Leviathan Falls

Interlude: The Dreamer

The dreamer falls purposefully into dream and dream and dream, swimmingly layer on layer on layer on the abyss. She is threefold, and one still missing, and the dream tells her about the unfolding across the emptiness and of the light of stars and cells and minds, the flicker that draws them like songs and kisses because their kisses were all light. The ones that don’t feel the stars calling fall out of the dream, and the rest become wise and broad and fuller than the old ocean, comfortable in the vacuum with only their own slow heat to warm them.

Yes, the dreamer dreams like swimming with the tide, but the gates. How did the gates happen?

Grandmothers whisper in voices that have never known teeth. Look here, I will tell you everything. Look here, to where the light becomes everything, look how the light learns to think.

Yes and yes and yes, but the gates. The darkness. How did the end come?

Light itself fractures like an old woman holding out a glass bead, inviting a child’s marveling eyes. Look what light can do! Look how rich it can be! Isn’t it prettyful and beautisome? And don’t you want to eat it all up so it can eat you and expandingcontracting fullness of the bloom?

But the gates. The gates. And the things at the end.

Grandmothers smile and smilingly nod, noddingly smile and the dream shifts like a kick in the face. The rich light diffracts, and there are holes in the spectrum. Infinite holes of more than darkness between the light that’s more than light. The dreamer chokes. Reality splits her open like vomiting or orgasm or seizure and the grandmothers hold the glass bead that had her head in it and it wants to explode.

Is she okay? Do we pull her out?

Not yet.

A new physics falls into place all through the dream. Yes yes yes, the monkeys began with the parabolic arc of stone through air, and they learned everything in that order that isn’t the dream or the dreamer, that’s the one in blue. The light began swimmingly, with the caress of waters and salts, and its first chapter was different and its second a second difference and its fullness a different fullness, with fingernails in the cracks between this and the permanent outside.

The grandmothers say look look look how it all happened once and all happens again. The cold roof of the world broke open and gave the stars. The vacuum shatters in the same way and shows the outside, the older real, the vaster real.

The body of God. The heaven where the angels all hate us.

The dreamer feels herself shaking, feels herself losing bladder and bowel control. Don’t wake me up don’t wake me don’t wake don’t.

You wanted to know is I did and I do.

A new physics gives new problems and the problems ticklingly new dreams. A second crash outward, a new efflorescence, a vaster self. And the toolbox was the toolbox: co-opting fast life to bring what makes it rich, sending out what will or may one day return with presents for the grandmothers who cast them free, and the vast patience of the ones who are too cold and too slow and too wide to ever die, too sudden for time to touch. A bubble blown into the holes in the spectrum and a thousand thousand thousand seeds sent like kisses to the singing poet stars. And then…

The dreamer flickers. The body someplace starts to fail, and she feels something deeper than dream opening under her. All that begins will end, and the end is clearing its throat in the hallway. Bring me up. Bring me up bring me up bring me up.

What is this? the blue one says, and the dreamer pushes away, but it isn’t her dream anymore. The grandmothers cackle and run, trailing her in their thousand fingers. And the echo says Sorry. Didn’t mean to drag you in here. Just try and relax. But it isn’t speaking to her.

A nucleus in a vast atom, and the burning clockwork at its heart. The power of a million suns harvested from the older universe. Yes yes yes, the blue one says. I see now. Show me how this works, and the grandmothers do.

She’s seizing.

Pull her out.

And the blue one puts a gentle hand on her head and holds her lovingly underwater. A system goes dark, a few voices out of quadrillions go silent. A hundred systems. They go to war, and the war fails, but show me where you buried the guns. And the grandmothers gigglingly do.

Yes, the blue one says. Yes. That’s what I needed.

Thank you.