, who in that second year took to mumbling right before he fell asleep, nothing Zach could make out. The cantillated rhythm of it though. In sleep Axel's eyes would flicker wildly beneath lids of delicate veined glass. And Gould was loyal enough to keep his mouth shut, and plainly unwilling to risk his stake in their roommate's market savvy, even when Zach ended up, night for night, crooning lullabies in a half-forgotten tongue, guttural yet magical like all the secret languages of childhood.
(Another of those shameful secrets-afterwards, he missed comforting the tormented boy.)
Zach shifts his gaze to an imaginary point in the distance, or what ought to be distance. His earliest memories are of music-sometimes lilting, sometimes mawkish, sometimes discordant; never less than enthralling. His mother sang at bedtime or at work: certain songs ambush him even now with a frisson of pure feeling, of longing primal and inexplicable. At once he hears the voice, the glorious liquid voice of the cello which drew him away from the stall and through the small rutted carpark, past the rusting postbox with its dangling door, down the flagged path, and into the ramshackle farmhouse itself. 'It's the Adagio from the Haydn Concerto in C,' Marc said. 'Do you want to hear it from the beginning?' Nobody in his home played a string instrument, and Oupa's recorder would only come out on special occasions. Once he was allowed to cycle on his own, he followed the sinuous melodic trail to the farm, several kilometres distant. Two men, sapiens both, yet they didn't mind his visits. Sean gave him his first clarinet, taught him the rudiments of wind technique and theory. They continued to play duets long after Zach's skill outstripped his mentor's. Men who deserved a better end. For a short time in the latter half of the twentieth century, homosexuality was tolerated, even welcomed. He's often wondered if the reversal of public sentiment had anything to do with the advent of augmented cognition.
Zach snicks his tongue in annoyance. There's something refractive about the illusion of infinite distance that is forcing his eye inward, as though to generate a vanishing point within himself. He's always depended on the extraordinary accuracy of his senses, with hearing quite possibly the last he'd relinquish voluntarily. But what happens when far becomes near? Or cold becomes sweet or noisy or heavy? Or all of them? Or none? He rubs two fingers over his tattoo, then drops his hand in dismay when he hears the itching in his through his beyond his skin.
'You see,' Pani says. 'Shamans speak in music.'
'I promise you, Pani, I'm not a shaman.'
'It's all right, I won't tell anyone if you want to keep it secret.'
'And I won't teach you another note if you persist in transposing me into a different key.'
'What's that?'
'Listen carefully, I'm going to try something.' Fixing his gaze on the nearest column, he raises the clarinet to his mouth.
There is no flash of blinding light, no roll of thunder. Lev simply steps from the ice. A Lev for each pillar, astonishingly, but then Zach blinks and the multiplicity is gone.
'Tornarssuk,' Pani breathes.
Don't mock him, Zach begs Lev silently. And indeed Lev acknowledges Pani's awe with an easy, almost indulgent grace. Teachers ought to be screened for downright decency; parents too. Something tells Zach that this man-man?-would consider it an honour to be called a teacher. He smiles at Pani, then strides to the caribou hangings as though their reappearance were perfectly natural.
'Your family will soon start fretting. Go back now,' Lev says, parting the skins. 'Your turn will come.'
Pani has trouble wearing solemnity for long. As he bows, his eyes fillip a look of delight and mischief and smugness at Zach before slipping into the access tunnel. Lev adjusts the pelts so that there is no crack for a draught to penetrate, while Zach, to dispel the feeling of sway and dip, the slight sense of vertigo, closes his eyes and runs a hand over the clarinet, not trusting his eyesight. Not quite trusting his fingers either.
'You're still thinking too literally.' Lev laughs in his old way. 'But you're learning.'
Zach clamps his mouth shut. He is not going to ask a ream of foolscap questions. Lev holds out his hand for the clarinet.
'You know, I prefer homo musicus,' Lev says.
'What?'
'There's a universal music that underlies all cognition. Among other things, this instrument is a very sophisticated translator whose task is to render itself superfluous.'
'Simus hear differently than sapiens, translation's impossible. Unless you're talking about other forms of life?'
'Ears aren't anything more than channels. The mind generates hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling . . .' Lev taps the clarinet. 'Music precedes language. Your scientists have yet to discover that music is deeply quantangled in neural structure. Without music there's no consciousness. Even emotions are essentially musical.'
'Does that mean the deaf can be taught to hear?'
'You've told me about Max, haven't you?' He holds the clarinet aloft. 'Play.'
Zach reaches for it, but with a sweep of his arm Lev propels it towards one of the pillars. Zach braces himself for an impact. Instead, each of the columns reverberates with a different tone overlaid with subtly fluid intratones.
'Go on,' Lev says.
Zach stares at the clarinet, now embedded in one of the pillars. 'You don't need it,' Lev says.
Zach shrugs and closes his eyes. It takes him a while to quieten his mind, but then he begins to picture his Buffet in his hands, its body as familiar to him as his own. He fills his lungs and belly with air. Its mouthpiece moulds itself to his lips, warm and a bit tremulous. At first there is only the first tentative tremolo which far out in the middle of the sea could mean nothing or everything, which is a mere echo of a note, an audible shiver on the surface of the water, but which slowly and inevitably begins to build, gathering momentum, becoming now a line of melody, now a movement of Laura's sonata. As the piano adds its voice to the rising sonority, the music surges ever wilder ever louder ever closer to the icebound coast.
It's beautiful, Laura says.
Zach flounders, swallows a mouthful of brine. The roaring in his ears syncopates into an erratic heartbeat, and when he opens his eyes Lev and the columns have disappeared.
'Laura?'
The windy hissing of burning oil, bitter in his nostrils, is his only answer. Wearily he settles himself on the edge of the sleeping platform without touching the clarinet, which is lying exactly where he left it before the meal. Should he be unnerved? Or just relieved? His eyes pass over the meagre possessions of the family who have given up their privacy for him-the all-important kudlik, a large kettle, some battered dishes and utensils, a coil of rope hanging from a length of caribou antler, skin sacks, a spear. And in the alcove where the platform meets the fur-draped wall, an item even more unexpected than the clarinet.
Zach goes over to examine it closely. Feeling a bit light-headed, he drops to one knee and rubs his eyes, which are beginning to smart from a faint smokiness in the air. His fingers are drawn to the creamy ivory.
A length of narwhal or walrus tusk, he can't tell the difference. The upper half of the figure delicately worked, its grain and glow evoke living skin in the same way a Michelangelo statue breathes and sweats and pulsates with freshly oxygenated blood. But like the Captive Slave the carving is only half-finished: a woman's head, arms, and torso are struggling to emerge from the tapering piece, struggling to escape the restraint of tusk. Her hair lies in a long plait along her back, so finely sculpted that each strand seems combed in place. Zach runs his fingertips over the lower half-smooth and polished, with a small lift to the tail. Perhaps finished after all. Another fucking seal, he thinks savagely, but never the right one.
'Nashuk will tell you the story just now. I've asked her to bring you something hot to drink, something to help you sleep.'
Caught off guard, Zach glances round to find Uakuak standing in the entrance.
'Would you like to come in?' Zach rises gingerly, but the dizziness has passed.
'Just for a moment.' Uakuak takes a seat on the sleeping bench and gestures for Zach to join him. 'I don't sleep much any more, but my wife insists that I rest my old bones.'
'In my world, men half your age don't have your strength and stamina.'
'My spirit grows restless. I've had a good life, and there's not much I regret, but one thing I would have liked is to travel to other worlds. Alas, I don't have your shaman's gift. My soul will do its journeying soon enough, though.'
Zach is quiet while he struggles to find a measure of truth, not just courtesy. 'Many in my home believe as you. I wish I could.'
Uakuak's scrutiny lasts till Zach is on the verge of getting up and moving away. The old man asks gently, 'Who is it you've lost? Your wife? A child?'
Zach is silent, staring at his hands.
'The dead stay dead, Zach, there's no changing the past.' The quiet words of a man who has no need to prove anything. 'There is only another past, separated from us by a thin layer like young black ice. In dreams we may catch a glimpse beyond the darkness, while a shaman sees further into these realms. And there are so many realms, far more than stars in the sky, drops of water in the sea.'
And far more clich閟 where they've come from, the old Zach would have thought. Yet snowbound though he is, this wily hunter would have far less trouble understanding quantum theory, if properly explained, than most of Zach's own classmates. Quantum reality is counterintuitive to the average sapiens. Countless times in physics class he's heard them ask, how can something's nature become fixed and definite only when it's observed? And even more often, what do you mean by random? Science is supposed to be able to predict an outcome, that's what science does.
Science used to: drop a Newtonian apple and it fell in a predictable time with a predictable velocity through a predictable trajectory. But now science deals in probabilities and nonlocalities and emergence and Wu's Qlions. And still without an adequate unified theory to consolidate general relativity and quantum mechanics. Cosmic reality eludes even the cognoscens mind-and might always, if the Purists have their way.
'The worlds to which the spirit travels are real, as real as your own,' Uakuak continues. 'It's only natural to be afraid. Shamanic journeys are dangerous, and the journey to the White Seal the most dangerous of all.'
'Please believe me, Uakuak. I'm no shaman. My people use special tools to make many things'-he can't bring himself to repudiate their lives-'and many distant journeys, but nothing remotely supernatural.'
Except, of course, that these aren't lives, or shouldn't be. Till now Fulgur has only uploaded test participants in the rehab programme, plus a few volunteer research subjects. Everything else is background: programmed modules for verisimilitude, like a sophisticated version of gaming avatars.
Uakuak laughs, then places a hand on Zach's forearm. 'Tools can't teach us how to live. There is no distinction between natural and supernatural, least of all to our true senses.'
'If I'm a shaman,' Zach asks, 'then why don't I know how to find the White Seal?'
'Tomorrow while we hunt, the women will ready a cleansing bath, afterwards you will fast and rest and, if it's your practice, take some of the tea Kiviuk, our shaman, prepares from the plants he himself collects and dries. No one will disturb your solitude. In the evening we will join our music to yours, our drumming, and Kiviuk will guide you till the White Seal appears.'
'And if she doesn't?'
'You have already heard her calling, haven't you? So Lev has told us.'
Damn it, he should have known! Cautiously, 'Lev visits you?'
'A fine shaman from the far south. Whereas you, he tells us, are angatkuqpak. A shaman's shaman.'
Yeah, Sean would have been proud of him. This time he curbs his wee daft cognie tongue.
Chapter 35
Fulgur headquarters is located on a substrata of Jurassic oolitic limestone, deposited after the breakup of Pangaea when sea levels rose a good 200 million years ago. Fossilised dinosaur bones and footprints have been found throughout the region, where swamps and salty lakes remained once the seas subsided again.
Andrea Frechen, principal architect for the complex, sleeps very little. She's known for her eccentricities, particularly her habit of driving to the site of her current project in the middle of the night and walking round for an hour or more. It soothes me, she tells the security guards, but any laughter isn't malicious, for she's always been well liked.
