S. Stirling - The Sword of the Lady

If the trees had spoken, he would not have been surprised. He did not feel as if he dreamed; rather that he had woken, as if he had been drifting beneath the sea all his life and now had plunged upward like a leaping dolphin into the shock of air and light.

Rudi made reverence; then he stood erect, his arms crossed on his chest. 'Why am I here, Ladies'' he asked bluntly.'When last I remember I was on a task of some urgency.' 'You are here to understand, a little,' the Mother said.'We have to come towards you in forms you can grasp so that we can talk at all; but that limits Us.' 'Of course,' he said.'How can a man tell all his mind to a child, or a God to a man' What can you tell me'' 'What did I tell you about magic, child of my heart''

Many things, he thought. But… 'That it doesn't stop being magic when you understand it''

She nodded.'Then see.'

Darkness; a nothingness in which he floated, nothingness so complete that even emptiness was absent and duration itself had not yet begun. A point of light, and existence twisting as it expanded and the arrow of time sprang from the string, soaring upward. Darkness that swelled, dense and hot and pregnant with Being, and then a flash of light as suns fell in upon themselves and lit. They burned with a glow that illuminated curtains of red and yellow fire, structures so vast that worlds would be less than grains of sand amongst them. Stars and galaxies flying apart from each other. Darkness again, as they dwindled into distance. Suns turned swollen and red and guttered out, or exploded in cataclysmic violence that faded into cankered knots of twisted space. Those boiled away in turn. Darkness more absolute than imagination could encompass, as the stuff of matter itself decayed into absence. Darkness without end, for nothing was different from nothing and nowhere was anyplace and everywhere. 'What does that remind you of'' his mother's voice asked.

He blinked back to something like the waking world, where light flickered ruddy on tree bark. 'It's… it's like the way Sandra Arminger sees the world. From what I picked up over the years in what you might be callin' her unguarded moments. Dead, in a way. Everything moving on its own, without spirit. Grand and glorious and wonderful, but… empty. And we gone like a candle flame when we die.'

He blinked alarm.'You're not saying that's true, are you now''

She smiled gently at him, and indicated their surroundings. He nodded, taking the point, and she spoke: 'No. But once it was, until it was made to be different. What did'-she looked up at the ravens-'a certain old gentleman tell you once about history and time''

He blinked again; that night on the mountainside was far distant in miles and months, but it wasn't the sort of thing you forgot. Even if you'd been dreaming a vision while your wasted body lay on the edge of death. He repeated what those deep tones had so cryptically revealed: 'Fact becomes history; history becomes legend; legend becomes myth. Myth turns again to the beginning and creates itself. The figure for time isn't an arrow; that is illusion, just as the straight line is. Time is a serpent.'

After a moment he went on:'Was that truth' The whole truth'' 'Yes. No.'

The figure who bore his mother's semblance smiled sympathetically as she denied him certainty. The blond maiden spoke:'It's so hard to say this in words-' 'But hey, you'll give it a try,'dapa,' the black woman said sardonically.

The Maiden tossed her fair head and said:'Then see again.'

His body dropped away, and once again he floated in nothingness. The point of light, and the same eon-upon-eon passage from light to dark. But this time a light was born in the last darkness, and it looked at him. 'That is Mind,' the Mother whispered.'Wisdom. Wisdom itself, that brought together all knowledge of all that ever was.' 'Hope,' the blond Maiden added.'Love.' 'That's us,' the black figure of the Wise One said.'Including you. Many times removed. Mo' removed than you can imagine. More than we can say in words-' 'You keep saying that, but you speak in words nonetheless!' Rudi said, exasperated.'And it's more ignorant I am afterwards than ever I was before!' 'Then see,' the Three said together.

This time the perspective was different. More abstract; he strained to see pattern, and meaning, but for a long moment all was chaos. Then order appeared. Instead of the point of light, there were two great sheets of… Being. Rippling through spaces in which whole universes of stars would be less than one kernel of barley in an ocean, like the banners of divinity flying on the ramparts of the Western Gate. The sheets drifted towards each other, and in that contact was born the light he had seen at the Beginning of his twin visions.

But there was a difference. Something passed from one cycle to the next. Something tiny, yet containing everything, and from that all changed as existence spread out again. 'Mind,' his mother, all Mothers, said.'The universe births life. Life creates Mind. Mind encompasses that which bore it blindly, spreads through all the stuff of matter and makes a new Heaven and a new Earth. One in which from its beginnings through all time life is no accident, and is not doomed to death forever, but instead is transformed. To return upon itself once more and give Itself birth.' 'And now there is a God,' the Wise One said.

He fell through singing veils of light, struggling with awe and anger at himself, that he could not grasp the concepts roaring by him like dragons. Then he stood before the fire again. 'Is Godhood many, or one'' the Mother said. 'Both,' Rudi replied.'Both at once.' 'She is all things.' The Maiden nodded. A sigh.'And so, He is divided.' 'Your friend the padre would say there was war in Heaven,' the Wise One added.'He's not wrong, either. Don't mistake this you're seeing for the only truth.' 'The Cutters!' he said suddenly.'As above, so below. Sure, and if there's war here, there must be so above.'

The three nodded. The Mother spoke: 'Not exactly. In the stuff of Mind, there is… it's more like arguing with yourself than a fight between Good and Evil. Would you say a tilled tamed field is best, or a wilderness unbound and unguarded, living only by its own law''

Rudi blinked.'Why… both, of course. How could either be best ' Both are needed for the wholeness of things. Humankind is there to be the guardians of it; to tend, to take what they need, but not to take all.' 'Yet some long for order; for the hedged garth, for the tame-bred kine, for the richness of the grafted fruit. Some long for the wolf's howl. Some would have the universe unfold as it will, and run to its ending as matter itself decrees; others would take matter up into the stuff of Mind.' 'Submission against structure,' the Maiden said. 'Not a fight for us, unless you mean inner conflict and that happy therapeutic horseshit,' the Wise One snorted.'But it's sure enough a fight at your level, boy! One between Good and Evil, or Us and Them, which is close enough for government work.' 'You need have no doubt I'll fight,' Rudi said grimly.'Whether I may win or no. The Cutters… the Cutters and the Power behind them claim all humankind and the world as well, and say none of us may breathe or believe save as they permit. If a God said that to me, a God with the sun in His left hand and the moon in His right, I would dispute it by the sword. Or my fingernails, if they were all I had.' 'Good man! And it's a fight you'd better win,'cause we can't do it for you. Not without undoing ourselves and more worlds than this.'

Rudi nodded his head, a single brief jerk. He wasn't sure of much, but he was suddenly certain that the person whose appearance that Power bore had also been a warrior once. 'You've shown me matters great and terrible, Ladies,' he said. 'But… one thing I do know, and always did. This Earth of ours, however bright and dear and grand to us, is but the smallest fleck in all that is; and you've shown me that that All is vaster by far than I knew. Yet here the Powers are contending for our allegiance as if we were the sum of things. Why us''