Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
The Diplomat Teaches Oneness
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
The Diplomat and I sat with some thieves in their hot, stuffy cave. They watched us, unable to believe that we were who we said we were: the Gaia diplomat and his novice, traveling alone, and carrying or wearing all that we owned—clothes and begging bowls. Their eyes said, “how can you make us rich?”
We sat there while they tried to take our measure. At least there was a cat. That’s another good animal from Gaia. It let me scratch its ears, having already taken my measure.
I hadn’t wanted to go with the thieves, when there was still time to choose. The Diplomat had said, “they are part of us, we are part of them, we are all one with everything else,” adding, “whether we like it or not.”
Sometimes I thought the Diplomat was a naïve idiot.
“Rathand will take you some place while we talk it over,” said somebody who thought he was the Chief Thief.
So we sat outside in the cold, blessed air. Rathand let us sit against a big tree. He sat down facing us, his sword across his lap.
In the middle of asking Rathand about his family, the Diplomat paused as though he were listening. Then he stood up.
“We will be going now,” he said. “Though I would have liked to hear about your mother. Please don’t use your sword, it would be bad for you.”
Rathand looked down at his blade in surprise, then lowered it.
“You could come with us,” offered the Diplomat.
Rathand stayed, however, when we walked straight into the brush.
“I hope that boy is all right,” said the Diplomat when the shouting started far off, “but he had to make up his own mind. They were going to kill us, you see. Hang our bodies by the road to frighten people.”
I stared at him.
“I have had practice not fearing death,” he went on. “But I’m busy, and besides, you are here. So I thought we should leave.”
“How did you know what they were going to do?”
He looked at me, blinked, and grinned. “Haven’t you been listening? We are one with all creatures. When you know that, it is easy to hear what you are thinking in your other heads.”
Many footsteps later, though, he admitted he had preferred listening as the cat.
Gap of Dreams
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
When the human race grew up a bit and got more sense, and matters on Earth were better in hand, we had a chance to look further about the place, just as we had always wanted to:—and when the time was right, making the proper ships was easier than we thought. So we flickered about in the deeps of space like fireflies in a North American summer night, and sometimes we found an answering flicker. The Sudantii were one of these. (It’s not their own name for themselves, which we don’t have the scent glands to pronounce, but one given them by an Irish romantic with bad spelling.)
We taught them a lot, whether we meant to or not: how to grow pumpkins, which do extremely well on their world, in some places growing big enough to be good houses; how to make whiskey, which they like best as a perfume. They taught us a lot, whether they meant to or not: how to grow detachable tails; how to grow detachable tales, which, like the wagging kind, may be reconnected elsewhere. From them, we learned not to hurry. From us, they learned to dream. Neither people yet knows how (our children might).
The Sudantii set aside whole evenings for dreaming.
“It is art,” they said.
“It is a manner of excavating terrors, yet safely,” they said.
“It’s fun,” their elders said.
“But we like the gap of dreams best,” one friend told us.
“What’s that?” One of us asked.
“Have you not practiced this art many thousands of years?”
“Yes, but perhaps we use different words.”
“The gap of dreams, it is the place you walk to just before waking. You come to it and all the dreams are still around you, releasing their perfumes, and you think you’re in them still, but a voice is scenting, ‘You are in a dream.’ And you drift to the surface. And you wake.”
They told us how some of them had begun to practice lengthening that moment. They have Gappers now, who came back from that place with answers, questions—even recipes. We have begun to gap, too.
Ah, the gaps! The lurch before planetfall. The breath before you lead your lover into your new pumpkin. The space after the equal sign in an equation. The moment you smell whiskey perfume, before you lean back and count the stars like fireflies.