[ssf] the jonah kit :: chapter nineteen

[hardcastle]

  His flipper aches from the chomp of the bull's jaw, but it isn't
  seriously damaged. He swims obediently now, while the bull
  dawdles far behind him, sending out only occasional pulses to
  track him.

    An expectant silence stills the ocean, which the bull seems
  chary of disturbing.

    The Big Wailing Ones -- those gossips of the sea -- have been
  hushed by the leaping, dancing Click-Whistlers, those who can
  send two modes of signal together: and because they can send
  two modes, those were the first (as sheer game, to start with) to
  leap the gap between clicks of his Own Kind, and whistles of
  the Singers, Songs so vast that they can cross whole seas ...

    As he swims, he thinks of what the bull has pulsed to him ...

    Tens of centuries to attune the Wailing Ones! His Own
  Kind can pulse out songs direct to them now. But the leaping
  little Click-Whistlers still do it faster. Such vivid, playful,
  speedy Ones! They toy with ideas as with floating wood or
  weed-mass -- butting and nodding notions about brightly in the
  kaleidoscopes of their minds. Alas, they cannot fix ideas in
  glyphs. Their kaleidoscopes keep turning, losing the bright
  patterns of their thoughts in play.

    However long they whistle the signatures of the great glyphs,
  they can only turn them through an axis or two, in whistle-talk.
  New glyphs are beyond them, till his Own Kind state them.

    If they weren't so happy, this might be their tragedy. They
  sense so much more than the Dumb Wailing Ones, of the inner
  order of a glyph. Guess at that deep moment of the Star, when
  a glyph becomes a map of thought, images of the world: when
  his Own Kind swim mind in mind, dreaming down the sea years
  through simpler and simpler glyphs of understanding as the
  aeons drop away, back to the simplest, First glyph of all in
  the melting midst of an Ice Age ...

    By comparison his Own Kind's evolution to awareness is a
  tangible planned thing, mapped in the glyph stages in their
  brows. They can almost direct that evolution now, by choice of
  glyph refinements -- moulding the melon through choice of
  sounds, in star-glyph after star-glyph, towards magaglyphs of
  awareness still far away down the swimming ages, still
  unattainable, yet guessed at as The Goal.

    A process slow as the growing of a coral atoll -- to enclose a
  pool of water, reflecting exact images clarified out of the wave
  tumble of Time, and Being.

    The Stars will build this mirror, cell by cell, in soft
  honeycomb brows.

    While the Click-Whistlers wonder at this enterprise, and
  caper round it, playing games. Sad that they can't enter a Star,
  with their tiny bodies and brows -- when they are the ones who
  linked the glyphs to the songs of the Crying Ones, so that new
  glyphs can be known throughout the seas. Yet not so sad for
  them, as they gambol and copulate and whistle, leaping and
  dancing on their tails ...


    He pulses a chary click; hears Three, and then another
  Three, converging on the same point of ocean. Six points of the
  Star. He is Seven.

    He meets them nose to nose: old male, old female, younger
  female in one Threesome; three strong bulls in the other.

    Slack, calm day -- easy to stay in position, waving flukes.
  Almost as easy as holding (hands)!

    His left eye glimpses flank and eye of the oldest bull; his
  right eye squints at the old female. Of the others, he sees
  nothing at all -- only feel the butt of their brows, as they
  rock in and out.

    'We repeat a simple Glyph' the oldest bull burst-pulses,
  'CONGRUENCE. Tune our seven clicks to CONGRUENCE. CONGRUENCE
  opens the mouth to the Greater Glyphs --'



    In the mobile wax, a ghostly, dissolving diagram conjures
  out of sound. The wax, at sea level, being still in its most
  fluid oily state. Pulsing a repeat of it, he reads the same
  images printed briefly on six other melons ...

    Ranged in the Star, there's only inwards to be heard from,
  only the oily sculptures conjured by their voices to hear. No
  more world of sea and sweetmeats. Bodies block off all outside
  sounds, in seven directions. Seven melons are the sole field of
  attention.

    Pulsing, the ghost gathers strength; and interlocks in a seven
  fold chain of wax -- an annular polygon ...

    Thoughts cluster round the glyph ... Thoughts articulated,
  in waxen crystals.

    CONGRUENCE is a (key), he reasons. What's a (key)?

    A (hand) turns a (key). The (key) almost always locks; rarely
  opens ... The (hand) then, is congruent with a lock. Five bars
  curl round a cage, to make a (hand). One short bar. And four
  long bars. Bending. Locking.

    The cage fits on to things. It acts on things. Things obey it.
  Thus things are made -- such as (steels).

    But the (hand)-cage is flexible too, caressing hair, the lips,
  the penis. It even opens up flat and seems not to be a cage at
  times. Yet it is only the model of a cage, unfolded. Thus it
  makes fools of us. (But who is the 'us'?) For it seems so open
  and free, so extensive, always reaching out. We pity those who
  lack these flat, soft cages. The Cageless Ones, we think of them
  as. They have no grasp of the situation. No grip on the world.

    (But who is 'WE'!! Who is 'WE'!!)

    This (hand) has formed the mind, the thoughts, the (words).
  Minds, thoughts and (words) have all followed the contours of
  (hand), unwittingly. How could I be aware of this, when awareness
  is of the same shape as what it should be aware of? One
  fits the other perfectly, so that one never notices this ...
  Awareness takes (hand's) fives and tens for numbers. Accepts its
  grip on things for relations in the world. (Hand) closes round
  awareness in a cage -- and so subtly is it done that cage and
  awareness appears identical, and call them Consciousness ...

    'What are those (Hands), (Words)?'

    The question is his own.

    It's theirs, too.

    For they are congruent, the Seven. The Glyph prints itself in
  their brow oil, fades, reprints itself ... In the congruent
  intervals, questions take form ...

    '(Hands)? (Words)?' Probing. Insisting. Constructing an image
  of him, around the Glyph. Filling in the gaps in his own self-
  image, till his mind floats physically, mapped in oil ... The
  resonating Glyph teases it out and frames it. The liquid mirror
  hints ...

    'There is Another One, in him--'

     'The faintness of another being--'

      'What are these (hands), (words), (steel)?'

       'The Glyph can be tuned. Dilated. More is implied--'

        'Star can tune this other being--'

         'Are you reluctant?'

          'To know who I am?' he replies. 'How can I be?'

    Soon, a sharpening of the self-image ...

    'You are an (instrument), a (tool)--'

      'The relation between your two Selves was carved by (Steel)--'

        'Yet there was love in your making, too.
         Did you know this love?'

          'Love ... yes. There was snow, there were (trees)!
           Yet I saw nothing through my eyes
           I had to be led by the (hand) ...
           She lead me. She she she. Thin tiny.
           How could she lead my bulk?'

         'The other being in you--'

        'We can tune this Being more--'

       'A point here, a point there:
        separated sparks of the Reality--'

      'Dots of a glyph of Being--'

     'We link them in a net. A web emerges. The self that hides--'

    'Let us repeat a higher Glyph, REPRESENTER--'



    Sound boom through their brows then. A new sound is
  echoed, re-echoed. Magnified resonances print the oil till a new
  Glyph of complex wax transacts them -- their oil stiffening as
  though they're deep under tons of sea, diving to the deep floor ...

    While the wax remains hard, a sound ghost vibrates into
  being again. Bits of lattice built for another reason regain
  their old, lost order. A ghost surfaces through his invented
  being and floats in the wax annulus, within the Seven.

    Awareness of himself hangs brief as a jellyfish dissolving on
  the shore; melts as the wax melts back to oil.

    The Seven suck air, blow foam across each other's backs ...
  and regard the image of him in their memories.

    He's exhausted by the strain of sustaining that density of
  wax, which should weigh him down on a dive. But amazed.

    'We must form the Star again, together.
     You are only a pup; need resting and feeding,
     strength to sustain the Star.
     We held the Glyph up for you in your brow, then.
     Condition of dependency.'

      'You are used to making sounds with (Steels).
       With (Steel Instruments). Strange.
       Let us rethink the map of you that was spun round REPRESENTOR--'

        'You will learn to carry this Glyph,'
         clicks the old female, more kindly
        'Even the Great Glyphs, RESONATOR, CONCEIVER, TRANSCENDER ...
         But you must go now.
         For a while. Till we think how to cure you.
         Hear this--'

          'Once, World was a single point, in the womb woven of silence.
           Time passed, and the first sound, in a womb woven echoed,
           till it became many sounds.
           World was woven from waves of sound crossing, vibrating,
           for a million ages.
           Till sounds stiffened into hard wax of the world,
           with all its shapes of Being, and the soft wax of the sea.

           All is born of sound.
           Yet not by this thing (Word), be sure!
           (Word) and (Hand) are destroyers of sound. Disruptors.
           They rupture the womb of silence itself ...

           We must pulse a song for the Wailing Ones to warn Our Kind.
           Nothing may warp the searoad of the Glyphs ...
           Oh so slowly we have followed it,
            ever since the mid-Time of Ice!'


           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0575019387
           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watson_(author)