Down to a Sunless Sea

24 The Dream Festival

So it was that the travelers took up lodgings in the palace of Prince Azuri, and it was a rather casual arrangement. In a day or two, Brant arranged things so that he and Zuarra could share one of the cubicles, while Agila and little Suoli found another. Doc Harbin roomed by himself, except when little Aulli shared with him.

As for Tuan, he and the warriors of his band kept strictly to themselves. And, even as the desert chieftain had promised Brant, he did keep his men under tight rein lest they offend the Sea People.

Brant and his companions were free to wander about as they wished, and spent hours exploring the quaint raft-city. Will Harbin was fascinated by the method with which the golden children extracted their glassy metal from the luminous waters of the underground ocean, and reported to Brant—in a rather bewildered fashion—that he simply could not understand how it was managed.

“They pour seawater into huge ceramic urns,” he said, and added, puzzled, “Something causes the nodules of glassy metal to precipitate on the bottoms of these urns, from which they scrape up the stuff periodically. It comes out in a gummy form, which they then deposit in molds where it hardens, somehow—into metallic form. But don’t ask me how they do it! Frankly, Jim, I’m wondering if science back Earthside hasn’t been wrong all these centuries about alchemy. …”

The boy Kirin came by one day to invite Brant on a “fishing” trip. Zuarra was curious to find out what the lad meant, so they both accompanied the child down to the wharfs, where a merry gang of young people were set to leave.

They had no boats, but something like long fibrous pontoons strapped to their feet, and they moved out to sea by the use of long paddles. Zuarra, to whom the sea was still a fearful and a marvelous thing, decided to stay behind, but watched anxiously as Brant paddled out with the youngsters. He was awkward at maintaining his balance, at which the children hooted and cried, but out of mischief, not from malice.

And suddenly, a swarm of sea-slugs made the surface of the ocean boil. Merrily boasting, the children snagged these with lassoes fastened on the end of short rods, and scooped the wriggling creatures out of the water, tossing them in rattan baskets they wore strapped to their backs. Brant was nowhere near as agile at this as were the youngsters, who had, of course, been accustomed to this form of sport all their young lives.

Brant was curious as to how the children knew where the slugs would rise to the surface, and when. He asked Kirin about this, for by this time he had mastered the local language sufficiently to converse in simple words.

The boy looked puzzled.

“We do not know when they will come, or where,” the boy said. “We—make—them come.”

“How do you do that?” demanded Brant.

Kirin touched his forehead, exactly between and about an inch above his eyes.

“With the niothya, of course! How else?”

This word was new to Brant and was not a part of his rudimentary grammar of the tongue of the Sea People. But just about then the fishing got so busy that he decided to explore the matter later, once things had quieted down.

Once the baskets were full, the fishermen returned to Zhah, and Zuarra was heartily relieved to see that Brant had not been harmed by his dreadful exposure to this strange new element called “water.”

Later, when Brant told Will Harbin about the enigmatic niothya, the old scientist admitted he had never heard of it.

“Sounds like telepathy, to me,” he said skeptically. “Another old superstition, long exploded back on Earth. But … well, why not? First alchemy, now mind-reading—or mind-control, or whatever. I’ll have to start believing in necromancy and black magic next, I suppose!”

As things turned out, that very evening they learned more of this mysterious niothya power. Aulli and Kirin came to inform them that they were all invited to a festival, which Prince Azuri was holding in honor of the visitors.

“Sounds all right to me,” Brant said amiably. “What sort of a festival is it?” He presumed they had in mind a lot of singing, and dancing, and plenty to eat; but you never could be sure with these lazy, naked people, who entered into amours so casually, and walked away from them at the first signs of boredom.

They might have meant an orgy, and he didn’t think Harbin would enjoy that sort of thing.

“Of the niothya,” the children said in chorus, and left the room. Harbin and Brant exchanged a glance of interest.

“Now perhaps we’ll find out what all this mumbo-jumbo is about,” declared the scientist.

That evening they ate in their cubicles, as servants brought succulent dishes on wicker trays to where they all were staying. After the meal, Kirin and Aulli came to fetch them to the festival, and they came to a very large hall which they had not seen before, where rows of benches climbed the walls in tiers, not unlike the bleachers at a sports event.

Taking the places of honor which had been reserved for them, the travelers glanced about curiously, wondering what was about to happen.

“Shall we begin the Festival of Dreams now, O Prince?” inquired one personage who seemed to be acting in the capacity of master of ceremonies on this occasion. Prince Azuri, who was cuddling and whispering with a tall, long-legged girl with pointed breasts like ripe pears, and whom Brant had been given to understand was the Prince’s latest lover, nodded distractedly.

With an impressive gesture that seemed to command silence, the master of ceremonies, Hathera, seated himself in the center of the arena on a plump cushion. Kirin, who sat at Brant’s left, slipped his small hand into the Earthsider’s big paw.

“We must all join hands now,” the boy informed him. His bright eyes were alive with excitement and anticipation. Brant didn’t understand why, but nodded, and took the hand of Zuarra, who sat at his right. After all, when in Rome… .

Silence fell as the throng ceased whispering and chatting. The quality of the silence was not strained exactly—not one of breathless suspense—but rather calm, placid, serene. Brant wondered to himself if they were supposed to pray.

Then Zuarra gasped, and stiffened, and Brant’s jaw dropped in amazement. For out of sheer nothingness formless colors appeared. Lambent haloes and streamers and shapeless blurs floated, wound, or drifted. Lilac, pink, cream, orange, lavender, amber, puce, mauve—it was as if the elves had ransacked a rainbow for its loveliness, and were invisibly strewing its luminous treasures on the empty air.

Brant looked around at the nearer faces; all were rapt, expectant, almost ecstatic. Will Harbin was staring dumbfounded, his jaw slack. Tuan sat stiffly, bristling with stern disapproval at this unnatural sorcery. Brant let his gaze return to the center of the arena, where in mid-air the colors were still forming.

The luminous hues strengthened, becoming brighter in color and beginning to shape themselves into definite forms. Some were things like blossoms, which reminded Brant of the flowerlike handicrafts which festooned the rafters of the throne room. Others were like lucent bubbles that floated to and fro. One such bubble began to chase the others and they fled from his rush, forming a long train of flying spheres that wound around the pillars which supported the roof, in and out of the rafters, causing the younger children to burst into giggling while the older people watched the lovely game with smiling faces, nodding judiciously, as if applauding an artistic performance of some sort. Which was probably exactly what the Festival of Dreams was, after all.

The bolder and more aggressive bubble, unable to catch any of the timid, fleeing ones, paused hovering in the middle of the room and began to blow itself bigger and bigger, as it were. The larger it grew in girth, the fainter became its color—which, by the way, was mauve.

As the tint dimmed, an opalescent display of fleeting shades and admixtures and permutations of color crawled across the surface of the expanding sphere, reminding Brant and Harbin of the wealth of hues sunlight strikes from the oily scum that floats on the surface of water in the gutters of streets.

Zuarra—and many others, too—gave voice to a gasp as the expanding sphere suddenly exploded in a gush of many-colored sparks that fountained into the air and fell back again in curving, graceful streamers. Hers had been a gasp of alarm, however, while the others had gasped at the beauty of the thing.

Like a cloud of fireflies, the shower of sparks collected, formed a whirlpool that slowly revolved, a wheeling vortex formed of minute points of pure light that looked like nothing more than models of the galaxy which Brant had seen back in Nebraska as a boy.

The belt of sparkling light began to revolve faster and faster, sucking up and absorbing all of the other light-shapes in the arena, the floating flowerlike forms, the shapeless blurs, and even the shy bubbles which still lurked or lingered among the rafters of the ceiling.

Now—rousing a concerted murmur of pleasure from the audience—the vortex came apart in long, meandering streamers composed of particles of light. These wove about the room, forming incredible arabesques of sinuous, interweaving complexities that would defy description. Bands of different colors flickered through the weaving spirals in a sequence that began with deepest crimson, then carmine, brick-red, warm pink and so on throughout the spectrum of the colors visible to the human eye, ending in the deepest of violets.

At which point the lights winked out and the show, it seemed, was ended. A thunder of delighted applause crashed like surf upon the head of the master of ceremonies, Hathera, who now could be seen as rather the artist who had orchestrated the display. He bowed deeply, beaming with smiles at the success of his exhibition.

The crowd rose, broke up in groups, and went into adjoining rooms to sample liqueurs from trays already laid out and awaiting them, to discuss among themselves excitedly the quality of the work they had seen.

“That was … niothyal” asked Brant in an awed whisper of Kirin.

“It was niothya,” the boy nodded solemnly.