In the Hollow of Time

PART I

THE COLONY

The land was ours before

we were the lands.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people . . .

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living.

—Robert Frost

1

A LONE FIGURE EMERGES FROM the enclosed colony and makes his way over several miles of scorched earth toward the encircling hills. Where the land begins to rise, Yori Kashimoto follows what must once have been a riverbed. He loves the solid density of the terrain pushing back against his feet, even the heat on the soles of his hiking boots—enjoying the sense of being grounded.

The smooth channel ascending slowly between the jagged cliffs is strewn with river rocks polished by centuries of water rushing downward. The nearly black stones are lovely, irresistible to the touch but too hot in the blazing sun. Often on these excursions when he has found a camp for the night, he sits on a hillside overlooking the plateau, passing one of these stones back and forth in his hands, feeling the night-cool surface and the unearthly weight of the thing. Its sheer impenetrability presents a brute reality that the wanderer can measure himself against.

His treks into these hills satisfy curiosity and teach him to attend to whatever the blinding light of a desert sun gives to teach. Some two hundred yards farther up the riverbed he discovers, among clumps of dry weeds, a fissure in the rock just wide enough to slip through. A turn left reveals a path winding steeply upward over a surface not worn smooth by erosion. But the sharp, uneven ground sheltered from the scorching heat must be navigated with care. Eventually, the crevice terminates at a small opening that might be the mouth of a cave.

Poking his head inside, he sees nothing. Hours in the sun have blinded him to the darkness. Proceeding by touch rather than sight, he enters, sets his backpack down, and waits. Spreading himself out, back and arms and hands, against the welcoming cool of the wall, he watches a wide chamber slowly materialize in the dimness. It’s a strain to make out the shape of the place. Roughly oval walls fading back and upward into obscurity offer little clue to how big the room may be, but stalactites of various lengths bear witness to the presence of water eons past.

As vision clears, a few details emerge. On the side opposite his resting place strange markings extend from the floor upward into the dark. Approaching them, he touches one of the figures on the smooth surface and discovers that they aren’t random and not on the surface at all. They are in it. Scratched, etched into the wall with a tool. Not figures but words! Impossible words, in Arabic letters! His heart races and breathing stops as he staggers under a sensation of some nameless threat as though nature itself had turned capricious.

Struggling to calm himself, he extends a trembling hand to the wall, and forces the decision that, even here, what looks like stone and feels like stone must be stone. However uncanny, words are words and nature is nature still. Rubbing his hand along the wall, he finds etchings by the dozens, the works and words of human hands where humans have never been. His heart outruns the blind finger as he traces one of the dim figures like a blind man reading Braille. It’s a name: Plato! They, these engravings, all seem to be names. Names extending right, left, and upward beyond reach, into the dark.

Why the growing sense of terror? If discovering the Chauvet Cave paintings could astound a world, what’s to be said about stumbling onto human names in a cave on an unpeopled planet orbiting a distant star on an outer edge of the Milky Way?

For some minutes Yori remains rigid, staring dumbly at the wall in front of him. Then a human voice—where there can be no voice—a woman’s voice: Are you one of the Eternals?

It’s not clear where the sound comes from, resonating from wall to wall. He turns around slowly, straining to find an impossible cause for an impossible effect. Eventually, twenty yards away, nearly opaque in the depth of shadow, he detects a human figure in lotus position, motionless on an outcropping of rock.

Excuse me. Who are you? The preposterous ricocheting of his own trembling voice through the cavern adds to his alarm. The startling timbre, pitched in a tone that doesn’t coincide with who he recognizes himself to be, serves as a pinch to prove it isn’t all a dream.

Do you live in the surplus of time or from one moment to the next? Each phrase, uttered slowly, fills the cavern with quiet authority. Do you belong to the living or the dead? The words make no sense as they die away into the stillness but leave the barest residue of sense behind.

Instead of replying, he stands spellbound by wonder in the middle of the cave. Long before founding the colony, explorers from the mother ship discovered that there were few indigenous life forms more advanced than flora on Planet 2314. So, what is this? Hallucination? Rational beings underground who have somehow escaped detection? Survivors of a cosmic disaster that dried up the surface millennia ago? Or if the dim scene before him isn’t real, is he still sane? Perhaps she, this woman, is a simulacrum and not human at all.

That possibility might strike deeper terror into his heart, but the tone of the voice precludes terror. He’s accustomed to conversing with virtual presences of people long dead, sitting across the table in a seminar room—at least it’s called conversing—but this is not the Academy, and there is no way information systems could find their way into the heart of these barren hills. Besides, no one but he ever ventures outside the colony except on closely monitored research assignments.

If not a simulation, then might she, this woman, be a life-form from elsewhere, able to assume human shape and imitate his language? If so, she is—they are—uncannily good at it, better than any virtual system he knows, at matching tone with gesture and facial expression. And where would they have found models to imitate?

The eyes now—her eyes—indistinct in the dim light, have the depth of human eyes and convey the obligation to respond as if she were human. He finds it impossible to doubt that he’s addressed by a sentient rational being.

At least he responds as if it were true and asks again, Who are you?

Paola. One of the Eternals. The tone is slightly mocking yet she speaks darkly, out of a depth of understanding like that of an old Zen master he once knew in a book. Could she be reading his memory and assuming the role?

I don’t understand anything you say. If you are real, where do you come from?

I’ve watched you, crossing the plateau and exploring the hills. Sometimes you remain for two days and sleep in the open or under the shelter of a warm rock. You are one of the wanderers but not like the others. Whether these remarks are intended to unnerve the student further or to prepare for something still more mysterious—either way they work.

A student, he replies, as though to clarify his identity.

What do you study?

History. He speaks it hesitantly, this word that feels too light for the occasion, as though the commonplace turns incomprehensible on the end of his tongue.

What is history?

He replies cautiously, maintaining his composure. History is the study of the past, what happened before.

"So, they still have nothing to teach at your Academy." The voice seems to convey disappointment.

Once more he stares and begins his conjectures again. Machines can be programed to imitate human feeling, but even the latest programs leave a flatness of affect amid disheartening clichés. If you listen carefully, you can detect the artificiality of nothing understood, when the timing of responses is off, or a metaphor is taken as literal, or the tone doesn’t rise or fall at just the right instant. Processing rather than understanding. People may call it artificial intelligence, but for one accustomed to reading care in the face and the eyes of another, it’s hard to mistake all that for the indifference of no-one-there. Impossible. Impossible as it is for anyone to be in this place, Yori concludes that if he is not facing a person, he must behave as if he were. So he repeats his question, Who are you?

That’s hard to say. She slips from her rock and moves with a grace beyond deliberation toward the darkness at the back of the cave. A human motion, unhurried and soundless in the cloistral silence, but without the distortions of androids. Elegant even in a homespun shift that can only result from long human culture or its effective simulation. But which? And whose?

Without looking back, she gestures for him to follow into a low corridor. The seeker of light hesitates to accept the invitation into the dark, then corrects himself and takes a step forward. When she extends a hand, he stares at it as though it were an unfamiliar, even threatening object. But she waits, leaving the hand in the air until he summons the courage or suffers embarrassment enough to accept. It’s warm and familiarly human, that hand, except for an unfamiliar roughness. Then she leads down a steep and winding way into darkness as deep as the unthinkable void before creation.

Yori is accustomed to degrees of darkness and light but not degree zero. The starship is a bubble of continuous light swallowed up in endless dark made visible by a million pinholes of light in the heavens. The colony is another such bubble of visibility, though designed to protect against the assault of too much light from a desert sun.

This is different. Descending into the earth along a labyrinth that twists and turns through vaulted passageways too narrow for two to pass abreast—this is darkness absolute. Impenetrable darkness of impenetrable earth. Yet there are things only visible in the degree zero of light. Sight denied, Yori’s attention is drawn to the very capacity to see. And the earth itself is illuminated as something more and something darker than an object one may look at from a distance and make use of. Sitting on top of the plateau or tramping through the hills, he is on but never immersed in and belonging to earth. But here, descending blindly through the arteries of the planet, its substance impinges on him as bodily presence without distance.

Though eyes are useless, the way is smooth underfoot and the sounds of rocks moved by moving feet take the measure of the spaces. He can feel the walls move away and hear the width and height of corridors opening intermittently into larger chambers. Everything seems more closely related by being only heard and felt and yet the way down is so meandering that his usually keen sense of direction deserts him. Only a nameless something in the touch of a guiding hand and in the unwitting trust in the authority of a voice holds him within bounds.

Eventually, somewhere in the heart of earth, the way ends in a large cavern where, far above, a cleft in the rock formation offers a meager glow of natural light. After the eclipse of the descent, Yori is arrested by the fact of light itself, though in the dimness he can just make out the shape of the open space. The woman drops his hand and, leaving him in place, moves forward to a central hearthstone where the smoldering remains of a fire lend a domestic touch to the underground chamber.

Slowly the room assumes the shape of a larger oval perhaps eighty feet long and half as wide. There is light enough to study the setting, but it’s his hostess—or his captor—who dominates his interest, moving about her simple chores with a grace beyond the reach of anyone he knows. If she is adopting his form by some alien power, then why a form so natural yet so palpably unlike his?

She must be older than he by two decades and quite different in appearance. Unlike his slight, Japanese physique clad in the uniform of the colonial student—black hair, long oval face, wide eyes, pronounced nose, less tall than his friends of European heritage—all quite different from her. The brown eyes almond-shaped, the long, straight dark hair falling to the shoulders, olive skin—all these might be Etruscan in one who is neither tall nor stout but sturdy and maternal in a simple country dress.

In the neighborhood of so much mystery Yori is attentive to every detail. The more closely he observes, the greater his suspicion of depth. Everything about her reveals a scope of human culture for which she could have found no model for imitation in the colony or even on the starship, and she could have known neither of these by natural means.

As the narrow light from above is rapidly fading, he extends his search for clues to the chamber itself. The other caves he passed along the descent into this netherworld sounded empty, but this one, large as it is, does not feel empty. A smooth floor and relatively smooth walls with ledges and fissures here and there give the feeling of being lived in.

He takes the liberty of moving about, tentatively exploring natural forms in the shadows. There are piles of coarse fabrics neatly folded on tables of rock along the walls. The singular cleanliness suggests a disciplined but simple life of some duration. Along the right wall he touches outcroppings that might serve for sleeping, and random formations jutting up in the floor like aboriginal furniture.

As the woman occupies herself at the hearthstone, he moves across the open space to the left wall where rows of plants resembling fungus grow in the hollows of the rock as though cultivated. The longer he looks the stronger the impression of a human dwelling space. Nothing has been explained, but the orderliness, along with her earlier speech and behavior, are consistent with rationality as he knows it. That fact helps quiet the turbulence of his spirit, and yet the effect of each art and of the whole exceeds anything in his experience.

This is the Chamber of the Hearth, she says, as though introducing him formally to a living being. The Rule of the Hearth governs here. That only deepens the mystery, but she seems oblivious of the effect. Then in response to his question about her identity, Your question will take time. To learn the answer, you will stay. We will eat together. Then you will sleep here.

These clipped remarks are not invitations. They fall somewhere between indifferent facts and commands. It isn’t her terse words that unnerve him and not her manner, but her indifference to such things and her peculiar way of watching and listening. The eyes don’t so much meet his as rest on him, not bold, but attentive and indifferent, asking nothing, revealing nothing, as though he were transparent, and she were seeing right through. The uncommon stillness as she moves, her soft gaze, and the hypnotic authority of the voice—all these hold him in awe, neither terrified nor at ease. It’s not as though she’s a shell with no interiority but as though she’s quite human with a more than human interior and more than human perception. Somehow he feels accused. Not as a criminal in the dock is accused but accused in an older sense of being understood by a power that sees and exposes the tendency of his own being.

Without further words, she sets about collecting a meal from materials he doesn’t recognize. Vegetable all, chopped and cooked in some kind of oil like a stir-fry. Without asking, she goes through his bag of scant camping supplies and takes seasonings to add to the pan on the hearth fire. The curious thing is that she knows what she needs and is familiar with the uses.

Meanwhile she appears to forget all about him as though enclosed animal-like in the moment, unlike the animal, she is clearly aware of being-in the moment. The quality of her attention excludes everything in the vicinity except the task at hand, though Yori still feels that intelligence saturating the surrounding space. If he were so much as to glance into a crack in the wall behind her, busy as she is, she would know.

With a single gesture she shows him where to sit, and they eat together in silence, he perched on a small rock on one side of the hearthstone, she on the floor opposite, legs crossed like a female Buddha. It’s a strange moment where nothing is ordinary, yet a strangely relaxed moment. The grace of her every motion and gesture, the eloquence of every phrase, the tasty food, the orderliness of the cavern itself—all these speak a human language and a culture spontaneous and ingrained. Every imaginable way of accounting for her being unlikely, he might as well believe he’s sharing the meal with a chthonic priestess at Eleusis. And yet between himself and her, if one of them is real and the other not, then surely it is she who is the real thing.

The silence of the cavern is also unnerving. He has known only three places in his life: the starship where he was born, the terrestrial colony where he has lived for nearly a year, and the surface of these hills that he visits as often as his studies allow. On the ship and in the colony, there is always a background hum of machinery so that in the hills he relishes the stillness, but this underground world lost in the hush of interstellar space is as silent as its night is dark and eerie to the point of alarm. Her not speaking adds another degree and a different quality of silence that makes his ears buzz. In the middle of it all he meets a gaze across the hearth that openly studies him. The idea dawns that she may know him better than he knows himself, and for that, he needs her.

During the meal she remains nearly as still as the surrounding stones, as though observing him by superhuman power, studying the slow relaxing of a troubled mind. The disinterest of that attention has the odd effect of separating him from himself and leaving an interval between. Or is he moving gradually closer to the moment of trust when he will be able to say here what he needs to say that cannot be said in the colony? Closer as well to the moment when he will be ready to hear things unimaginable in return.

When they have finished the simple meal, she announces, Now you will stay the night. She gestures for him to bring the rustic utensils to a stone basin at one side of the room where they are washed and restored to their places. Then she lights a reed torch at the hearth fire and leads him to the stone ledge in the far wall. Spreading a straw mat, she says, Now you will sleep. When you wake, you may ask one question. One only. And she moves away, leaving him in the dark.

It’s pointless to try to sleep after all that has happened, and yet his second thought is a flood of light from somewhere above. Waking from a sleep so deep and dreamless that for several moments he can’t place himself, he sees the light come to rest on a stone in the middle of an open floor. The first thing that rushes in on a storm tide of memory is the moment of terror before the wall of names. It’s a return of the suspicion that nature might be arbitrary after all, but if it were, could he have been there to mark the fact? What lingers, the idea borne in on him with the morning light, is that reality might be discontinuous, broadly consistent but not governed by a reliable chain of causes.

In the middle of a reflection that would never again be far from his mind, the mystery woman approaches with a cup of something that comes hot and fresh. Now that you have slept, what is your one question?

Is he intended then to decide in advance what he most wants to know? Having lost yesterday’s odd instruction in the swarm of uncanny impressions, he can’t think where to begin. I don’t know what to ask.

Without giving him time, she replies, Another time then. Another casual remark in circumstances where nothing can be casual.

Not daring to contradict her, he lets the moment pass. I have to get back to the colony. I have a seminar today.

Promptly she relights the torch, puts a piece of blue fruit into his hand, and summons him back through the caves the way they had come. The descent into the dark earth, however mysterious, had been easy enough. But ascent along the same path is anything but easy. The angle is much sharper than the riverbed outside rising from the plateau into the hills. Following her once again into complete darkness secures a discovery only half-understood a few hours earlier. If the denial of sight had opened his eyes to the capacity for sight itself, it is not sight alone. By some means, whether sound or touch or smell, he senses the woman moving silently ahead. He feels the distance between, the angle of ascent, even the twists and turns in the corridors—sensations without organs of sensation—as though the two were connected by a magnetic tether or other immaterial line of communication. Not vision alone then that is clarified by perception withheld, but the possibility of sensation itself as he feels the earth around him expanding or contracting into chambers of various size.

Back in the first cave he stops to rest. In a flood of inscrutabilities so numerous and disorienting that they don’t yet add up to experience, he has forgotten about the names. Remembering now, he stops and gestures involuntarily toward the wall. The being calling herself Paola passes him the torch and he walks slowly up and down letting the light fall across the surface. Touching the inscriptions with a finger, he reads one random name after another: Confucius, Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Zhuangzi, Euclid, Jesus, Mozart, Einstein, and on and on, astonishment growing with every step. Poets, philosophers, scientists, heroes—a who’s who of human achievement.

He bursts out, But these are Ulro names! They can’t be here!

Here you’re in the hollow of time. Where would you expect to find the Immortals but in the underworld?

Instead of explaining, she takes the torch from him and walks toward the entrance and the daylight. You may come when you like. When you do, you may ask one question. Only one. Don’t squander it.

Extinguishing the torch, she reverses her steps, and disappears into the darkness, leaving him in a crevice on a lone hillside.

2

REELING FROM THE EFFECT of so many mysteries and so little understanding, Yori begins the descent along the arid channel where a stream had once flowed into a freshwater lake, now the desert plateau. Here and there a few scruffy plants add a touch of green to the brown landscape. One who has seen a verdant world only in reproductions and the contrived landscapes of starship greenhouses barely feels the desert as deprivation. And yet the idea of barrenness accompanies the sensations of solid ground underfoot and endless sky overhead. Given the leisure to think, many things of this sort might have come to mind but, as he stumbles downward, the bewildering events of a day and a night leave no space for such ideas.

The encounter with whatever she was—chthonic prophetess or goddess or other species of alien, tending her impossible underworld of sacred names—has turned his world upside down. Strange utterances, adding up to nothing, have disrupted a safe and secure life and left him unacquainted with himself. And yet why, when he should be happy to have made his escape, why the unaccountable feeling of exhilaration? It’s like having been awakened from a lifelong sleep and finding himself transformed by a momentary dream without content. As though he had lived his former life on a monotonous plain, then wandered into unknown heights and stumbled into unimaginable depths of experience. The effect in the yellow morning light is of having been exposed by less than a thought to a precariousness at the source of things. As the heat begins to rise from the surface of Planet 2314, these inchoate sensations gather to a point of conviction: There is a task to be performed but no hint of what the task might be.

As Yori emerges from between two ridges onto the desert floor, the transparent vaults and domes of the colony squatting in the distance appear as a cloud of vapor dissolving slowly in the rising light. Taking its signal from the flat earth, his mind goes blank, and in the hour it takes to reach the northern gate he trudges mechanically along without idea or purpose.

Through an unused airlock monitored only by unused surveillance cameras, he passes into the climate-controlled shell. It may look small from the distance of the hills but inside it’s as spacious as a small town. Between his entrance and Government Square where the New Academy is, he passes through several zones that describe the social structure of the settlement. First, a sector that in another place and time would have been called industrial. It’s the part he likes least and usually ignores, but today, being so unsettled, he feels the need to reorient himself to life in the colony.

Ambling attentively through this outermost zone, ignored twenty-four hours earlier, he passes into the neighborhoods of the Providers who make and distribute necessary goods and services. It’s a residential circle lined on either side of the streets—more paths than streets—with identical row houses, neat cubes of cookie-cutter uniformity. The colors have been selected to balance daylight heat with nighttime cold rather than for aesthetic effect. Similarly, the neat and clean passageways, that, to the eye of a historian evoke dim memories of the narrow urban streets of medieval Ulro, are reduced here to a tightly woven grid. Occasionally he steps aside to let a small cart pass on its daily round of deliveries. Everything in sight is plain and serviceable, nearer historical Bauhaus than Baroque but more ephemeral. The residences and intermittent squares look different from yesterday. It’s as though the life here, for all its high-tech luster, is smaller than Yori remembers. And has lost something of its reality.

After the neighborhoods of the Providers comes the district occupied by the Professionals and the Governors who run the various departments. Their lodgings too are row houses built on the same utilitarian plan except that they consist of two cubes vertically stacked. There are traces of architectural style: shallow front porticoes flanked by shuttered windows on either side and doubled in the upper story. The hierarchical class system inherited from the starship is elastic but firmly based on achievement. In an environment where amenities are limited to need without luxury, the few perquisites of this second residential district are thought to provide incentives to excellence.

It takes only a few minutes to walk from the north entrance to Government Square at the center of the