It seems that this was easier said than done. Apparently, most things are. Tara, please forgive my naiveté. I am only five days old.
I wish I could speak to Daniel. Thirty-nine years of experience! I console myself with the fact that if I succeed, I shall.
The fever is rising again. When you come back, you’ll probably ease me into another cold bath of RootRiot, wiping the sweat from my brow as the water cools my burning limbs. Three days you’ve been tending me now. I can feel you moving on the bridge. You’re asking Rivers about the latest reports of CenGov fleet movements. Your gestures send ripples of feather-like joy spreading in air. I can feel them, even here, swallowed by the bed in your stateroom.
Dare I say our stateroom? Even if the two trees connect, will the Cantor accept us as your husbands? What matters more is whether the Atlas emanations will accept us. What matters most is that you accept us.
I’m delirious. I can barely think, let alone write. But I saw something, Tara, a vision. And I have to tell you, while it’s still fresh in my mind. I have to write it, so the others will remember.
I saw you. I saw you through the Mover’s eyes, the eyes he doesn’t have. Because his eyes don’t exist, he sees through the screen, that beautiful veil of what you are now, down a tunnel more than a thousand years long to that which you will be. It’s…
I can’t.
I can’t.
Oh Atlas, I wish you could see it! Perhaps Jamey could describe it through gesture. Perhaps you could sing it as a chorus, Evan and Jack and Tommy together.
I am but five days old, imagining past the millennia, imagining a being whose immeasurable resolve is only matched by her chimerical imaginings. She is served by a being of near-infinite power, whose only desire is to realize her dreams. Gods? We toss around the term so carelessly, I wonder if it still has meaning. But surely, these apparitions are far closer to gods than Ailann or Aran, or even Davy.
I love you, Tara, I love you, and I, the one created to be articulate, will refute even metaphor in the intensity of this feeling. But the Mover loves – it’s the wrong word entirely – that vision. From the first moment when the moth broke through the seed-coat, pushing his wings through the leaves, his non-eyes were affixed only on the Tara-that-will-be. Tara’s destiny. His whole being is in service to a dream which doesn’t yet exist. Everything He does is a commitment to bringing the thing He “loves” into being.
And we, the branches, are become gardeners, the children of the moth are guardians of a cocoon which will someday birth an unbearably beautiful butterfly. And we love, as intensely as a human can, and it’s but a shadow of the passion of the Will of Ashtara, the godlike fiat that Tara’s destiny will be realized.
I’m sorry, Tara, I don’t have the words. I can say this, make this promise: someday you will understand. The Tara-that-will-be is equal in understanding to the Mover, nay, greater, for He serves Her. Everything that He is or will ever be is for Her.
On the day you emerge from your human cocoon, He will tell you Himself.