Дэвид Уоллес - Island of Fog and Death

Peri suddenly blinked awake. She instantly knew something was wrong, because the clamour, the shouting and the screaming had faded into silence. Strange.

She sat up, and was surprised to find that her wounds no longer ached. She looked around herself, confused, but could see nothing but fog.

She poked a finger into the gaping rent in her abdomen. It sank in and she felt warm, wet blood and slimy viscera, but no pain. When she pulled the finger back out, it was clean and dry. Strange, again. She wondered if she was dead.

“I thought we should talk,” said a soft voice.

Startled, she looked up and saw a tall, slender, white woman who seemed to exude a bright white light. The woman was completely white from top to toe – alabaster skin, flowing white gown, long white hair, eyes so pale they seemed to consist of nothing more than pupil and sclera. She was astonishingly, breathtakingly beautiful, but with a delicacy of features that was ethereal. The proportions of her face hinted at an other-worldly nature. Come to think of it, her slender figure was quite androgynous, but Peri decided to think of it – her – as female.

“Is this a good time? In the middle of…” She stopped abruptly. “That’s not important. Tell me, am I dead? What is this place?”

The woman smiled. “The answers are, ‘Not yet,’ and, ‘We stand – well, to be accurate, I stand and you lie – on the floor of a cave in the rocks beneath Anifail Island.’”

“Then where has the fight gone?”

“It remains around us.”

“Can you just tell me plainly, what has happened!”

The woman looked thoughtful, as if trying to find a good way to explain. “Think of it like this… Time is a river, ever flowing by, and you and I have stepped away to stand on the bank for a few moments.”

“What?”

“Or perhaps… Yes, this will work: consider that we occupy the space between the tick and the tock of the universe’s clock.”

“You’re saying that you just stopped time.”

The woman smiled again. “Not precisely. We have moved aside from time’s flow.”

“So you yanked me – somehow – out of conventional spacetime,” Peri tried. “Time has flowed on, beyond us. What are the others experiencing? Have I just… vanished in front of their eyes?”

“You are acquainted with the concept of the universe’s many dimensions,” the woman said, with an approving tone. “That is good. When I reverse the process and restore you to the universal coordinates from which you were translated, the time coordinate will be restored. Your companions will not observe any discontinuity.”

“Okay,” said Peri. Then a look of horror crossed her face. “No – wait – not okay! Wasn’t that thing in the cave just killing me? You put me back, I die. That doesn’t sound good! What’s going on, lady? Who the fu – er, who the heck are you? And why am I here?”

The strange woman waved a hand and a pair of white armchairs emerged from the white fog. “Please,” she said. “We should be comfortable while we talk.”

“Ah, I’m not sure I can stand without my insides falling out,” said Peri. The woman merely smiled again. Peri stood and sat without spilling anything. She noticed that her blood did not stain the furniture. “Hmm. You seem to have a thing about white, don’t you. What’s that about? Symbolic of something? I hope it’s not purity and innocence, ’cos I don’t have much of those any more.”

“Your sense of humour is returning,” she replied. “That is good. No, what you are perceiving as white is an absence of colour. Without time there is no motion, and without motion, photons cannot arrive at the receptors in your eyes. You are experiencing artificial neural stimuli designed to lessen your anxiety. The effect operates monochromatically, because colours would draw too much energy and reduce our time together.”

“But I can see my own red blood,” objected Peri, holding up a sticky hand.

“I take no credit for that,” the woman said. “You know it is blood, you know what colour blood should be, and so you add details of your own devising to the neural experience.”

“But if there’s no time dimension, how does cause and effect work? How can we be talking?” asked Peri. Then abruptly she held up a hand. “You know what? I don’t understand much of what’s going on here, and I don’t really think I care anyway. Let’s get back to questions I do care about. Who are you?”

The woman smiled. “In a sense,” she said, “I am your true mother.”

Ah, definitely female, thought Peri.

“And your true father.”

Okaaaaay, maybe not, Peri thought.

“My function is that of your planet’s Servator. You may use that title, if you wish.”

“Okay, three things, really quickly. One, that isn’t your name; two, I clearly remember my mother and father, who didn’t look anything like you; and three, what’s a Servator?”

“Servator is a Latin word that comes close to describing my role. I am, at once, the Watcher, the Observer, the Listener, the Deliverer and the Preserver. But I recognise that there is a cultural inhibition to addressing someone by their function rather than by their name. My true name… that is difficult to render in a form comprehensible to you. Humans have used a variety of names to refer to me in the past. Perhaps one of those might satisfy your need? One of the oldest is Avalokiteshvara, but that is rather long to my mind. You were conceived among the Hmong people, so perhaps Kab Yeeb would be acceptable. You were born in Vietnam, where I was known as Quan Am among other names.”

Peri’s eyes opened wide. “Guanyin,” she breathed, remembering Shanghai.

“That name was used by the Han people of China,” she confirmed. “If you wish, I would be content to use that name.”

“You’re not really a – a goddess , are you? I mean…”

“Sufficiently advanced technology,” was all the Servator needed to say. Peri nodded her understanding.

“I guess you should call me Peri. Though you already seem to know a lot about me. I mean, ‘Conceived among the Hmong people’. How did you pick up that little detail? And you missed a question.”

“I was present in the temple in the forests of Laos,” said Guanyin.

Peri frowned. “I was told earlier today that I’m not quite a standard human. What do you know about that? Did you have something to do with it?”

“That is one of the points I wished to discuss with you. Yes, I did have something to do with it. But let me explain my role.

“The functions of a Servator are essentially passive. I am not permitted to intervene in human affairs. Nevertheless, humanity is at risk, and I am reluctant to see it ended. I therefore found what I believe you would call a ‘grey area’ in the directives that govern my actions. You, Peri, occupy that grey area. I judged that humanity would benefit from the existence of certain capabilities. I set up a laboratory beneath an abandoned and forgotten temple in the Xieng Khouang region and set about engineering someone who would, in time, develop useful capabilities.”

“Are you telling me that I’m the result of your tinkering with my mother’s eggs?” Peri was horrified. “What am I going to turn into – some kind of monster like the thing on Anifail Island? Are you responsible for that, too? And just how is that not intervening in human affairs?”

“Your mother’s eggs – that is, your birth mother’s eggs – were not involved in your conception, nor was your birth father’s seed. I engineered what was needed and implanted it into a surrogate – your mother – to bear and nurture you. But please do not be anxious. You will not become something to be shunned or feared on sight. My goal is the preservation of humanity, so it is essential that you can work towards that goal from within humankind. I will not intervene in human affairs – but you can.”