They Fly at Ciron Read Free Page A

years after someone has died here, Ienbar can go to his scrolls and tell you what his name was, where she lived, who were their children, and what work and what good deeds and bad deeds were once remembered about each person in the village. Well, according to those elders, you and I are not really alive—we’re not really living our lives, hereand now, as we walk along the path, pushing the branches aside that grow out of the underbrush.” She caught and released a branch; it whooshed back behind them. “What we think and feel and experience as our own consciousness, living through moment after moment, is really the one great consciousness reading over our lives, from our birth to our death, as if each one of us were just an entry in Ienbar’s scrolls. At whatever here-and-now moment, what you’re experiencing as your present awareness is just where that consciousness happens to be—what
it’s
aware of as it reads you over. But that one great consciousness is the only consciousness there is, now believing it’s Rimgia the grain picker, now believing it’s Tenuk the plower, now believing it’s Mantice the water-cart driver, now believing it’s Naä the singer. While it reads you, of course, it gets wholly involved in everything that happens, in every little detail—the way you might get involved in some song I sang last evening, in the darkness when the fire’s coals were almost out, when the song seems more real than the darkness around. But that one consciousness reads through the full life not only of you and me and every human being—it reads the life of every bug and beetle and gnat, of every worm and ant and newt, the life of every hen whose neck you wring for dinner and every kid whose throat you cut to roast; and of every grass blade and every flower and every tree as well. It reads through every good and friendly and helpful deed and happening. It reads through every painful, harmful, and hurtful thing that has fallen to anyone or any creature either by carelessness or conscious evil.”
    “But what’s all this reading of all of us for?” Rimgia laughed. (Naä’s notions could sometimes be odder than the questionsthat prompted them.) “Is it to learn something? To learn what life is about—the lives of gnats and people and flowers and hens and bugs and goats and trees?”
    “That’s where the theory gets rather strange,” Naä explained. “What that great, single consciousness-that-is the-here-and-now-consciousness-of-all-of-us is trying to learn is what life…
isn’t:
the greater Life that is its own complete totality. You see, after it’s finished reading you, it knows that, however important and interesting and involving the various parts of your life were, that is not
really what Life
is about. But only after it’s finished reading through the whole of your life, only after it’s actually become you and experienced the length of your years, can it know that, for certain. And only after it’s finished reading me, does it know that my life was not the essence either. And so it goes, with every wise old hermit and every mindless mosquito and every great king who rules a nation. And when it’s completely finished with all the things it could possibly read, from the life of every sickly infant dead an hour after birth to every hundred-year-old hag who finally drops into death, from every minnow eaten by a frog to every elk springing from a mountain peak and every eagle soaring above them, to every chick dead in the egg three days before it hatches, only then will it be released from its reading, to be its wondrous and glorious self, with the great and universal simplicity that it’s learned. That’s what those elders thought—and that’s what they told their people.”
    The two young women walked silently.
    Then Naä went on: “I must say, though I found it an interesting idea, I’m not sure I believe it. I think I’d rather take the nothing.”
    “Really?” Rimgia asked,