A SHADOW'S TALE/ JACK WAITTS

In a darkness swimming with a trillion shadows, the little house trembled around the sleeping man. In Harmon Tern's dream a drop of blood fell. It splashed into a pool of perfumed water, liquifying and expanding until it blossomed into a rose. After the rose faded there was an eye of pure compassion, an eye like no eye he had ever known.

He woke: dawn. The shadows writhed. He stirred in his bed, wondering,
sleeping, then waking again. He thought of the eye that had looked at him. He remembered the compassion that was both personal and impersonal.

When it was time, he rose, showered and dressed, moving with the rest through the workday routine, the drudgery of it, the emptiness. Yet he carried with him something no one else could know -- he carried with him the eye's clarity, and it was as if it were reminding him, waking him from a nightmare that he had not known he was having.

When the pod came at the end of the day to take him home, he looked out at the fields of dull grey pipe
that lined the streets to the horizon. At that moment , in utter emptiness, as he sped towards the empty, anonymous houses, a different hope became possible than the dull, familiar hope of avoiding pain. It was a familiar feeling, yet he had never felt it. It seemed to him to suffuse the entire world, even the thousands of miles of battleship grey pipe that expanded out from every point to every other. He arrived at home in the dark and ate a small meal of fish stew and bread, falling brightly asleep in the night's murmuring shadows. Inside the constancy of their hum was a dire, incessant mumbling that seemed to have its origins at the very lips of dread.

**

Elsewhere, on a mountain, at the edge of fissure high in the starless sky, the darkness had coalesced into an angular machine that housed the overeseers and their many systems. A crew of managers peered from the windows of their pressurized dome, leathery and winged, their hollow bodies stuffed with sawdust and onions. "Their was a DREAM." one of them said. "We know it happened, but we don't know who." The others bent over the glowing dials, monitoring the far dark reaches of the technosphere,where billions of subjects worked, trudged and shivered.

When the serpentine man arrived for his briefing, he kissed the socket where the power grid was enabled. Having followed the custom, as all must do, he sat and waited for the day's intelligence, enjoying a libation of reddened milk, stirring it with a length of curlicued fingernail to whet the the leather of his lips as he brooded.

**

In the forest of death, where the silent ones had hidden a thousand years before, in the deepening whorls of the wood's shrinking tendrils, a little bird of yellow-gold slept in a crystal only a few even dreamed of. Around the bird's head was a golden mist, hovering, silent, motile and hidden.

At the moment Harmon Tern dreamt of the eye that held him, one of the bird's closed eyelids had twitched. At the same time, in the grove of the forest of death, the first of the silent ones came forward from his death-sleep, to stumble then sit down slowly and think, not remembering the location of the little bird, but intuiting a certainty at the fact of its existence.

Next, the singer came, who had been silent two thousand years. Her hair was the color of the sun itself, and she sat quietly next to him to begin her song, that was as much a poem as it was a song. It began with a silence that ended in a hum. And then she began to sing, and in the song her refrain was ever as follows: "our father of the word, our mother of the abyss, meet us in the place of hidden silence" Her eyes vibrated as if in REM sleep as she sang. She seemed tinged with the glow of rose and the scent of myrhh, and it was as if the forgotten world that slept inside her as she sang rose to wake in her mouth as song. The more she offered, the more the silent ones woke. --Those whose ancestors had preferred death or banishment to the tincture the dark ones added to the blood at birth.-- They stirred from their isolation and its half-sleep of pain, until the sweet sad notes of the woman's song soaked through the layers of their long human silence.

When the third one came, the willful one, he sat down beside her and crossed his legs and began to hum. Out of his humming little figures emerged from his belly, annointing the air with their simplicity and their shifting, as if the stars, sun and moon had come to shine again from inside him. In the forest the silence that had held its perceivers in sleep held the entire slow procession of the waking ones in suspension, until they also began to sing.

Everyone who had come to the edge of the grove could feel the high sweetness of the song's presence in the air, a presence that changed everything it touched into itself again, so it could never be anything but what it had sought to be all along, that this, and only this, was its deliverance into freedom. And that was when the bird in the hidden crystal, in the ever-shrinking forest even the dark ones had known they must preserve, managed a tiny wingbeat as its heart began to shudder .

**

Harmon Tern, alseep in Pipe City, felt showers of stars pour down on the land, rinsing the depths of a forest in their silver glow. Strange elemental figures kissed the ground, flaming out into the darkened sky and back again.
Elsewhere, in the round dome where the silence was abhorred, the sawdust figures paraded back and forth, purring and twitching over the glowing dials.

The dark man sipped his reddened milk. He sat quietly as a parade of figures poured through his head, triangles, ochre and muddy-hued lines cascaded through his dark brow as he sat in the quiet, and waited, listening. Then he walked to the glow-screen that marked the zone of bodies sleeping and working on the grid of souls. He began to erase them one by one, then three, then five, then twenty, then a thousand. They floated from their sleep into a sky bloated with ash, and did not wake or breathe again.

But the man who had dreamed was not one of them. He woke suddenly and remembered the pain of his life. The tired, droning, incipid misery in which he found himself to be a hum in the machines he maintained, mere marginalia to their grinding and the hovering intensity of holographs and digital mirrors. He realized this sweeping joy had come over him out of nowhere. It was a joy that he had had a life at all, and that for the first time ever in his capacity to discern, he could feel it , claim, it, call it his own. He was horrified that he had believed them when they had said he was of the Hub. He remembered how he had felt a dim surge of pride when they had offered him an increase in rations for his performance. How he had applied at the ministry for a wife to come, and they had said he might be listed with Reproductive Services.

Now, in his waking, in the dim far life, he thought he heard the stir of a breath inside him, and it was the breath of something unfettered and luminous. He held it in his heart, because he had a heart , and somehow, somehow, it was still beating ! He wondered for a moment how it had come to this. How, as a human being, he could have been tricked into believing that the world was merely a means to the maintenance of great machines. He bent down and wept , and,with his tears seeping into the smooth carpet of the habitat, said a word of thanks to a presence he could not name. . . . It was at exactly that moment he knew something he could not possibly have known: that the world had begun to wake from the freeze of its machines, and in that feeling he was both joyful and afraid.

**
In the cathedral of the forest, the silent ones grew and took their shapes. The yellow gold bird had held its vigil all night,
in quiet consecration of the golden light in its heart and the white light that reached up from the earth to meet it. Where the two intersected, a little tree burst forth into the empty space . It was a very good tree. A tree of silence. In its presence was inscribed everything that had ever been or will be.

**

On the mountain the serpentine man sipped his reddened milk, looking into the mirror that hung above his desk. He saw himself shadowed there as the form of his own death and the harbinger of the deathshead's of perhaps a billion more. Rising from his vision he sighed a sigh, turning to the power grid to kiss the socket once more time, then hurled himself through the tinted glass window of his office, falling into darkness through a thousand feet of sky.