Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams (20 page)

Stanwick
grinned at David Beach, allowing the weight of Stephanie’s words to
sink in fully, “It seems that his genius skipped a generation, but
yes Stephanie, your grandpa found out about the leeches.”

West picked up
the bottle of Drambuie from the side table and offered David
another glass, “David, relax, have a drink, eat some food, and let
me explain.”

West sat back into the
couch cushions and closed his eyes, “I was fourteen the first time
I met King Pretchis the 289th king of Allim. I recognized him of
course. I’d seen his face in public transmissions, but I was in no
position to appreciate who the man was until my first meeting with
him. Pretchis was a little older than he appeared to be, I mean to
look at him, I would have guessed he was in his late fifties and
yet he had held court for most of our lives, so he was certainly
older. When I met him though, I realized that this man, this face …
somewhere in the back of my mind, this face transcended the
superficial recognition of first meetings. Pretchis was archetypal,
his face typifying what we thought of as the face of King Dannum.
His strong jaw line, deep set eyes, the lengthened bridge of the
nose, these features cropped up again and again in the archives of
Allim, in illustrations of the great figures from our history. If
you had asked an artist to render a likeness of Dannum, there you
would have the face of Pretchis.’

Stanwick
laughed, “You want to explain how you came to meet the king?”

West licked his
lips, trying his best to stir his recollection, “I was brought
before Pretchis, because I’d been skim reading.”

Stephanie’s
nose wrinkled, “You mean, like when you read a few words from each
paragraph of a book?”

West opened his
eyes, “Not quite. You see, there were great stores of knowledge
held in the archives of the scientific academy of Arctum. It was an
immense privilege to be given access to the archives, and there was
a very clear protocol dictating how the archives were to be
read.”

Stephanie shook
her head in disbelief, “There were rules for reading?”

West nodded,
“Certainly. Many libraries even now have very explicit guidelines
for handling precious books. In the archives, you had to inform the
administrators exactly what it was that you intended to research,
and they would provide you with an index log which granted you
access to specific files in the archives. Once you had located your
file, you could only read one page at a time.”

Stephanie lay
down on the floor with her head resting on her arms, “So how could
you skim read?”

West smiled
mischievously, “There was a device, common to every home in Allim.
it was referred to with an initialism made up of our words
describing the parts of the brain. In modern parlance, the acronym
would be H.O.P.A.R, denoting Hippocampul, Occipital, Parietal,
Amygdalic repeater, or the ‘hopper.’ When it was first introduced,
it allowed its user to revisit dreams or memories in perfect
detail, with the ability to abstract an out of body experience, or
to slow down or speed up time. My description won't do it justice,
but imagine being able to recall a dream as if it was a real
experience that you’d lived. Skimming the archives was made
possible because of the hopper. The ability to slow down a memory,
and really take your time to examine the details was incredible,
but additionally, events experienced in the hopper occurred outside
of the normal scope of time. The brain would kick into a much
higher gear, so something that would appear to take an hour in the
hopper might only take a couple of minutes of real time.”

David clapped
his hands together, “Oh God, that’s awesome. So you were flicking
through the information in the archives, then reading them at your
leisure in this device?”

“Do you not
have one here?” Stanwick asked West, “I’m sure everyone would love
to try it out later.”

West replied,
“I’ve got two; not here, but upstairs sure.”

Stephanie
looked at her dad, grinning from ear to ear, “Can you imagine?”

David smiled at
West uncertainly, “Why aren’t these things in the news?”

“David, you
have to understand, there’s been a war waging between two factions
from Allim, and it’s a war that’s lasted for the entirety of human
history. The two sides have always been in agreement over one
thing; we will never share the technology of Allim with the rest of
humankind. Our society wasn’t ready for it. Our society found ways
to abuse it, and none of us harbors even the remotest hope that
another society would have reacted to our technology differently.
By the time of the fall, Allim was in many respects more advanced
than civilization is currently. We hadn’t managed to escape the
planet’s atmosphere, but there are a great many things that you
take for granted now which were also commonplace then.”

Stanwick rolled
onto her front and propped her head up in her hands, “Of course,
one could argue that if it hadn’t been for West’s abuse of the
hopper, people might have taken a different view on the
dissemination of our technology. One would have to be very wary of
whom one made such an argument with, and that in presenting such an
argument, one would be inviting oneself to a full scale brawl. I
for one, would never suggest such a thing.”

Unable to
contain her thoughts any longer, Stephanie asked West, “What were
you reading?”

West set his
head back down and closed his eyes again, “It started with reading
about the hopper, and the research that led to the creation of that
device. It may sound pretty stupid, but I suppose it comes down to
the fact that I was convinced that using the hopper, I could find a
way to alter reality with my mind. It started with the death of my
parents, and a desperate desire to bring them back … As crass as it
sounds, that childish ambition was the reason I started to visit
the archives, but I was a keen enough student to learn quickly that
my desire was beyond the scope of science or technology, at least
at that time. In reading about the hopper, I learned about the
device’s inventor, Stracklin Kith Tiarsis. Reading about Stracklin
led to more important discoveries.”

Stephanie sat
up again, too engrossed to lie still, “What was it? What did you
discover?”

“For one, I
discovered that Allim had not always been peaceful. We lived in a
society without weapons, and without a language of warfare.
Granted, if you want to harm, or even kill a man, even the most
innocuous household item can be put to the task, but to the best of
common knowledge, no item was made in Allim with the sole purpose
of causing harm to another human.”

Charlene
interjected, “Pff … You all were pretty naive.”

West sat
upright, turning to Charlene, “How do you figure?”

Charlene
laughed, “You don’t get to a place where nobody feels safe flicking
through the pages of a book, not unless you’ve broken a few fingers
along the way.”

West relaxed
again, “We were naive! We were scared, and naive. I couldn’t tell
anyone about my discovery, because it ran contrary to the teachings
of the book of Antrusca … Heresy.” West held up a finger, marking a
point in the air, “Not the only culture ever to come to the
conclusion that heresy should be punishable by death; however, the
Kings of Allim were certainly some of the most ardent adherents to
such thinking. Eventually, I was caught skimming the archives, I
was brought before King Pretchis, and suddenly, my reading gave
birth to another revelation. Pretchis’ likeness to the archetype of
Dannum went far beyond a casual similarity.”

West heard the
hush sound of fabric on the hardwood floor, and he looked up to
discover that Stephanie had sidled closer to him. Sitting by his
feet now, she asked, “Did Pretchis know what you’d discovered?”

“Actually no,
at least, he certainly didn’t give that impression. Pretchis seemed
to know only as much as my index logs revealed, that I’d been
reading about Stracklin Kith Tiarsis, and his field work outside of
the walls of Allim.”

“In the void
garden?” Stephanie asked enthusiastically.

West touched
his nose with the tip of his index finger, “Correct. King Pretchis
explained that I was one of only four people that now knew the
truth about the work of Allim’s greatest mind, and as Pretchis
himself was one of the four, and the other two were his closest
advisers, he needed me for a very special task.”

“What did he
want you to do?”

West laughed as
he sat forward on the couch again, “He told me that I was to leave
Allim, find the base camp that Stracklin Tiarsis had established in
the void garden, and learn as much as I could about whatever it was
that had led to Stracklin’s greatest invention.”

“Oh God!”
Stephanie inhaled deeply, covering her eyes with her hands, “Did he
let you take any friends?”

“No, in fact he
told me that because I had officially been arrested, the Dannustine
guards would make a show of publicly executing me.”

Stephanie
slumped onto the floor dramatically, gurgling while she clutched
her throat, “You had to play dead?”

West nudged her
with his foot, “There wasn’t really much pretending. I was given a
drug which put me to sleep.”

Stephanie lay
on the floor now, pressing her arm against her forehead. She waved
her legs about, feeling her feet swaying lazily as she mulled over
everything she’d heard, then suddenly she kicked the floor, and
lifted her head, rambling excitedly, “Pretchis, Dannum, Pretchis,
Dannum!”

West looked at
Stanwick, and the two exchanged knowing smiles.

“Go on
Stephanie …" Stanwick suggested.

Stephanie
turned over and stared at the ceiling, sure that her sudden
epiphany was correct, “King Pretchis was King Dannum! Because of
the leeches right?”

Stanwick lay
down on the floor, with her head next to Stephanie’s, “Right.”

Stephanie shut
her eyes tight, her mind buzzing with a thousand thoughts. I want
it, she thought to herself, I want to be a frickin Leechborn. She
felt Stanwick’s head move beside her, then felt her breath as she
whispered, “Not yet little one.” Stephanie’s body went rigid with
excitement, her muscles warming from the sudden tension. Stephanie
had known her whole life that it should be possible, that it was
basically down to stupidity that no one could hear her thoughts,
especially when they were so clear.

David pushed a slice
of meat around his plate, while he listened to Stanwick and
Stephanie talking. Everything sounded so special, so full of
mystery, but he was finding himself more and more pissed off. He
looked at his leg, sullenly, some small thought on the tip of his
mind, frustrating, and intangible. He listened to Stephanie’s
gleeful exclamation, and it only made him feel more disconnected.
There was that thought, peeking out of the shadows again, and it
was stronger now; not Déjà vu, but rather a sense memory of another
time, another almost mystical experience. He was seven years old
the first time he’d had the communion wafer placed on his tongue by
a priest, and he had walked down the isle of the church, wondering
why he couldn’t feel the mystery of it, asking God guiltily, where
was his special feeling? He stared at his arm now, asking that same
question.

Suddenly he
jumped up from his seat on the couch, rubbing his arms frantically,
“Oh shit, shit!”

“What is it
David?” West asked calmly.

“I think I just
saw one!”

“You saw a
leech?” Stephanie asked, jumping up from her lying place on the
floor, “Let me see, let me see.”

David held out
his arms in front of him, stepping backwards as if he could somehow
escape his own flesh, “I can feel them. I can feel them moving
under my skin. How do I get them out?”

Stanwick
laughed hard, lifting her head off the floor and leaning back on
her outstretched arms, “I’m surprised it’s taken this long for you
to feel them.”

“It’s horrible!
How do I make them stop?” David yelled, his voice raising quickly
in pitch.

“Hold still.”
Stanwick commanded him, “Stop moving and concentrate.” David
continued to pitch backwards though, rubbing his arms, then bending
over to rub his legs.

“David, if you
just stand still, I’ll tell you exactly how to make them stop.”
Stanwick’s words fell on deaf ears, but David quickly ran out of
space, his back pressed against the wall of the apartment, his eyes
closed tight as he tried to block out everything that was going on
around him. In the darkness, he started to see them move, only
vague flashes of light at first, but soon there was a vast expanse
of blackness, writhing with a million red bodies, pulsing and
spiraling into one another, consuming each other, and evolving in
shape. He heard Stanwick again, her voice calm and syncopated,
“They have answered you David. They have answered your desire. They
have answered your need. Now you need to take control and give them
purpose.”

In the
blackness, David could still see their bodies, yes delving, yes
tearing into him, but now they moved with the sound of Stanwick’s
voice, and they were no longer chaotic.

“What would you
be David? Listen to my voice before you think. The delvers will
adapt, they’ll learn whatever purpose you put them to, but not
everything is quick with them. Some desires, they will bend
themselves to over the course of mere minutes, and yet others will
take months, or even years for them to achieve. Think on that,
because right now, I can see it in you; you are in a perfect state
of awe, and they are waiting for you to make a connection, they are
waiting to impress you, and they are desperate for you to impress
upon them your want for this life. So what would you be David?”

He tried to
open his eyes to look at Stanwick, but he was transfixed on the
ocean of slithering bodies, “I don’t get what you’re saying. I’m
David Beach. I’m a father. I am an assistant to the undersecretary
of …"