Chapter 18
The dozer was coming. Yesterday it had eaten the old sneaker factory and vomited out an ocean of tar that its tentacular cranes had whisked into a parking lot. A strip mall—that’s what their home would be, and then another strip mall across from it, and then more malls and stores and strips and malls and stores. The techies would come in, hungry for the kitsch of identity, and the embyays and the counters and adjusters and all those who saw the hoarding of objects as their purpose and comfort. Hemu pitied them, wished he could walk among them and lend flowers to their hair. Perhaps they pitied him, and wished to bring him to a nice house with a large bed and many closets. But that was unlikely. The hoarders could not look past themselves.
This night was cool—but no wind, a blessing—and the moon was full, a puddle of pale light amidst the haze. His brothers and sisters sat quietly, closely, with crossed knees that brushed against their neighbors’. From here the city was a waterfall of lights in the distance. They had chosen this building carefully—above the dozer’s tallest antenna, and a good distance away, so that the dozer sat in an arena of sorts, clear to view.
The Slow God spoke to them, taking a long time as usual. The first note of the first word had come with the appearance of the strange and vulgar woman. Hemu had heard the note, and listened closely. You needed to be quiet to hear, and patient, and to keep your mind free of distraction. That was why the hoarders could never hear, never understand. Their things, their objects, hung like chains around them, dragging on their minds, clamoring with need. And the Sad Gods could not hear because they were afraid, and their fear was a scream that drove out wisdom. And the Blue God? Did it know the words of the Slow God? Did they speak to one another? The Blue God was strong. Strength could bring ignorance and ignorance eroded strength.
The second note had come in the chapel, loud, louder than any he had ever heard. It rang each time he touched the woman, Saru, when their hands brushed and then atop this very warehouse—when the dozer looked much smaller—the sound had nearly deafened him as she had grasped his hand. It was too loud to hear then, surrounding, indistinct. He had given Saru what comfort he could—so much chaos in her, so much violence. She was a creature of violence, and chaos, and many forms of motion that created more motion. The note then had seemed like a warning and he had chilled. Was Saru a threat? A danger? Was he to lift her as she slept in the Slow God’s peace and drop her over the edge to die against the pavement? It was not the way of the Slow God, he admonished himself. It was his own fear, fear of her violence leading him to his own.
Tonight had come the third note and the word had become clear. It was a beautiful word, as all the words of the universe were when you took the time to listen—and also frightening. So they had come, in a long procession to the top of the building, and then sat and held hands for a while, to share comfort and let it grow among them. They had sung, a long, slow chant that came from the belly, each note guided into place by the Slow God so that together they could—in the crude mechanism of the human voice, the muscles slapping and strumming one another and the vibrations bouncing along their throats—find each other in the cool night air and dance and meet and join in love. It seemed that the haze lifted then and the lights of man all vanished, and all that was was the mood, bright and close, and a billion points of light spread over the galaxy that were the notes of their song. He had wept then, as had the others, because of the longing and the knowing, and then they had dried their tears and drawn apart and fallen each into his own silence and pondering of the Slow God’s word.
A tiny star drifted up from below, like a pale blue lightning bug, he imagined, though he had never seen a real one. It was followed by another, and another—a dozen tiny blue-white stars drifting lazily through the dark. He watched the flower in front of him, dangling from a thin vine growing out of the cracks. What wisdom his God had, what power to bring life to this old building, to draw such green from the crumbling mortar, the matchstick crack between two bricks, and from that vine to bring such a pretty flower, a perfect white bell that rang with the words of peace. He watched as the delicate petals opened, unfolding, revealing a tiny galaxy of colors, no larger than a pinhead. It seemed as he stared into the flower, that he was again looking at the bright night sky with the moon and the stars and all of existence spread overhead. The galaxy in the flower went dark, and a blue-white speck of pollen drifted up to join the hundreds of its brothers and sisters to dance in the night sky.
More and more, and now they came together and formed crawling shapes of light. They seemed to have no fixed dimension, to be single points and then flat and then a full dynamic three, and it seemed they strayed into other dimensions, that he was watching and re-watching the colors come together and grow and merge and take shape. He looked down at his hands and they were old and wrinkled, with aches in the knuckles and wrists. He touched his face and felt the ridges of painful acne that had caused him loneliness and unhappiness before he was a man. And then he was a baby, a child, unable to control his head and the colors followed him as he tottered over, but he was always Hemu and he sat, cross-legged, and watched the Slow God enter his world.
The shape She chose was humanoid. They had told Her this was a good shape for navigating the world and would not cause much distress. She had chosen to be a woman for they showed greater patience and endurance in Her mind. She lamented the fact that there were so few forms of life to choose from on this planet—everything that thrived was vermin. They told Her it was not always like this, and She looked deep into their memories, the memories of their bodies and their fathers and their father’s fathers, far, far back and saw all that Earth once was. She had wept for them to live like this, knowing what had been, but they could not see into their own flesh memories and could not know the way in which they had been cheated.
Now She was whole. Tall, taller than the dozer, taller than the warehouse, taller than the Gaesporan tower in the dark. She could be seen for hundreds of miles, a blue-white giant, nebulous, shifting, a body with two legs and two arms, that swam more than walked across the earth. What did the others feel, the hoarders and elzi, their ward hips, and the Sad Gods in their tower? Did they tremble? Did they rub their eyes and shake away their doubts, confused by the pollution of drugs they forced into their vessels? Did they run in fear or run with hope and joy towards the God striding amidst their city. Or could they even see Her, blinded as they were with their devotion to distraction, to the anything-but-life they clung to as their own form of spirit?
She turned towards the warehouse where Hemu sat, a shifting mass of color, twisting and melding so the arms swung around and passed through them. He felt the warmth and color of Her, a sensation of suckling at his mother’s breast, a smell of clove and fresh rain. It seemed he was there in the warmth of Her for a long time, his whole life maybe, and that perhaps he had died and was in fact another person, and maybe this had happened many, many times. Then the color and the warmth withdrew, drifting away like a cloud, slowly, so that the knowledge of Her absence did not come too suddenly and strike them with despair. She was singing to them, every color a note, and they joined in, adding where they could, and he felt that their song reached across the city and touched each soul and told them of peace.
She moved towards the dozer, the hateful machine, grunting and sputtering, spewing noise and smoke. Her body wrapped around it, sinking down and becoming a sphere. How like an ocean She looked, he could almost see the fish and life swimming within Her. And then he realized it was a vision, and he saw as far as his mind could what She truly was in Her own dimension, an ocean, a living ocean of unified sentience. She was a single consciousness formed by the trillion creatures of a planet-sized sea. She and the beings like Her traveled through the space of Her universe and intermingled, coming together and separating in twos and threes and sometimes millions, the creatures within them forming new ecosystems, new consciousness, and new unified sentience. And he saw that this world, his world, was anathema to Her, with its dead, acid oceans and ponds of tar and oil, and the supreme dominance of a single species destroying any chance of shared life. But She came, came to show peace, to show what could be, and the gift of his life or every life on Earth was not a worthy show of gratitude.
He gasped and the vision broke, his mind strained and twisted by the knowledge of another world, and he did not weep but sob and cry and wail and beat his fists against the stones of the roof. As the vision faded, his memory dimmed, his mind moving back into its familiar ruts to save him from the knowing; he controlled his tears and stilled his breath and wrapped himself in the peace of his God who was good. He watched as the sphere around the dozer grew brighter and shimmered and then seemed to pop like a drop of water and splash through the city. Wherever the waves touched, the filth and decay of man’s folly was washed away, and in its place lay a carpet of the Earth that was. Hemu knew that this was the Slow God’s gift to man, and that in the new order, the new world that would be built in flames tonight, She would protect all who sought peace beneath the trees.