The storm passed. The living things in the garden slowly begin to call out to another once again.
Just as Taxchan is getting back into the groove of leaning, biting, chewing, swallowing - occasionally honking into the air - leaning, biting, chewing, swallowing, leaning . . . the sky ripples and accumulates into a fold, like a rug kicked aside. He rears upon his hind legs again and looks to the endocellular heavens. A cloud drifts away and a pore is revealed in the photocytic membrane of the sky. Protoplasm collects around the rim of the pore, and as the plasmic condensate begins to get too massive to cling it fall in one disgustingly mucous-like drop.
It lands on the mass of ferns that Taxchan has been chewing on, and spreads into a watery blue pancake. It picks up bits of fern and soil and rock as it pulls itself into an erect shape and forms a shell of fibrous photocell around itself. It settles into a humanoid form. This new man born of Mu Merai looks to the heavens and waits.
Taxchan strains to be polite. It is, from the point of view of an Iguanodon bernissartensis, difficult and, anyway, redundant to be polite – iguanodons are rarely offensive. But the surprise of a visitor from beyond deep space – one as obviously unique and rare as himself – seems to demand a special level of courtesy.
Taxchan's sinuses balloon slightly from either side of his face. He honks loudly to announce himself and then in a deep hooty voice asks, “Tea?” The visitor looks a little like a human – though composed of cellular materials, soil, and plants – and the only humans that Taxchan has ever known were great drinkers of tea. Those were the Nunnings and their ilk, whose tsaiophilia was an antidote to loneliness that helped to prevent conflict in their society.
The man of Mu Merai shakes his head gently and explains, “I’m waiting.” His voice is surprisingly high-pitched and has a strange submersed quality to it.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Death riding a storm.”
“I felt that too,” Taxchan says. “Death is not coming now.”
The soil-and-protoplasm man stops and looks to the dinosaur. “It has already passed?”
“I think it is worse than death . . . Yes. I think that it will come again, but not right now.”
“Then my calculations were wrong.” The man’s fern-leaf brows furrowed.
“It is not bigger than death,” the iguanodon continues, enjoying the chance to converse, “it is not like extinction. It is more profound than death, a different kind of end. Beyond death. I do not know what it is.” He chews on a tough, thick fern-bush stem. As an afterthought, he adds, “Who are you? My name is Taxchan Choth.”
“It is much more profound than death, yes. It is more profound than nothing. It is something that cannot be named. I am called Golem now.” The creature looks to the sky again, “It is after the end of existence and before the beginning. The small rip took a part of me, and now I wish to tear it wide so that it may have all of me.”
He swallows a mouthful of gingko. “Suicidal?” A stem snaps in his cheek and the dinosaur gets an idea. “Did you tear it open?” he asks Golem. “Did you make the sacrifice?”
“No, I have glimpsed it once, and now I follow, trying to arrive at its destination before it does.” Things were swirling around inside its body. “Do you know to which dimension it left? Otherwise I must stay here, and decipher why this place was chosen, so that I may find it again.”
“So it moves across universes? No I don't know about that. You are welcome to stay here, it is a refuge for the all-but-gone,” Taxchan says, wondering if the Golem might fit in with the other creatures. Reminded of the Gardens, he continues, “But none of the living things out there –” he gestures with his mitten-like foreclaw “– are to be harmed. Tread carefully on the grass, and eat not the fruit.”
Apparently the idea is new to the Golem. “I haven't time to stop to harm them, I must seek the un-making before it flees too far from me.”
A few minutes pass before Taxchan thinks of another question. “How far will this unmaking go?”
Golem begins to conjure complex dimensional maps and equipment from thin air. Glass-like holograms hover in front of him – floating charts and equations – strange curled pieces of metal that could be shells or instruments. The iguanodon chews thoughtlessly on a cycad leaf and watches the newcomer stroke the charts like animals and manipulate numbers. “The end comes to all things,” he says, “Who knows how far it will go. It needs no herald – I merely seek to meet my end sooner.”
Willing to help, Taxchan explained his own experiences with death, extinction, and waiting. He tells Golem of his eons in the underworld.
Golem’s answer is completely dismissive, “It will not take me.” He moves his panels of light around him – numbers to the sides, circular charts to the back, galactic maps to the fore – and takes up a compass. “Nothing has, nothing can. Only this storm. And it only took such a small part. The afterlife, is but another form of life. It is not what I seek.”
“No.” Taxchan is certain that it is not life, nothing like life at all, to degenerate and eventually fade away. But there are few beings that one could meet, even in deep space, that have been dead. And it is true that Ewewawa, the giant around which Mu Merai hung in orbit, is not part of the Numenskal Alliance, and does not have beings on it that are aware of existence of the underworld caverns. “In the caverns of the afterlife, one can travel very deep. The caverns are very wide, wider than stars, wider than galaxies. Shades sink into these caverns and dissipate on the way down. Their molecules cease to exist by the time they would be entering the deepest, hugest holes in the universe. The Numenskal Alliance could not chart those holes, but they knew that even the deepest and emptiest holes were still caverns.” He slurps up a thoroughly-chewed leaf, slinging slobber in all directions. “On the other sides of those caverns, where the molecules of shades pass after long eons of sinking and drifting and forgetting: that's where your unmaking will be.”
Golem replies “It will not be so, but I explore every option. Kill me. Kill me and I will see if your underwold differs from countless others.”
“I am not in a killing mood. I am in the mood for eating and talking.”
They are both silent for some time. It is difficult for Taxchan to follow Golem’s work – his charts and equipment are either very advanced or very different from what he knows. Being an iguanodon, he is not anyway given to worry about holograms and charts.
[continued]
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