The Verse:
Up and down the towers go
A dreaming tree and the tree’s dream.
The Vision:
It’s one of those dreams where you’re inside of a building which seems somehow familiar. I keep finding new rooms. It makes me irrationally happy.
Commentary by Archbishop Co’oal Venesti:
The vision of towers is provocative. In general, the tower is a manmade object, a symbol of hubris. Here, however, the tower is identified with the tree, the symbol of natural creation. It is as if man’s aspiration and god’s impulse have merged – an apt image for the new empire of humanity.
Commentary by Elma, High Prophetess of Skarsia:
Now we’re cooking.
Commentary by Prince Dermot McRath:
Elma was correct. When Tommy was emanated, Tara’s visions were comic and personal. When Ailann was present, they hinted at events of epic scope.
I was the one who suggested the experiment. Hurley had never been physically present when Tara took the amrita before. He could read, touch, even alter dreams. If he could make a dream lucid, could he do the same for a vision? Would it become possible to prophesy at will?
Tara took twice the quantity of blue amrita that she had been using. She could take as much as she wanted – we would never allow it to harm her. But with Hurley present, she was willing to go deeper and farther than ever before. She entrusted herself to him.
It did not turn out at all as we expected.
Commentary by Prince Hurley O’Niall:
I could always feel the moment when, as she drifted off to sleep, the window to her dreams opened. The thread of conscious thought frayed. Images blew in, absurd intrusions flickering on the breeze. Cartoon figures. Remembrances of her day. Mathematical equations.
But this was a sinking downward, an absorption. The window to her dreams did not open; she descended the stairway to ours. The dreams of a dreaming tree, sticky and resinous. Honeyed sunlight and dark mysteries of soil. Time that quivered like the surface of a soap-bubble, extending in all directions. And reflecting from the surface of that bubble, visions which rose like opium smoke.
Could I hope to control this, the dream that arose from the deepest part of what I am?
The dream that arose from the deepest part of what I am is a vision of Tara. She could see it now. She extended her hand towards it, her wide eyes absorbing its light. I could do nothing. It was for the best. Were I capable of action, I would have wept.
For a moment, the Tara-that-is touched the Tara-that-will-be. They were transparent, like glass. Then the future seemed to pass directly though her. I could see her, solid, oracular, still sitting on the couch in our chambers. But she was inside of us as well. She was everywhere at once.
This is what I and I sees, I thought. And then I realized that it was only the smallest fraction of what He sees. What am I? I asked.
“Home,” murmured Tara. “I want to go home.”
I almost spoke to remind her that she was home, but she rose and took my hand. We wandered down the hall and out into the gardens. I wondered if this was a good idea. She would come to no harm, of course, but it might not be good for her to be seen in public in this state.
We walked through the grand main gate of Court Emmere, down the paved road towards the capital. Roads between towns ware rare in the Domha’vei. Earth’s colonies tended to use hovercars, to economize on construction. This road was a ceremonial one, the one used by the Apple and Rose procession each year at Nau’gshtide. But we turned aside from it, heading southeast through the fields towards the seaside. Then I understood where we were going – the small village of Merenis Port-of-Call, where the Longtongue River meets the Sea of Illusion.
No one seems to notice that the Matriarch is walking the village streets. No one heeds us at all. I finally understand that we are still deep in dreaming.
I know exactly where she is trying to go. But I don’t know if it will still be there. The block of flats where Daniel once lived was torn down years ago. There are condos on the site. Merenis is no longer a fishing village. The wave of immigration made seaside properties desirable.
I was correct – condos. Yet she is undeterred. The stark white geometry of the building rises in contrast to the sea. It’s wrong. Dolparessan architecture should be fluid. The people who live here could not possibly adapt to the synergy of animal and plant which is the unique soul of this world.
She looks at me expectantly. “Use your key,” she says.
My key?
She points to the tenant directory. Apartment 24. H. O’Niall. It is between L. Fearghus and D. McRath.
“Daniel’s rooms were really getting cramped,” she says.
I place my hand upon the door. It opens.
The interior of the building does not at all resemble the exterior. Everything is solid wood. But it isn’t dead wood. What appears to be ornate carving and inlay is actually a pattern of knobs and whorls which take the shape of geometric figures.
“You see?” she says. “It really is a tree. The bark is just a little bit different.”
Around the exterior of the lobby is a circular pattern of plants and fountains. There is a hilift in the center. We mount it, and the platform rises, almost to the top. My apartment is on the 25th floor, counting the lobby as the first. “It isn’t like this,” I protest. “We radiate from a center.”
My apartment – like all of the apartments – is composed of four semicircular rooms, ringed around the open center of the treedominium. We enter.
There’s no furniture. No gravity. The walls are shifting panels upon which dreams are projected. “This is what you’re like inside,” she says.
But there is no inside of me. I am the inside.
She laughs. On the screen I see a series of painted dolls which open like eggs, each exposing another painted doll. “That must be one of Davy’s dreams,” she says.
She takes my hand. I almost don’t notice. She’s pulling me back into the corridor, but I’ve only seen one room of my home, and I want to investigate. “This is why he makes all of you play outside,” she says. “If you stayed inside, you’d just stare at the walls all day. But you’re the worst. You don’t even have windows.”
“Who has windows?”
We take the lift down to Apartment 15. It’s Driscoll’s flat. The exterior walls are made of glass. He has nothing but windows. He can see everyone and everything.
He looks at me and he’s shocked. “Where am I?” he says. “How are you here?”
His voice. His voice is real. It’s outside. We’re outside. Outside and inside have flipped.
“Where did you come from?” I ask. “What happened?”
“I was – you know where I was. Where I always am. In Daniel’s flat. Inside.”
I shake my head. “Daniel’s flat is gone. These condos are there instead.”
“What?” He peers out the window-wall of his apartment facing the sea. “It looks the same as it always did.”
“You’re looking in the wrong direction,” says Tara.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say.
“Let’s fuck,” says Tara.
“I think we’ve hit the dosage where things get really weird,” says Driscoll.
“It’s okay,” says Tara. “I just have to make sure I see Lorcan before I go. I have something important to tell him. And there’s something else I need to do.”
“Why don’t you take your hat off?” says Driscoll. “These things happen.”
He is right. There is a lot of common ground between an artist and a dreamer. I am grateful that Tara didn’t go to see Lorcan first. I am grateful Tara didn’t ask to see Cillian.
So this is what I and I dreams of.
“This is only happening because neither of us has a brother,” I say.
A dream of sex. There’s pleasure, and there’s strangeness. The strangeness is a sort of pleasure. I close my eyes.
He’s so soft. I and I made him to be sensitive to everything, and then Ailann used him in a game that made him brittle. When I touch his face, I can feel the place where Tara struck him, the sort of blow that felled the giant Ari. Driscoll had not even cried out. Worse, she had hit Ari during the course of a fight; Driscoll had been sucker-punched at the beginning of lovemaking.
Tara nods. “We’re all made of scars,” she says. “The invisible ones are the worst.” For a moment, she looks sad. “I apologized to Ari. But apologizing to Driscoll would only make it worse.”
“Ari will never admit he was wrong,” says Driscoll. “I know I was. Forget it.”
“Close your eyes,” I tell him. “We can close our eyes now.”
“You can,” Tara assures us. “I can see for you now.”
I can feel Driscoll’s pulse softly flutter in his throat. He smells like cedar.
“I need to talk to Lorcan,” Tara says, later.
“Don’t go,” says Driscoll. “I want to stay here.”
Tara takes his hand. “Shall we dress?” I ask. She laughs again, pulling us out of the apartment.
We take the hilift up. Tara rings the bell.
“What?” says Lorcan, crossly. “Why is everybody naked?”
His walls are covered with red velvet brocaded paper, like an old bordello. The apartment smells – of blood, of sex, faintly of rotting wood. On one of the walls is a crucifix. Jamey hangs from it. When Jamey sees Tara, he looks ecstatic.
“I have something to tell you,” says Tara to Lorcan.
“It had better be important,” says Lorcan, glancing over his shoulder at Jamey.
“It is important. You’re the hero.”
“What?!?”
“I can see you standing, spear in hand, at the prow of the barque of the sun.”
“You’ve lost it, little girl.”
“And you have to find it.”
“This is the best idea yet,” says Jamey, and the cross, which was a part of the living wood, blossoms with roses.
“Let’s go,” I suggest. “You said you have something else to do.” Being naked in front of Lorcan is making me uncomfortable, and who knows what Tara might suggest under these circumstances. I didn’t want to end up on that cross.
“I think I’ll stay,” says Driscoll, sinking to his knees in front of Jamey. He begins to weep.
I’m reluctant now. I’m feeling protective of Driscoll. Tara takes my hand. “We have to go down.”
“Down? Down where?”
Tara points southward, towards a window. “Look,” she says.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look under the water.”
There is another building under the water. Or rather, it seems to point downward into the water rather than up into the sky. “Goliath,” I reason. “Who are we going to see?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Ash wants me to open up another apartment. I get to pick.”
The hilift hits the lobby, and then begins to sink. There is a second lobby beneath the first. Tara goes over to the directory. The first twelve floors are occupied. “What name should I write?” she murmurs. “Lucky thirteen.” She looks at me. “I think Driscoll wants a brother, don’t you?” She writes “Ace.”
“Should we go see?”
She shakes her head. “For when we go to Eirelantra. You can open your eyes now.”
I’d forgotten that they were closed. I’d been able to see everything perfectly.
When I open them, I am back on the couch in our chambers at Court Emmere.
*****
Tara was bathing. I mixed her a vodka and redberri to take the edge off. I needed one myself. There was quite a commotion going on inside.
Driscoll passed out, said Patrick. For a little while, Jamey and Lorcan did, too. Jamey looks really happy, but Lorcan just looks pissed off. I suppose neither state is abnormal. But Driscoll is behaving very strangely, and he won’t tell us anything.
I have a question for Davy, I said. Who’s Ace?
Driscoll and Wynne’s brother, said Davy.
He’s the next emanation.
I know, Davy replied.