CHAPTER EIGHT
The Forgotten Memory
V
Wilburn and the prophet, Buttrom, looked around. There was no sign of Alfajean, no sign whatsoever of anything at all except the road and themselves standing on it. After an awkward silence, Buttrom cleared his throat. “So… uh… where you from, kid?”
“Fenlin Duchy. Over by Hambserg Village, if you know where that is.”
“Nope. Can’t say I’ve heard of either of those places. What province are we talking about?”
“I… think they’ve got provinces in New Trapoban. We just have duchies in Argylon.”
“Argylon? What’s that?”
Wilburn eyed Buttrom skeptically. The man didn’t act like he was kidding, but some grownups could be really good pretenders. “Argylon,” Wilburn said, careful to articulate each syllable “You know... the Kingdom of Argylon? …the biggest country in the world?”
Buttrom gave him an okay, I’ll humor you, little fellow sort of smile. “That’s a very patriotic thing to say,” he said, “although I wouldn’t go around repeating it within the borders of the Empire, not unless you want to face the lions in the arena. I’m curious, though… where is this Kingdom of Argylon relative to Nalafarnalus? It must be a remote island. I don’t remember ever seeing it on a map. Mark you, I can’t read the sign on my own shopfront, so that isn’t saying much.”
“Relative to… where?”
“Nalafarnalus,” Buttrom repeated.
Wilburn shrugged. “Dunno. Never heard of it.”
“You’re twisting my nose,” Buttrom said angrily. “Gosh darn it, kid, that isn’t funny. I’m having a tough enough time telling what’s real and what isn’t without you messing me around. There’s no such place as the Kingdom of Argylon, is there? You just made that up. You’re from Prozapple Province, same as me. I can hear it in your accent!”
Wilburn took a small step backward from the man, slightly alarmed. “Um, dude,” he said, “I mean, Mr. Prophet—”
“I’M NO PROPHET I JUST MAKE POTS!” Buttrom bellowed. His face was scarlet.
“Sorry, sorry!” Wilburn said quickly. “All I meant was, I’m not twisting your nose. I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about Nalafarnalus! The Nalafarnalian Empire! Oh, come on—Nalafarnalus is actually the biggest country in the world!”
“Okay… well, I dunno. Maybe we’re from different worlds.”
Buttrom’s broad shoulders rose and fell with his rapid breathing. “No,” he said. “For one thing, that’s impossible. For another thing, we’re speaking the same language. How could you speak perfect Nalafarnal if you’re not from Nalafarnalus? That’s ridiculous. And yet you claim you’ve never even heard of Nalafarnalus. Know what I think, kid? I think you’re a rotten, twisted little liar. You’re sick. I see what you’re trying to do—you and that phony angel are in on it together! You’re trying to make me lose my mind! Well, it won’t work, because I’m wise to your scheme now. I see past that honest face. You’re evil! You and that angel both!”
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“Oh yeah? Well, you’re a pee-pee poo-poo stupid butthole head!” Wilburn shouted. It was the meanest thing he could think of, and perhaps he’d overdone it, because Buttrom staggered backward as if shoved by someone much stronger than Wilburn—who, in any case, hadn’t touched him—staggered, stumbled, sat down hard in the dirt, blinked helplessly for a few seconds, and then began to cry. Big, sorry crocodile tears rolled down Buttrom’s cheeks. He wasn’t a super noisy crier; he just whimpered softly like a puppy. After a while, he lay back and perched his wet bowl on his belly, where it jiggled with the rhythm of his weeping. It was too pathetic. Wilburn turned to go.
The problem was, when he looked first one way down the road and then the other, he couldn’t tell which way he’d come from or been going. Did it matter? Kinda, yeah, he thought. There were some rules to this unnatural wasteland… not the same ones he was used to, but consistent rules, or at least… somewhat consistent-ish, and one of them, he sensed, was that the way you went changed where you ended up. The way you went… the way… was there more to it than directions?
As Wilburn stood scratching his head, trying to work out what to do, he began to feel a cold prickle on the backside of his eyeballs. Then, not twenty paces up the road, there was a shimmering like heatwaves, and then a glowing latticework of heptagons inscribed itself in the air, forming a seven-sided corridor that stretched into infinity. This was, Wilburn later realized, his third first-impression of Iddo, technically speaking, since he’d forgotten their actual first-meeting, then met Iddo again in the closed-loop sub-dimension of HA Sector-1 Parallelaspace, and was now remembering their first meeting without remembering that he was remembering it.
The shaggy creature lumbered from the portal and proceeded up the road toward him. Wilburn stood rigidly still, experiencing something he had no words to describe. The words he didn’t have but would have used if he had had them were—electric—and—radar—and—download. Psychovatric signals pinged between him and the creature at a speed far faster than conscious thought. It was a conversation less of minds than hearts, a mutual testing of intentions, dispositions, emotional reflexes‚ a thousand tiny questions asked and answered in the blink of an eye, progressing like a chemical reaction, like two oceans flowing into one another.
The result was that in the time it took the creature to arrive in front of Wilburn, the creature had become Iddo, the person Wilburn knew, and who knew Wilburn, better than anyone else in the world apart from Mom. Yes, better even than Gramma Fark, whose harsh demeanor had always precluded total intimacy. Wilburn and Iddo knew each other. Not in the sense of details and facts, although they did exchange a few of those, but with the knowledge of old friends greeting one another after years of separation. Deep down, where it really counted, the two of them understood each other perfectly. On the surface of things, however… well, perhaps not quite so much.
When Iddo halted in front of Wilburn and offered him his hoof, Wilburn just looked at it, then up into his face. Iddo’s eyes twinkled. “Lesson One,” he said, speaking both aloud, in his rich baritone, and silently, in a language of pure meaning that filled in where Wilburn’s limited vocabulary fell short. “It’s a nearly ubiquitous practice across the length and breadth of spacetime to greet new and old acquaintances alike with a cordial touch… the precise nature of which touch depends on the physiognomies of the parties involved. A handshake, for example, only works if both of you have hands, a statistical unlikelihood given the endless diversity of lifeforms in the universe, and thus—as well as for many other reasons—the Astral traveler must always be prepared to improvise. I have a hoof, you have a hand. Two hands, and a pair of feet if you want to use them. Who knows what you’ll do, you see? Not even you. That’s what keeps life entertaining. Every moment is a collapsing of infinite possibility into finite actuality. Every single moment. Which brings us to Lesson Two: the spacetime continuum is an illusion.
“Oh, it’s real, in so far as all illusions exhibit the basic quality of existence, but it is a subordinate reality, it does not ultimately exist. The fundamental fact of the universe is—ready for it, my boy?—omnitemporal presence. Here and now everywhere always. That’s the whole shebang. Before and after now… nothing. Not even nothing. An un-thing un-is-ing, the absolute antithesis of being, so much so that to even attempt to talk about it, to call it an it at all, is to attribute more reality to it than it deserves. Note, this hasn’t stopped me from publishing several lengthy volumes on the subject, which leads us at last to Lesson Three. Actually, scratch that—no more numbering your lessons. The motif grows stale. Where was I…? Oh yes, obstinance and blatant self-contradiction. Yes, these are essential tools for the practitioner of metaphysical arts, particularly with respect to academia. You must harness the absurdity, my boy, or the absurdity will harness you. And right now is the perfect opportunity to practice. Right now is always the perfect opportunity to practice. I’ve made the first move by sticking out my hoof. So, now it’s your turn. So, go ahead. Improvise.”
Wilburn, still not altogether comprehending, reached out to grasp the proffered hoof, but at the last second he changed his mind and closed his hand into a fist instead and delivered a solid punch to it—there was a friendly pulse of mutual exaltiture, bathing the two of them briefly in golden light.
“Exactly,” Iddo said.