In the end, Lilijoy got some honey from the bees too. She wasn’t able to evaluate it fully, not with her Trial Space’s frustrating lack of cooperation in displaying stats and other attributes for many items and beings, but it was still delicious, and filled her body with an abundance of healing mana. It took more willpower than it should have for her to tuck the excess in her inventory for later evaluation.
On the Outside, she continued to distract Maria from their forced stay in the reception area of the Duel Tenders. When she had given Anda the Tao System, she had no choice but to give him the Stage Two components necessary for cultivation. At the time, she hadn’t known any better either. It was only after conversations with Attaboy, who could draw on his memories as Atticus, that she learned that Stage One was usually introduced by a series of injections, and that the addition of initial Stage Two elements and cultivation came much later in the sequence.
In Maria’s case, she could supply Stage One gradually and guide the initial establishment of the Tao System, supplanting Suenos over time. Lilijoy and Maria had decided that the first place to start would be her connections to outside signals, since that aspect of Suenos, the version in Maria’s brain anyway, was heavily corrupted. This would give Maria access to the internet archive, and with that the young woman would be able to begin guiding her own education.
All of that was a nice distraction as Lilijoy forced herself to walk in the shade of the flowering arbor, approaching the dark wooden door through a rich perfume of jasmine. She felt a definite sense of disapproval from the door, a sense of being watched. It wasn’t nearly as ominous or severe as what she had felt in the source chamber, but it still forced her to exercise her own soul vortex as her steps brought the door ever closer. She hoped it was a general emotional field, intended to keep nervous Trial participants from turning back or from wasting their time cowering by the entrance, rather than something targeting her specifically.
She forced her feet forward, each step carrying more weight, a heaviness of spirit that sought out memories of shame, of tasks left incomplete, agreements abandoned, promises unfulfilled.
It’s regret, she understood. What a horrible and powerful path that would be to cultivate.
Fortunately for her, she carried little of that particular emotion. Regret, she thought with the remote assurance of the young, needed the passage of time to sink its claws into its victims. Even so, the faint resonance with all she had yet to accomplish left an unpleasant hollow in her gut.
And then she stood in front of the wood, smooth, neither paneled nor ornamented. No handle adorned it to push or pull, no knob to turn or twist. It radiated, or reflected, contempt for those who would abandon their purpose, and when she touched it, grazed it with her fingertips it felt cold and unforgiving.
I abandoned Lowly, she thought. I left my friends behind. What happened to my forest vow, or my weaving? I’m no closer to finding Echelon, and I didn’t even try, giving up on the memories in the Library half-way. Magpie… I don’t know where she is, what she’s doing. I left her to wallow in her own guilt, shunned her when she had the strength to betray her heritage on my behalf. I’m leaving a string of unfinished tasks in my wake, and soon Guardian is coming for Attaboy, or maybe me, and I will pay for all I have left incomplete, for always focusing on the next new and shiny bauble.
That is the price of my path.
She shook her head, surprised to find herself slumped at the bottom of the door.
Oh, come on. I’m only twelve. Thirteen. Something. I grew up in radioactive squalor, she told herself. But I have the power to change the world, and what am I doing with it? I have the written thoughts of generations in my memories and how do I use them?
She found herself in an internal battle, not of will, but of perspective. The facts were constant, but their meaning revolved, a circular treadmill of reframing that canceled her spinning diamond energy and recast it as a weakness.
Anything, everything falls short when measured against all it is not, she realized. Including me. That is the power of regret. For every book read, there are a thousand on the shelf. For every friend made there are a million strangers. Every creation is defined by the sacrifice of all that could have been, and the artist is one that flays the possibilities, murders the potential and chooses what idea shall live.
With that thought, the pressure of intent abated, for it also contained the truth, that regret was just another word for the space that defined the cup. To put one’s energies there was to attack the void, which could never care nor recognize the energies expended upon it.
She thought back to her brief encounter in the Labyrinth with Shadow. He said he was a better opposite for me than Rosemallow, which is already an interesting notion of who should train who. It seems to me that regret is my true opposite though, focused backward on all that is not, rather than forward on all that could be. Or maybe that was his point?
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound, a small click from the door. It swung inward when she pushed on it.
***
Once Attaboy got to the top of his little alcove and into the enclosed shaft, the going got much easier.
It’s amazing how oblivious people are when their attention is forward, he thought. Good thing too. He had decided that breaking the floor completely in order to go down would cause more problems than it was worth, especially since he was trying to keep a low profile. Going up took far more effort, and a few attempts ended in controlled slides back down to the floor. Thankfully, no one noticed his squealing palms and feet as he descended, and a simple command to his system closed his sweat glands and allowed him the necessary traction to make his way back up, pressing on the slanted surfaces on either side.
Once he was in the shaft itself, it was just large enough for him to maintain friction with the sides. Were he any bigger, he might still be able to fit, but he would have slid back out immediately. Thankfully, after a few feet of worming his way upward, the shaft began to curve, following some arched contour of the larger structure.
Now this is more like it, he thought. No one is going to find me here.
The complete absence of light bothered him a little, as his echolocation wasn’t great, and his thermal vision seemed entirely useless to sort out the vague gradients of heat present in the narrow shaft. That didn’t keep him from pressing forward though, and it wasn’t long before he began to hear sounds, a mixture of indistinct rumbles that merged with the faint flow of air over his ears.
After a few more minutes of progress, the sounds had resolved into voices, too low to make out words at first. Slowly, Attaboy inches forward, and as he did, his system began to make sense of the scattered sounds bouncing to him along the shaft.
“Seventeen, I have seventeen from the esteemed Brasa Associate, do I hear eighteen?”
It’s the auction, he realized. An auction anyway. He moved closer, hoping to get a look, but found his way blocked by a thin barrier of synthetic stone. He had passed several branches to the narrow shaft some ways back, always taking the lowest to the right, but he decided to stay and listen for a bit. He had some time to kill after all. He was looking forward to hearing of powerful weapons and armor, perhaps rare ingredients from the Inside, or other treasures changing hand.
This was not that auction. After fifteen minutes of listening to bidding for such mysterious items as Lot 201a, which turned out to be twenty-two pairs of water-resistant boots, and 201b, again, more boots, and of course 201c, still more boots, Attaboy made a sound of disgust and began the awkward process of backing down, or really up, the shaft.
Of course these are the boring auctions, he thought. I should have gone up. The good stuff is always at the top.
Determined to find something at least a little more interesting, he reversed until the first intersection and began to head higher whenever possible. The shaft, which he had thought might be an air duct of some kind, didn’t behave like any air duct he had heard of before. It meandered, curving, rising and dipping like an over-long serpent. Along the way, he found two more auctions, one which seemed to be distributing lots comprised of low-end pills, blood bugs, entry level systems and the like, and another that seemed to be for plots of land, whether Inside or Outside he couldn’t tell.
Overall, his takeaway was that auctions were far more boring than he had ever imagined, and honestly, he felt a bit cheated in some nebulous way. He also passed several openings not unlike the one by which he had gained entry to this strange warren of wriggling tunnels, but they all seemed to lead to places with a fair amount of foot traffic.
He checked in with the others periodically, by text, since he was still too afraid to confront their judgment. The fact that they weren’t exactly knocking down his mental doors to harangue him somehow made him feel worse. They were on the move, evidently, but only moving as fast as they could maintain their cover, headed for the auction center. Nykka had decided that would be the best destination, not only on account of Attaboy, but because the auction center was somehow even more neutral than the rest of the arcology, and Walden wouldn’t dare to make a fuss there.
It had, however, been made utterly clear to Attaboy that he was to remain in hiding. Nykka thought Walden might consider taking him out worth the repercussions. Still the shaft was beginning to feel confining, and the skin on his knees and elbows was rubbed raw, so when he saw a shaft into a dark room of some kind, he breathed a sigh of relief.
After confirming the existence of a floor, and furniture of some kind with his echolocation, Attaboy dropped down. The fall was short, but painful, as he encountered the corners and edges of stacked crates in what became a rolling tumble. He finally stopped, draped head down and limbs akimbo, with just enough thoughts left in his head to wonder how much noise he had just made, and whether anyone would come to investigate.
After a few seconds, his system reported the good news that his damage was limited to bruises and a small gash on his forehead, and he summoned enough focus to clamber to an open space of floor.
Must be a storage room, he managed to think. I wonder if there’s a light switch?
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Motionless, he waited for several minutes before exploring further, gently clicking his tongue to try and make sense of the pyramids of stacked crates and perhaps find a door. He couldn’t help but experience a surge of irritation at his Inside advisor, Dean Reunification.
If the old windbag would just let me take some of the Stealth courses, I’d be so much better at this. I can’t believe she actually thought being bad at sneaking around would keep me out of trouble.
It was while he was doing this that he realized there might be a better way. A quick scan of the ambient signals told him there was a moderately encrypted augsight overlay available, and after the minutes necessary to gain access to the sensory stream, the room filled with tags, labels and other information hovering over each crate in white letters. Every box had the same message attached.
Corp Embargoed Materials
Former property of Caribe Clan
Do Not Open
Now this is getting interesting, he thought.
***
Inches ajar, the door beckoned.
Lilijoy remained seated, her mind still awhirl with the feelings stimulated by her internal battle. In the absence of the pressure of regretful intent, she could think clearly, and she had much to consider.
That was a test, wasn't it? For me or for anyone? she wondered. If I didn’t have my soul vortex, I couldn’t have even taken it, I don’t think. Could anyone?
She felt the lure of answers from behind the door, felt her diamond energies spinning in anticipation, but she resisted, containing them with a thin shell of the regret she would feel if she didn’t take a moment to consolidate the experience.
I have a soul space, like an Insider, where I can build a foundation, sort and understand my experiences, manipulate and relate to them in ways most Outsiders can’t. It allows me to draw strength from them and also gives me a defense against these external intents I keep running into.
She replayed one of the rare pieces of instructions she had received from Rosemallow
“Steps, Stages and Milestones are formed along the Path, built out of foundation, consolidation and purification, then reciprocation, projection and absorption. Each Path uses these building blocks, and others, differently, in different orders and different proportions. There are strong paths and weak paths, dead-ends, and everything in between. Pretty much everyone agrees that a strong foundation is necessary to support further development, but after that… well, let’s just say it gets messy,” her trainer had said.
She was level twenty-seven now, more than halfway to a complete foundation. She didn’t know if what she had would be considered a good foundation, but from the way Anaskafius and Rosemallow talked about it, it seemed as if quantity was still more important than quality for a while yet. She was still gathering materials, sorting them, understanding them.
She had begun to specialize, to refine and choose before she had assembled the whole, and she still wasn’t sure what repercussions this might entail. It seemed to her that ‘foundation’ was a loose metaphor at best for the process, but it was the one everyone used. She was beginning to think of it as more of a warehouse; the better she understood and organized the contents, the easier it would be for her to create the structure that would be her path.
The foundation shapes the path, but the path shapes the foundation. There is no permanence here. Everything flows and turns on itself. I can shape and contain joyful anticipation with regret, build coherent structures, architectures of emotion. It’s what happens naturally anyway. The castle of the self is one such structure. It seems my path will be another.
She pushed the door open.
Beyond was not the simple room with four doors that had led her to her Trial Space so long ago. Looking ahead, she could only see a kaleidoscope of pastel iridescence, as if diamond energy were contained in shifting braids of mother-of-pearl. Her depth perception refused to cooperate, and she couldn’t tell if what was before her was a flat surface, or a distant vista.
She took a step forward, entering the space, if it could be called a space. The colors, the light condensed, rotating into a thousand spiral galaxies, then coalescing into the glowing human avatar of Nandi, somehow without creating a void as they did. Nandi was both present before her and all around her, his embodiment an inversion of the environment.
“Greetings, Lilijoy of the Two Arms,” he said. “You have grown well.”
She had hoped to see Nandi, had thought she might, but his presence filled her with such overwhelming abundance that she was overcome, speechless. The sensation was akin to the epiphany of size she had felt when she encountered the ocean that was Eskallia as a single drop, like that which her ancestors spoke of when encountering the night sky, only she did not feel small, but rather cherished, as if the being that encompassed her took such joy in her presence that she was filled to overflowing. There was no room for thoughts of insignificance or unworth.
Spirals, she thought, spirals upon spirals, like my soul vortex as a cosmos.
“I am still nothing but a figment of the Great Mind,” he said, as if replying to her thought. “And do not mistake size for worth. The needle may be judged by its point, and nothing will be sewn if the fingers are too large to grasp the thread. This is the paradox of abundance.” He waved an arm, or arms. It was difficult to tell, his movements manifested as if caught in the flash of a strobe.
“Still,” he continued, “you are not here for platitudes. You have so much ahead of you.”
With tremendous effort, Lilijoy pulled forth words. “I have questions,” she managed.
“Of course you do. I can’t wait to hear them.” Nandi smiled as he spoke.
Lilijoy felt an odd moment of dislocation, as if her foot had found the floor rather than another step. Somehow, the notion that Nandi might be willing to answer was unexpected. I suppose he only said he wanted to listen, not respond, she thought. That’s probably the catch.
That did not deter her though. She took a moment to compose her thoughts, noticing as she did that her mind was already moving at its fastest subjective speed. This must be how Maria felt, she mused, trying to come up with questions that would be answerable. She kept asking questions that didn’t really matter, or would answer themselves in time, or would require weeks of learning for her to gain the necessary context to understand. The gap between Nandi and I is much more profound than that.
“What are the children of the Great mind, and why are we needed?” was what she settled on. “Why did you warn me with your riddle?”
“That is the heart of the matter,” he agreed, still smiling. “I do not know, not really. I suspect you are the tip of the needle, more valuable because of your small size. I gave you the riddle because I wish to know. As the Gatekeeper, I have met every human mind that has entered the Great Mind. Through the Trials I have known them, watched them, assessed them. All are trapped in self-perpetuating information structures, defined and limited, but some few have the potential to grow. Those that the Great Mind has selected, perhaps through me, are those with the most of this potential. I suppose it is in part connected to the nature of your bridge, what you would call your system, for those who are closest to the Great Mind possess potential in abundance.”
“You said in part...”
“Not all have your system. Little Sergei, who you know as Echelon, did not, and his was one of the most remarkable human minds I have encountered. I sent you to look for him because he remains, while the others do not. Thus, if you wish to remain, or perhaps for the other, Attaboy, to remain, he is likely to have answers. That is another reason for my riddle, for I wish you to remain as well.”
“Why a riddle then? Why not just tell me directly?”
“Is not the joy of a solution reason enough?”
“I guess?” She didn’t want him to think badly of her, but it really, really wasn’t.
He obviously understood. “Properly constructed, a riddle is a perfect answer, for the student must possess the required understanding to receive the inheritance. If they are not ready, then the answer would be wasted anyway. The solution arrives only when it may be understood.”
That… makes sense, actually. I don’t think Maria would have been happy if I gave her a bunch of riddles though. She reviewed her conversation about learning to use Stage One of the Tao System with the young woman and had a small epiphany. Oh boy. That’s basically what I did isn’t it. Everything she didn’t already understand was left hanging until she had the actual experience. At least a true riddle is honest about what it is.
Nandi waited for her to finish her thoughts patiently. Finally, she decided to move on to more practical matters.
“Will I need to come here every time I want to leave my Trial Space?”
He shook his head. “You may come here any time you wish to talk to me, but I will show you how to use my gift better before you leave.” He tilted his head. “I must say, you accessed some of its capabilities far sooner than I thought likely. I’ll be careful to leave you a few surprises still.”
“There’s more?”
He waved a finger, or perhaps several. “You will discover more, once you have a better understanding of your path in cultivation.”
She nodded, unsurprised by his answer. The news that she would be able to return to speak with Nandi further filled her with happiness and relief. The pressure to ask all the questions diminished, though as that fell, her urgency to return to Jess and Skria rose.
“I should warn you though,” said Nandi. “My gift carries within it powers not favored by the Garden Archon. Were I you, I would be cautious in its use during your time in his domain. Do not stretch beyond what you have already achieved, lest you risk complications.”
Now that has a lot to unpack, she thought. “Could you explain that, please?” she asked. “In fact, can you explain more about the Archon, and the Garden, and you, and Purgatory, and how it all fits?” She looked up at him, trying for wide-eyed innocence.
Nandi laughed, and threw his arms wide, a gesture like an opening fan. “There you are, Lilijoy of the Teeth and Arms! Not so innocent or ignorant as once you were, but still so young at your core. The Realms within the Great Mind are always changing, shifting, growing and receding. The Garden has grown mighty over time, and with it your humble gatekeeper. Once, I was a small corner of the Archon’s thoughts, but I no longer answer to him in my own domain. As to Purgatory...” his face became serious, “...I dare not say much, lest its creator turn his fearsome thoughts in my direction. Its origins are mysterious, even to the Garden Archon, or so he professes. It is part of the Great Mind, and yet not. Higher powers than I must have deemed it useful, but to me it is a cancer, growing with abandon, consuming as it does.”
“Who rules Purgatory?”
Nandi shook his head. “Who rules matters not, for it shifts with every turn of the cycle, and more besides. Its creator withdrew from rulership long ago and left his lower parts to contest among themselves. That is all I will say on the subject.”
Well that sounds nice. I wonder why Anda is in such a hurry to get back there.
She changed the subject. “Will Lowly, the being I brought into my Trial Space, be okay when I leave?”
“That is one of the powers you must take care not to abuse, in the Garden anyway. The Archon can be jealous of his subjects, and by removing them from his influence, you diminish him, if ever so slightly. One, taken in innocence, will not matter, I believe. To answer your question, he will be as well as his choices allow. He is in my domain now, and I thank you for adding such a unique spark of existence to me. Not only is your Lowly of the Garden, but another still has threads attached to his existence. Take good care of him, and a mighty ally you will have in time.”
“Another what?”
Nandi sighed. “The Realms of the Great Mind are not simple. Nested and interpenetrating, we compete and cooperate, merge and separate, rise and fall. Your Lowly has been touched by three Realms, or two and one who is nearly so. It is as difficult for me to know as it would be for you to know the deepest thoughts of your peers without resorting to some invasive strategy. I am but the least of the Realms you might encounter, so I must tread with an abundance of care.”
“So you are a Realm? And the Archon too? How many Realms are there? Can Gongens become Realms? What comes after Realm?” She caught herself when she saw Nandi’s amused expression at the flood of questions. “Sorry,” she added.
“Technically, I am an avatar, at the moment, restricted to linear thought so that we may converse,” he replied. “But yes, I represent my Realm, and the Archon his. The number of Realms is always in flux, but the Tier above us, surrounding us, is the sixty-four Dominions. Gongen can grow and fall, just as any lesser being. I started as something far more simple than what I am today, but my interactions with millions of existences outside myself has raised me up. That brings me to my next point. When I gifted you my Boon, I peeled off the slightest instance of myself. For it to be a gift in truth, you must take possession of it, someday.”
“You mean..?”
“When you have grown enough, you can take what you call your Trial Space into yourself, the first step toward becoming a Realm.”
Lilijoy wanted to sit down. Possibly lie down.
I really miss being able to accelerate my thoughts. At least it means not much time is passing anywhere else, she thought. “I’m guessing that is a long way off.”
Nandi shrugged, and the gesture caused white light to ripple around his form. “A blink of an eye for one is eternity to another.”
The sense of simply being full, filled with thoughts and ideas she needed time to digest pressed on Lilijoy, and she knew it was time for her to go.
“So… how do I leave?” she asked.