Forgive Us Our Trespasses
A story by Keith Croes
Radyl reached perpendicularly from the major axis of the star system and the galaxy to regions where he knew he could be alone. For Radyl mathematics was the sublime embodiment of the promises of the upper people. He needed room.
Sensing nothing around him but the inscrutable living emptiness, which was everywhere, he leaped joyously into the exercise, beginning with trigonometry: dwindling to an infinitesimal point, extending into a line, then displacing points on the line so that each point became the apex of an ever-changing triangle filled with the infinite points of the triangular plane. With broad, curving sweeps of the apical points, he flashed in bright triangular shapes across space.
He next opened himself to geometry, calculus and quantum physics, a soundless, profound progression through multifaceted geometrics and mandelic geodesics, then a deft twisting into the parabolas and curlicues of the famous equations. He ended with a playful multidimensional dance that defined his universe. He could do no more than that. Yet he knew with a surge of excitement that there was much more that could be done.
The men and women of Radyl's planet had come a long way. They drew from the higher planes, from the upper people themselves, and by doing so provided for unlimited regeneration of their physical bodies. They did not know old age. But most inhabitants of Radyl's planet, Triamn, embraced the promise of the upper people that the Triamnians would live within their bodies only for as long as their bodies would be needed.
The upper people were evidence of the vast secrets that remained hidden from the people of Triamn. Although they appeared rarely to Triamnians in solid, physical form, usually to convene councils on Triamn's progress and place among the civilizations of the universe, they claimed to uphold physical life and matter itself. Yet it was clear that they had no actual physical form. The sensitive could feel their presence in the flora and fauna of the planet, and even in the living emptiness between the stars.
To the Triamnians, who were still in body and could manipulate their world only through their machines and their science, the upper people were respected teachers and part of the natural order. The upper people explained the Triamnians' destiny simply: to become like the upper people, to sustain and nurture the physical universe.
Yet there was danger in this destiny, danger on Triamn itself from disgens, clever animals that could strike Triamnians with deadly virulence; and danger in the Triamnians' burgeoning powers, which not only brought their minds together with others throughout the universe, but allowed them to envision and even interact with other universes, such as the time bubbles. Travel to the time bubbles was prohibited by the upper people, as was all speculation at councils, except in the most general terms, about the destiny and the origin of the upper people.
Radyl knew himself well enough to know that he found it all too easy to overlook the somber prescriptions of the upper people. He was a happy man convinced that he lived in the happiest of times. He and his woman, Otos, traveled wherever their musings took them. They often dipped below the physical universe to skirt the time bubbles. And though he would never seek to confront one, Radyl had enjoyed fighting the disgens. He'd fought several in this body and had killed two, and he'd never felt threatened or outmatched. Perhaps that's why he and Otos lived at the edge of the city bordering the wilderness.
Kneeling over and gently separating three bunched tomatoes that seemed intent on bulging from their tight red skin, Radyl heard Otos' approaching steps on the soft dirt and quickly withdrew toward the galaxy and the star system. She saw the shimmer of his daydream retract into his head like a silver wire from the cloudless sky.
"Wandering again?"
Radyl grunted and packed the moist loam around the base of the tomato plant.
"Don't let Parya see you doing that." She mimicked Parya's voice and Radyl laughed. "Mathematics is an intellectual pursuit. You have enough intellect, Radyl. We all have enough intellect. Concentrate on the world around you. Listen for the messages it sends you. If you were so smart, you could look at the soil around that tomato plant and see what was missing and what was unnecessary. You could touch the tomato plant and feel its hunger. You could visualize the life in its leaves--its archetypical tomato-ness--not as a concept but as actual vision. You are too quick to intellectualize. Remember, man. Intellect almost killed us all." She was knocking him on the back with her fist.
"These tomatoes couldn't get any fatter." He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down to her knees. "What's wrong with these tomatoes? See that fat one there?" He pointed. "It's extremely happy."
They rolled laughing in the dirt until Otos caught a glimpse of the long, blue sky and lay still, staring across Radyl's shoulder. He nuzzled a loud smack into the nape of her neck, then stretched out on his back beside her.
"The condensation is tonight," she said softly.
"Yes."
"Remember the loneliness of death?"
"Yes. And of birth."
"So many lives, so tangled together." She pressed her head against his and their thoughts blended. After a moment she rose and walked away, dusting herself off and giggling. Radyl squatted and eyed the bushy tomato plant. An insect lighted on a leaf in front of him.
"No, no," he scolded. "I told you you could have the ones over there." The insect pumped its wings once and flew. Around the plump red fruit suspended on its taut vines, Radyl thought he saw a lick of flames. Beneath his feet he felt the planet turn on its axis.
The city was delineated into many smaller communities, each with a central park, and most of the people in Radyl's community were at the park that evening for the condensation. The arnik, an open platform with three columns holding up a conical roof, had been erected. The woman, Podis, who was in her eighth month of pregnancy, lay on her back inside the arnik on a high bed draped with white cloth. Her man, Tyldan, stood beside her with his hands resting on her stomach.
Radyl and Otos, unlike most of the others, had brought no blanket. Greeting the figures they had known for centuries, they sat thigh to thigh on the grass under an old oak and watched with amusement as Parya flitted on and off the arnik in the setting sun. The yellow globes around the park pulsed soft music over the gathering and were already glowing in anticipation of the night.
Parya, a tall, slender, intense man, had been in his body longer than anyone in the community and was therefore the community voice. He had called for the condensation because it was his responsibility to monitor Gorl's movement through the star system after Gorl's death. Parya wore the traditional white robe and black sash.
"He hasn't done this too often," Otos said.
"We don't die too often. I wonder if he used mathematics."
"What do you mean?"
"If Gorl was condensing at a certain rate, it would be easy to calculate the moment of condensation."
Otos put her hand to her mouth.
Just then Radyl saw Sonti, who had gone with him and Otos through a thousand years during the time of many bodies, and he waved her over. She took their extended hands and sat, instantly melding into the two meshed minds at the base of the oak.
"Sonti, we are not through yet," Otos whispered.
"I hope not. If I die, will you two have me at condensation?" Still holding her hands, both squeezed. They felt her delight at the simultaneous squeezing and the three began laughing uncontrollably. A vortex of swirling high-frequency light--greens and blues and violets--rose several feet above them and widened beyond the diameter of the oak, bothering a young couple nearby.
Still chuckling, Radyl drew back and caught the eyes of the couple, holding his palms upward in a gesture of helplessness.
In a while Parya spoke and his voice came from the yellow globes.
"Our friend Gorl returns." Cries of delight and applause speckled the park. The sky rippled in orange and black. Parya stood on the platform in front of Podis and Tyldan beneath the light that spilled from the arnik's cone. Tyldan's hands remained resting lightly on his woman's belly.
"While his former body long ago rejoined the elements of Triamn, Gorl has encompassed the star system to the orbit of our outermost planet, a journey we have all made many times. We once traveled that road in darkness; now we go with open eyes.
"With open eyes, Tyldan and Podis have conceived a child. They ask that Gorl accept the child as his home, his tabernacle. The vessel of condensation is Gorl's decision, as it is for all of us. We can only make the offering and welcome him. We can only think how right it would be for him to rejoin us.
"Please, welcome him." The crowd's thoughts placed them all in a luminous ultraviolet web. The sun had completely set, but suddenly the park was surrounded by the pinkish hue of the condensation, which seemed to brighten and thicken. Those who knew Gorl shouted and laughed in recognition. Soon the condensation swept through the crowd in a diminishing pink dome, closing in around the arnik and then enveloping only Podis and Tyldan. As it shrank into a bright red ball within Podis' abdomen, a yellow beam penetrated into the glowing nucleus from above. Several people in the crowd moaned and were still.
"What was that?" Sonti dug her fingernails into Radyl's arm.
"Something has entered with Gorl." Radyl stood and helped both women to their feet. "We'll have to ask Parya. Perhaps he will know."
"Can you stay with us tonight?" Otos asked. "We will go to him in the morning." Sonti nodded.
The park emptied quietly with only a few isolated groups singing the festive songs of the condensation. As the globes blinked through the trees behind them, the three walked silently in the milky inkiness beneath two of Triamn's moons. Talking lightly of other things, Radyl surrounded and hid within him the uneasy knowledge that Gorl had been killed by a disgen, though he knew that Otos was also aware of it.
Radyl made love to both women and they held and touched each other for hours, recalling in vivid detail the tapestry of their centuries together. They relived the times when such recollection was unavailable to them, when they entered many bodies and were husbands, wives, children and parents to each other. There were many painful moments that they did not ignore, but experienced with courage and intensity. In the morning they ate fruit and milk. As they readied to leave to find Parya, they felt his presence outside the house. Radyl opened the door and the two embraced. Parya wore the light lime green coveralls of the apiarist, a contrast to his dark, solemn features.
"An upper man came to me last night and told me to seek out someone who had killed a disgen."
Radyl motioned him up the few steps to the living room. Otos prepared tea and the four sat on the colorful cushions around the room.
"Radyl, years ago you killed a disgen. You must tell me what you saw."
Radyl sipped slowly from the cup, then held it above the saucer. He felt the nutrients from the fruit and milk spreading through his body and knew that Parya sensed this awareness with satisfaction and a certain amount of surprise.
"First," said Radyl, "I learned that it is not easy to kill, even in self-defense. But..." He looked at Otos. "It is not entirely unnatural. I have killed two disgens."
Parya nodded.
"Like any animal, they were not outside their bodies. But they were more closed in than some animals. What I felt was agitated, angry, dangerous. They were difficult to detect at a distance. One got very near to me without my knowing. One was very old. One sent its mind to me."
A chilliness settled around Parya. "He projected to you?"
"He sent a thought into me, against me."
''Then they can travel outside their bodies."
"It was a simple, brutal expression. Perhaps an animal intent on killing could make such a projection."
"What was it like?"
"Like.. .snapping, hungry jaws."
"And when they die?"
"They expand and dissipate without self-awareness."
"They are not absorbed like an animal?"
Radyl answered slowly. "I have never in this body seen a higher animal die. Only a disgen."
"Was it yellow?"
"Yes."
Parya shook his head. His tea steamed untouched on the low table beside him. He picked it up and blew on it.
"Did a disgen enter Podis with Gorl?" Otos asked.
"I don't know." Parya looked at the floor in front of him. "Something was with Gorl. It has happened in several communities."
"What do the upper people say?" Sonti asked.
"Only to beware of disgens. The upper man last night told me that something had joined Gorl at the moment of his death. It went with him in his expansion to the edges of the star system, contracted with him and condensed with him. It is an inextricable part of him. But I could not see it during those times that I sought Gorl on his journey. I did not see it until the condensation."
"But what of the child?" Sonti cried.
Parya shrugged. "The upper man said that other such children have grown normally to adulthood. Their bodies regenerate; they are absolutely normal. But they are not the same. They are a composite. They are a new individual. But I don't think the upper people know that much about the disgens. I think that is why I was sent here."
The four let their thoughts intermingle in a kind of mourning for the man who was Gorl and for the child who had the unimaginable task of bringing a new personality into the universe, into one-body existence. But they also sought from each other an idea of the magnitude of the threat that they faced. They ended, as all such meetings end, by celebrating the intersection in their lives that had brought them to this intimacy. The moment would become part of their history and it was to be treasured.
Parya held Radyl's hand at the door and sought his eyes. "The disgens are more dangerous than we know, Radyl. I believe that. To lose our individuality is to lose something of our destiny. Keep your mind on Triamn. You are needed here, not poking into strange corners of the universe."
Radyl soon made his way to the work room in the lower level of the house, a miniature materials research laboratory that was part of a network of many similar facilities. Ordinarily Otos would have joined him, but she and Sonti talked, made lunch for themselves and Radyl, and walked hand in hand through the garden and the greenhouse and down the paths that wandered through the woods and connected the homes of the community.
Sonti left late in the afternoon, and Radyl and Otos ate dinner in silence. When he had finished his meal, Radyl walked out on the green carpet that clung to the rough terrain behind the house. Otos had developed the carpet, a blend of synthetics and living plantlife. He sat next to the narrow brook, which splashed over a waterfall and into a stream that passed beneath a footbridge in front of the house. Smiling, Otos strode from the dining room and sat beside him, handing him an apple.
"We have cleaned up Triamn," he said, "rescued it from disease and poison, maintained its balance with love and understanding, outgrown our governments, ridiculed war into nonexistence, secured the planet for our future. We have touched minds and shared history with other civilizations in our universe, have visited other universes. We deserve more than Triamn. We have earned more than Triamn. We are more than Triamn."
"So, we are going to meet them by the time bubbles?"
"Yes."
Otos and Radyl had friends from another galaxy, two beings who had also traveled many centuries together through a history so different and compelling that the four had come to see their friendship as crucial to their destinies. Theirs was a wordless exchange of feeling and experience that they had taken to many places throughout the universe and even down to the space above the time bubbles, where they had invented a game. They were to play the game that night. At the appointed hour, Radyl and Otos reclined on their usual cushions in the living room and sent themselves inward and downward until they could see the huge expanse of clustered spheres.
They would not have to venture too close. The space above the time bubbles was different in a way that made the game possible. Something about the time bubbles lent their sentient presence a kind of hardness and mass, a physicality that included inertia and momentum. Radyl and Otos formed two linked rings and circled one another, waiting.
The two appeared in the starless blackness above them and descended until they met, each one touching the other three in a tangled, constantly changing structure. At first happy and excited, the two soon detected the Triamnians worry, injected themselves fully within it and brought forth a healing compassion. They offered to call off their meeting, but Radyl and Otos assured them that they wanted to continue.
They paired off, one drifting away with Otos and one with Radyl. Otos directed her partner to go first, and they separated by what Otos judged was several hundred miles, although she knew the estimate was meaningless. She had no way to tell how large she was, nor her distance from the time bubbles nor the size of the individual spheres. They seemed to extend forever in all directions, and they seemed to be "below," a perception she thought was probably an artifact of experience on Triamn. How the four of them entered the universe in the same general location when they came here was a mystery.
Radyl and his partner, below her and far to one side, were racing toward one another. The game had begun. Otos picked up speed. Under the rules, the being coming toward her had already assumed a shape. Her challenge was to assume some kind of receiving shape and cling to her partner for one revolution before letting go, sending them both back in the direction from whence they came. As there was no adhesion between them, the shapes had to lock somehow to allow the 360-degree rotation. From practice they had learned how to match each other's velocities.
As the distance between them diminished, Otos saw that the being had become a long cylinder with four stubby cylindrical projections at the proximal end, which was tilted toward her line of flight. She became an open dish with four holes, each of which had four tabs that fit tightly around a projection. During their long revolution, her partner congratulated her. She knew that if her design had been less elegant, she would have been chided. If it had not been able to properly attach to her partner, she would have continued on, embarrassed, through space. That was the game.
Otos' first accepting shape was a thin disk. Her partner became a five-pointed star whose tips clasped her edge. They turned tightly against one another above the time bubbles.
The four of them spun and talked without words. Sometimes a pair would pause to appreciate the shapes the other two were making. Otos marveled at Radyl, who was equally likely to become a complex geometric form, a mythological animal or a common Triamnian item like a shoe or a garden rake. The two beings from the far galaxy could defy description with their intricate woven sculptures, then shock with their strikingly familiar and simple manifestations. The Triamnians often wished that the proceedings included colors other than the dull gray in which they perceived each other.
They always seemed to tire of the game at about the same time. As Radyl sped toward his partner, he thought perhaps this would be the last swing. His partner was a cone and was coming toward him a little too low. Radyl adjusted his path, becoming a loop that settled about a fourth of the way down the cone. Radyl knew that he wouldn't be able to complete the full turn in his current shape, so he wrapped an appendage down around the bottom of the cone, a breach of the rules that prompted a mild protest from his partner. Thinking that he ought to let go at 180 degrees and demonstrate his failure, Radyl held on slightly too long.
Most of the revolutions during the game were on a plane very nearly parallel to the time bubbles. Radyl had latched on to his partner high and their revolution was nearly perpendicular to the time bubbles. When he let go, he was flung directly toward them.
He felt the hardening, the mass, of his sentience increase, a sensation that blocked any thought he may have had about returning to his body. Much sooner than he would have thought possible, he passed the blinding white boundary of one of the bubbles, experiencing the time compression as a thousand pinpricks, as though he were crystallizing. It was the same whiteness inside, like a bright fog. Just as he was slowing to a stop deep within the bubble, he pulled himself back to his living room.
The upper people, an upper man and upper woman, came at dusk the next day. Otos was still shaken from Radyl's experience at the time bubbles, and she began to sob when she felt them outside and was weeping when she opened the door. Radyl had never been so close to upper people and he watched them in fascination as he led them to the cushions in the living room.
They carried around them the purest kind of wisdom and love and antiquity and completely opened themselves to the two Triamnians, yet remained much more than the Triamnians could fathom. As he sank into a cushion across from them, Radyl also perceived a sad determination and sense of failure.
"Welcome to our home," Radyl said, and they nodded. Otos sat quietly now, looking deep into Radyl.
They wore identical brown robes too warm for summer. Finally, when the four had reached a calmness that included a clear realization of their location on the face of the planet, the upper man spoke.
"Do you know who we are, Radyl?" His voice carried musical tones.
''Of course."
"Are you not aware of our order to avoid the time bubbles?"
"I am aware of it."
"Then why did you go?"
"Because I am able to go."
The upper man nodded. "Are you able to discern the consequences of your action?"
"I have not had time to consider them."
The upper man laughed. "You would need plenty of time." His face darkened. "Radyl, you have become a father. An illegitimate father. A child-father."
"There is life within many of the outer time bubbles," said the upper woman. Her voice sang a higher song. "When you entered the time bubble, you passed through primitive life forms and bestowed on them the spark of your own sentience. You have planted the seed of a sentient universe."
Radyl's grip on the room and the house and the land around it loosened, and he began a slow spin. "What are the time bubbles?" he asked, and the spinning stopped.
"Embryos," the upper man replied, "embryos that will one day become a universe much like this universe, or much different than this universe, populated by beings as different as the beings within this universe, but each with individual histories and a grand destiny."
"Is that true of the time bubble I entered?"
The upper man shrugged. "Since it is not possible for you to stay within the time bubble and guide it to its destiny, it faces grave obstacles in its evolution toward higher levels. But sentience always has access, by its inherent qualities, to higher planes."
"Why can't I stay within it?"
"Because you are still within a body."
"Then who stays within the time bubbles?"
"The time bubbles are for us." A melancholy resonance dwelled in the upper woman's words. "Slowly, as we become ready, we travel to the time bubbles and take one for our own."
"Then one of you can take my time bubble and stay within it?"
She shook her head. "The seed you gave it, as infantile as your development is, is uniquely yours. Even now it grows and changes in ways only you could understand. But you couldn't, because you are not yet ready or able to understand. The time bubble must remain alone with itself."
Despair shot from Radyl and across the land for several miles.
"You see, Radyl," the upper man said gently. "It is much like being an illegitimate father."
"It was an accident."
"It was arrogance."
Radyl flushed with anger. "Is it less arrogant to tell us nothing of this, to expect obedience to a command that cannot appear to us to be anything other than unreasonable?"
For the first time, the two upper people looked at one another. "We have debated this," said the upper woman. "In two weeks there will be a council where the significance of the time bubbles will be explained. We have tried to guide you as we were guided. We are not infallible."
Otos spoke, and her voice to Radyl sounded even more beautiful than the upper people's.
"And where is the being who entered this universe when it was a time bubble?"
"It is much more than it was," said the upper woman. "It upholds us even as we uphold the physical universe, and it is and always was the living emptiness, as you call it. More than that, we do not know. There are many mysteries that await even us."
"We were once in body as you are in body, and there were upper people before us," said the upper man. "It is not a matter of clear steps from one to the other. There are many different beings in the universe in many different stages. This will all be explained at council."
"But there had to be a first generation," said Radyl.
The upper man paused. "Yes, there had to be a first generation, so to speak, of sentient beings in body and without body. The first in body were probably the first without body. We do not know when this occurred in our universe. It is probably irrelevant."
"Is it irrelevant to the first generation of sentient beings that there is no guidance from the one who gave them sentience, the one who entered their embryonic universe?"
"It may be more difficult for them. We do not know. The guidance is as individual as the beings who enter the time bubbles. We have been told that our universe received active guidance. That may not be true elsewhere."
"Has this happened before, someone in body entering the time bubbles?"
Another pause. "Yes."
Radyl took a deep breath. "I believe that you came to explain the consequences of my action as a guardian would tell a child exactly what it was that he had done. Tell me, what has this done to me?"
"You have been cut off from us in certain ways," the upper man said slowly. Radyl felt them then, working their way between his organs, diving into his cells even as he dove into the time bubble. "Why, we are not sure, although we think we have an answer. If, after the deepest contemplation, we reach a consensus among ourselves, we will share the information with you at the coming council. More than that you will discover for yourself. We came to tell you of things you could not know for many eons, not of things you will know soon."
"And what of Otos?"
"She is.. .unaffected," the upper woman said.
"Thank you." Radyl felt an odd recoiling from the offer of comfort that was coming toward him. "Please leave. Now."
The two vanished and their cushions, where they had been sitting, expanded with a quiet rustling.
Radyl withdrew into himself over the next few days, wandering the hills on the edge of the wilderness bordering the community, coming home only to eat and sleep. Otos went alone to the work room and explained his absence to the other scientists on the network by saying that he was on a journey. It was not unusual for them to part for extended periods, seeking fulfillment to some unresolved portion of their histories. Once every decade or so one or the other might leave for as long as a year, although they had done so less often lately.
Radyl first noticed the change in his skin, which sometimes tingled and then felt like tree bark, and he soon realized that his body was not regenerating. Neither could he leave his body except in his dreams. His mathematics exercise became a meager musing performed solely in his head, and he discontinued it.
Otos prepared his meals and left them on the table. Knowing that he was always home by dark, she retired to the bedroom at twilight so that he could be alone in the living room, where he slept on the cushions. She had not seen him out of his body nor could she reach into his mind, and she was sick with worry and fear.
She jumped and cried out when he stuck his face into the bedroom one night, a face she barely recognized, with taut, ashen skin and sunken eyes.
"I'm dying," he said.
"We must go to Parya, Radyl."
Radyl looked at her and she buckled under a blast of hate and fury. "I'm sorry." He entered the room, sat slowly on the bed and touched her arm. "I'm sorry," he said, then quickly left the room.
The council was being held in Triamn's major city, located on another continent in the northern hemisphere. In Parya's city, the voices from all the communities were gathering in the domed hall to watch the holographic image of the upper people.
Parya rode the underground shuttle, which drew power from the planet's magnetic field. This would be his fourth council and the eleventh such conclave held since the Triamnians began one-body life more than fifteen hundred years ago.
He rode in bemused solitude, wondering at the similarity of mood between this and his previous three trips to the dome. The words he could memorize, the import he could appreciate, the precise inflection he could bring back and relate to the people in his community, even perhaps adding, and legitimately so, his own interpretation of events. But a true understanding of the enormous revelations that typically emerged from a council of the upper people--this would keep him occupied for decades. Helping others to understand also was both a crushing burden and an inestimable reward.
There was much to be gained from staying in body so long. Although Parya realized that others were easily led to wonder why a position of responsibility was granted someone simply for managing to stay alive, he knew the cohesion he brought to the community. Indeed, in some communities, the voices had attended as many as eight councils. This depth of experience, available to one and all in the community, was an invaluable and irreplaceable resource. Those who needed it the most understood it the best.
But more than that, he knew he had built, with gradual, laborious steps through the centuries, an unshakeable personal vision. By maintaining the close proximity to Triamn that seemed part of his destiny, he had come to know that the most vital secrets, the ones the Triamnians most urgently needed to unravel, were within the aging rock beneath their feet, a rock that was an organism that was a gateway. When Triamnians realized fully the promise of the upper people and were finally freed from life within a physical body, Parya knew with an irrational, almost frightening certainty that the planet would disappear. It would be gone. Its dissolution would be part of the process. The out-of-body escapades that were all too common in the community were nothing more than wasteful self-aggrandizement and intellectual hedonism.
Parya exited the shuttle station and blended into the pedestrian traffic streaming toward the dome. Other than the black sash that distinguished a community voice, there was virtually no common sartorial scheme, with men and women alike dressed in a mad rainbow of colors and styles. In splashy jump suits, long, billowing dresses, short skirts, puffy costumes and skin-tight leotards, the voices moved along like a parade of chattering tropical birds. Parya wore a green tight-fitting sleeveless shirt with a sparkling red starburst pattern on the back and gold trim at the neck, and light, loose black trousers. In the waning light, their excitement surged over them in violet waves.
Filing through the open doorways at the base of the dome, he met two men he knew from nearby communities. They sat together and talked until the image materialized before them on the brightly lit plane.
The next day, after sleeping in the living room as usual, Radyl disappeared into the woods, and Otos went to seek Parya, who was in his fields collecting combs from the hives. She neared him, then hesitated.
"Don't worry," the tall man laughed, noticing her flitting eyes. "I've sent them out for a walk."
Wearing the lime green coveralls, he rested with her in the shade.
"After hearing the words of the upper people at council, I was planning on visiting Radyl this evening," he said.
"Radyl was mentioned at council?"
"No." He stared at her and saw fear retract behind a wall of calm. "Is Radyl well?"
"It is a private matter, Parya. I apologize, but I can't share it with you just yet. Why did you wish to speak with him?"
"Because we must hunt the disgens and kill them. I have to organize the hunting parties, and I hope Radyl will lead one."
"And why must we kill the disgens?"
Parya sighed. "There will be a meeting of the community tomorrow in the park. I have much to tell everyone. Especially those whose minds wander throughout the universe." He peered again at Otos. "There is much danger in the time bubbles, and they have told us what the danger is."
"What is the danger?"
"Those who travel out of their bodies into the time bubbles will no longer draw sustenance from the upper people. Their bodies will no longer regenerate and they will become disgens."
"And why must the disgens be killed?"
"Because they threaten our individuality."
"Of course." Otos stood and held her hand out to Parya, who grasped it. She let him feel nothing but the respect she held for him. "But please, we will go to the meeting tomorrow and then you can ask Radyl about leading a hunting party. Give us time to hear what you say." 'Parya nodded.
Otos waited for Radyl to come home that night and then walked from the bedroom to the living room, where he sat with his legs pulled up against his chest. His mind was closed, but she could smell the forest in his clothing.
"You are a disgen," she said.
"I know. I've found them and talked with them."
"And what did they say?"
He shrugged.
"What are they like?"
"They are like me. They are sentient beings who die, like we have died. They are what we were." He wept, and she was still. "And they hunger. They hunger for the higher level they once had. They hunger for you." He looked steadily into her eyes. "I must go with them. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day."
She sat beside him. "Or maybe not."
In the darkness of early morning, Otos took the poison, and Radyl sent a yellow beam into the expanding pinkish glow over the bed. His empty, cracking body slumped to the floor, and after a moment he felt an intense heat as they passed through the tomatoes.
THE END
keith@croes.com