Chapter 8 Echo #4
All heads turn to Xenophanes for his reaction, but the Not Here isn’t done with Echo, it fidgets in the back of her mind and the water in her stomach churns.
Xenophanes frowns, rubbing his sparse beard.
‘I’ve heard about this, shall we say, “duality” before.
In Colophon some years ago, a traveller told me a similar tale, but it doesn’t sit well with me.
The truth should be a united concept. We cannot constantly go around believing in two mutually exclusive realities.
Do you not find it contradictory to hold both these concepts in mind at once and still believe you’ve found a truth? Shouldn’t the truth be a singularity?’
Nabu frowns. ‘Not at all. It’s like the raindrops: Who are we to say when they become the water in the pool?
It may be when they are in the pool, or when they hit the pool’s surface, or, because that is their destiny, all the way up in the sky.
Then again, perhaps they’re never the pool, but always retain the memory of their constituent parts.
At our feet is a phenomenal thing, an object that is at once a thousand raindrops and a single body of water.
The world, likewise, is ten million such divisible objects, and one indivisible whole.
It only makes sense for divine-mundane duality to be true. ’
A wind sweeps the house, storm-cold, breaking the heat and bringing Echo out in goose bumps.
The Not Here writhes, threatening to dominate again.
Echo takes a sip of water, the owl eyes in the bottom of her kylix staring back at her, and realises she’s going to be sick.
Xenophanes and the others continue debating, but their lips produce no comprehensible sounds.
Concentrating hard, she puts her kylix down with the pomegranate rind inside and whispers an excuse to Nabu, who’s caught in the debate and waves her away.
Ears rushing with a rainforest sigh and Not Here murmurs, she teeters outside, into the street.
The rain douses her high, but not her nausea, and some meters down the road the Not Here takes over, pages and footnotes assaulting her mind’s eye.
She drops to her knees and vomits in a drain, gagging on the words the Not Here’s forcing out of her.
Civilisations looking back on two millennia of faith and still finding God in a mathematical event; and Hellenic culture, just writing and reading after its Dark Age, just coming into being at the heart of a crossroads; and her world, so far away, unpicking at the seams from fire, flood, drought; and the Keepers’ time, that far ahead again, birthing Project Kairos and Excursion 1133; and the Deed to found a school of philosophy that preserves the concept of a divine-mundane duality paradigm, to revive the world, to resuscitate her—
‘Echo?’
Of all the people to be crouching on the curb, offering Echo a cloth for her face, Leaina is least likely.
Her beautiful features pinch with worry as raindrops spatter her muslin dress.
Echo takes the cloth and wipes her mouth, avoiding the other woman’s gaze, staring at the rain washing her bile down the gutter and waiting to see if she’ll be sick again.
Leaina rubs her back, shushing her. ‘Do you think there’s more?’
Echo shakes her head, twisting the cloth. The Not Here simmers. ‘Am I dying?’
Leaina laughs, but not cruelly. ‘No. Come on, let’s go sit under that awning out of the rain.’
Echo flops outside a shuttered shop, knees up and hands scrunched in her damp hair, trying to figure out what’s real. ‘Hul gil is bad.’
‘Seems to be for you.’
‘Not only for me, for reality also.’ The flood of memories seeps away, leaving her mind desolated by the Not Here.
‘Fuck.’ The swear word comes out in English, but Leaina doesn’t flick a brow.
Lots of non-Athenians revert to their mother tongue when they’re in pain, and nobody knows all their languages.
Maybe Leaina has her own swearwords too.
Echo starts thanking her for the cloth but her voice breaks.
Leaina pats her knee. ‘It’s nothing. Don’t be a silly boy.’
The ‘boy’ sends Echo over the edge and she bursts into tears. She aches to go home. Back to the Not Here, her freedom, her own woman’s body and her own high, soft voice. She wants she, her, woman—not he, him, boy.
Leaina puts an arm around her, cooing. ‘It’s alright, you’re just coming down.’
Echo curls into Leaina’s shoulder. Leaina’s dress pins digging into Echo’s cheek, and she must feel the binding strips through Echo’s tunic, but Echo doesn’t care: Being held is worth the price.
‘I really am sorry,’ Leaina says, and it’s the first time all night Echo hasn’t sensed her flirting. ‘I was never going to tell. Of course I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have teased you like that, we have to stick together, people like us.’
‘It is fine.’ A tear crosses Echo’s mouth, and she rubs it away.
‘No, it’s not. It’s bold, what you’re doing.’ Leaina’s eyes grow wide in the moonlight. ‘But this illusion won’t last forever. If I noticed, others will too. That’s all I was trying to say.’
Echo leans against the shop wall, its plaster still warm from the boiling day. ‘That is acceptable. I am not here forever.’
‘Where are you going?’
The Not Here almost says the future, but Echo stops it in time. ‘The same place everyone will go.’
Leaina huffs a laugh, though she’s more likely thinking of the Styx than the future, and Echo relaxes.
It’s a relief being with Leaina, not keeping secrets or filtering the gazes and dismissals of men.
Still, as Leaina stares at the stars and licks her lips with her rounded pink tongue, the Not Here murmurs that men’s hands still hold the future.
Echo will still call it the Not Here, even though she knows what it really is now.
‘Not Here’ is a term she can wrap her head around.
‘Future’ is notched against the string of the past, ready to shoot into the unknown at any second, giving her vertigo even when she’s sitting on the ground.
Leaina is an arrow too, aimed at an end that Echo can no longer believe will be pleasant.
Footsteps approach from Harmodios’s house, and Nabu and Kosmos emerge from the dark in a dandelion puff of lamplight, Nabu holding a silk parasol over their heads.
Behind them, Echo can just make out Hanno and Absalon.
Her stomach flips like she might be sick again.
The Not Here told her the truth about her purpose here when she was vomiting in the gutter, and what comes next will not be easy to navigate.
Yet for the first time since she arrived, she has the certainty of cliffs planted against the sea: She’s right, the Deed she’s been sent to Athens to complete is not to usurp the tyrannos.
It’s to found a philosophical school before anyone else does, one that will preserve the mindset of the divine-mundane duality paradigm, which Nabu described to Xenophanes and which will otherwise be lost to history.
The tyrannicide will go ahead, but it must do so without Nabu and Kosmos—Echo, and Project Kairos, need them more.
But how to convince them of that in only one moon cycle?
How can she explain that her world, the Not Here, is like the pomegranate leftovers in her kylix.
Here and now the world is a whole fruit, a thousand seeds, a million potentialities, but without the concept of divine-mundane duality, it will become the leftovers: the skin without the flesh, eaten from within.