Dill: “Is this what’s called a propaganda war, Dad?”
Mitch: “No, I should not say that.  This is what’s called wiping excrement off the sole of one’s boot.”

Evil: sheep in wolves' clothing
​
Altogether now: “Any old iron, any old iron, any, any old iron.  You look sweet/Walking down the street/Dressed in style from your tail to your feet….

No? Well, you never did have a sense of humour. As previously described, soulless, witless and of course they cannot rhyme.

Stop at nothing to drag everything and everyone down to the level of the gutter, will you, stop at nothing, hate intelligence, hate literacy, hate education, hate morality, all got to be capering vicious incontinent impotent animals, haven’t we, because then we’ll be fucking equal and we’ll all be ignorant ineducable psychopathic degraded depraved illiterate degenerates and no-one will be hurt by anyone saying so, no-one will be offended. 

Yeah, the world Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott, Milburn all the so-called Labour filth all yearn for.  Can’t wait, can you, for all the people like me to be destroyed, intelligent people, educated people, honest people, creative people, people who think they can say what they think.  Except of course for the master sheep-shearers, the puppet-masters, priests, politicians, vermin like Linch, Naylor and Goldstone, sitting on high pulling the strings.

Yeah, they just wanted me to say I was sorry and I didn’t mean it.  Of course I fucking mean it, vermin, traitors, criminals, thugs, illiterates, sly, cowardly degenerate evil lying vermin obscene and disgusting cowards crawling around behind closed doors, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty,dirty little pieces of animal vermin, butchering my body because you’re apes who can’t speak or reasons, of course your fucking degrees are a sick joke. 

Is there anything more ludicrously obscene than this spectacle of retarded criminals psychopaths, freaks being upheld and protected and maintained being free to destroy my body and my life because I have identified them

I have not of course actually done anything wrong to be crippled for.  In both cases, starting at the Free, I identified and took the piss out of animals who were attacking my body. 
A filthy Trot criminal slum ape, a strutting gutter-ape, a stinking tard illiterate nursey criminal keeping a couple of black girls in a leaking attic where they wouldn’t have to do any work,  threatened my spinal fusion, made me into a fucking porter, made me do heavy manual work at minimum to sate the malice of a spite-ridden tard from a fucking poly tard training-school and probably because he was put up to it by cockroach vermin crawling around in secret in the Royal Free.

And everyone sits back and lets my body and my life be wrecked. 

Lower than vermin is flattering.  You just are, aren’t you, Linch, Naylor and Goldstone, something obscene diseased, depraved, degenerate, an ape.  Why do you pay any attention at all to anything that criminals refuse to say in public where it can be challenged?  Why do you completely reject the facts?

Think these are normal people, human beings who respond to fact, reason, argument, wit, and they’re just all grinning skulls, android, permanent vacant smiles, play with your dolls, dearie, Stepford Wives, isn’t in  it, think these deformed sick mad animals are academics and it can’t be happening.  You tell them the facts and you tell them the facts and you tell them the facts and they just destroy you anyway without a fucking word.  They don’t do language. 
And no-one will pay the slightest attention to the facts, any of the facts, the fact that I was desperately ill with an atypical pneumonia, the fact I was in the Brompton. 

I cannot be sitting in a major London teaching-hospital surrounded by vacant-eyed evil.  But I was. Just sat there and did nothing and nothing and more nothing.  Pick one at random, Porter. Tell the country all about the monkey-nest that spawned you where it's normal for women to be knocked around, where there is no debate, where there are no ideas, where the answer to everything is brutality.

Animals do not like to be disturbed when attacking bodies; they like being free to be filthy animals and so the entire corrupt diseased obscene mechanism of vermin swung into action, all jabbering and whining and lying behind closed doors.  Probably name the lot, Dieppe, Isenberg, Bailey, Welsh.

Christ, they’re so boring, but then the pompous, humourless and self-important always are.

Then of course if you had half a mind you could jump from the Who song ‘Pictures of Lily’ to ‘Lili Marlene’,  though of course you would jerk a bit at which particular army could possibly relate to my evening wear.  So I’m the pin-up of the Seventh Cavalry.  It’s obvious.  Call it a meeting of cultures.  The one thing you can’t do is accuse me of the latest piece of mongol fuckwittery, cultural appropriation. 

Don’t you like my tail?  I think it’s a magnificent tail.

You are pathetic.  That’s obvious too.  I guess you're my experimental animals too.  I have shown you are filth all the way through.

It’s not as though I haven’t spent 20 fucking years telling you rather basic things about me and my family. 
THE NEW MARXISM
The State is not abolished. It withers away.
1. It cannot wither anywhere unless and until a majority of citizens are self-determining adults not dependent children
2. It is frightfully unnecessary and unkind to massacre tens of millions of people in order to fail to bring about the withered State and infinitely more constructive to start from a non-statist perspective.

While undoubtedly sundry of its adherents treat Marxism as a religion - undoubtedly there are as many flat-earth Marxists as there are flat-earth Muslims, those to whom the Book has been given unto the world, and deviation from its teachings heresy - it is not a religion but a humanist, rationalist view of the world, or in other words Marx, Lenin and Engels could on occasion have been talking out of their rears.

As with any world-view, Marxist-Leninism is rooted in its time and place and it is as ridiculous to claim that every proposition arising from consideration of Europe in 1840 is true for all time as it is to claim that every proposition arising from consideration of Arabia in 600 is true for all time.

Essential to Marxism is the development of consciousness.  As Marx said, the proletariat needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.  The average Marxist knows diddly-squat about consciousness. This is the chief reason attempts to bring about the revolution have ended in tears. It is not possible to have a new way of doing things when people have the mind-set of the old one - which of course pseudo-Marxists enthusiastically cultivate with their statism. It is a logical impossibility that the State shrink while people are taught to regard it as mother, father, sister, brother, the source of all sustenance, the tit to hang from. This is not a new way of doing things but simply the substitution of the State for God the divine multi-vitamin in the sky, the external source of one's being and doing.

One of the few areas in which the Left is wholly unblemished is the fight against slavery, against trafficking in human beings. One of life’s little ironies, possibly an internal contradiction indeed, is its contempt for personal ownership, for the sovereignty of the individual over himself or herself. Who owns me if I do not own myself? The State, religious nutters…The Left is second to none in upholdng the right to exercise the rights of property over other human beings. Ah, I see: slavery is fine so long as no-one is making a profit.

Somewhat evidently, individual sovereignty is at root incompatible with the orthodox Marxist vision which consists in (oh, go and look it up in Fowler, I being one of the 10 people in the country who still enjoy Fowler) people doing and being what they are told to do and be. People are free and one of the things they are free to do is make money. Capital is a form of power. The purpose of democracy is to contain power. It must therefore contain the power of capital.

The notion it is given people are in some sense property, tools of a greater purpose, whether God’s will or the demand of the State (in both cases of course what equally fallible fellow-humans have decided is God's will or the demand of the State) is the gospel of something like 95% of the current 'Left'. Soviet Marxism took this lock, stock and barrel from the more disgusting kind of religious baboon. To insist on being oneself not a creature of the will of others is evil/insanity. The ape has a stock vocabulary - wilful, insolent, impudent, all terms which simply mean resistant to a wilful, insolent, impudent animal attempting to impose its will not only on other people but on reality itself, to shape the mental world of all who surround it, to create a false reality and call it Troof.

Once people are designated a purpose if they fail to be fit-for-use they are expendable. Thus the Gulag Archipelago. Are you noting this loud and clear, comrades? To be all one can be is to exercise one’s heart and mind to their fullest. If you don’t want to do that, fine. Just keep your bloody hands off others. In both cases, the religious loon and the orthodox Marxist, they of course assume rather it is their purpose in life to force people to be other than they are and impose their delusional realities.
 
Think I said that already but – have you got that, McDonnell?  No, I thought not.

‘An amiable and virtuous man who preached a most excellent morality’ – but for the rest what a load of screaming bloody bollocks.  No, I don’t suppose the utterly evil creatures who are now the only power in this country like being reminded of the Religious Census of 1851.  (Oh, they’re not?  Then why are equally powerful people not helping and supporting me?)

All this about religious nutcases was settled once, settled in the C18th, and there is no fucking issue with Muslims in the West because it has all been settled and  of course the scum of priests all know that and it has been settled and they deliberately side with Islam, together with turd like McDonnel and of course people don’t bloody like Islam, because it has all been settled  and it’s a load of screaming loon shit and its fucktard nutters are not appreciated and how long the huge array of degenerate and evil monkeys from Murphy O’Connor to Warsi to McDonnell to Blair think people will put up with being expected to run at the level of insane peasant butchers – so clearly they  think you ‘ve got everything settled, military, security services all squared, poised to fire on civilized life, gun down, arrest anyone intelligent, anyone rational, anyone like me. 

Tell us all, tell us do, why should a creature like Sacranie be protected from knowing what people think of his loony nutter psycho religion why shouldn’t they hear it.  I really want to get to the bottom of this, McDonnell, see how what passes for your mind works.  A group of guys pitch up here as elsewhere in the free world who have not only the minds of 12th peasants, completely ignorant of the thought of the rest of the world, both before and after, but the minds of murderous 12th century peasants, completely unfit for the company of thinking life, let alone anywhere where Marx’s ideas circulate.  If ever there was a bunch of junkies out of it on the opium of the people these are they.  So – Marx shouldn’t have said that?  Is that your position?  Think of all the poor little Christians he upset?   But they coped. What’s  with Muslims that they can’t cope?

Instead of attacking the English, isn’t it  your duty if you care about your people the Irish to educate them, start by telling them which country they’re in.   Or is there just only one reason why cunts like you want these filth nutters in England and that’s to overrun England and destroy it.

What kind of monsters, what kind of perverts sit back and watch a woman being physically abused, remembering of course the words of Comrade Lenin as we answer the question

Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed--“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to "wither away". We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away. (My emphasis. You guessed.)
VI Lenin: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State

Wonderful display of the social principles of Christianity:
Thus Marx in the Year of Our Lord 1847: “We can also save ourselves all this tedious talk of communism,” opines our observing Consistorial Counsellor. “If only those who have the vocation for it develop the social principles of Christianity, then the Communists will soon fall silent.” The social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial Counsellors. The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, with somewhat doleful grimaces. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable. The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity. From: The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter

Are they all terribly servile, obsequious, on their knees begging to know how best they can assist their masters, running down your legs is it, come on, tell me to my face how a creature how is obviously a psychopath, a sick animal who thinks it has rights over my mind and body, tell me how this ape is not to be offended, is precious.  Telling me why you are so sick and mad and twisted and degenerate and degraded that you think it has rights over my mind and body is possibly more interesting but I don’t suppose you’re capable of it,.  Come on a psychopath, a pervert, a psychiatric case who thinks it can’t be criticised, can’t be derided, any criticism is an evil slur to be ruthlessly punished, a screaming nutter who thinks it can mete out that punishment, something that belongs in Broadmoor,

Come on, strip the mask off the pervert, it’s a nutter, it belongs in a zoo, the only reason it’s not in a cage is you protect it.  Is its name Carol Black?

However calm and reasonable they are within the narrow field of the practice of medicine, these people are clinically insane and that is very disorientating.  To them it’s inconceivable to uphold a free, democratic and civilized country, inconceivable to interfere with the physical abuse of a medically vulnerable woman, inconceivable to speak in the open or demand the facts, inconceivable that my body and mind are not the property of overlords who of course can disport themselves with my spinal fusion. Inconceivable that people be expected to think, to reason.   

Here’s an idea, McDonnell, instead of whining about your own people, the Irish, and how awful the English are to them and to Muslims, why, good comrade that you are, do you not rip apart the teaching that damages them.  Boneheads, no word is more exact for a pretty pink-cheeked Irish nurse, it’s a nutter, an animal, but it wasn’t born like that.  It was taught by de Holy Church to be a sick animal.  I expect they’ve all gone off now to whinge some more about de Holy Farter and how the Vatican would never have allowed the French Revolution of 1789 or indeed the English Civil War.  I have of course little doubt that Catholics spread filth among those from outside England, attributing to themselves a significance in England they simply do not possess.  Probably even English Jews fall for it.  Then McDonnell can tell us all the huge intellectual and moral contribution to the life of the nation made by all the psychopathic boneheads, psychiatric cases who belong in padded cells, existing in a world that exists solely in their heads, completely divorced from reality, as absolutely mad as someone who thinks he’s Napoleon. 

And all this has been said countless times before and not one normal human being to kick the skids out from under them, to stand up and laugh in their filthy sick vacant animal faces, to ignore their ravings. 

And what pathetic filth do they come out with laughable filth to ‘justify’  20 years of attempted murder, they’re sure they’re just coming round, they really need to understand, if it were  just explained to them as if hadn’t been explained a million times.   There are only two answers to creatures like this.  One is to ignore them.  The other is the gallows. You choose.  But of course you have chosen.  You love offal, worship offal, fall at the feet of offal, anything filthy and sick and dirty and vile and obscene and evil, you cannot do enough for it. 

But funnily enough, though I’m sure there are big bad wolves in the shadows, I think these are sheep in wolves’ clothing,  sheep who by the filthy symbiosis of corruption and fascism have been given rights that do not exist over their masters’ prey and so they strut around full of it, but I don’t think they’d be up to much if anyone stood up to them.  Possibly I’m wrong; an opinion coloured by all that giant intellect they completely fail to display. 

But I laugh in your filthy sick vacant ever smiling mad psycho animal faces.   Whether I ever shall get anywhere is feeling at the moment a bit moot, since my body rather seems to be telling something that goes like, ‘despite 20-30 years of bruising and battering I kept together while you had Katie to look after, but basically I’m pretty shattered’ – it keeps misfiring in one way or another  - and absolutely fine though my mind is, I do need to coax my poor old body to some semblance of functionality to be a force in the world.  I thought I’d been looking after it since I’d been in Brighton.  No, that’s not accurate:  I have been  looking after it.  Must try harder.   I do seem prone to waking up malfunctioning in one way or another and what the fuck am I doing with high cholesterol.  I really truly do not have a diet suggestive of high cholesterol, five a day, it’s more like seven.  I guess it’s just too much sitting on my arse.  I shall undoubtedly go for the hydrotherapy and hope that invigorates – and defurs.  I mean I like fur, but not in my arteries, puh-lease. 

And unfortunately I can believe that I have had a heart attack in the past, not because I have smoked, but because I have experienced the hideous emotion of hate that physically tears in the chest.  To counter it and for the sake of my general well-being I have always meditated. 

If The Anile Heir is about one single thing, which of course it isn’t, it’s about defining evil, recognizing evil and detachment, being untouched by evil, living free of evil.  Which is just a little more difficult when evil controls every move I make, so you’re all happy now, you control me for the rest of my life, your chains are wrapped around my body, as you have controlled me since I left UCH,  I can do this, I can that, but only within the limits of my masters’ chains, that makes you feel good, hot and wet, that is excellent, oh how powerful and important you are, o contemptible subhuman vermin,  I have not ‘got away with’ being an intelligent, literate, educated, civilized moral human being.  Physically you control me. 

Kilana siy tan.  There is no harm to the ego, the self, because it is illusory.  It does not get antsy, threatened, because it isn’t there, or if there is not dominant, does not automatically, as one does, assume itself of greater importance.  Thus ‘you cannot talk to me like that because I am the emperor’ has no place in the construct; nor of course does ‘you cannot talk to me like that because I am an officer’.  I have received a certain amount of straight talking from what used to be called the other ranks though equally many have understood what I was trying to do; I think Challin possibly had a discreet hand in that. In any case the general consensus is that I bit off a great deal more than I could chew and got delicately, courteously, possibly the biggest bollocking it has ever been my misfortune to receive, an outcome with which they are of course content.   No harm done….No, I am not digressing!   Sure, you can talk to me like that, because I am a human being.  As such, however,  I am not required to like what you say.  I think I noticed.      The physical body, however, is very much there.  Harm lies in physical injury, physical duress, because any such damage, any physical constraint upon volition is not illusory.  I did just wonder when he mentioned PANTHER dragging me to my feet.  Never in a million years.  I should have to have become violent first.  That is the principle of the initiation of force.  Everything’s cool, so long as both parties are free to walk away. I’m not sure it’s quite that simple, but it seems a more than adequate base.  The everything that matters therefore included me.  This guy is upset.  That matters. What is he upset about?  However, also, I am adult and fully in possession of my faculties.  I can be expected to communicate in an adult fashion and I can expect to be told how moronic I am, whether I have an ego or not! Also a lot of other things are mattering too so do not waste my time, puh-lease!  I have learned another one for the dictionary: ‘my stuff’.  But Ritawa, this is all your stuff, man, nothing to do with us.  True-untrue? Certainly nothing prompted by the immediate situation, as for instance a remark about AMI with which I took issue. 
Everything not tainted by harm has a gurgle of laughter in it.  I just think about that.  I saw it.  I think that must be serious harm.  Obviously they don’t find the Cult funny but I don’t think it would much have spoiled the party if I had made to hit him or something grotesque like that. I think I may be flushing even as I write this but I think overall they would have found that – not unfunny.  I took a deep breath and asked: had I made to hit her?  Should I not instantly have been clapped in irons!  Er, no.  My lady Maya is Hadin-Wadud.  I should probably have found myself on the floor with my arms twisted behind my back.  Let me say that increases the number of counts on which I am remarkably glad I did nothing so vile!  

Kilana siy tan Degraded vermin, subhuman offal, you can walk away from words. What other filth do you obscene degenerate offal whine to each other behind closed doors, that’s nothing really wrong with me, I’m just pretending.  I do understand that it is very very critical that the great British public doesn’t set eyes on me, does not see an appallingly bent and deformed old woman.  And you   all strut around fully mobile, every stinking ape among you running and jumping around, triumphant at having crippled me, beaten me up and left me for dead, triumphant that no-one will touch you, aren’t you, absolutely insolently confident no-one will touch you. No-one’s interfered with your every waking move, no one has made it too dangerous for you to have a bath, no-one has stopped you going for long walks – animals are so fucking obscene.  You really think you’re in the right, don’t you, to have crippled me because you’re such pathetic sick damaged inadequates you can’t cope with language and think the world revolves around you. 
So I still laugh in your filthy sick vacant ever smiling mad psycho animal faces.  I cut my head on August 21 and it is now September 26.  At first I washed my hair with the most pure hypo-allergenic shampoo I could find, E45.  I think I’ll probably give it another couple of weeks before colouring my hair again, I think defo dark green, and cautiously and carefully applied make-up does slightly improve the basic issue.  Actually maybe not the dark green.  I don’t know that a swimming cap completely keeps the water out and the reaction between dark green hair dye and chlorinated swimming-pool might be a little dubious. 

THAT AM I

That indeed, ‘old boy’, are you, the difference being I know what I am and you do not. If you have love and the universe, you do not need God, though possibly you have It anyway. Depends on what you mean by 'God'.

My happiness is not contingent upon your approval, your liking. That of course your sick sad ego finds intolerable. You must matter to me, no? I must find you important, defer to you, take you into account. I do not. Thus in common with sick sad monkeys of all kinds, Nazi monkeys, Stalinist monkeys, religious monkeys, you force yourself into my life physically, impairing my mobility such that you are ever-present in my life. Vulgar little man, aren’t you, not a gentleman.

As I have previously remarked:

Having class is entirely distinct from being a member of a social class. You, I suspect, may be either what people think of as a 'real' aristocrat, ancient title and blah, or someone who thinks having a lot of money and mixing with the 'right people' makes him posh.

Since, however, you are sly, cowardly, dishonest piece of puke, a thug, a wordless, mindless baboon, you have no class at all.

You seem to think your culture (what culture?) important. We all have our cultures, of course, and within them many quaint customs that have not survived into the modern age. If we are to be civilized, we do not do such things any more. Perhaps you might ponder that? However, if you insist on being a product of the Stone Age, I would remind you that my culture used to have a fondness for stringing people like you up from lamp-posts. Shall you all swing together/Dressed in the old light blue? Just a thought. Perhaps we should therefore agree to differ?

Hmm, that would be irresistible. No, not the stringing-up. A Labour Government was so mortified by the distress of an Old Etonian that it allowed him to cripple the grand-daughter of Labour pioneers. You do just have to see the funny side.

But then it is terribly obvious that the entire ‘New Labour’ project was dedicated to the destruction of England, the destruction of freedom, the destruction of reason.

Ah, the insolent deliberation with which democracy is rejected. Ah, the smooth voices of the clinically insane, it isn’t an issue, nothing may be said. How many doctors are psychopaths? Isn’t that an interesting question. How many doctors really believe that they are divinely or otherwise appointed to command and order things as they please? Apes find speech so unnecessary and reason too too taxing. The insolent, insolent out of hand refusal of the norms of a free and democratic society,


For the moment, therefore, old boy, you must be jolly pleased with the outcome. The slave-sluts of London medicine have proved wholly reliable. You know you can count on them to work to destroy democracy, rely on them to shit on freedom and to beat up women who displease you. They’ll do anything for you, cripple the grand-daughter of not quite the founder of the Labour Party, after all it must be all right if it’s Master’s will. Make you wet between the legs, does it?

Animals are obedient. I’m a human being.

You are of course a psychopath, sick mad child-monster-animal cannot see where it ends and someone else begins crouching in terror of reality of the rest of the universe, must control or fragile self will die, die if people don’t like it, die if people oppose it, die if people are themselves not what it demand they be, all must obey, what will happen if people have ideas of their own – well, in your case the loony drivel you call your religion becomes the preserve only of a handful of freaks. Keep them infantile, keep them obedient, claim to reward them with power, your power, they can determine what others may be. Cannot. Illusion. They have no power over me. You have no power over me. Except of course that of the thug. How impressive can you get.

Reality REALITY REALITY frightens little monkey, other minds, other hearts the most freaking obvious reality to any of us is another human being who is separate, distinct, equal, not permitted, not permitted TERRIFIES little monkey. Monkey must have power. Power really impresses the slave-sluts. Ooh how great it is, how important, it doesn’t need to speak to its victim. It commands. Its slaves obey. Frightened little monkey, aren’t you. Absolutely fucking terrified of speaking to me, or of course to anyone who regards you as an equal not a master.

And so there are questions, big fat obvious questions to anyone who is not a completely enslaved nutter. The problem with a free and open establishing of the facts? The strange proposition that some people are considered innately incapable of lying and so there is no need to establish the facts because the truth is already known.

May not be. Forbidden. Monkey screams. I do not think you scream openly though of course your slave-sluts do, but rather fancy yourself as a cold hard man of steel. Can that veneer be shattered? Probably.

And so instead of being taught to love their neighbours as themselves, to regard their neighbours as equals, they are taught a seedy hierarchical ‘respect’, taught systematically their own supremacy – are they not, brothers, sisters and comrades - taught that whatever drivel has been fed them as ‘reality’ is sacrosanct and may not be challenged and so of course they scream, taught psychosis, taught of course to be feral, to hit, to use no words, taught to despise language, logic, liberty and love.

And you old boy will do anything to maintain Corruption, keep them mad, afraid, ignorant, dependent, subservient and all the politicians suck your cock, certainly in the case of the bastardized fascist fake Left because they too believe people are property, to be and do what the State requires. They are funny, aren’t they. They babble about equality and demand slavery. We are equal in rights. That absolutely petrifies you, doesn’t it, the mere idea someone can address you as a fellow human being not an overlord. Can say things to you you do not wish to hear. Or of course ignore you.

They are repulsive. I am repelled. I trust I have made that clear, woodentops whose sole criterion for judging an idea is whether Master permits it, who would burn all the books if they knew what they contained, a cancer in the University, tumour cells replacing healthy tissue.

I have to say one of the areas in which I am wholly lacking in knowledge is the law governing the keeping of dangerous animals but it would seem to me likely, whether one is the Master of Longleat or a fan of poisonous snakes, that the law demands they be securely contained that they pose no threat to others. You wish your dangerous animals at liberty to molest others and politicians concur. That has to be funny. When others do not even wish to contain the savage beast but merely to comment on its bestiality you cry 'They must not be hurt!' and politicians, who are either fools or evil, rush to assist and to attempt to enforce silence but what is the hurt but the existence of other human beings who are not like them.

You really believe you are set on high to dictate to others, that you are some kind of superior life-form endowed with rights particularly over me, either born to or given by God the power to dictate reality.

Hey it’s the Wizard of Oz.

This ain’t Kansas, bubba.

Keep them afraid, keep them animals, keep them impotent, incontinent, keep them terrified of words, monkey cannot cope with words, keep them hating and fearing human freedom, keep them enslaved, keep them convinced everyone is the property of their master. Keep them believing a psychotic frightened little monkey speaks for God, his will is God’s will, keep them incapable of question, keep them obedient, keep them intellectually incapable because if a cowardly thug represents God, then God is a cowardly thug.

Keep them FRIGHTENED. Keep them hating freedom. Keep them shit and then they’ll hate the freedom to say they’re shit. Keep them frightened of words. How can words hurt control change you? You change you. Or rather obviously not. HATE FREEDOM hate no control, hate no-one kneel HATE IT. Frightens little monkey.

Try going down to Yasgur's Farm, man. Perfect love casts out fear.

What happens when people stop sucking your cock? Apart from your need for a hand-job of course.

What are you, apart from robe, gown, status, power. Have you a heart? Have you a mind? Are you anything besides a large baboon who hits people? When people are free to ignore you. Set moral example, persuade with reason. Why are you right? You cannot. Thus you think you need not, convince yourself you have Truth. You are morally superior. You ordain. The slave-sluts of course are utterly convinced of their intellectual superiority. They have Truth. Therefore I am lying. Convinced of their moral superiority, for they are obedient and their minds are dead. They do not cannot will not question. It terrifies. Cannot question Truth.

Animals are obedient. I am a human being.

Your Truth is a load of intellectually and morally indefensible ape-shit.

It is not demonstrable. It cannot therefore be binding. Anyone who does not have cunt-for-brains can see that. It exists only in your head. Other realities exist only in the heads of others. Both cannot be binding. Hundreds, thousands, millions of alternatives cannot all be binding.
…

Christ, you are so pathetic, and Christ, those who fall at your feet are so evil, so absolutely unflinchingly corrupt and obscene and evil.  Come on, May, Parker, Javid, Linch, Blair, Milburn, Goldstone, Naylor, any of you, what’s your problem?  What is your fucking problem upholding a free, democratic, rational and civilized country? Some fucked-up religious psycho, what's your fucking problem?  OK, you believe in God.  Others don't.  Others think completely different things, so what's your fucking problem?  

So all the lying vermin I do not doubt exist who whine that they really want to help and support me, where are they, come on, where are you, where have you been for the last 20 years of hell , left completely  isolated, disabled  and desperate, where are you vermin, I bet they lie about that too.  Lie that I'm being looked after really.  So why am I fucking saying that no-one has ever ever given me any help or support, no-one has ever come near me, not financial, emotional, political, practical, no-one has ever even admitted any of this has happened, ooh but they wouldn’t disbelieve some slimy monkey of a priest, how evil is Murphy O’Connor?  Oh I do bloody understand you’re all lying vermin, feeding on lies, and how bloody critical it is no-one ever comes near me and gets exposed to the facts.   Deliberate attempt to destroy me mentally and physically, destroy me emotionally, leave me with no-one to turn to, no-one to give me a hug, backed by the whole of medicine, across the political spectrum, backed by MI5.  I do not exist, this is official.    Of course I find it necessary to periodically remind you that I do.
Extract from The Anile Heir © 2006.I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act1988 to be identified as the author of this book.
Lattic said the shrine at Maona-pri had scared him, partly because anything that old defies any puny inadequate meanimg you previously attributed to the word ‘old’, but mostly because he couldn’t understand it, understand what it did to him.  He said he felt absolutely safe there. Nothing inside or out could hurt him.  It’s in the stone, he said, rather helplessly.  The power is in the stone.  The mentors put the power in the stone, Narak had told him. I knew Lattic’s first impression of the mentors (it lasted about thirty seconds or until he started to explain his problems, whichever was sooner) was along the lines of sweet gentle folks who don’t know they’re alive.  Fidub has not remained a Cult-free zone for 6000 years going on ever because they don’t know they’re alive.
 
Not transformed.  Free.  Free to be Lattic. 
I wonder….The ferries run nearly all night in the summer.  I grinned to myself.  Sarat would know.  Sarat probably still knows, underneath the avalanche of further fact that must have crowded his brain.  If they haven’t changed the timetables of course, which they almost certainly have.  I logged on and looked up the exotically named Fidubi Ferries while composing a letter in another part of my brain, which went something like, Dear Tet, I understand that I appeared with a good reference!  I mean you value Hass’s views and he thought I ought to talk to you and I’m not saying it would have been different if I’d appeared off my own bat (bat-wings?) but – but what, Fal?  There was a ferry in an hour which I could catch if I moved it, and one back at about 5 in the morning, which suited what I had in mind just fine. I ought to be able to create an absolutely soothing, silent and safe atmosphere in my own den of course, but I hadn’t.  I couldn’t go to Zur’s shrine, too many people would recognize me.
 
So of course the first person I saw was Vax.  He gave a quick yelp of laughter. 
“I have travelled many leagues,” I said, “lit and fig.  Whether I’ve got anywhere is something else.”
“I look in from time to time,” he said.  “I hear things in our island fastness, you know.”
“Maybe one corner of the puzzle is complete.”
“I’m around.”
There’s a café  for when you need to eat  and the party is in the basement if you want to talk  I didn’t want to eat or talk.
Carlin just thinks it’s old.   Did Narulis ever sit here?  No, why would he, he was young, adventurous, a sea-farer – so maybe he went to sea to escape from a broken heart!  If Sarat failed, if he were ever driven out of Kadun – where on earth did that thought come from?  It had to work, it had to.  With very little encouragement I could work myself back into a state wherein it was dependent upon me to make it but no, that had never been exactly.  If everyone didn’t do their utmost that would be a betrayal of Sorg.  The thought sat more easily now that I had defined my utmost and set it in motion. The pillars the colour of damp sand, intricately carved, just a little bit crumbly, shimmered in the candle-light.   I looked more closely and cocked my head. Were those letters?  If so it was no language I knew.  I closed my eyes and no, it wasn’t a time-slip, just an awareness of time, of waves of time, past, present and future, which I suppose is another way of saying the bloody Whole. No, that hadn’t been what I meant, Sarat hadn’t been what I mean, when they did fail, when they returned to Fidub, they must have come here to recover.  All times are now.   I might just as well have been some Fidubi wench from aeons past.  It was easy to be like that here.   I am sitting in a pale-green tunic – well, at least it wasn’t crimson corrugated iron, but I guess that’s part of the bloody Whole too.  I surrendered myself because here I am safe.  The shadows came but could not touch me, not here, shadows trying to blot out the light.  ‘They came, the skull-faces, but we laughed.’  I didn’t laugh, I just went on sitting.  Somewhere it seemed Vax was saying, “And what does Hass say?” and I almost looked round before I realized the conversation was in my head.  “I have to stop,”  I replied.  “I just stopped.”  I did laugh then.  Because it was all so funny.  It never works when you try to put words to what is – the messes people get into, that’s OK, but people being killed, people in pain: It is all so funny.  That makes more sense, the bloody gurgle of cosmic laughter.  Inside.  That’s the point.  It is inviolate.  It is untouched.  It is real? And all the human crap is not real, but we are human and have to be human.  I knew enough to know better minds than mine had lurched at this one, but that is the balance.  I had a sudden image of myself on – not exactly a tightrope, because it wasn’t much more than knee-high and it wasn’t that there was no safety net, the trouble was on the contrary that nets to catch me if I fell abounded, catch and trap me, but I was skimming along, easy-peasy.  Suddenly I felt sure the rope was going to break but no, I told myself, and it didn’t.  Yet.  Suddenly it snapped.   This, I thought, is not totally unfamiliar but this time I know what to do!  I threw myself clear of the nets.  I didn't seem any the worse for wear but I was sure I was somewhere else, thought it didn’t seem to be anywhere.  Despite this mental circus-act, I was feeling very lazy, very relaxed.  I suppose very safe.  I wanted to stretch out and found myself another cushion.  There were a few other people around but they too were lost in their own little mental worlds. I wondered about other people’s pain, grief, fear (that makes a change, huh?) and where it went.  I mean, I had no doubt that some of the people here were as distraught and devastated as I had been but it sort of melts away.  Because it isn’t real.  I sighed.  OK, so let me in this safe place ask myself what the hell is my problem with reality, but it really didn’t seem to matter.  Maybe that’s the only way to look at it, casually, creep up on it unawares.   The central fact of my life is – oh, do I have one of those? A determining fact of my life is that once I was in Azt – what?  Unreal is such an unhelpful word.  No, my relationship with Tet didn’t seem unhappy or boring or even not what I wanted, it just didn’t seem real.  And Tet is not a wishy-washy person.  It was just – somewhere else.  Like everything else is right now, which might just tell me something important if I only knew what.  There is a crossed wire, a plug in the wrong socket, like – like putting the headphones jack into the power socket. A little mental game came to me, unplugging all the major connections – like I knew what they were or anything, but just pulling out any plug I could see!  And Hass would say, I said to myself sleepily, just leave all the loose ends alone, don’t try to figure which should go where.  I can’t honestly say that this little exercise made me feel the slightest bit different, but I did drift into that really nice waking dreams state – is it alpha rhythms, can’t remember – and had a really nice though not remotely revealing, so far as I could see, trip.  I came to eventually, blinking and reflected that – possibly – spending the night with myself on the floor of the shrine at Maona-pri counted as my most insane act yet.  Thirsty.  Where is the caff?  I got up and looked around.  Half-open door with light on, that must be it.  It wasn’t very much lighter, the sort of people who want a drink in the middle of the night don’t want to walk into a blaze of neon, and much as described by Lattic, benches with cushions on and broader benches in front of them to serve as tables, and really rather strange lamps on each table, like mini-inverted chandeliers which, Lattic had said enthusiastically, give you enough light to read by without disturbing the ambience, which was pale pink; the walls were pale pink, and there were paintings which looked rather good, even in the half-light.   [The loos, I discovered, were pale pink too, everything including the bowl, with good paintings, and well lit.  There was a rather gorgeous one of a tree in bud.  I wondered if I could get a reproduction.  Somehow I had no doubt these were originals.  I didn’t think the shrine lacked funding and I wondered.]  Behind the counter a middle-aged man with a bushy beard was engrossed in a book. There was a water dispenser.  I drank thirstily.  There was a solid wall of books, vids and disks cunningly illuminated by under the shelf lighting.  Lattic had raved about this.  I made my way to the counter. The guy looked up and said hi.
Hi, I said.
Hunger? Thirst?
Hot drink?
Anything in particular?  You will be amazed at our range!
I looked around.  I shall?
Under the counter. 
Lemongrass?
Come to think of it, I thought, right this moment, I could do with apple-stock!  I wondered if I actually could or whether that was me tweeting Carlin at me.
And ginger?
And I’ve suddenly realized I’m ravenous!
Do you an omelette?
That would be brilliant!  Thank you!
Give you a shout when it’s ready.
The laughter gurgled up from somewhere
You shout here?
Didn’t you notice the juke-box?
I grinned and wandered over to the books.
The Illusion of Time.  That sounded a bit heavy, a bit theoretical.  Why Am I Here?  You pick that out wondering where is here.  Here turned out to be the universe.  Something a bit more local, I think.  Why is a Zuri in the shrine at Maona-Pri in the middle of the night?  This enchanting collection of meditation music from the Age of Calpedene.  The what?  Oh, it’s the name of the performers.  You don’t call yourselves The Age of Calpedene unless there was an Age of Calpedene.  Slap your wrist, Fal, you should have paid more attention to Fidubi history in school.   I could certainly try that one, my place could just do with enchanting music and indeed there were headphones and a drive to try it with.  Oh yes, oh this is gorgeous.  All I need now is something to read while listening to the enchanting music – er, do you buy, do you borrow, do you donate?  Oh, right, a sort of ledger with a pen tied to it.  The box for donations is in the wall to your left.  We ask you to write the title of anything you take so we can keep stocks complete.  That’s simple enough.  I continued browsing.  Put The Light On!  Why are you so darned unhappy?  So life has dealt you a lousy hand.  You are in charge.  I think I’m going to like this… Eternal Flame: A History of the Shrine at Maona-Pri.  I picked up a vid, Treasures of Maona-Pri, while I was at it. Who are You and What Do You Want?  That sounded – pertinent.   Death: It’s All One Continuum.  That was definitely going to engross me, but not one for reading in a caff, even this caff.   When the chef brought my omelette I asked him if he was one of the mentors and he confessed he was.  I felt suddenly shy but came out with it anyway.  My partner died and I had a sort of experience with what might have been his – ghost.  Some people said it was projection.  I have talked about this, I mean.  I wondered is – there anything you can recommend.  Anyone saying anything sensible about – that sort of thing.  Oh you poor girl, you, he said.  I felt immediately swaddled in love.  Oh I see, I said, that’s what you do.  He cocked an eyebrow.  People can say anything, everything because they’re safe and warm and cosy and smothered in love.  That’s about the size of it, he said.  Whom have you talked to, may I ask.  I sighed.  Hass. Hasiyata Talal.  His lips twitched.  And you want a – second opinion?  I’ve had second opinions, third, tenth, I said.  I think I’d like some kind of – overview.  That’s a good one, he said firmly, pointing to Death: It’s All One Continuum.  Let’s see now, hope we’ve got one…We do try and keep everything in stock…There we are!  He triumphantly produced a small cream paperback entitled Matters of Life and Death. Your dinner’s getting cold.  Unless you want to talk.  Thank you very much.  No, I said.  But I’d better…I gestured at the ledger.  You eat, he said.  I’ll write!  Thank you, I said again.
After a while I went back to my cushions then got up and walked slowly up to the Flame.  It rather seemed to me that I saw things in it, sparks and flashes, but I rather prosaically put that down to tiredness, except I couldn’t stop looking.  ‘Love and cannot leave,’ I said to myself softly. I looked up at the Window THAT AM I and an incredible collage of starburst and flame but – rather prosaically – I guess I’d disconnected again – what had me really gaping was the structure of the Window, its divisions, though the images were different. Yes, well, I’d seen that before; so that’s where the Dacunine Window comes from. 
I was just thinking time I was mooching off when the first rays of sun hit the centre of the starburst, were refracted.  Yikes!  It was as though the whole shrine had been set alight. 
A voice behind me full of laughter said simply, “Good, isn’t it.”
“Is there music in the glass?” I asked.
Just laughter.
I turned to face the stranger.  He was a tall, thin, elderly guy, slightly stooped, now looking at me with frank curiosity.
“The lady knows Carlin.”
“Oh,” I said, “the lady knows Carlin!”
The lady, I thought to myself, has just found another – project.  Ancient history! 
I got home, said good morning to Benji, told her my night’s activities, swallowed some strong coffee and set to thinking about – oh what a cliché – making my house a home.  Then I went to bed, though I didn’t sleep, but did another session of pulling out those mental plugs, an endeavour which seemed to me suddenly as important as regular physical exercise.
My choices were strange and intricate.  Whatever tenderness Tet felt for me could not, I felt, reasonably be expected to stretch to re-creating some of the greatest work of all time for my sitting-room – though I did wonder how it worked – did the artist do the drawing and the glazier the transference onto glass?  Nonetheless, I did not like my windows.  I wanted a window to look at, not through.  I can’t be the first person to feel like that – surely there must  be specialist suppliers.  I searched, there were, but the products were artistic gunge. What I wanted, I realized, was a nest in a corner of that space, a sort of special place where I could sit in a mysteriously imposed mental safety and listen to the Age of Calpedene.  I deliberately gave the psychological ramifications of this a miss on the grounds that whatever it was it could not possibly be damaging.  My room was quite big enough to lose an end of it and this I did, replacing the window, mentally at least, with something large, beautiful and pictorial and creating a step up to an arched entrance which instead of a door was a delicate double waist-high iron-work gate. I didn’t want any furniture, just rugs and cushions and I didn’t want to put anything on the walls because the beauty would come from the window I didn’t have and couldn’t find.   Artists must work in glass, the possibilities are too intoxicating to be ignored.  I tried the galleries and did find some beautiful stuff, but it still wasn’t what picky me wanted.   All it really needs, I thought, is a huge window sticker!  What d’you call them, transfers?  Historic site and all that, there were probably hundreds of them in the shop that I hadn’t found and wouldn’t have been open even if I had found it.  Time for a day-trip to M-p.   Yes, yes, yes!  All glorious in reds and golds.  All I need now is a builder and a glazier – and somewhere to live while the work is being done?  No, I can camp upstairs.  This is rather fun.  I turned my attention to the other 90% of my accommodation.  While I have work done, is there any other work I want done, any other interesting  niches to create!  The trouble with my beautiful light and spacious room is that everything is built-in, and so everything is hidden and so the general effect is as uninteresting as living in a large box.  An artist – I grinned – might rave about the spareness of line, but I didn’t feel in spareness of line mode.  I was not going to invite an artist to give his considered professional opinion.  There were definite ramifications to having my home designed by Tet. I found some interactive interior design software – model your ideal home!  That gave baby hours of endless pleasure.  I got there in the end.  Alcoves, alcoves were what I needed, and a bay window.  My every instinct was against central divisions.  I had quite enough of those.
Oh, and I wanted to make my loo and bathroom fun and pretty
So then I’d had the builders in and got there and felt thoroughly content with not just my place but my space so I went off to spend another night in M-p, appreciating the first one had been good for me at a level I couldn’t even describe or define.  However delectable my space, there is something in the atmosphere after 6000 years, something in the stone.  Something.  Something that wards off all hurt, all pain, all fear, all anger – and all mattering.  This time I rested my back against what I ridiculously thought of as ‘my’ pillar and hugged my knees and simply breathed.  By no means a classic meditation posture but I was happy and this time I felt emboldened to actually take on my dragons and slay them, because I wasn’t.   I think I might find that impossible to explain.   I was also emboldened by having done a little bit of very elementary detective work on break-ups due to the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun from stats from the Vasuculi Civil Affairs Department (couldn’t they call it something else?) to self-help and problem-page sites.  Nobody had been lying to me!  I hadn’t really thought they had but it was good to see they hadn’t. This bit of my saga at least was entirely within the realm of normal human woe.  Of course if I knew what the question was I might know what the answer was.  Yes, this, yes, that, but why.  It’s the wrong way round!  At the centre it will be obvious why.  Again I had the sensation of some kind of fusion.  I am Fal, I said to myself, lazily, sleepily.  THAT AM I.  All are One and do not know it.  I just need to get past – whatever it is I need to get past.  Is that a good circle or is that a good circle?  A circular maze came into my mind and I came to sharply filled with the sudden realization that there was a block on the way through it, which I suppose is screamingly obvious really, but I’d never thought of it like that before.  Hallo, obstacle, what are you?  Now I’d visualized it, I could so to speak prod it and poke it.  It wasn’t very responsive.  You have to bear in mind here we’re talking about a short thick black line.  I felt fairly frivolous.  It’s my mind,  I could push it here, maybe make it change into something else, do what I like with it.  Hey, maybe I can jump over it!  Nothing changed inside but I had the definite sensation of the block rising to meet me. Aw, don’t be like that…How about brute force, pneumatic drills!  I knew the drill-heads broke.  So you want to be difficult, do you?  As though that wasn’t obvious or something. Now look, I made you, I can unmake you…Suppose I parachute into the centre.  Like maybe I fly away on my eso pink balloon and flutter gracefully down.  I enjoyed that one, but it didn’t seem to change anything. What is going to happen to me?  I knew that was the question but there wasn’t an answer.  But no look if I get centred I think I must think mustn’t I, that something so devastating will happen to me that it must be avoided at all cost.  Can’t we have a try before you buy here!  What else am I having?  This business of mattering.  What will it do to me, what shall I lose?  Are you Maya?  And  a chorus of dancing bears high-kicked across the floor of the Ciletij Senate?  No, actually, but I knew I was dead on target.  I had a flurry of the sort of thoughts you don’t want to have and since I was alone having them I was extremely glad I was where I was, in a well-equipped operating-theatre, not in my home first-aid room.  I didn’t fully love Tet, I held back a bit, I loved you.  I’d leave, betray, forget.  Sorg was a male you.  I couldn’t not.  I heard Hass telling me I’m not gay but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t in love with Maya and I felt confused because I felt I understood ‘like that’ and ‘not like that’ but not both at the same time.  I just said over and over to myself, Maya, then reason kicked in and I thought as I had before, no, the order is wrong, it doesn’t make sense, but perhaps after all it did if I thought, no felt, felt that with Sorg at last I had Maya.  Me hadn’t fully, properly – what was the bloody word – loved Tet, not the real me because me was on some kind of eso trip with Maya but I did, I do love Tet, with both of them dead I’m free to love Tet.
Umm, that’s rather a high price to pay.  No wonder I’m  ravaged by the whole thing.  Having thought I’d lost Tet too. 
The word bi floated into my mind, as in bi-sexual.  Can you be asexually bi-sexual?
So long as I can love my eso, not someone else’s. 
It sort of seemed to explain the whole Hass thing, but I couldn’t have put into words how.
Bi. You point both ways, equally attracted, or in my case un.  Hermaphrodite.  You are both. We’re all fthat.  Oh the continuum of gender indeed.  My male part saw no reason why I shouldn’t love Maya.  That made sense.  I think.  THAT AM I.  It doesn’t have a body and it doesn’t have gender.  Therefore I have neither body nor gender.  Therefore we have to be human.  Here and there and in my case all over the damn’ place.  I thought that in my case the chicken definitely came before the egg.  I mean, it all seemed so much simpler to my gang because they hadn’t fallen in love with someone of the same sex without being gay!
Eeek!
Or not exactly.  To complete the square the matching-pair that should have dined with Sarat and Maya was not me and Tet but me and Hass.  Had I oh what’s the word, subliminally understood that?  Amida, Amida, Amida, and what I’d waded into, at six-freaking-teen, I mean, was Sarat and Hass sorting out their relationship, but Sarat isn’t talking, Amida, darling, he isn’t talking about his relationship with Maya and he isn’t talking about his relationship with Hass, and in both cases why the hell should he?
Oh did I hole them below the water-line and other such allusions, not expecting me to be so thick that I didn’t see what water-line, what boat?  Sarat is an outer and exo kind of guy….What difference had that made?  Probably rather a lot. And Tet?  Tet is outwardly outer and exo.  The eso is all in the art.
And in Fal.
Right now, I think – I don’t think – I need to be – I feel, yes, sort of floaty, but in a very prosaic way or maybe that’s actually how it is, I just don’t feel – the weight of me, which is strange because I don’t feel like moving, either, don’t feel I can move from this spot.  The only need I have right now is to see the sun hit the Window again.  Practical Fal kicked in, plenty of time for that.  A drink would be good.  But that would mean both moving and saying words to another human being.  Don’t think I can do that.  To some extent and heretofore, I have just punched me in the stomach, followed by knocking myself unconscious.  Rather literally in terms of having knocked out who I thought I am, but there might be an element of wishful thinking there.  I need to grow.  To let me spread through me.  Just sit.
Eventually I wanted to go to the loo.  We are human.  Quite so, yes.
I definitely wanted the tree in bud.  That is so me. 
It was the same guy behind the counter.  He smiled in recognition. 
“Do you do strong coffee?” I asked.
“We do.”
“Yes, please!”
“There’s a painting in the Ladies’, tree in bud.  It’s unsigned.  Do you know whom it’s by?”
“Guy called Manya.  Lives over on the Leolisle. We sell a lot of his stuff.”
“That’s really what I meant.  I did come once in daylight!  Went to the shop.  I didn’t see…”
“I think it’s in the catalogue.”
“The – yes, of course.”  He cocked his head.  “I mean, you’ve only been here 6000 years.  Not just for locals.”
“I look that old?”
“This place,” I said, “you just could be!” I stifled a yawn.
“We do B and B too.”
“Sorry!  Oh.  No.  I’d miss the sunrise.”  He laughed.  “Why have I been allowed to live my life and not see! Is there music in the glass?”
“Not a lot of people ask that,” he mused.  “Something of a specialist enquiry.”
“Can we just say I know Carlin.  Rather well.” I paused.  “I think I’m being silly.  There’s nothing secret – it’s just -  I’m not here because I need to talk to someone.  I’m here because I need to talk to me. When I was five, kid in Zur, Maya Talal became my best friend.”
“Oh dear, dear, dear, dear, dear.”
Once more the cocoon of love.
“I told you the other bit.  Not the bit in the middle.  I had a partner in Zur.  In Kadun I ran off with Sorg San-yaega-baht.”
“You have been through it.”
“I have rather somewhat been through it. I’ve talked to Hass, Sarat, Amida, Vax and my ex.  I may be sick of bending other people’s ears!  I wasn’t there when Sarat let the music out, but oh I heard about it.”
He gave a grin which showed he knew all about dynamic young emperors releasing music in glass.
“Let out long ago.  You’re Fal?”
“I’m Fal.”
“I’m Taja.”
“Hi!  Do you do this all the time?  The night-shift, I mean?”
“Good grief, no.  We all do a month.  Since there are rather a lot of us, that works out about once every two years. For the caff, I mean.  There’s also the party, of course.”
The cocoon hadn’t wavered. 
“I think,” I said cautiously, “you’re thinking of what has happened to all of us.”
“The terrible pain. The ghost was Sorg?”
“If,” I said.
“Any more thoughts?”
“Not really.”
“Customer!” A thin pale young man had come in.  “If you want to talk again, mail me.  [email protected]
 “Will do!  Thank you.”
He was chuckling.
“I used to be a school-master.  Remember me to Sarat, I taught him when he was ten.”
“Local boy makes good!”
I finished my coffee and took the tray back to the counter.  Taja gave me a half-wave of thanks while talking quietly to the thin pale young man who on closer inspection looked terribly ill.  Perhaps he has some awful disease.  I think I’ve got problems? 
Such as they were, I went back to ‘my’ pillar contemplating them.  I knew I was still a long, long way from where I needed to be.  Two things now presented themselves, neither of which was exactly soothing. 
I thought I’d lost all three.  That was enough to cause havoc to anyone.  Could I say my enthusiasm for my relationship with Tet was – well, real or well – some kind of over-reaction to not having lost everything after all, like – like you think you’ve lost fifty dollars and find you’ve only lost fifty cents.  Phew!  The other thing wasn’t any better.  What would my life with Sorg have been?  Happy, certainly, but an extended fantasy that might or might not have one day crashed on reality?  It was not comforting a) to think that I could have spent the rest of my life in a state of delusion, b) to think of the hurt I should have done to him or c) worst and most unbearable c) that his murder had saved me from myself.
It happened.    Part of the bloody Whole.
I didn’t think I needed to doubt that I love Tet.  I did that before my life got complicated. I did think I needed to be extremely – distrustful of my advanced capacity to tell myself it was perfect before and will be perfect after and the bit in the middle doesn’t matter.   I remembered a bewildered Kai.  But it can’t have been, Fal, perfectly and absolutely happy.  Because to remember it like that is to deny the problem entirely, deny I have a problem.  And it’s my problem and no-one can take it away from me, so there!  
I used the pillar to scratch between my shoulder-blades, if you see what I mean. 
And what is the prime scapegoat?  Sorry, Benji.  Why, it is the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  What would my life with Tet have been? That’s a different can of worms.  Can I say I should have grown up, grown out of it, as Bandi had comfortingly said I should.  Probably, I decided.  We should have had children, both of us, Maya and I – the terrible pain came from nowhere then ricocheted off.  I closed my eyes a minute.  What would Sarat have been?  Not, I think, a vet.  Environmental activist? And they all lived happily ever after, except none of them ever dared use paper cups.  I managed to laugh. The wider question of responsibility.  Or denial of.  While Kadun went to hell.  Could Sarat have been happy worrying about paper cups?   Of course he couldn’t.
Was that another of my either ors.  If Krarlik had decided to invade Dabida, that could have been mildly interesting for about ten minutes, while the ‘invading army’ (once again!) settled in – oh of course, oh how freaking obvious!  I expect. The meaning, purpose and origin of Garsit is probably that it’s far enough from the border for Jaizal’s soldiers to have decided they could safely settle.  But that, the putative invasion I mean, had potential repercussions even hairier than what had actually happened.  Visions of them returning to Kadun with Sarat at their head. 
 None of this is part of the bloody Whole.  None of this has happened.  Well, Garsit has happened.
There was a Matter of Kadun, outer and exo.  By the existence of this – no, by Sarat’s choices, my life has been determined.  Or not, as you prefer. 
OK, Fal, which do you prefer?
Me.  My choices.  I could not keep me separate, being incomplete.   I could not see myself as independent, not required to give a flying fuck about the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  But that of course is exactly the opposite of what I’ve been saying – oh, of course, the independence had to be the delusion and the bMbK the reality.
Sorg.  My choice.  I did that.  But faced with a male Maya-clone who was mad about me – a what?  He was nothing like Maya.  Leave it a min.  I didn’t give myself a choice.  I was being controlled by me?  Not by love, not by lust.  Two halves, one on each side of the crack.  This is what I need. Like when you’re drowning you need air.  Thought I needed?  To heal the crack?
It was beginning to get light.  I went to sit in front of the Flame.  The sun rose on the Window of the shrine at Maona-pri, blotting out everything that could possibly matter.
When I’d finished being transfixed I went home thoughtful struggling with the realization that I had lost nothing or nothing that I ever had in the first place.  I had a session with Benji and then I very thoroughly and systematically searched the site of the (of course) internationally known shrine at Maona-pri.  I was having an idea.  There were lots of things wrong with it, but I was having it anyway. 
Deal with the practical side first. 
I had never in any meaningful sense commuted and taking the ferry to Maona-pri and back struck me as commuting in a meaningful sense.  So I wanted to be a volunteer, did I.  Well, it would certainly be a wholesome and constructive use of my time, but the practicalities seemed to have escaped my better nature.   Obviously I should have taken the house on the Sohenisle.  No, I am not going to move again, especially for something that was bound not to last, a fad, a stage I’m going through.  
Oh really Fal, and why do you want to be a volunteer?   Other than you have transferred your enthusiasm for any eso outside you to a place instead of a person.  I only want to help out in the shop or something…Oh yeah?
Is that a healthy suspicion or an unhealthy suspicion?
Boing!  Oh I see.  The devastation, the loss, is the loss of other people’s eso. 
I think I need to think – I think I actually need to think now.
It’s all in the mind…The crack is in the mind, the glue holding me together is in the mind.  The absence of the glue is in the mind.   The car always starts!  Is that the eso, sort of emergency starter?  When – when the rest of what you think of as you. Because it’s still there even if you think it isn’t.  So exactly what are you saying, Hass?  I need to love it.  To accept it as part of me.  I can be here and now and not float away to – but that wasn’t necessarily exactly all down to me, now was it, whether ghost or not, the bMbK made time itself hiccup.  Except time had slipped in Zur so I couldn’t in all honesty say that was nothing to do with me, whatever that was.  If I love it as much as I love me, I unite with it.  If I love it less than I continue travelling furiously in ever-decreasing circles.  If I love it more than – I – I do things which I can’t accept in some terrible sense damage me such as Sorg.  Because it doesn’t have gender or identity or boundary.  Because  - it’s not ‘my’ eso, it is the bloody Whole, and that bit of the bloody Whole that is Fal is – infused by it.  Is that the point?  Might be.  If I understood it.  Infinite and separate.  Here and there.  But that which is me cannot not be a part of the bloody Whole, whether I think I am or not.  Well now, that depends, doesn’t it, on what you mean by real.  As in whether permanence is part of it.  ‘They just want you to be real.’  Presumably not permanent.  Everyone else gets it, damn it!  Hence of course my insecurity, thank  you, Tet. 
This has to have a source.  So far as I could see, my entire childhood and early youth had been emotionally, intellectually, morally and metaphysically impeccable!  All in the mind…I had consciously/unconsciously/sub-consciously firmly plugged the headphones jack into the power-socket!  I wanted to be like Maya.  But I’m not Maya, I’m me.  Oh dear, is that a divorce or is that a divorce?  And I knew I wasn’t like Maya in what I suppose I thought of as superficial ways.  Hass even asked me, what was Maya doing while the rest of us were making mud-pies?  Oh I see.  I think.  I gave it identity, gender, boundary.  Eso was like Maya.  Not like me.  Like Hass.  Not like me.  Like Sorg.  Not like me. 
I think it’s for moments like this I created my own little hide-away.  The whole terminology – oh Fal, you can’t be that dense.  Can I?  Outer and exo.  Inner and eso.  Some people, my young brain figured, are – contain – the eso and some don’t?  And I’m one of the ones who don’t, but I didn’t know I thought that.  If I thought that.  Eso doesn’t do, it just is.  I think it would be quite easy to have embedded that one.  To have had it apparently reinforced.  Sarat did.  Maya was.  Maya got herself a rather good degree in the ancient languages of the Malpurian sub-continent while Sarat was plotting.  Could anything be less relevant?  Uncomfortable echoes there.  Did I always secretly think if it wasn’t the bMbK it wasn’t Real?  Anyway, it doesn’t follow.  Can’t say Sorg was while I did.  Oh,, oh, oh, oh, oh.  No, I can’t say that.  I just possibly can say the attraction was Sorg was and did.  Showed me how to be me? 
Enough!  I shall read something soothing and perhaps instructive.  I dug out Eternal Flame.
……….
Let me creep up on this cautiously because I think this will hurt.  Try Lattic and his new life.  It’s real.  Then his life before was fake.  Or horribly real, depends, depends what you mean by real.  The realities of his scene were nasty and real.  But he was fake.  What is it they say, there is only the real, then everything else is fake.  But you can’t say that!  Makes it sound like – oh, I said that. Did I say that?  Not exactly.  Bad theatre.  That’s exactly what my life has been.  All of it???  Acting a part.  Back to Lattic.  How can you say killing someone is acting a part?  The curtain falls and everyone gets up.  But they don’t.  Maya doesn’t. Sorg doesn’t.  All one continuum.  Do I sort of fail to understand that they do?   After all….Somewhere.  But I think I’m running from the point.  Day-to-day reality.  Day-to-day reality is people die and someone somewhere loved them.  That’s not – what did Hass say, it happened.  Is that – how it’s all one continuum?  It happens, like everything else.  What is is.  Is what was is?!  Lattic stopped being fake.   That’s what gee, you make your own reality means.  At least when it’s not an idiot meaning be fake.  And  what do ‘they’ also say, love is the real, and it sort of makes sense at 16, even though it’s obviously crap…Because pain and death and hate are over there somewhere else.
 
Such as Kadun?  Ohhhh.
 
And when a gaggle of hyper teens, who at least have had an elderly relly die, if not a hamster, said, whaddya mean by that, what did ‘they’ say?  They said you need to try to love everyone, and see everyone as he or she is.  They said all crime comes from people being self-centred, lying to themselves, being fake.  They said when you love a particular person you – all right, all right, did I love Sorg or did I just love me and what I got from him.  I can’t bear it.
 
Or do I mean did I love Tet?
 
I wasn’t even ‘grown-up’ about it.  But then that would have broken the dream.   Flying visit to Zur, Hi Tet, I’ve fallen in love with someone else.  How could I, how can anyone, but that’s being grown-up and it’s tough.  Not as tough as the thought that if I’d had the sense to break the spell and got my feet over my doorstep.  Hi Tet, I’ve fallen in love with someone else, all right, me.  Isn’t that what all this chasing other people’s esos amounts to?
 
Why aren’t I screaming?
 
And we probably gave the seminar on divorce counselling a miss at six-freaking teen.  Was there one?  They oh they, they taught us not to fuck with other people’s feelings.  Underlying it, one now sees with hindsight, they didn’t expect our attachments to be perman- serious.  Underlying it also – we were going to have to learn to be civilized because you can’t drop math or change school because your relationship with a class-mate failed!  Run away to another country.  Yes, well, that class I failed. 
 
It was (of course) a class that failed to take account of the unique bonding properties – in my case unbonding – of the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun. Was that a surrogate, as in ‘clearly what was wrong’ with my relationship with Tet was that it didn’t have the magic glitter-dust all over it.  My main problem with that is that there’s a nasty little worm of truth in it.   Yep, we weren’t truly indissolubly bonded because – because what exactly, because we didn’t have a common obsession – and as to how this maps against the whole business of Maya being hopelessly unobsessed - ?
 
Maya was my role-model, except, except – don’t wanna be inner and eso, wanna be me.  Except I did vaguely grasp somewhere that I was not Maya and our lives were very different.  Not Saski: Maya.  Always my darling Maya.
 
 So  What would have happened if I’d let go when we – when she made love to me. Oh Fal.
 
Now I need to think.  Or maybe talk to Venga.  Or not Mel but Cantilip.
There is one female person with whom I’d be gay.  Was.
Think: my progress or lack of does not hinge on being unable to talk to Maya.  That is/would be a great cop-out. 
Think: exactly what am I saying here?/do I think I'm saying here?
Male and female, we are.  A continuum of gender, there is. 
And as usual I have it all the wrong way round.
That might just have blown my little mind into the stratosphere.  OK, I had no particular reason to define myself as gay, straight, both, neither – neither? - none of the above!  Depends on with whom!  Do I conceivably make my point?  My previous sexual experience having been limited to – just limited (?)  Put it this way: what can categorically be said about Mel and me is that it did not convince me heterosex was the cosmic all.  Subsequently, however....But that was after.  What else is fixed in this game of shifting sands?  Sarat and Maya.  And only now does it occur to me, do I let it occur to me, that Maya and me parallels Sarat and Hass and she was transcending her boundaries.  Or that Mel put her up to it to see if I was gay, though I think Maya could have come up with it herself.  But what no-one realized, least of all of course me, was – was that I was nuts about Maya, just waiting to fall into her arms, but it could never be, could only end in tears, my tears, and so I cut myself off from me. Indeed a repeat performance of Mel.  Is this plausible?  Unfortunately yes.  An advanced sense of self-preservation.  I thought hard then about my impeccable childhood.  It was given that A-M went to ordinary schools in Zur.  They'd been doing it for 600 years.  It was given that ordinary Zuri found friends on the hill.  That didn't mean – I rather desperately searched my memory for someone, aunt, dad, teacher who might somehow have implanted in me that I could get out of my depth, needed to stay in my comfort zone.  It clicked. Everyone was quite sure Mel would look after me, quite, quite sure.  Mel's little friend who treats the hill like a second home and happened to grow to have film-star looks.  Me, it came to me suddenly, was lost a long, long time ago in others' assumptions, others' expectations.   And me reacted.   Did I?  Or was I always in my own little world.  Something penetrated – not, alas that little world.  People made cracks about Mel and me and it just never occurred to me.  That it was real.  That it had a reality quotient.  Which I think means.  Which is somehow bound up with the dramatic story of my eso.  Nobody scared me but I scared myself.  Oh there is something there.  Wish I knew what.  A fixed idea who  I was.  But I don’t think I loved Mel Like That. 
 
FIREWORK DISPLAY!  BLINDING LIGHTS!  FAL,YOU ARE A MORON!  Explosion in my whirring little brain, even.  UNDER, you imbecile, not over!  Because if the eso is the core, the block can’t get down to it, can it, so what I have to do is dig and go UNDER the block.  Never quite seen myself as a terrier, but ludicrous mental image of little terrier paws frantically scrabbling.  I suppose.   My self-confidence, let it be said, is not what it was.  Senta!  I dawdled off to find her.
I suspected I’d earned a gold star, but all she said was, “You will find it well-defended.”
“Ramparts?”
“Cannon,” she suggested.
My scowl must have been nearly as good as my eight-year-old one.
“This is going to hurt…”  I tried to put pieces together.  “Lounging around in the shrine didn’t hurt because there was no threat….” I giggled suddenly.  “The thing is, who is firing the cannon.”
“Yes,” said Senta.
“I – am attacking me.  Or defending.”
“Continue.”
Thanks.
“Does the eso join in!” Thinks: there are three of us here?  Me?  Senta waited.  “I – this hurts my head already.  I mean if I say – I have said – it bursts out in – time-slips.  It’s not passive.”
“Whom d’you think is firing the cannon?”
“Oh no,” I said.  “That’s – cheating.  The cannon was defending the block.”
“You are threatening the block.  You are bombarding yourself?”
I managed a grin.
“Why not, I am divided.  These are – metaphors.  This is not going to be fun.”  Mental image of me in a hard hat with a light on it in a dark cave, clad in what seemed to be padding and armed with a pick.  I burst out laughing.  Then jumped and rolled out of the way of rock fall.
“Hmm.  What happens to it?  More a rabbit.  Burrowing, I mean.  If I dig my way under – oh.  I don’t like that one.  Wouldn’t the simplest thing to do to me to be to collapse onto me and crush me.  In my mind, in my mind, in my mind, if I don’t want to be crushed.  But really if I emerge triumphant does the block vanish, like in a fairy-tale?”
“That may depend.”
“On what?”
“What it is.”
“Integrate it?”
“Or you become integrated.”
I stared.
“That would seem to suggest – the block is the eso.  Hang on – I – whoever that is - made the block from my eso?”
She smiled.  Infuriatingly.  Somewhere I am screaming at Hass: You knew!
“Guess it’s time I started digging.” I got up but she raised her hand to stay me.  Oh.  That bad?  “That bad?”
“Interesting,” said Senta.
That really annoyed me.  I realized it was meant to but not why – laters.
“I am not a spectator sport!”  Trouble is, when things are on about 15 levels at once, “Serious?  I’ve gathered up the pieces of me once.”  The response to that one hung in my mind.  “I didn’t put them together right?”
She smiled rather gently for Senta.
“I’m around.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning not just the obvious: thank you for knowing I have to do this on my own.
 
I retreated to my room and flopped in the chair, then got up again and gathered paper and pens.  This I was definitely going to have to draw.  A mountain-range came immediately to mind.  I can do that.  Shaded triangles.  I laughed suddenly and added a little mountain-goat, but leaping from peak to peak was not the point here.  Female person in hard hat. Did I label any of this?  That, I thought, was (probably) the crucial question.  I knew I very much wanted to, label it, reason it, order it.  Only I don’t know what any of it is.  Or do I.  Either it’s all the same stuff or some of it is illusory, and pffft, vanishes like the bad-fairy in a children’s story.  Then I realized I was as usual (why?) totally missing the point and my shaded triangles became diamonds descending to the centre of the earth or me, as you prefer.  Heavily overlapping, of course, no easy gaps.  I sat back and gazed glumly at my work.  OK, Fal, one thing you have achieved here is make a small black block into an impassable range. How interesting.  Try again.
Simple rectangular block with a line through the middle.  On which is small female person in hard hat.  Under or over?  Want 3D!  Want software!  Want female person walking round block inspecting it, which was of course ludicrous because if I could walk round it.  Can’t be infinite in length, can it.  Why can’t I walk round it?  Why have I never thought I can walk round it?  S-s-s-enta (it did come out rather a hiss) you haven’t been having me on, have you. Back to the maze.  The block blocks the path to the centre, but only because it is a maze, only because it has walls, if it was plain flat ground.  Only if the block has – sentience, it’ll stop being a block and form itself into a wall around the centre.  Giggle-time: fine, all I have to do is burn down the maze.  Maybe. 
Or have I totally distracted myself from the task at hand?
Because right now I’ll do anything but this.  I took another piece of paper.  Big black box labelled ‘Job to be done’.  I’m actually not that hot on drawing a female figure turning her back on something but I had the general idea full on.  OhIsee.  Your presence would force me to do something, would it, Senta.  I so wish I could get outside all of it and see what I’m supposed to do. 
 
Suck it and see.  So I had my lightbulb moment, did I.  The way I’m going on, you’d think I only had one chance and had to make the right choice.  No, it is not an impassable mountain-range, it’s – I spluttered into giggles.  It’s a – sandcastle.  Damn you, block, whatever you are, I made you and you can be whatever I want you to be.
 
Pause for sarcastic laughter.
 
I knelt on the beach in Zur with my trusty bucket and spade and began to dig. 
Yes, you’ve guessed. My spade snapped on solid rock.  Oh no, I said, this is an imaginary unbreakable spade and anyway there is no solid rock immediately below the surface of the sand. My next spade just might have looked less like a kid’s toy and more like something someone twice my size would use for shovelling cement.  It didn’t break.  That I suppose was progress.  It didn’t however, continue smooth descent to the depths, just stopped.  Common-sense Fal kicked in.  If I were digging in the garden and that happened, I’d take a trowel and scrape away the top-soil to see what the impediment was.  So I did, just slightly cautiously, as though it might be a nest of scorpions or something. Underneath the spade was – apparently – more top-soil.  To my surprise when I scrabbled at it with my trowel it shifted. Reassured this was moving a mountain of soil with tweezers, no threat?  I gave a particularly violent thrust with the spade.  It didn’t actually go very far but I had the distinct sensation of toppling into a hole after it.  Unnerved? Me? Fearless Fal?  Falling, falling, falling into Maya’s grave.  Nothing grotesquely obscenely screamingly awful happened like confronting her rotting corpse  I thought that was maybe because my self-preservation instinct kicked in but I forced myself to look around.  All on my own.  Whose grave?  Oh for - ! I’ve done the death of the self equals suicide bit!  Or was this the risk death bit. All the same I knew what I had to do next: dig down beneath my grave.  Senta is around.  Good!  I dug.  Bloody rabbit.  Do I bloody well go down the rabbit-hole?  I realized there was something a bit hysterical (does this surprise?) about my digging and paused.  I ought to – what ought I to do?  I couldn’t think of the word.  Shore it up, give it supports.  Think.  (I internalized it that) part of me died when Maya died.  I have to get beyond Maya’s death.  Which just might win the tritest remark of the year award.  Century?  Epoch?  My mind somewhat elsewhere as it often is when one is doing purely physical tasks (!) I imagined a few bits of broken stone and in a desultory and incompetent fashion shored up my tunnel.  I really think – OK, I’ve got this far.  It doesn’t have to be a bloody rabbit-hole, does it, it can be more human-sized, like an – entrance.  I am looking into a dark cave.  I giggled, remembering the Falsit.  I need a torch.  The cave was resistant to my attempts to illuminate it.  At the moment I so to speak crossed the threshold the word ‘pot-hole’ came to me and once more I was falling, falling, falling through free space, more floating, really, but I knew there was only one direction: down. As though I had a ‘chute. I am just – falling, endlessly falling.  Then – it wasn’t like ghosts or physical forms but – it was like Maya and Sorg were both there, smiling, and they both said, “You always loved Tet.” Which was all nicely calm and surreal except that I was choking and sobbing, tears pouring down my face and as far as I was concerned I might as well have been in a void for all sitting on the nice white carpet meant anything.
Except I landed.  In Tet’s arms with a white stallion he’d borrowed from Sarat not.  Back in normality not.  I don’t know where I landed.  I can’t explain where I landed.  Somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.  It had no identifying features.  That sounds good, doesn’t it.  Unless you’re there.  Maybe landed is the wrong word.  I didn’t fall further.  I was stationary.  It wasn’t frightening.  It wasn’t ethereal.  It wasn’t anything.  Chance to catch my breath?  Recall I am bloody well doing this to me.  What does this mean?  What am I telling myself?  Who is me? I ought to be floating if I’m nowhere!  I was actually then much nearer than I had been when sobbing to 1,2,3, end the trip, but well kind of I’d clearly been on one, arrived somewhere, even if it was meaningless. Even if it was meaningless, it meant something to me.  Open, open, what does open mean, no closed doors, no open doors, no doors, no divisions, whole.  If this is oo I have arrived where everything is whole, it seemed to me frankly – anti-climactic.  Wasn’t it more like – no possibilities.  What on earth have I done to myself now? Oh wait a minute.  I – make.  I focused on a bit of non-frightening non-ethereal nothing and demanded it be something, didn’t tell it what.   Whatever it was it needed to be it.  No, that was just being antsy!  If I just looked at it, I’d see what it was, if it was anything. I suddenly realized – maybe!  If I just totally let go.  I was refusing to see. 
The next bit was just a little hairy even by my high standards.  I was too dumbstruck to other than surrender to it.  Hmm, there may be something in that.  Think the best way of putting it is all my alternative futures.  One of the best ones was when I shot Sar-fenan but it also had me paired with Reakoed (Reakoed?), had me as some kind of ranger, had me crowned Queen of Dabida.  And had me dead, having thrust Maya out of the way and died in her place.  I died in Sorg’s place as well. 
And then it all faded and I was, I had put myself, back in my nice room.  I stretched out on the floor and went limp.  That was no effort at all. What the fuck did I just tell myself?  My eyes closed.
When I woke up it was dark.  I staggered to my feet and groped for the light, then sat blinking.
Who, me, dependent?  I have never in my life more wanted a cup of strong coffee.  I looked at the time.  I guessed it was possible to plead medicinal use but maybe not at 2 in the morning.  I found I badly wanted to talk to Sarat about the consequences of our choices.  I tried to see.  As if what actually happens isn’t complicated enough, in the background, if you don’t switch the bloody thing off, the busy little brain is also computing the might have beens and goo-ing you up with them too.  Hass said: it happened.  Only one thing happened at any given point, you stood here not there, you said this not that.  
That’s not quite the core of it, though, is it, Fal-girl.  The core is something less comforting: what is/was splitting me is in some way preferring one of those futures over what happened.  Lot of choice over being dead; Sar-fenan shot me in one of them.  Ohhh: is the death of the self suicide kick by any chance something to do with wanting a future in which I’m dead and at the same time of course deeply sincerely not wanting.  I dozed off again.
In the morning I popped in to see Senta
“Bit hairy.  Don’t think I’ve finished.  Just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.”
I decided I needed to connect with normality before playing any more games.   I went swimming, after which I ran round the grounds of the retreat, after which I stuffed myself at our renowned buffet .  After that I sat on a bench in the gardens and cursed no phone on which to play some stupid mindless game.  There are moments in life when what you really need is to play Right Angles.  I thought about Benji instead and wondered how Lattic and Narak were doing.  Then I got irritable because I couldn’t see where to start.  Having an immovable block is such a good concrete project.  Actually I had a horrible feeling I knew where to start and I wasn’t going to enjoy it.  Just replay the movie. A moment of excruciating pain.  I crumple to the ground.  I am dead.  Not much to say there really.  Try harder.  Is that what I want? Extinction.  Never mind what it might be, take it as is.  Would my world be a better place without me in it.  Sorg would be alive.  Would his world be a better place without me in it?  Would I rather be dead than sitting in a retreat on the Leolisle.  Yes, I did recognize these were increasingly absurd questions.  I was in fact near giggling at my enthusiasm for pursuing the subject of my previous demise.  It had to be done…What – no, what did I get out of the idea that I should have died in Sorg’s place.  Sacrificed myself.  My self, to which I otherwise cling.  Like grim death.  Hmm.
Proved I could sacrifice my self.  I did giggle then.  The only person who demanded that proved being me.  Proved I could tell my self to take a running-jump – just not off the high board.  OK, Hass, this time I’m going to dive.  No pool ever had that many steps to the top.  Varied though my life had been, I had had few encounters with heights.  I had dived real-time but not I now realized from very far up.  Why am I making myself climb into the stratosphere?  Why don’t I simply jump in?  That seemed to me a much more sensible idea and I (equally cautiously) descended and stood at the side of the pool glaring at it.  Then I remembered I had a perfectly good real pool to jump into.
I sat pool-side real time and – noted I was trembling.  Oh FFS!  Me, water, frightened?  I think I need to report the swimming-pool is full of sharks.  So the outside meets the inside, does it.  I stood brave and resolute, courageously facing death by firing-squad or something.  I took a running jump, surfaced, swam to the side of the pool, swam a couple of lengths as though I was competing for gold because I was suddenly seethingly furious.  Climbed out.  What was all that about?
Felt no different other than that I was visibly shaking.  Oh right, Fal came to the retreat to overcome her terror of water.  This did not seem a constructive path to pursue. I knew I had to have done it.  WTF. I felt a definite preference for the apparently formless nothing. Follow another alternative future.  Reakoed.  I wracked my little brain.  Had he ever given the slightest indication – bearing in mind my defo hopelessness at people.  Work avoidance: OK, Fal, why the fear, why the fury? I had actualized – now that’s a good word – something that metaphorically petrified me, but that wasn’t actually the point.  The point was my little mind had refused to differentiate between my exciting inner life and reality. Ah, yes, it would seem a block has been removed.  It’s the wrong bloody way round!  What (I thought) was supposed to happen was that I jumped metaphorically with the total lack of concern with which I jumped literally.  Hmm.  Why the fury?  Hence the fury!  I think I need advice on this one.
“Am I going in the right direction?” I finished.  “Feels as if I’m disappearing up my own.”
Senta finished laughing.  I suppose that was a sort of answer.
Then she teased me.
“You are sure no subconscious fear of water, pushed under by one of the boys, perhaps?”
“Quite sure.  All of us.  Fins.”
“Continue,” she said.
“Thanks,” I growled.
“You might revisit the cave.”
“Might I.”
Lovely day.  One of those days when you feel everything is perfect unless you’re obsessed with how it isn’t.  Don’t wanna revisit a cave, real or imaginary.  I lay on the grass and after a while recreated my cave.  What Senta had not said is I went in the wrong direction.  It’s my cave; this time I was sure to give it a floor, though I wasn’t sure I trusted the floor.  Damn it, the least I can manage is a trustworthy floor.  I concentrated hard on the floor being granite reaching down to the core of the earth.  I crawled in cautiously and made myself comfortable with a couple of cushions.  I seemed to have forgotten it was a road to somewhere.  Inwardly and outwardly I began to doze.  A path opened, like a cliff-path, cut in the rock.  I viewed it with high suspicion, surmising it was going to take me somewhere from which I was expected to jump, but I climbed, quite fun, lots of handholds.  It seemed to be getting lighter.  I came to a step so broad it was like a platform or a seat.  I sat.  I decided it had grass or at least hardy weeds in the cracks.  By the way, you need to understand – as if I did – this was kind of a joint effort.  I didn’t consciously create the ledge, for instance, but I did consciously decorate it.  yesiknow: that means two of me present!  Or did it?  Anyway, I felt vaguely positive.  I continued my ascent.  I was still suspicious of this climb but there was plenty to hang on to.  Except it was all in mind and my mind over which my control is still imperfect could make it vanish.  I came out into a field.  Not, I was relieved to see, a field of flowers, but maybe it was the wrong time of year.  It was of course the field by the stream and I felt tense and tearful before there was anything to be tense and tearful about.  The stream came to meet me, I can’t put it any better than that.  Actually I can.  It was coming in my direction and flowed past me.  I need to follow the stream.  I walked along beside it.
               When I surfaced the sun was beginning to set.  Refrain: and what was that about?
I went to find something to eat then headed for the Art Room.  If there was one thing I was clear on, it was the layout of that particular stretch of land.  X marks the spot I started.  Therefore the stream was headed for Zur.  Been there done that.  Apart from minor details like the stream representing Sorg.  “You always loved Tet.”  I shouted out loud: No!  No, it wasn’t all fake, no, I loved you, no!
Die in people’s (plural) places to prove I loved them.  To them?  To me?
Why did you come back? I asked Sorg.  Shakily.  If you came back.  If I imagined you came back. 
I had to believe I loved you. More than life.  Beyond death.
As you loved me. 
Sorg will always be looking after me.  Thus the time-slip in the garden.  Metaphor? Reality?
Because Sorg loved me like that. 
The only person I love like that – oh shit, I can’t die for Tet.  Safe, safe, dear boring old Tet is safe.
I think pale and drawn summed me up at that point.  Oh and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
Chasing risk, Fal? Chasing death?
Chasing love.
The relationship I wanted with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it.
Did it have any love?
Hass, I was suddenly completely sure, would risk his life for me.
Some people avoid talking about others to avoid blaming them or appearing to blame them.
Or merely just designating them too as not totally perfect.
Because if there’s one thing that stands out about this four-sided triangle of mine it’s that I’m the only one who ever had a problem with anything.  True-untrue?
Sarat let go of his boundaries.  Hass didn’t.  Wouldn’t.  Couldn’t.  But then Sarat loves Hass like that and Hass didn’t love me like that.  Except I’ve just said he did. Does.  If it had been up there on the pink cloud Hass wouldn’t have refrained because of Mel any more than Sarat refrained because of Maya.
Maybe.  The parallel is not the same. 
I’m the only one who hasn’t resolved his or her problem with anything.
What my problem is would er – seem central to that.
We were six-freaking-teen.  Why do I give everyone a break except me?
I don’t love with my eso.  When I do I don’t recognize it.  So – so somewhere I ‘need’ the risk of external death to make up for not loving with my eso.  That is painful.  It is also very particular to the bMbK.  Whatever people’s questions and difficulties in normal life, the option of getting killed is not usually present.  I have to see something there.  Just not quite sure what it is.
More real.
Of course I embraced the bMbK – lit and fig.  It solved my problem.
It created my problem?
I thought my face was screwed up very tightly.  Bunny is desperate to get back to the centre of the warren.  I paused to relax myself.
In peacetime Dabida, peacetime anywhere, people don’t on the whole die suddenly and unexpectedly.  They have heart-attacks.  Tragic death of bather off Zalintan Head.  They don’t risk dying suddenly and unexpectedly unless they’re nuts.  Unicycling down the middle of the highway without lights while drunk?
The Matter of Kadun brought death into all their lives.  Sounds like something from the gutter-press.  Which doesn’t stop it being true. Before when it was given we’d all live out our lives and die naturally.  And after. 
Maya was ready to risk death.
But that must have clicked with something that was already going the wrong way in me.
Must it?
Fal, you screaming nitwit. Tet had been shot.  That is going to somewhere like I can only love people who’ll risk their lives.  Until in the end the life that has to be risked is mine.  What that is not is, you always loved Tet.  Bunny’s face was once more practically as if a spiralizer filter had been at it. Tet was defo – is – live till ripe old age until we perish of natural causes surrounded by doting grand-children.  Normality.  I sat back.  I sat forward.  I stood up.  I sat down.  None of it helped.  Of course I love(d) Tet but it couldn’t have been enough because I’d internalized – because Maya was my first love. Is that right? 
I was the only one anything was right with because I wasn’t hitched onto risking death for the bMbK.
That is another way of putting it.  Me and the rest of Dabida.  And Fidub.
So my problem with going back to Tet is what, emphasis, my problem, leave his problem out of this.  Forget betray Maya Sorg, betray the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun, Sorg bloody died for the bloody Matter of Kadun, Maya bloody died for the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  I am not Sorg.  I am not Maya.  Do Pietri and Caluna think they have to die for the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun because Maya did?  Vij, Sarsh? When I’ve quite finished getting furious with myself, I’d already come back to Zur.  Are you thinking I’m averse to helping Sarat?  Sponge.  I am very close to the B-word: balance.
Distinct, as in separate, as in running on a different track.  Vij must have been – but that doesn’t mean he got out the cammo and went off to – no, that’s – they’re all fighting this bloody war.
I don’t know how Fal fights this bloody war.  Without being consumed by it, literally, devoured. 
Crash-landing in Carlin.  Was that not now how I thought I had to fight this bloody war.  And all I can do is run it down, dropped out, broken down.  Pretending to have a breakdown.  Yes and no.  All I knew with total certainty is that my life was in shreds.  Sure, the car started.  That doesn’t mean I hadn’t reached rock bottom.  Or ground zero, as you prefer, being faced with myself.  I gambled with the bMbK being real and real it was,  kind of – kids have a plastic snake and put it in mum’s bed, only it’s real and its bite kills her.  That, I object to myself, is gambling with it not being real. My delusional trip.  What did they all think?  Does it matter?  I think most people have a sense – a funeral is some kind of closure, however inadequate.  It is to be completed.  Couple of stiff drinks, quick shot of sedative from the doc, whatever it takes not to throw yourself into the grave on top of the coffin, stand there screaming.  Maya and Jaizi held me up, literally.  Sarat wanted to be one of the coffin-bearers.  I think that was probably the only case ever when ‘not appropriate’ prevailed.  Only because he decided on something better.  Karci, Vrin, As, Mardis, Vishtu, Barfanu.  Then Sarat finished speaking and he walked over to me, and said possibly the only words that could keep me on my feet: “For Carlin.”  And so I spoke, but how much those two words went into me and through me and branded themselves on my soul and contributed to my current condition – we all went back to the House and I knew it was impossible for me to leave Carlin, impossible, rooted, not conceivable to so much as go back to Azt and collect my undies.  Then I saw the cottage.  I knew Saryulin understood, understood something basic.  He offered to do all the dealing with solicitors in Azt for me.  I said: I have to.  He nodded.
But my duty to Sorg is something I made up on the spur of the moment.  Doesn’t that sound wonderfully awful?  If it wasn’t quite that, what was it.  Something that came out of me, if a tree had grown out of me it wouldn’t have been any more shiftable.  At that on-going moment in time.  So what was it?  The perfect charade.  How the dashing young widow of the dashing young officer continues to fight the war.  Just exactly right, if I had neither past nor future.   If I weren’t me, more than, apart from.  Oh how desperately I tried to be only Falita san-yaega-baht.  It all made sense then.  But the roots I put down were real.  I wasn’t just there because of Sorg.  Real connections with real people.  What do they think of me in the Rabbiters’?  I need to talk to Vishtu.  Then Maya’s death broke it all open.
B is for Balance.  Nonetheless and heretofore it is the case that I am bound to Carlin.  If not by Sorg’s ghost.  If I want to be really vicious about myself and I want to be really vicious about myself, nothing like imagining I was communing with Sorg to keep me hog-tied.  Doesn’t any man break the rope?  I knew I was welcome at the House at any hour of the day or night with anyone whom I cared to bring with me.  Anyones: Tet and I and our kids.  Scream of brakes.  On the cusp of maybe Tet and I should live in Carlin.  After all, hasn’t he painted all the best bits of Zur by now. Just scream: have I achieved nothing but a huge circle?  I can live anywhere.  Got that bit.  Tet and I can live anywhere.  Got that bit.  How about Vaconik?  Don’t think we’d like the weather.  I knew there was something in Tet being before as well as after, but I wasn’t sure what.  Only natural, life goes on, of course Fal finds someone else.  Sorg was just a thin scraping of jam in between two thick slices of Tet? 
I dug out Senta and explained as briefly as possible that I needed to talk not to her, not to me, but to the Rabbiters.
 
Strange to be back in the real world.  I had a latte and suspected it made me high as a kite, but I wasn’t driving anywhere just yet.  Lattic saw me getting out of the cab and rushed to greet me. 
“Passing through,” I said. 
“It’s so lovely here, we’ll miss it!  But how are you!”
“I really don’t know,” I said. 
Narak came running over.  I owed them some kind of explanation at least.
Later I stumbled and tried to cover it with a light laugh.
Narak cocked his head.  Has the patient been wise to discharge herself?  Might she not be in danger of collapse?  The bloody car always starts. 
I muttered about not having eaten a lot and Narak frowned.  Senta, I observed to myself, thinks I’m a big grown-up girl capable of looking after herself.  I wonder if that’s true.
Tea and mounds of toast, which I wolfed.  Narak frowned more.
“Been fasting?”
“Not consciously.  I guess…”  What did I guess? “Guess I don’t think mental journeys need as much nutrition as physical ones.”
They listened.
Narak said, “You have to talk to Tet.”
That had occurred to me on the ferry.  It was an agreement I’d made with myself that I shouldn’t talk to anyone directly involved until I was right side up.  You can break agreements you make with yourself.  It’s really easy.
In this case I thought not.  Carlin would be bad enough.  How should I start?  It’s about my future relationship with Carlin.  Sounds like a bloody envoy negotiating a trade-deal.  That was the conversation I was resolved to have and I was going to have it.
I slept deeply, woke up dopey, devoured croissants and jam, picked up essential kit and got into the car before I changed my mind.
I stopped for some good cries and eventually turned up at the Rabbiters’.
Faces wreathed in smiles.  I wondered if they’d be so happy after I’d babbled for twenty minutes.
After a few minutes I said, “I need to talk to you guys about something.  Can we go in the back room?”
This is awful, I thought.
We settled in the back room.
“It’s,” I said.  I did actually wonder if I was going to get any further.  “As you know.”
“Personal?” asked Vishtu.
“Yes,” I said.
“Known each other long time.  Terrible times too.”
These guys have seen me a hysterical demented wreck.  They also know about Sorg’s maybe-ghost.  Just maybe they know everything that matters.
“Sorg,” I said.
“Life goes on,” said Barfanu.
“Can’t stay living in the past,” said Vishtu.
“There’s someone else,” I said.
“Natural,” said Barfanu.  “Lovely lady like you.”
Vishtu grinned.
“Anyone we know?  Better deserve you.”
“It’s more than that,” I said.  “More complicated.”
“Don’ tell un it’s young Asdinan!  Waiting for him to settle down.”
“No, it’s not As.”  Expectant pause.  “It’s the guy I left for Sorg.”
“War,” said Vishtu.  “Things calm down, they look different.”
“Are they allowed to?” It came out without thinking.
“No-one expect you to stay a single lady.”
What made me think the Rabbiters weren’t as conversant as anyone else with the findings of the Vasuculi Civil Affairs Department?  Is it not a story as old as humanity?
“It’s more than that,” I said again.  I am going to flounder here. “It’s – complicated.”  When in doubt, repeat yourself.  “We’re still working things out.  It’s as if I’ve got two countries now.   I don’t want – as though Kadun doesn’t exist, Carlin doesn’t exist, Sorg – didn’t happen.  It’s all part of me.  You’re all part of me.  He’s an artist.  He’d love Carlin.  If – say – we lived some of the time here, would anyone mind?”  Is this busking or is it busking?  Is it the opposite of what I convinced myself of in the retreat?  Is it having my cake and eating it too?  Hi Tet, I’ve just planned our future.  What was that about walking all over me?  These weren’t exactly after-thoughts, more pushed down below the surface, with Mitch’s famous granite slab on top of them.  Which didn’t 100% prevent me from knowing they were there.
“Sorg’d want you to be happy,” said Vishtu.   “Anyone got a problem it’s his problem.”
“Thank you,” I said.  By this time wet rags have more backbone.
“Artist,” said Barfanu.  “More the merrier, I say.  Liven the place up.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “Tet livens things up.”.
“Friend of Mel’s, int he,” said Vishtu.  “Saw his stuff on TV.  Beautiful, just beautiful.”
Somewhere under the granite slab I am squealing Tet’s stuff has been on Kadun television and I never even knew! Somewhere else I am asking myself how I could ever have thought Mel’s friend could be unwelcome. And of course somewhere I am giggling because the whole of Carlin undoubtedly knew everything external to the maelstrom there was to know about me.
 
Then I sat in my car a little way outside the village and realized I’d done the unforgivable at last, not of course for want of trying: I’d said Tet and I were an item when I was by no means sure of Tet’s view of that.  Except I was.  OK, either I’m right or my crowning achievement is to have rendered myself wholly insane instead of merely half-insane.  I drove back to Zur feeling happier than I had for ages.  Being wholly insane may be enjoyable.  Delight in it until Tet blows my head off.
 
I arrived at – my home.  There was a sign on the door. ART IN PROGRESS.  DO NOT DISTURB.  I texted him.  I am a work of art in progress all on my own.  May I disturb. 
 
“Oh now Fal-girl, that’s for the morons.  And to what do I owe?”
“You haven’t killed me so far,” I said, “so I’m gambling you won’t kill me now.  I’ve just been to Carlin to see how people would feel about you and me living there, at least some of the time.”  Silence, not, I thought, ominous.  “Everything I did was all right and all wrong,” I added, meaning mostly that what I’d been doing in Carlin was cool, perfect, if only all of me had been there.
“I seem to have missed a few episodes.  You’d be living with me in Carlin?”
I took a very deep breath.
“I’m thinking the point here is would you be living with me in Carlin?”
“You’re that sure.  The missing episodes, Fal.”
A nose is not so hard.  Perhaps one day I shall show you.  I should like to argue this question of software with them.  I have not told you that I am loosely involved in art therapy here in Zur.  An advisory capacity.  I would like to meet Senta.
When I was digging my way out of my own grave, he closed his eyes a moment, but he laughed at all the ways I could have proved my self to no-one but me by ending up dead.  Then he became serious.
“Twice you could have killed, Fal, and no-one’d think the worse of you for it.”
“Except me.”
“The rule of law?”
I nodded.
He sat back and howled at my discovery so late in life I was terrified of water.
“So if I take you swimming and I dare you jump off the high-board – would I be so callous!”
“Grrrrr.”
I’m thinking your mind moves ahead of you.  The stream connects Carlin to Zur.
Yes, I said, and it’s fluid, amazingly enough.
He simply said yes to my having been hijacked by the bMbK, that he’d thought something of the kind, though not so plainly. 
“Where is Sorg’s grave?”
That shook me. 
“There’s a family cemetery.”
“I should have come.”
“Tet…”
“We are not all perfect.  Was holding you up not my job?  ‘For Carlin’.  I do not have Sarat down as a moron but possibly the worst thing to be saying to you!  But then Sarat on that day.”
“How could he have possibly known!”
“So then it was seeming to you a statement – what did you say, a smear of jam, a denial of reality.  Not just a man, that is past, but a place, many people, that is current. If Fal and Tet live happily ever after in Zur it never happened, a critical part of your life erased, where is Kadun?”
“More than just a long weekend.  Less than everything.”
“That part of you that died with Maya. I cannot for a moment deny that the physical, the emotional aspects of another man in your life, but I am thinking there was always a third person in our relationship.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perfectly and utterly happy, only there was always someone else there.”
“You ran off with Maya.”
“Actualized – it’s my new word.  My delusion.”
“So now both people are dead and I – I do not think one death more critical to our relationship than the other.”
“It’s a bit,” I said.
“We cannot play what if.  Only what is.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“Am I not a simple lad at heart?  And if I say what is, what was, what was real is a line of fire burning through all the dross, is that not simplicity itself!”
“Give or take a few million words.  They told me I was not being real.  Can I ever forgive myself?”
“Have you not paid for your idiocy? A thousand times over.” Pause.  “I am thinking we are both on the high board and if we dive it is irrevocable.  But did you not just dive?  Did I not dive many years ago now?”
“Fire,” I said, “not water.”
He grinned.
“Who would not have doubts about flinging herself into the flames.  Perhaps too there is something in the idea we were kids.  Playing with fire.  But now we are not children. Should we not be looking at property, like responsible adult citizens?”
“Tet.”
“Oh my Fal-girl.”
Fire melted the coffee-table between us.
 
When we asked ourselves whom to invite we realized it was half the continent and absurd and should invite no-one, but after, after we should have a party. 
Mum and Dad.  We went together.  Mum gave a little squeal and threw her arms round both of us.
There were still shadows, my shadows.  Not dark deep dirty ones, but shadows.
Dear Karci and Vrin
I just – just?  Wanted – want? In person, don’t want you to hear it at second-hand.  If it’d been a piece of paper, I’d’ve torn it up. 
Where are they, anyway?  I have no bloody idea where they are.   Last seen in Azt.  I didn’t think either of them would be far from Sarat.  Hey, maybe I should make it a mass-mailing exercise: Hi, Everyone I Know in Azt.
Try again, absolutely plain.
Dear Karci and Vrin
I want you to hear from me in person that I’m getting back together with Tet.  We’re going to live in Carlin, at least part of the time.  Part of me is now carlini.  That’s just how it is.  Part of me of course isn’t. Fal
The other one of course I just had to drive across Zur. I didn’t want to give Sarsh a miscarriage.  Tet volunteered to come with me.
“What good would you be if Sarsh went into labour!”
He burst out laughing.
“Get some practice…I do not think Sarshi san-yaega-baht is so fragile.”
“I don’t really.”
“Metaphor.” He’d dubbed it the Sandwich Syndrome and we both knew he was right.
We also of course both knew that if we both pitched up it saved a lot of words. 
We pitched up in the evening and got told they were on the hill.
“Is it,” I asked cautiously, “something official, d’you know?”
Are you entertaining the leaders of the Pentangle, Mel?  Or just negotiating AMI’s future relationship with Carlin.  This is much more important.
But nothing like a bit of farce was more guaranteed to make Tet and I – Tet and I.  We chortled together and drove off to the hill.
Hass was extracted from whatever the gathering was.  He looked at us and laughed.
“We wanted to see Vij and Sarsh,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. 
When much later I was telling Hass the whole story, he said this bit reminded him of nothing so much as Sarat and Maya’s dilemmas over whom to speak to first.
“Darling,” said Sarsh, “you worry so much about things.”
Tet hooted.
“Free and easy type myself.”
“Good for her,” said Sarsh firmly. 
I wondered how much Sarsh knew.  I doubted Hass had told anyone anything, ‘cept maybe Sarat, but the state I’d been in in Carlin was common knowledge.  It was 20 years before I learned that Sarshi, who did believe in a – manifestation of a dead Sorg independent of my subconscious, had said half-laughing half-crying, Sorg, let there be an end.  Bad enough your being dead. And Pilo said: he will not leave Carlin with unfinished business. 
“I’m going to fret,” I warned everyone.  “I haven’t told your parents.  I haven’t told Saryulin, Duvi, As.  It’s just I don’t want people to find out second-hand.”
“Sorted,” said Sarsh briskly.
Karci to Fal:
Dear, dear Fal
Woo-hoo!  Look forward to the exhibition!  But you, dear Fal.  No-one expected being s-y-b to define you for life but Sorg is/would be (I’m a just don’t know on these things) so happy for you, it’s just so exactly on the grand scale, I mean what’s a border, a line in the sand or in this case a dirty great ravine, how he’d want it to be.
Love Karci.
I seemed to have forgotten about the grapevine.
Sarat to Fal:
Well, now, Fal-girl, and isn’t this is turn-up.  So glad for you both.  Maya would be so pleased. 
All our love.
I remembered I was a responsible adult citizen and reckoned Narak and Lattic and for that matter Senta would assume I stayed overnight in Carlin.  Text from Narak: Everything OK?  Everything, I replied, is just fine.
And so to bed.  I realized I felt shy.  Tet realized he felt shy.  Both of us realized each other felt shy but only one of us could say why we felt shy.
“As though it’s the first time,” said Tet. We flopped on the bed giggling and after a while stopped feeling shy.
Farce broke in again.  We wanted to go to the shrine, nab the first free mentor and just very quietly and privately get paired, but we still had to have witnesses and it would be good if they were people who mattered to us, not two stray Zuri hauled in off the street.  Reakoed and Maitlan were obvious, but that was only three-quarters of the Six. We have to have Mel and Hass.  And we had to have Cantilip and Venga.  Dual-nationality?  It’s a doddle.  This made ‘quietly and privately’ a bit problematic.  
“And Lattic and Narak,” I said.
Tet rang Mel.
               “What is the point of being King of Dabida if you can’t slip unnoticed in and out of your own shrine?”
               “Often wondered that,” said Mel.
               I knew this was the culmination of the conversation the five of them had been having ever since I ran off with Sorg and that nothing bar war or death would have kept them away.  I also realized that I didn’t really want this momentous occasion to see me clad in leggings and a T.
               I rang Narak.
               “Eek, darling, eek.  Of course we’ll  come!”
               “There’s a posh frock in the back of the wardrobe.  Dark blue.  Matching shoes.  Dark blue earrings.  Any make-up you can find!”
               “It shall be done!  Where are you?”
               Lattic brought a little posy of flowers from the garden.
               Narak grinned.
               “We nearly brought Benji but perhaps not.”
               “Benji,” I said firmly, “will be there in spirit.  No-one has had more of an earful from me than Benji!”
               I disappeared upstairs and duly emerged transformed.
               “Whew!” said Narak.  “Not seen you dressed up much.”
               “She is, isn’t she,” said Tet.  “Now, my lady Fal-girl, if you will do me the honour of accompanying me to the shrine.”
               “Nothing,” I said softly, “would or could please me more.”
               I am Falita Emery and I like it!
               We all crept, not really any other word for it, back to the house. I saw that a small but critical amount of catering had been fixed.  Maitlan examined a flagon of apple-stock.
               “I believe carlini live on the stuff?”
               Narak, Lattic and I produced a trio of most evil grins.
               But it wasn’t like a party and even less like a wedding-party.  It was much better than that: a family get-together.  I rapidly kicked off the posh shoes, which didn’t fit terribly well, but no-one would let me play hostess, so I reclined on the sofa I’d bloody well bought in a state of delirious contentment, with Tet beside me grilling Narak on the cultural scene in Carlin.  And schools.  And I grinned and said, hang on, we’re all foreigners!  Or honorary carlini as you prefer.  I think all three of us have roots.  Absolutely, said Lattic.  Hass grinned and said send them to the basket-weavers’.  The what? asked Tet.  What they call Simtian-Li, posh progressive.  As went there.  And me! Said Venga.  I looked up at Hass and he met my eyes and we both knew he’d avoided saying ‘what Sorg called’.  One day we’ll mention his name in normal conversation.  Not today.  Low-down on anything is in the village, Narak was saying.  Latest productions – director probably lives in the village!  It might have been the apple-stock but I pointed at Tet in mock-horror.  He has never been to the Rabbiters’!  Cantilip patted his hand.  Never mind, darling.  We can’t all be perfect.  For reasons I’d swear totally unknown to her, Tet and I creased.  She blinked.  Long story, I said.   The action is in Car-sandis, said Narak, but the nucleus is the village. 
The bell went.  Tet came back carrying a small box.
“PANTHER Courier Services. ‘Tis from Sarat.”
So everyone paused agog.
I opened it carefully.
In it was a huge translucent shimmering scarf.  The Leotard Look.  I laughed and cried at the same time as Tet carefully arranged it round my shoulders. But at the bottom of the box was a large book and I got all trembly again because I knew what it was.  It’s dark green leather with a clasp, the key still attached by a tiny chain.  I opened it and suddenly recovered myself, laughed, proudly displayed the front page.
               “You didn’t know we were talented calligraphers, did you!”
               This is Fal’s and Maya’s Unique Record of Everything
               But still only I knew just why this book.  I turned the pages slowly and carefully.  Had the pressed flowers survived the years?  Would they fall out?  There were poems meticulously transcribed. 
‘Love never dies.’  But that wasn’t it.  Birth-days.  I giggled remembering we argued about hyphenating it.  Maya was adamant: birth-day expressed the day you were born, not the anniversary thereof.  A snapshot had come loose and fluttered to the floor.  Sarat and Maya on the beach.  When we were six-freaking-teen and nothing could hurt us. Nothing can hurt us.  Nothing has hurt us.  Is that the last and craziest step of all? Mel picked up the picture and sat looking at it and it passed through me, but painlessly, others suffered, Fal, as much if not more.  Then there I was, six-freaking-teen, as drawn by Tet.  I showed him.  He said, Did I not always love you? And I knew that was the line of fire cutting through all the dross. Has anyone got a phone!  But no, what I wanted to say to Sarat was possibly beyond words but certainly not a public occasion.
               “It’s the same and it’s different,” I said.  “OK, I’ll make sense in a minute.”  Shall I?  I wanted to say nothing has changed, don’t you all see, nothing has changed.  Nothing real.  It was crazy.  The hell with that.  But Tet understood.
               “Should we not all go down to the beach?  Perhaps metaphorically speaking.”
               “Neither of us,” I said, very clearly, “none of us, wants today to be a public occasion.”
               Venga said softly: “Click, click, bloody click.”
               “Exactly,” I said, and laughed.  “Not sure where that gets us.”
               “I will not be trapped in my own home,” said Tet.
               “Ignore them,” said Cantilip.  “Perhaps they’ll go away.”
               “There are other things,” I said.  “People I haven’t told yet, people who matter to me.  Don’t want them to find out from bloody Glitz.”
               “Ah,” said Cantilip.
               “Then I tell them!” I said.  “It’s the same.  It’s different.  This party is moving to the Rabbiters’.” 
               “All or nothing,” said Mel.  “I wonder if Sarat can come.”
               “Is this mad or is this mad?”  Me.  Mel and Sarat both can command a decent amount of privacy if required, but I knew Mel knew what I knew: the party would not be complete in Zur.
               “I’m thinking,” said Tet, “it does not matter a damn what anyone else thinks this party is about.  We know what it’s about.”
               Small matter of explaining, I thought.  We’re not going to explain it.
               “It’s still not Batna-kri,” I said.  “The border.”
               “Fly,” said Mel.
               And so I stood in the drawing-room at the House and said, “This is my partner, Tet.  We’re going to live in Carlin.”
               Tet said only slightly mockingly: “It’s excellent work for the empire she does, I’m thinking.”
               “My dear girl,” said Saryulin.  “Welcome back.”
               “We’re having a party at the Rabbiters’.  Mel, Hass, all of us.  Mel’s there fixing it.”
               In due course Sarat arrived with Karci and Vrin.  If anyone thought, this is loony, OK, Fal’s got together with her ex, big-freaking deal, it’s a national event?  we didn’t care because we knew what this party was about.
               I teased As about not having ‘settled’ yet, and he said there is someone, she’s in Azt, so we’re keeping it very quiet.  Tell, tell, I said.  She’s an academic, translational philosophy, whatever that is, bit out of my depth, I confessed. 
               Finally I got two mins alone with Sarat.  I twirled my translucent chiffon.
               “Thank you.  Beyond words.”
               “Maya didn’t have much,” he said.  “Not in Kadun, left it all behind in Zur, but the few things that mattered to her I kept.” 
               I knew that also meant that Pietri and Caluna had borne the brunt of the horror of sorting through her things.  And that I was one of the things that had mattered to Maya.
               When I looked for Tet, he seemed to have vanished.  Ah well, can’t have gone far.
Unless he’s got lost!  I didn’t think Tet got lost.  When I saw him again he was drawing our party.                   Narak and Lattic insisted that they had their duty to Benji and we should stay at their place and house-hunt. There were one or two problems with this, like no clean knickers and still being dressed up.  Oh, and technically speaking we were in a foreign country without our passports.  While we were sure Sarat could smooth our path, we thought on the whole Mel could fly us all back to Zur. Tet went to his place and I to mine.  I tried to keep a straight face about what I was packing for my honeymoon – wax jacket and combat boots – and observed to myself that while I meaning we had not had a sexy undies thing I really thought I’d like something more interesting than white cotton but I could hop into Car-sandis for that. Then lost in conversation with Narak and Lattic I didn’t really notice how long Tet was taking to pack.  Then Tet arrived and Narak handed us the keys and observed the freezer was full so we shouldn’t be forced to pop into the village if it was ‘inconvenient’, and just for our convenience put a box of tea, coffee, bread, milk, butter and eggs in the car, and we were off.
               I knew Tet was in love with Narak’s as soon as he saw it, but all he said was, “Is this a style of building common in Carlin?”
               “Yes,” I said enthusiastically.  It’s curved.  Set a little forward from the trees, it follows the curve of the woods, and the roof is a single slope.  “Not nearly big enough for a family.  Hopeless as a studio.”
               “Ah, but the potential.”
               Once inside, he looked at the grate and grinned.
               “There is no Imperial Clean Air Act in Carlin?”
               “No-one thinks wood-smoke counts.”
               “In that case we must lay a fire.”
               “Logs are out the back,” I said.
               When finally we were reclining before a blazing hearth sipping coffee, he reached for his bag and carefully lay what I knew to be a drawing – it was between two sheets of cardboard – between us. 
He took my hand.
               “Hass showed me where Sorg’s grave is. I wanted to have a little talk with him. Nothing I’m sure he didn’t know already.”  I felt as if the world had stood still.  “I told him you were safe now.  I told him he was more than welcome at our party for is this not his place.  I told him indeed he was welcome at any time.  I told him a man or a woman can love two people equally and in life that is complicated but when one is dead it is not.  And then I told Sarat my conversation and he said, of course she’s here.”
               I was still suspended in time and space.
“Silly of me,” I said.  “I just knew our party could not be complete in Zur.”
Tet laughed,
“Are there not strange metaphysical questions there, all of which we shall ruthlessly ignore. ”  He looked mischievous.  “Duvi I think had a more mundane curiosity as to what is this man called Tet.  Of course my lady of Carlin does nothing so crude as the third degree.”
“Inevitable,” I said cheerfully.
 “And now I’ll show you.  And others.  A few select others.  Is there a scanner here?”
There were Mel and Vishtu and Cantilip and Karci and Sarat – and Maya sitting on a table and Sorg lounging in the doorway and in the middle of all of them me, and I haven’t gone through life not realizing I was good-looking but just possibly not that exquisitely, transcendently beautiful.  Then I realized we were all just slightly translucent.
“We weren’t exactly in Carlin, were we, any of us.  That’s why they could come.”
I knew now I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again.
We found the scanner.
Pilo and Sasala, Mardis, Vij and Sarsh, Pietri and Caluna.  Amida, Taja, Vax.  And Senta.
Subject: Our party
[image]  Tet and I paired today at the shrine in Zur.  At first we were going to be quiet and private, just Mel and Hass.  But that wasn’t right. We realized it was our party and went to the Rabbiters’. Tet drew it for all of us. We’re going to live in Carlin.
“Duvi gave me the names of some realtors,” Tet was saying.  “Shall we set to work?  I’ll make us some more coffee.”
Sarat, Saryulin, As, Karci, Vrin, Mel, Hass.
Subject: Our party
[image]
Sarat’s reply was instant, must have been one of the few ten second interludes in which he was sitting down.  Thank you.
Amida’s reply took longer to come.  Darling, Cho and I will treasure.  Long to meet your Tet, you must bring him to see us.
My dear, typed Pietri, if that was not so, then there was no point.
A number of other mails shot back and forth, which I didn’t know at the time.  The words ‘field effect’ occurred rather often.  Perhaps I should have mailed Kaminua.  The Rabbiters’ Rest, among other things in its long history the local for half an army, was not in or even particularly near the field and not noted for its ethereal nature.  But several things occurred to me all at once.  I followed Tet into the kitchen and stretched out against his back.
“Keep doing that.  Raises making coffee to another plane.”
I kissed the back of his neck, then whispered romantically in his ear, “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the inner and esoteric aspects of the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.”
I felt him grinning.
“A little, Fal, a little.”
“Would I be totally off-target if I said I can get really involved in the plans for the railways and you’d smile cheerfully and say Lido-extenders rule!”
His grin seemed to be spreading through the kitchen.
“But it’s not entirely true to say I don’t give a flying fuck about the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun!  We’re not living in that field, I’m telling you that much!  Our kiddies will be finding their own way not born half in another dimension or whatever it is.”
I buried my face in his hair and half-choked with laughter, then surfaced.
“So long as you know the lie of the land,” I said smoothly.  “How many?”
“That would be rather up to you, I’m thinking.”
“Don’t forget the studio will need an electrified fence.”
“That I’m thinking seriously.  A converted attic, a small retractable ladder?”
Later when we were slaving over hot Grid-sites the bell went.  Ridiculously, we felt surprised, as though nobody knew we were there. When Tet opened the door, there was no-one there, just (yet another) cardboard box of groceries, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh bread, cream.
“Look arter un own in Carlin,” I said.
“Looked after my Fal-girl.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “they looked after me.  Nothing fancy, mind, nothing embarrassing.”
We went early to bed, not, we thought, because we were particularly tired, but in fact we slept like only intermittently tactile logs way through to 10 the next morning.  It had been a rather exciting 24 hours. 
“Lunch at the Rabbiters’, I think,” said Tet.
Half a story.
Tet approached Vishtu, who was directing moving tables around.
“If you have a moment, I do not think I thanked you for our very fine party.”
“Pleasure all ours,” said Vishtu.
“As you may know, I draw, and I drew our party and I should like you to have that drawing.”
Vishtu slowly took it all in and smiled.
“Put it above the bar.”
Tet turned
“And now I’m thinking there’s someone we owe a drink, someone who kindly left us groceries.”
“’Course they were here,” said Barfanu.
Tet, I thought, brilliantly concealed his astonishment that all the Rabbiters had assumed Maya and Sorg were at our party.
“It is not, you understand,” he said to me after, “I am being patronizing.  It is not a usual response by any standard.  The field?”
“Barfanu,” I said softly, “thought it was perfectly sensible and reasonable for Sorg’s spirit to be looking after me.  The Rabbiters – they’ve been here for ever, seen it all – all the history of Carlin.  So any – experience of broadening of what is normal was first experienced centuries ago and passed down.  It is their normal.”  I was grinning at something else.  “You do know you’ve just become carlini.  Tet, all they need to know about you is you know Maya and Sorg were at the party.”