EUDAIMONIA

Ver. 1.0.4.5
EUDAIMONIA
A PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL

KALIDASA
!"#$%&' !"#$(%&) !"#*$+!"#$%,&-./0 1
Pūrṇam-adah pūrṇam-idam purṇāt-pūrṇam-udachyate

!"#$2. !"#$%*&*. !"#$%03*3(45./0 6

Pūrṇasya pūrṇam-ādaya pūrṇam-eva-avaśishyate

That is perfect, this is perfect. From the perfect ensues the perfect.
Take away the perfect from the perfect—what remains is still perfect.

Or, to express it in modern English:

EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!!!
 KALIDASA

CONTENTS

EUDAIMONIA..........................................................................................................................................13
BOOK ONE.........................................................................................................................................13

THE GOOD, THE BETTER AND THE PEALS OF LAUGHTER..............................................................447

11
- BOOK ONE -
 KALIDASA
What is the lesson taught by the unhappy conclusion to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? It is
this: Once the members of a species have permitted their moral standards to degrade to the point
of perpetual conflict, omnipresent governmental surveillance, and public mind control by priv-
ileged elites who persecute all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrime, it is far
too late to turn back. At that point there can be no revolutions, no heroes, little hope.
You see, there exists a limit to the bloodshed even the most powerful might inflict without des-
troying themselves. Walking that line is the true art of statecraft, the misuse of violence the fatal
sin; The law cannot forever be a bulwark against the martyrs it creates. Recognizing this, modern
oppression is based not on the gulag, but on cowardice. It is quite easy to “civilize” by teaching
cowardice: You bafflegab; You fence in horizons; You instil a herd mentality; You demonize sex.
You employ: A job is what they do when they are told what to do. You regulate the appetites: “No
pain, no gain!” You cut a child off when they are making a mistake; You tame.
Fact is, human beings learn from failure, not from success. What is the traditional image of a
conspiracy theorist? A man capable of seeing portent in every detail, a pot-bellied slob wishing
desperately that he mattered enough to be the object of planning and surveillance.

—from Nineteen Forty-Eight by Dr. Kurush X. Mehta

My failures have been so much more fruitful than my successes of late that I now wonder if
full enlightenment will not reveal that I have been on the wrong track entirely—that humanity in
fact benefits from bigotry, Thoughtpol, and for damn sure a state of constant, so-called “amoral”
selfishness—I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my coffee! To be happy, an in-
dividual must not at all be concerned with other people. Should I hesitate to satisfy my wants? In-
deed, should I not magnify my wants, craving more, more, more and more? Should this not be the
system? The smallest minority is the individual. Anyone who denies individual rights cannot claim
to be a defender of minorities. It is said that there is not the slightest difference between sansāra
and Nirvāṇa; It is said that there is not the slightest difference between Nirvāṇa and sansāra.
Whatever is the limit of one, is that the limit of the other? My mother says: “You’re selfish. You’re
pleasing you!” Is what is meant that I must spend my time pleasing her?
Knowledge, if it is to amount to more than justifications for a belief which may or may not be
true, must be indefeasible, entirely certain. Yes, the conviction it elicits must be so firm it is im-
possible to hold the least doubt. However, this requires more than a mere entrenchment in the
mind—would-be knowers can accomplish that just by entertaining no doubts. What could possibly
be the result? Is not real knowledge a conviction based upon reasons so firm one is forced to see
manifest contradictions in denying them? “Cogito ergo sum!” “I think, therefore I am!” By 2100
all real philosophy may have disappeared! The whole climate of thought may very well be differ-
ent. In fact, there may be no thought, as we understand it today. Orthodoxy may mean not think-
ing—not needing to think. Does this not sound a lot like the purest form of Zen?

—from Zen and the Art of Doublethink by Dr. Kurush X. Mehta

April 4, 2084, 1:41 am, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador.

The door behind Professor Mehta slammed open and he whirled to see that the central
corridor of the abandoned airforce bunker was reeling in violence—the crackle of silenced auto-

15
 EUDAIMONIA

matic rifle-fire, transmissions and wax-image faces grimacing in pain and determination. For an
endless moment he simply sat there, frozen by an upset he found difficult to accept.
But then the entire complex abruptly rumbled and shook. There came a shower of sand and
gravel from the rough-hewn, unadorned ceiling of the underground office. With Chandrā at his
side, the professor leapt for the door, noting Viktor obstructing the entranceway with his broad
shoulders, his blood-drenched back briefly visible through an already substantial haze of gun-
smoke, Alters in crimson-trimmed smart-armour beyond—sleeves of jet-black ceramite, moul-
ded into the rough configuration of an archetypal human male. An invisible line darted down at
an oblique angle through the muscles of an arm holding a machine pistol; The arm fell off like a
piece dropping from a statue, tipping away from the shoulder in a spout of gore.
Then what’s-his-name was with them and they all threw their weight at the door.
All had one final glimpse of Viktor standing tall against semi-circles of crimson-trimmed in-
sectoids, his figure proud as it dissolved into more red smoke and a fountain of blood. Then the
door was closed. Now, a snick, snick, snick as the militia Colonel threw the bolts.
Kurush: “Somebody detected your telecommunications before they were shut off?!”
He pulled his teenage grandniece away, met the despair in her eyes.
It was funny how quickly despair had become an old companion.
Time and time again of late, the LADY had let them come just so far, and only so far, against the
darkness, then at the breaking of the metaphorical dawn would yank hope away.
“I should’ve suspected trouble when the coffee failed—” the Colonel began.
A second, far more powerful and slightly longer rumbling drowned out the rest. A section of
rock wall caved in to their left. One large slab of rock tipped away from the wall, shattering as it
crashed into the glass-topped desk. The smell of burnt wiring swept through the office.
“You’ve a bolt hole out of here, I presume,” Kurush said. “Shall we use it?”
The Colonel was lost in his virtual-vision, receiving a dozen reports, then pointed: “This door
will hold for at least ten minutes against all but a laser... or a breaching charge.”
“They’ll not use a lasgun for fear you’ve explosives stored in here,” Kurush hoped.
“T-Those were Thoughtpol agents in Mountie uniforms...” his grandniece said.
They could hear pounding on the door now; Slow, inhumanly strong, rhythmic blows.
The Colonel indicated the cabinets against the far wall, gestured: “This way.” He crossed to
the nearest, opened a drawer, manipulated a sliding panel within it. The entire wall of cabinets
swung open to expose the dark mouth of a tunnel. “This door also is a graphenoid.”
The fugitives retrieved their backpacks from where they had been deposited, joined the Frank-
linesque militiaman. “You are well prepared,” observed the professor.
“We’ve fought forty years against Big Brother.” He herded them into darkness.
In the relative quiet, Chandrā saw a luminous UV arrow on the floor ahead of her.
The man’s voice came from behind them: “We’ll separate here. This door is massive. It will
stand for a minimum of an hour. Follow the arrows like that one on the floor. They will be extin -

16
 KALIDASA

guished by your passage. They lead through a maze to another exit where we’ve secreted an
old, pre-Wardenclyffe, electrofan airplane. A Neo often knows many things. There is a hailstorm
across the Sea of Labrador tonight. Your only hope now is to charge straight for that storm. You
must climb on top of it, ride it to Greenland. My men have done this in filching shuttlecraft. If you
glide high enough through the storm, there’s a good chance you’ll survive.”
“What about you?” was all the teenager inquired.
“I’ll go another way.” If I’m caught... well, I’m still a federal agent; Or I could be a captive.
Kurush nodded, turned to face the UV arrow, then took a shuddering breath.
Running like cowards, the professor cursed. But how else can I live to avenge my—
Chandrā heard him move, and speaking with a depth of experience that no sixteen-year-old
should know, said: “Viktor’s dead; You saw the wound. There’s nothing you can do.”
“I’ll take full payment for them all one day,” Kurush muttered.
“Not unless you hurry now,” emphasized the Colonel.
Kurush felt his grandniece squeeze his arm, spoke: “Where will we meet?”
“The longer we wait the better prepared they’ll be,” the Colonel said. “They’re not stupid.” Is
there any rebel who does not hate their own rebellion? “If I make it out, one of my cells will be-
gin a search. A storm’s path is known. Hurry! And God give you speed and luck!”
They heard the man go, scrambling away in the blackness.
Plans within plans within plans, the wide-eyed professor thought abruptly. Have we become
part of the plan of something much greater than even the Yəhi-Or now?
In the beginning, the professor had been as bold as a lion about his defiance, seemingly con-
vincing himself—but now he knew that his idea of a rebel had only been an idea of the letters
that spell the word. But a glance at the ragged, red-brown mess beneath his grandniece’s fin-
gernails communicated more than the lengthiest of essays on the nature of distress.
Chandrā found her great-uncle’s hand, tugged it once. “We mustn’t get separated.”
“Yes... yes...” a nod, if weakly, “of course.”
Every morning in Africa an antelope wakes up knowing it must outrun the fastest lion, or be
killed. It was indeed hell to be so weary and still care. So he shook himself, led her across the
first arrow. It went black as they stepped upon it. Another arrow beckoned ahead of them sud-
denly. They crossed it; It extinguished itself. They saw a new arrow come alive.
The arrows led them around turnings, past side openings only dimly sensed in the faint lu-
minescence. Their way slanted downwards for a time, then up, always up. They came finally to
steps, rounded a corner and were brought short by a spotlit brick wall with a touch pad in its
centre. Now and then a roar sounded in the distance, warbling oddly in pitch.
Had the professor let himself go, physically? But no, as a meme-broker, the man may merely
seem like one of those numerous and varied legions of late 21st-century hipsters, conceited or
over-educated coxcombs, who would attach themselves to the concept most in fashion, only to
vulgarize it; Glitterati who caricatured any cause they served, albeit sincerely.

17
 EUDAIMONIA

He released his grandniece’s hand and pressed the pad, the wall swinging inwards. Bright
light flared to reveal a cavern with an old Dickey E-Racer squatting in its centre.
A whisper from behind: “Where did Franklin go?”
Eventually: “He did what any good guerrilla leader would: He separated us and arranged it
so that each couldn’t reveal much about where the other had gone if caught.”
Kurush drew her into the room. Their feet kicked up dust on the floor.
Again, he released her hand, crossed to the E-Racer’s cockpit, opened it, lifted their back-
packs into the rear. Under normal conditions, the trick to not being discovered would be to be-
come a part of the expected surroundings, stealth more the art of blending into the background
than radar-absorbing materials. The Thoughtpol would have a covering force over the area. He
consulted his direction sense, hesitated: The storm he had seen was... that way.
Several times the professor had attended meetings of radicals who expressed incredulity at
the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice he had asked how many of those present could recite
the First Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; Was it also negative? Yet, what he
had been asking was the scientific equivalent of “Have you read the works of Shakespeare?”
The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. The pro-
fessor took hold of himself at last, vowing never again to fall into that trap... if we live.
Chandrā leaned against the aircraft’s opposite side, hesitated herself.
Her great-uncle reached, winced, rotated his right shoulder. The swelling from his latest injury
was so severe that it was causing a great deal of pressure upon the professor’s artificial heart. If
left untreated, would it kill him? Even so, she saw him nod: Shock and Awe!
Kurush always did terror well: Hid it well, but rode it even better. Some time tonight they had
passed a decision-nexus into the unknown. Had he come to realize that everyone’s terror had
a different smell? The arrests must always happen at night: The sudden jerk out of sleep; The
rough hand shaking your shoulder; The lights glaring in your eyes; The ring of hard faces around
the bed. What was known was that there was never a trial, no report of an arrest. People simply
disappeared, always during the night. Frailer even than these, and yet more enduring, did the
smell of terror remain in the residence for a long time? It was as if he observed himself from afar
walking down into a deep valley. Of the few paths back out, some appeared to carry a much
older, bathed and white-robed Kurush back into sight... but most do not.
A command: “Get in and strap yourself down.”
Kurush fastened his safety harness, helped Chandrā secure herself properly, checked the
aircraft. Everything seemed operational. He touched a control, watched the flaps angle down
into the setting his wetware told him was the correct one for a rocket-assisted take-off. The dials
and instruments came alive in his virtual-vision as the electrofan spun up.
He killed the lights, closed the hatch, felt sudden pressure. His hands were shadows against
the luminous dials as he flipped a switch marked for the door controls. A loud grating sounded
ahead. A wide patch of cloud-blurred stars framed by an angular darkness now appeared where

18
 KALIDASA

the far wall had been. Starlight from above defined a plain beyond, a suggestion of forested hill-
sides. The professor saw no bodies out there, but the sky was full of ravens.
Kurush depressed the glowing START-SEQUENCE button upon the panel and the rocket pods
activated, hurling the E-Racer out of its nest. Power surged from the electrofan.
Chandrā let her hands ride lightly on the dual controls, taking reassurance from the seeming
sureness of her great-uncle’s movements at the aeroplane’s throttle and side-stick.
She felt frightened, but knew better than to be distracting at a time like this.
Kurush fed a little more power into the electrofan. The E-Racer banked, sinking both of them
into their seats as a roiling edifice arose against the stars ahead of them. He gave the aircraft
more power. One last burst from the lifting rockets and they came out over a forest fire, burn -
ing houses and outcroppings under the starlight. Second Moon revealed itself above the horizon
to their extreme right, somewhat defining the ribbon trail of the approaching storm.
“Jetflares behind us!” pointed Chandrā, pinging.
He had seen them, hoping that they were RCAF machines, not the USSF.
Their E-Racer leapt like a frightened animal, surged north-west beside the storm front and
the immense body of Lake Melville. In the distance, he noted scattered shadows telling where
the line of beach ended, the airforce-base-cum-militia-compound sinking beneath the sands.
Behind, bright illuminations, titanic balls of fire and light. More napalm that way?
And then the E-Racer began to add its own blinding efforts at EW to the chaos. A radar sys-
tem’s electromagnetic waves shared characteristics with acoustic waves, and so could be co-
herently cancelled in a similar way, by generating a wave with opposite phase.
Seeing his grandniece sitting there white-faced made him realize that silence had a—
Something slammed the E-Racer hard from behind.
A moment of silence was a fragile thing: One roaring explosion and it was gone.
What would it be like to wake up a thousand times inside an AAM, fooled into thinking that
some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of opportunity was your heart’s desire? What
would it be like to wake up a thousand times or more, only to die again and again and again?
Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something, before feed-
ing it to the sensoriums of feline uploads. DARPA was going to be uploading human beings in a
few decades. Would the human race need to take a rain cheque on the utilitarian philosophy be-
fore it bit them in the cerebral cortex? Lobsters, kittens, children: A slippery slope.
The RCAF Alter/pilot would let lose with cannon when his target was too far away; This was an
old trick: Kurush would foolishly begin to fly in curves. The former closed the distance.
The professor jinked hard left, hard right. He dove the E-Racer down, only to pull up higher
and higher. Tracer rounds would fly wild with each manoeuvre. Their craft matched electronic
wiles against obsolescent telemetry software and onboard targeting systems.
The battle in the air was reaching its climax. In nearly all cases in which machines would be
downed that night, it would be during a fight that had been very short, the successful burst of

19
 EUDAIMONIA

fire having occurred within the space of a minute after the beginning of actual hostilities. What
was the heavy pounding of Homeric swordsmen or the creaking charge of chariots beside this
swift rush, this risk-taking, this cacophony, this headlong chase unto death?
The moment of truth: A final burst of cannon-fire drowned out all possible interjection.
Then: “—coming faster now!” Chandrā exclaimed. No, wait... where’s he—
“Yes-s-s!” Kurush exclaimed, as he slammed the throttle all the way forwards.
He banked left into the deceptively slow billowing of the storm wall, felt his cheeks pulled by
the G-force as they appeared to glide into a slow clouding of mist that grew heavier and heav-
ier till it blotted out the sea, the stars, RAMA, the Sprawl and Second Moon.
The professor heard a sonic boom: The fighter jet climbing hard to avoid the storm?
Across his virtual-vision would flash all the warnings about such storms—that the larger hail-
stones present at low altitude could indeed shatter plexiglass, that ice fouled up electrofans and
controls. He felt the buffeting of ice-blanketed wind. Kurush fought the controls. He chopped the
power down a bit, felt the aircraft buck. The E-Racer around them hissed and shook.
He increased their aircraft’s angle of attack, heard the wings screech with the strain. He kept
his attention fixed on the virtual display, gliding by instinct, fighting for altitude.
The E-Racer began rolling off to the right. Kurush focused on the glowing globe within the
attitude bubble, fought their craft back to level flight, breathed a slow breath in and out.
Chandrā had the eerie feeling that they were standing still, that all motion was external. A
vague flowing against the canopy and a rumbling hiss reminded her of the powers all around
them. What she found within herself then was that panic would be akin to jumping out into that
dark flowing, not realizing she had forgotten something until impact with the icy water. ‘I must
not fear...’ The constant re-assertion of a belief: Was it naught but an indication of fear? What
should help her far more was the belief that so long as her great-uncle remained calm within
this icy and motionless blackness of their oblivion, everything may just turn out all—
“We have the tiger by the tail...” Kurush whispered. “I can’t descend... I can’t land... and I do
not think it possible to climb out of this. We’ll have to ride it out like the man said.”
Silence: How long it lasted, Chandrā could not tell. It may have been five seconds or it may
have been five minutes. Time was unfixed: It wavered, stretched, shrank. They hurtled blindly
as finally she heard Kurush’s voice, low, tense, reciting the litany: “ ‘I must not fear. Fear is the
mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it
to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its
path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.’ ”

As the professor grappled the E-Racer’s controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out
the interweaving storm forces, Kurush’s third-party wetware autopilot computing on the basis of
minutiae. He felt warm fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, even the rare vortex.

20
 KALIDASA

The cockpit interior was a stinky box lighted by the glowing radiance of the controls. The grey-
and-black flowing of thunder and snow and hail outside appeared almost featureless. The most
basic way to get somebody’s attention would always be this: Break a pattern.
I must find the right vortex if we’re to get out of this...
For an eternity now Kurush had been hoping that the storm’s power would diminish, but still
it shook them as strongly as ever. He waited out another bout of turbulence. The professor re-
called his grandfather telling him once: “They used to pay my brother one-hundred-thousand
dollars or more a year, my lad, and they surely did it for just one reason. They knew that in any
pilot’s career, if he was very, very unlucky, there would be thirty seconds when he might actu -
ally make a difference. They paid him not to freeze if those seconds ever came.”
The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the whole aircraft. Kurush defied all fear
to bank the E-Racer into it. Chandrā felt the manoeuvre deep in the pit of her stomach.
An updraught and a downdraught met here, crashing mightily. He slid their craft into the centre
of the vortex. Kurush looked down, saw the snow-defined pillar of cold wind that was disgorging
them, saw the furious storm trailing away like a tumultuous river into the sea—moon-grey motion
growing smaller and smaller below them as they rode a terrible updraught. Fighting against their
astonishing, upwards tailspin, he saw a vague, off-white streaking, Second Moon passing through
his vision, left to right, over and over and over. It seemed as if they were being carried incredibly
far away. Kurush’s vision darkened, and then reddened and then darkened again. What would
it be like, to meet the business-end of a ball of plasma in mid-flight, as Kurush and Chandrā had
just now, flying blind through a thunderstorm only to come down still alive?
The vortex turned them, twisting and tipping. It lifted the E-Racer like a chip or a leaf upon a
geyser, spewed them up and out—a winged speck within a core of winding rain illuminated by
RAMA and the stars above. He heard his grandniece throw up, ignored her.
They reached the apex: The rolling plummet that followed seemed to last forever.
He was left floating in his seat. He pulled the side-stick backwards to set the canards down.
However, his view of the attitude bubble was diminished by the sudden stretching of his virtual-
vision in all directions. What he saw was a geometrical grid of glowing lines, along which moved
nodes of light—some slowly, others not. It was a hallucination he could ill-afford. With little re-
sponse from basic control inputs, Kurush jabbed the throttle, resulting in a momentary slower
rate of rotation. His vision became double-edged, encompassing both the controls and tunnel of
strobing lights. Time stretched. He opened the throttle a quarter, left it there.
The power gauge in his virtual-vision was blinking now. A red, blinking bolt of intense, clear
light amidst a geometrical grid. It seemed to transfix his forehead like a spear.
For a time which could only be measured in a handful of heartbeats, he hung in the air within
the cockpit. The red, impaling light was the only steady point in a Universe which appeared to
seethe all around him. He wanted to check the altimeter, if only he knew where to look; But the
geometrical grid and the hot beam on his forehead prevented him from turning away.

21
 EUDAIMONIA

Under the pressure of the ferocious light, he could feel every throb of his pulse distinctly in
his temples, as if it were his mind which hammered out his life, not his heart.
The beats were slow—too slow for the amount of apprehension he felt. He could not con -
ceive what was happening to him. But each blow shook him as if the very structure of his brain
were under assault. Abruptly, the bloody spear of light wavered, then split in two. He was lean -
ing in towards the dash—or the blinking lights were flying at him. The next instant, he heard a
voice—high, strained and full of fear, and yet full of steel too. The voice: “Dr. Freeman! Gordan!”
The next “voice” cackled with unseen electricity as it asked: Can you read US?
He found that the E-Racer was flying through a cavern deep in a black cave. Its walls caught
no light. The walls were undulating, but broken into countless razor-sharp, irregular facets, as if
the cavern had been carved with an erratic knife. Entrances gaped in the walls around the cir-
cumference of the cave. Low above the aeroplane, the ceiling gathered into a cluster of stalac-
tites, but the floor looked flat and worn as if by the passage of endless feet. Should reflections
have sprung through the stalactites above, the cluster alight with gleamings?
Outside the cockpit, there was a low, grinding noise, as of great teeth breaking against each
other. And now the cockpit was full of a rank stench, an acrid odour with a sickly sweet under-
smell—a burning under-smell: The smell of burning sulphur over a reek of rotting flesh.
The professor gagged. In addition, he was warned about a sudden lack of oxygen. This was
the first time a seizure of his had been accompanied by olfactory sensations.
Fear and bewilderment sucked at him as if he were sinking in a nightmare. Only now did he
realize that his hands were still clutched tight to the E-Racer’s throttle and side-stick.
The professor’s wetware had, sure enough, not frozen up—the solution had been a vast in-
crease in hæmoglobin. The blood seeping into his bandage would be downright black.
One device consisted of a biochip smaller than the head of a pin implanted into the brain, as
well as nano-filaments embedded throughout his sleeve. Normally, the system lay dormant. But
as soon as it detected a deviation from the norm in various parameters it might automatically
stimulate the cardiac and respiratory centres of the brainstem or trigger the release of varying
amounts of natural endorphins. In the event of death, about one to two minutes of memories
preceding the cessation of brain activity could be decrypted from the device.
“W-Wha...” Chandrā whimpered, wiping her mouth as he dove them down and away.
A little later: “We’re out of it... . Mostly... . And you seem to’ve given them the slip.”
Chandrā felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, glanced at the departing
vortex. Her wetware said they had ridden in that compounding of elemental forces almost six
hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.
It’s like the litany against fear, she thought. We faced it and didn’t resist it. The thunderhead
passed through us and around us. It is gone, but we remain. I am going to live...
“I don’t like the sound of our aileron motion,” said Kurush. “We’ve suffered damage.”
The professor felt their grating, injured flight through the controls.

22
 KALIDASA

Yet, they had escaped, and Kurush felt himself trembling both outside and in. A big seizure
would just seem to grab the inside of his skull and squeeze; It would feel as if it were twisting his
brain up, down and inside out: Like a washing machine suddenly flipping into that bang-bang-
bang sound when it got itself out of balance. This was what seizures had felt like when Kurush
had been a little kid. Post-human: Was it a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty?
Had the professor ever thought to himself that all it really meant was that the individuals using
it had a limited understanding of just what dysfunctions lifeforms were capable of?
Yes, the sensation was powerful and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question
of what caused this trembling awareness: Most of it, he thought, was likely the cumulative effect
of every stimulant he had ingested over the last seven years; Or perhaps it was the fatigue the
stimulants could not quite hide. Yet, he felt that a part of it could be the litany.
‘I shall not fear... .’ He was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised just past
the threshold of... something... that would not have been without the litany’s power. There were
certain sensations which were lost forever the moment they were explained in words.
Things persisted in an ever-so-subtle game of not being what they seemed.
The aircraft shook, Kurush busying himself with the controls as they came into turbulent air.
What if we’re still at sea when we’re forced down? Is there anything we could do?
A frown: “Anything” covered far too much territory. What would Viktor do? Kurush turned their
craft away from the storm in a swooping rhythm, scanning the night sky.
“There’s sea all around...” Chandrā said, face falling as she looked about them.
And then she pointed, pinged: “No, wait... I see moving lights!”
Kurush had been focused upon his new inner uncertainty, shook his head wildly. He looked
where his grandniece pinged, saw cones of light above the sea ahead and to the right.
He now felt a cold wind around his ankles; A stirring of rainwater filled the cockpit.
There is a hole somewhere... more of the storm’s doing.
“I’d better set us down at sea,” he decided. “The wings won’t take full air-brake.”
He nodded towards a place ahead where lights could be seen.
She obeyed, thinking: We’ve plenty of MREs. If we can find fire and shelter, we can survive
a long time on this island. Inuit live here; What they do we could do also.
“Wade out to those lights the instant we’ve stopped,” Kurush said. “I’ve got the packs.”
He forced himself to a casual gesture, turned to face his grandniece and smiled. The pattern
of a whole conversation welled up before his mind’s eye—the kind of thing which he assumed
a hero would use to dispel the nervous vapours in his companions before a battle. The pattern
froze before it could be vocalized, confronted by the single thought: This is Chandrā.
With that gesture a great-uncle was urgently trying to tell something to a grandniece. His ur-
gency was precisely what repelled her, driving the young woman to turn away. Kurush was left
stranded. In his mind’s eye, he was once again holding a handful of soil, a worm passing itself
through the world of that handful before being dumped into a shallow grave.

23
 EUDAIMONIA

By way of reply, Chandrā tossed him a lifejacket she had found... somewhere. She had stuffed
its pockets with their most critical belongings: The jewellery, half a bottle of tiny—
In a few economical motions she had her own jacket on and buckled.
Though she be little, she is fierce! marvelled the professor.
For some reason he recalled to his mind the laughing child she once had been, her always-
shy, white-toothed smile quite clear. JOY, oppression, tyranny, fatuity; The worst of all was death.
Must death some day have his day? Chandrā had as a child been delighted by pansies... or was
it daisies? He could not remember. It bothered him that he could not remember.
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest were “But it might have been.” Any rebellion
that included sixteen-year-olds with automatic weapons was one nobody could win.
Aside from sewage systems and chemical disinfectants, the 21st century did not appear to
do anything at all about prevention. Yet, they had a proverb: “Prevention is better than cure!” But
cure is so much more damn dramatic than prevention! It was a good thing JOY had not been
around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio.
Doctors would have drugged “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “The Taking of Christ” right out of
them. All the advantages of Christianity, alcohol or acid; None of the defects!
All this passed through the Parsi-Canadian’s mind in a few eye-blinks.
There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage—indistinct shadows of waves and
foam lifting like white hands. The E-Racer touched a wave-top with a hard lurch, skipped a wa-
tery valley, touched another wave and jumped airborne again for a while.
Kurush was attempting to kill their speed against the waves as best he could.
He pulled back upon the aeroplane’s air-brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. The
professor made mistakes, just like the next man. In point of fact, being rather more clever than
most human beings, his mistakes tended to be correspondingly that much—
Abruptly, and with only a faintest shudder of warning, the whole left wing—weakened by the
plasma and the turbulence—contorted up and in, slamming across the side of their cockpit. The
aircraft skidded across a wave-top, twisting to the right and tumbling down the opposite side to
plunge its nose in the next wave in a fountain of foam, blood and broken plexiglass.
There would be only the storm to hear the smash of the plane as it splintered itself against a
wave. The storm would quickly drown that sound out with its roar, just as the lightning turned
pale the modest flames that arose, like hungry tongues, from tumbling wreckage.

24
 KALIDASA
Although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons a non-existent thing can be more
easily, if circumlocutorily, represented in words than an existing thing, for the serious and con-
scientious historian, it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary to a
historian than to write about certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor prob-
able. The very fact that a giggling, facetious child like Dḗmos now treated the Didáskal as a seri-
ous thing should have prevented it from someday being born. The non-existent is escapist, and
that is its glory. Should a sixteen-year-old be scorned, if, while in prison, he tries to get out and
go home, or thinks and writes about other topics than his jailers or prison walls?
As most annals of the Early Hellēnistic Period affirm, the Diplomakía back then, as today, was
an advocate of a Sōkratic manner of inquiry. Above all else it taught an élengkhos in which ques-
tioning and re-questioning every facet of the world was the responsibility of the learned and un -
learned alike. A right question is often far more informative than the right answer.
Sōkrátēs was surely a queer spirit. His mind was in bondage; He was haunted by a vast and
unresolved doubt. In his day, I propose, almost all capable people were terribly afraid of being ri -
diculous, and were made miserable because of it—or maybe my erudition is simply so vast that
whatever I read reminds me of something that has no bearing on it. What is certain is that Dḗmos
looked on astounded as from his ordinary mind Sōkrátēs made extraordinary philosophy. They
were both ordinary men, by birth. Yet, from the ordinary they created legends —while I from le-
gends create only the ordinary! Along the way he fell in love; Fathered children; Befriended a
prince; Founded a dozen successful Akadēmíes; Wrote a hundred books; Escaped from imprison-
ment; Travelled widely; And attended the Dionǘsia frequently. Xenophṓn tells us of a Plátōn who
was industrious, skilful and more than a little outspoken, driven to perjury by this wonder-child
who was off-colour, finicky, disrespectful, infantile and effortlessly inspired.

—from The Circle of the World by Snorri Sturluson

Can you imagine a variation of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

that provides a resolution to the grandfather paradox? Can you imagine a time traveller
arriving in a different Universe’s history and not the history of their own Universe? You
can? good. Everything I just said is hokum. But it’s hokum that you can see.
As I said, we can presume that Dr. Mehta and Chandrā will assess the situation, try to
make some manner of initial, non-violent contact. Even if they’re separated, will he really
resort to the total datawipe of his memory inserts and/or the tooth?

—Erica “C-731” O’Bran to the Great Aiasheu

About two metrikós hṓrai after they had been scheduled to depart for Markland, when all
the frantic scurrying-about had subsided at last into a resigned calm, a short and approximately
middle-aged woman—ostensibly of a rather oblivious air, but with eyes that took in every mo-
tion—slid down from her perch beside her colleagues to leave behind the other groups waiting
along the pier. Often, an ice crystal would snap or crack like a twig behind her as it swayed and
shifted on an aerofoil, spar or the rigging or workings of some venerable yacht or racer. Con-
tainerization had freed up countless stevedores who before had but handled break-bulk cargo.
At first, it had been a joy to watch these individuals catch the breaks one last time.

27
 EUDAIMONIA

Under an evening fog the surf was flat, becalmed; It was an eve of subfreezing temperatures.
Dew froze thickly on aerofoils, smoke stacks, wharfs; Clear as glass, and hard; Its amorphous
yet dense structure helped it to cling to any surface on which it had formed—one of those out-
of-the-ordinary troubles which made spice for a whole slew of ordinary ones. Valandvik, whose
large, irregular but at every point interlocking dry-stone blocks arose in tiers straight out of the
as-yet-still-ice-free early-autumn waters of the Vinland fjord, sure did have a way of doing that.
Every now and then it shook itself out, presenting a hṓra or a day, a wonder or a mystery, so dif-
ficult to wrap one’s mind around that one had to shake one’s head in disbelief.
The dock-house down by the yacht club had never held so many warm bodies. It was a lovely
place: A wide porch, large trees overhanging the limpid water, modest frame-houses just like it
lining the boardwalk to either side, the shoreline patrolled by gulls. Three hṓrai before, urgency
had meant paying a detail all the attention it deserved, with all the respect it deserved, without
delay. Unfortunately, the ice had magnified seemingly trivial tasks or procedures, transforming
what would be viewed as mundane or unimportant under any other conditions into something
problematic and even significant. Thus one complication after another had spun out the last two
hṓrai, until it was evident to all that there was very little future left in the day.
There were bright colours to the west, giant butterflies dancing as the fog crept up the fjord
like a shadow towards the east. Could the woman’s vaguely feminine silhouette be discerned
here and there—always further and further away from shore—through gaps in the murmuring
crowd? And now, after she had walked for some time uphill, the light of the sun began to shine
through the thin uppermost layer of fog; Behind her lay a sea of mist, cutting through the valley
of shadows created by the steep terraces rearing their heads to the north and south that soared
so steeply and abruptly out of the harbour, as if in the making of this land the retreating ice had
burst through some barrier, carving out a valley to be an anchorage for ships and travellers in
times to come. On the further side of those steep peaks, the farmland of Vinland was rich with
large greenhouses and vineyards as well as hill, fold and byre—a countryside whose people
were summer people, thinking summer thoughts. And yet, the farmers and shepherds who had
chosen to dwell there were not as numerous as there might have been in ages past; And so the
people of Vinland lived for the most part atop the innumerable terraces of Valandvik or south-
wards, at Aguathuna, or southwards still, at Néa Spárta. Valandvik was where the hills of Vin-
land peaked, and, as the woman emerged from the fog, she saw the deep shadows of the irreg-
ular blocks, with, here or there among them, a patch coloured by the light of the sun. Above her
soared the splendour of the megápolis, with its countless steeples of stone so strong and so dis-
ordered they seemed not to have been erected, but carven by inebriated giants.
To Eurṓpē, Valandvik was the New World; To the New World, Valandvik was a gateway to
the West. The founding of the port had been such that it had been built upon many levels, each
delving into the fjord. About each terrace was set a crenellation and between each terrace there
was a stair, wide avenue or trolley-way. These, however, did not descend by a straightforward

28
 KALIDASA

path; The pólis’ train station was at the southern end, but the main entrance to the terrace below
faced north, and the next south, and so to and fro downwards, so that ! Street, that descended
downwards from the highest tower, the Glitnir, as well as the highest point, the rail station, swung
first this way and then that. Built upon the north and south slopes of a fjord, Valandvik was as
though carved into a long, tapered, deep, squiggly wedge in the earth, with the open end facing
the sea. The buildings were fortress-like, with peaked roofs; Many had ornate windows, or walls
covered in vines. There were people everywhere: Skrælingjar with ochre-painted skins and large
mustachios bound with ribbons; Northmen with their hair oiled, braided or hung with bells. The
bells of the water-clocks could be heard ringing out the hṓra. Partly in the primeval shaping of
the fjord and partly by the hard labour of Norse, Beothuk and Mi'kmaq, an entrance to the sea
had been blasted from the rock, rather than carved out entirely by the retreating ice.
Snorradóttir: Íslandic pussy from over the sea—lugubrious, crazy, drunk and rather absent-
minded. None of these ribbons and bells for her! Often, it was as if she was pulling sticky notes
out of the nest of her dishevelled hair and lecturing off them. A klovn could be a source of merri-
ment, she knew, and yet... who is it who can make the klovn herself laugh?
“For just a little while longer now,” was a short phrase whose length nevertheless could not
be measured; At least not by the individuals who were doing the waiting. The more Snorradóttir
had waited—the more she had paced—the more the whistle had not blown; Nor had the plink-
ing of the icepicks ceased. Maybe the truth was that the more stupid one was, the closer one
was to reality; The more stupid one was, the more patient? Stupidity may be credulous, but was
it also calm? Intelligence, on the other hand: Might it squirm and complain ceaselessly? Intelli-
gence might be principled and bold, but was stupidity not honest, sober, indulgent?
And the fog really was dense: Fog flowing down the fjord, dewing and freezing on the “rig-
ging” of a coaster which should have by now quit harbour and set sail across the fierce magnifi-
cence of the Straumsfjord. Wigwams, longhouses and time travel: Were they surprising topics to
mention in the same sentence? The Autarkēs had asked her once: “Do you know what happens
to those who ask questions?” There was a silence. The man had laughed. “Damned if I know!
Probably they get answers, and serve ’em right! If a man begins with certainties, he shall end
in doubts; But if he is content to begin with doubts, will he end in certainties?”
As if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing had happened: Fourteen days
ago, the forecast had been for “moderate to brisk” winds; The day after that, it had been for a
“moderately severe” storm. Hṓra by hṓra, the warnings had grown more dire. By the time it was
clear that a tempest of epic proportions had developed over the Sea of Markland, the storm had
been well on its way to becoming the deadliest in recent maritime history. There had been some
disagreement as to whether the man had been in the water for a considerable time.
In the future, the Autarkēs would inform them all that the salt water of the Norandvik would be
months yet in freezing. Guðdís Snorradóttir and Kiran of Buellt would at last assert it to be safe
if they slid out on their bellies. Thus, the klovner and their newest patient would do just that. The

29
 EUDAIMONIA

ice, clear as glass, would crack but not break as the three slid across it like seals. Guðdís and
her patient would exchange gazes of wonder: Schools of fish so thick there by the shore that
the Innut should rightly have been scarcely able to paddle a canoe between them.
In all they were two physicians, two vitkar and two klovner, each of whom understood that be-
ing a team did not mean an end to arguments, especially within a group who had spent more
time apart than they ever had with each other. Any depiction of an ortegral institution—a trans-
itionry, the Diplomakía, an Akadēmía, the Paidasía—might very well be incomplete without in-
cluding within that description the boulómenos: Literally, “One who wishes.”
As a basic organizational unit of society, an ortegral boulē was in many ways nothing which
a Classical or Hellēnistic Athēnian would recognize as a boulē, other than, perhaps, in the most
general terms, concerning itself with such things as the construction of a road, the care of the
injured or infirm, the baking of bread, the piloting of a whaler, or, in point of fact, any labour of
men and women that hardly ever failed in turning to the solid advantage of human beings—the
key to their plasticity possibly being the fortunate reality that, historically, the merest accident of
genealogy had meant that Dḗmos’ ancestors had been goatherds, and not shepherds: The two
have entirely different ways of approaching the Kósmos, and much of the history of the human
race might have been different. For sheep are rather stupid, following the shepherd everywhere
they go; But goats are intelligent, and will choose to follow the goatherd, or not to do so, as they
desire. Who would build the roads or staff the hospitals if there were no government? But that
was just the point; Dḗmos’ cure for the ills of Athēnian “democracy” had been even more demo-
cracy; Much more. Anarchism: Was it not nothing if not democracy taken seriously?
Despite their age, trolleys and autokínita could indeed traverse the wide, main avenues of
Valandvik; Which just went to show that, if there was going to be any philosophy of enlighten-
ment which could have envisaged the horseless carriages of the modern Hellēnic tradition, it
would be Buddha-dharma. The Tathāgata promoted a method, pursuing it to a finality that might
be called Empiricist: Right action began with right thought, which began with right observation.
In winter, the wind off the sea kept the pólis clear of snow, but if a blizzard hit and piled up, it be -
came impossible to clear the streets, the people taking to a maze of tunnels, or burrowing new
ones out of the snow. Otherwise, heated pipelines buried beneath the roadway would ensure
the pólis remained ice-free. Praśnayāna, like natural philosophy, was made up of those kinds
of observations which all became obvious once they had been explained; Of all the frictional
resistances in life, the most damaging was ignorance. Faced with moral issues, which, as in the
field of transhumanism, were likely to become ever more pressing, natural philosophy needed
to remember that technology was only dangerous in the hands of those human beings who did
not recall being one and the same process as the rest of the Kósmos.
All the way down the fjord the air was dead, and so too under the edge of the retractable, red
silk awning shielding the Night Court from rain and snowfall alike—unfortunately, bare feet did
not echo in the vast hollow thus created. Even here, down by the districts adjoining the ware-

30
 KALIDASA

houses of the docks, and even in the courtyards of the warehouses themselves, the pólis was
filled with trees, even the nomadic folk of the far north rejoicing to visit there.
Guðdís thought what an odd and deserted place this was at this time of evening; Then she
thought of the fact that, even after all this time, she had not decided if it enchanted her. Last, she
thought that perhaps this was because life was not about dreaming big—as any megápolis con-
trived to make one presume—but opening one’s eyes, and then opening them again. The first
of these, she knew, had been a First Thought, an everyday thought: Everybody had them. The
second was a Second Thought, a thought about the way one thought: Philosophers had those.
The third, however, was a Third Thought, a thought that questioned even the second to check
that it was being thought correctly; To listen to that was the heart of élengkhos.
If one could soar in lazy circles above these districts like the flocks of gulls that adorned every
fountain, one would note that the southern district of the pólis was a pleasure district—sixteen
levels thick with alehouses and theatres, as well as the finest Night Court in the New World. At
the centre of the activity would be numerous stave mansions of old stone and wood, embedded
in the luxury of manicured gardens or miniature forests. The pleasure district was heralded as
the Erṓsophy capital of the New World: Every possible amenity was contained within. Visitors
may board a trolley down at the docks—or the railway station—and so be hauled up or down by
polished brass carriages, avoiding the long hike: Valandvik was the only pólis in the world where
one could be run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. At any rate, the boulaí responsible for
Valandvik had assured there were wonders everywhere: She saw sunlight flashing off dozens of
waterfalls as they plummeted over the edge; The water fell in milky blue strands, shooting spray
in the air that danced in rainbows of gold, pink and red. Steam engines and waterwheels churned
ubiquitously, driving belts and chains to operate many mechanisms of comfort.
A girl, almost a teen, bent over the edge of a fountain, sprinkling her face and forearms with
lukewarm water. Arising, she smiled to the side for a moment at a man who was seated on the
fountain’s edge, his legs spread, bare feet immersed in the warm water. The girl stared eagerly
and unabashedly at his loose langoti, at his bollocks hanging down as well as at the creased fore-
skin draped over the head of a large member. In the centre of the fountain was standing, unat-
tended, not the play-thing of a boy, nor the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a
standard, that, if proportion were observed, it must have belonged to a young giant.
As a girl, Guðdís’ little sister had been taller than her and had owned a porcine doll; Guðdís
had only had a dildo wrapped in a handkerchief. By all accounts, it had been a rather good doll.
It had been named Ichabod. It was not his fault that he was but a dildo. Sometimes, her sister
let her play with her doll, but Guðdís only did so if Ichabod could not see her.
Others would talk about how to expand the destiny of humanity; Deep down, Guðdís merely
wanted to talk about how to toss banana-cream pies. Did what she had to say have more last-
ing value? Not that this was to claim that one of her favourite cures for boredom was not sleep.
It was easy to fall asleep when bored... and hard to get bored after a glorious fray.

31
 EUDAIMONIA

From the perspective of a Praśnayānist, as it happened, trüshṇā—thirst—was the source of

sansāra and Nirvāṇa both. To thirst and to quench one’s thirst were as linked as a thing and its
shadow; For whenever did mead break on the tongue as sweetly as when one thirsted to taste
it? And when did a parched throat know itself more utterly than when it longed for water that was
long in coming? How could trüshṇā be the cause only of suffering? To launch a rocket of desire
was all but to receive it! Whatever one drank, it was trüshṇā that gave it flavour. Even when one
knew only what one wanted, one went towards it. At times, one went fast; At times, slowly. Did
one feel happier going fast? There were more than a few who might confess they did not know.
God, surely, had forgotten the difference; It mattered not, as long as he moved.
Life in sansāra was, as it were, existence in a cave. What could they know of reality? For all
they saw of the true nature of the Kósmos was, perhaps, no more than flustering and amusing
shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave, and they, as seekers after wisdom far less than
Gods, could only request, humbly: “Go on, do Deformed Rabbit... that’s my favourite.”
Where does levity go when it is forgotten? Would she ever again be a sky full of surprises?
Her lusts had been blue and bright as day, her questions as crisp and poetic as a starry night.
Would she ever again be the most elegant mess which her apprentice had ever seen? “I ’ave
made kouignoù-amann, youer cun eat while youer brood. An’ I’ll put in youer stitches myself.”
In this way, to the Berserker’s psyche a fortnight ago had come that degree of over-ripeness of
thought that all but demanded a worldly retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.
Had she hated it when storm clouds had rolled in, heralded by claps of thunder that boasted
an ocean of tears? She had been cleaning her pistols in the library, it being the least bedraggled
room in the house. Now, “brooder” was an interesting word: Those who languished a lot in si -
lence were known as brooders; Then again, so too were hens sitting on their eggs.
Outside, the wild huntsman of the storm would pass continuously in one, long, loud blare of
mingled noises: Emergency services sirens, straining timbers and pounding rain continuing all
night. The very house had seemed blown sideways, the entire Kósmos askew, warped by the
storm’s terrible power. The wind had been like a maelstrom, chaotic, moving in different direc-
tions. The street-lamps flickered outside, the shutters rattled, and many times a white fork would
form a vein across the sky. More than once, there came a tremendous blast of wind that shook
the windows and burst open one of the hallway doors, or caused the half-dead fire to go roar -
ing up the chimney. Would it have been too much to claim that, due to the unearthly storm that
night, the klovn had felt that creeping sort of uneasiness which so often seemed like the touch
of something from another world—a hand stretched across a boundary-line?
Listening for hṓra on hṓra, she had begun to feel something in the hardwood floor underfoot
and in the empty barrels behind the library bar. It had been in the weight of a black, stone hearth
that held the heat of a half-dead fire. It had been in the slow back and forth of the oiled tip of a fin-
ger rubbing along the grain of a butt-stock. And it had been in the hands of a woman who had
sat there, polishing a triangle of maple which already gleamed in the firelight.

32
 KALIDASA

“Window-weather” described weather that was nice to look at through a window, but not nice
to be out in. Gluggaveður most often manifested itself in beautiful clear skies and lovely sunny
days that tricked one into thinking it was warm outside when in reality one incurred the risk of
losing an ear to frostbite if one were to step outside with too optimistic a demeanour. Meteoro-
logists at times saw perfection in odd things: The meshing of two totally independent planetary
weather systems to form a once-in-a-lifetime-event would soon be one of them.
Wherever she had ended up the next morning—butt-naked over the crapper or at the street
café around the bend—had she been sitting under the same glass bell-jar, stewing in her own
foul air? Yet, to take with her to the head a morning paper, ink barely dry, staining her fingers a
beautiful hue of grey that was both messy and decadent at the same time...  . She had licked
her thumb to get to the FOOD section, then CURRENT EVENTS, her fingers wrapped about it and a
mug of OJ as she curled into what had once been relaxation. I know... at times even a pair of
lucky, rocket-ship underpants don’t help enough! Guðdís had brought the newspaper close to
her eyes to get a better view of the half-naked man’s bloodstained face, spotlighted like a three-
quarter moon against a vague background. She had felt the man had something important to
tell her, and that whatever it was may just be written on his face. The smudgy crags of the pho-
tograph had resolved themselves into an odd pattern of dark- and light-grey dots.
The inky-black newspaper paragraph had not even told her if the man had lived, only what
the Windigo had done to him when he finally got him aboard: A new way to stop persons from
choking to death. It had not really sounded magical till she grasped that a way of turning nearly
dead people into fully alive people would be worth a dozen real-life spells that just went twing!
The newspaper had mentioned the body of a drowned fisherman recovered. The curious thing
there had been the injury to his shoulder: Made by another fisherman’s cleats.
That evening, Úna’s curiosity would be aroused long before Kiran produced the kúmenkaffi. A
sip; A sigh. Guðdís: “The Marklandshaf case. I want it.” Any steak with the power to make them
salivate over a year hence would not have been a waste of time in any case.
As Dḗmos himself had once said: “Only a very stupid person accepts an open bribe, for there
are other methods by which the same results might be achieved: The favour granted, some-
thing expensive bestowed as a gift, the conferring of benefits which make even decent men feel
indebted. Presumably, when rich men wine and dine politicians, it’s with the intention of persuad -
ing them to use their position to the rich man’s advantage, but not inappropriately. In this con-
text, ‘not inappropriately’ oftentimes masks a whole world of misbehaviour.”
Back in the present: On the uppermost tiers of the pleasure district, Guðdís came upon the
flickering light of lanterns, and the shadowed shapes of revellers; Her stride now shortening in
reflection of the underfelt and the overthought. Activity never actually ground to a halt in Valand-
vik; With such a large crowd coming and going from the pleasure district alone, there were often
enough people about for some form of hustle-and-bustle to be well-received, and it was inevit-
ably a more eccentric one than any of its more numerous daytime counterparts.

33
 EUDAIMONIA

The first to throw their pitch against the gate of her good judgment was a Nipponese man
with grey, braided hair. He waved a ladle in her face, indicating a small wagon-cart decorated
with a faded taikyoku-zu—the usual double curve within a circle, half black, half white.
“Delicacies from the table of Ryūjin himself, a delicious taste of the sea. Tuna eyes in broth.
Crisp the taste; Fragrant the juices; Small the portions; They who know that enough is enough
will always have enough, that is what I always say. I see that frown! Do you know that if you do
not change direction, you may end up where you are heading? I have several flavours—grilled
and then salted to perf...” But the man could see she was chuckling to herself.
Zen: A view on the Kósmos and humanity’s place in it that was shared only by very unsoph-
isticated individuals... and the most brilliant of aspirants to Buddha-dharma.
Must it be said that there was much division of labour within a boulē? Late the evening be-
fore last, Guðdís had stridden into the community centre puzzled to behold but a single folding
chair, set quite alone, with an air of deluded sociability, as if it had gone mad and thought that
there were about it a hundred others. Kiran, with a grin: “Thank God it’s nay ouer problem!” In
the end, between refreshing spoonfuls of a similar eyes-in-broth of which the distributor had so
eloquently defended the virtue, Centralizer Úna had confirmed how, amidst terrible thunder and
lightning upon the Marklandshaf at night, two storms had come from the north and the south in
some kind of battle, the whitecaps reflecting overwhelming noise and sudden glares. Úna had
affirmed how the crew of the icebreaker Windigo’s Feast had donned bulky, protective drysuits
and dived into the sea. Again and again they had failed to reach the body. Under the weight of
failure, the crews of two ships of the convoy that had not been in before joined in. It was one of
these who had reached the body—a man’s—floating like a corpse, bright orange on the sea. It
was also they who had grabbed the torso of the man under the arms and brought him aboard
a skiff; It was also they who made him regurgitate the icy brine he had swallowed.
Once most women had seen how easy it was to make a difference, they were forever altered.
Not Úna. It was not her intention to save lives any more than she saved another from dreaming
or awaking. Khristianoí were convinced that after death they would enjoy bliss eternal, and yet
Ḥayim often did not wish to join Úna in such a “dismal” topic of discussion!
Úna: “A daímōn’s perspective is different. For how long did Dḗmos’ descendants read head-
lines like: ‘Two Men Die Attempting Rescue of Drowning Child!’? Very Praśnayānist! Not very
Praśnayānist! I try not to laugh: You are a sea captain, steaming for a week up and then down
the Sea of Markland. For two weeks you search the ocean with binoculars. As far as your eyes
can see, waves; North; South; East; West; Only waves. Every morning, as the sun climbs, you
raise your binoculars. As it sinks, you force yourself to stumble below decks for sleep. When you
are drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me
drowning and come help,’ you just scream. Much of the body of Sūn-Tzǝ Bīng Fǎ is about how
to fight wars without actually doing battle. The author has this to say about ensuring against de-
feat when outnumbered, out-gunned and out-positioned: ‘Don’t have a battle!’ ”

34
 KALIDASA

A fight in the open field did not call out the excellence in a man, and nether did simply waiting
chivalrously as some sinking leviathan of an ocean liner at last took a final plunge into sea, in the
knowledge that if the ship had heeded any of six iceberg warnings—if her watertight bulkheads
had actually been watertight—if she had carried more lifeboats—if any one of two dozen things
had turned out otherwise, one’s life may well have been saved. Rightly was it said that a ship-
wright who had skill in not making a mistake had much kūng-fu. Imagine a horizon cut with fog
and bits of smashed iceberg: All that remained after its encounter with azipods, an ískrete hull
and a bergskip’s disinclination to drop from security into a dark and watery grave.
Did Praśnayānists abhor approximate answers, possible beliefs, unspoken assumptions?
A name could not begin to encompass the sum of all a human being’s parts. But was there not
an entire Sourcery of names? Even the most complex of individuals could be called up whole
by such means. On Gaia, it was easy to be anything that one claimed—no identification cards
or codes of law, and no nationalities, no tax numbers and no formalities regarding human travel.
What was the point of a document which simply enabled others to learn who this sümpatḗr and
sünthugátēr were, where they had visited earlier or how they would look if photographed unflat-
teringly? Could there be privacy in a society paranoid enough to manufacture IDs? Úna had not
thought about the possibility till now, taking it for granted that her privacy in particular would be
invaded. She ignored it unless she was up to something the locals did not like.
Úna was not as interested in the man’s identity as she was in what he said in his sleep: “ ’Twas
brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and
the mome raths outgrabe.” Twice now, had the unconscious man actually clocked a nurse? Was
it nothing but gibberish, as beset the dying ever more and more often nowadays?
Úna: “Lastly, please turn your attention to the phonetic notations which were handed to you
as you entered. Let me take this opportunity to remind us all that those suffering from sleep-
fighting physically jerk or even stand up and engage in activities reminiscent of warfare during
sleep; Some engage in shouting or ranting, in addition to striking and biting. I have heard many
of you jesting: I have it on good authority it is only terrible if one is losing!”
Some time later, Úna had reminded them all that it was a mistake to theorize before the evid-
ence was in: “It biases the judgment.” A thought: “We used to think of foresight as an inscrut -
able flash of something outside that magically took us over some boundary in one atomic leap.
We called it a heúrēka moment. However, on reflection, prevention comes in increments, lever-
aging what was always there. Foresight is not about predicting the future, it’s about minimizing
surprises. Our approach need not be one of trial-and-error. The old, reactive approach—watch
what happens, limit the damage, learn from experience—was always preposterous.”
A mechanical, artificial hand, with fingers which could be positioned individually by means of
internal cogs, had been created five-hundred years ago by Liáng Lìng-zàn. That morning, Úna
had been tinkering for the thousandth time with her prosthetic, taking it apart and putting it back
together again. It worked perfectly. Had memorizing these intricate steps given the steampunk

35
 EUDAIMONIA

Buddhist satisfaction? Watches were the most perfect thing in the world, as far as Úna had as a
child been concerned. Úna: “The test of a first-rate Bodhisattva is to hold a thesis and antithesis
in the mind at the same time and still remain able to function.” The more she learned, the more
certain Úna became that life was ridiculous. Her years of mentorship seemed merely to have ex-
isted for the sole purpose of demonstrating to her, the more deeply engrossed she had become
in her star pupil, that Guðdís too was an utterly absurd individual for whom the improbable and
implausible and “impossible” would relatively soon come altogether to life.
Guðdís’ feet had wandered her down towards a rather broad square: ! Square. This district
was not exclusive to craftspeople, though it was where their halls and homes and workshops
loomed on virtually every corner, and they were most tolerated in their habit of leaving inco m-
prehensible—though rarely hazardous—devices out in plain sight for all to see.
Now, if one could soar in languid circles above this district instead, all the enterprises below
might just seem like watching an elaborate comedy, only one had sat down ten mikroí after the
play had started, nobody explaining the plot, so that one had to work it out all by oneself from
the clues. The workshops and boilers which bordered on the square were provided with water
by numerous waterfalls cascading from the plateau above. Waterwheels, windmills and pendu-
lums swung everywhere. Rearranging the water supply was a game the residents played. The
only rule was that nobody’s water supply was to be cut off completely at final delivery. Every few
weeks, a new offshoot of some duct, or some new pumping apparatus, would appear, stealing
water from older ducts or pumping apparatuses. Weeks later, another artisan would divert the
water through their own new channel. The storm had littered the square with lonely pillars and
ductwork, the residents remodelling their watercourses twice as oddly as before.
The fact was that neighbourhoods that had been built up all at once, rather than bit-by-bit over
the decades—or centuries—often transformed little, physically, over the years. Such places at
times displayed an inability to update themselves, enliven themselves, repair themselves, or to
be sought after, out of choice, by a future generation. Such a place could be dead, dead from
birth even, but nobody had noticed until the corpse had begun to rot.
One house to her right was solidly crafted from granite blocks. It had a peaked roof crowned
with a windmill, and a large leather rain-collection bladder in a wooden frame. Its front garden
was still visible as yet, the height of winter’s snow still months away and its winter-door boarded
up, as if in wait for the inevitable return of the extraordinarily deep snowdrifts.
To her right was an arc of workshops with one gap like a tooth knocked out of a smile, atop
which winding stair lay home: A house jutting from a gap between adjacent terraces, anchored
to the stone for some incomprehensible architectural reason. From her library balcony, if she
so chose, she could watch through her telescope the artisans at work, her interest being in the
workshop phase, the pains-taking of tēleotékhnē—kūng-fu—and not the museum exhibit, the
embalming phase. Time and she had bickered: All hṓrai were midnight. She had had a grand-
father clock too, but had shot them both up, in protest of the way they mocked her.

36
 KALIDASA

Last year, Guðdís had in secret ordered two-dozen lady bugs from a garden centre and set
them loose in Kālī’s hotel room; She had also sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters, put
goldfish in Kālī’s bathtub. Sure, Guðdís had had other momentary flowerings, a month maybe
of orgies, but then she would suddenly swell again like a rotting apple, grow soft, sour and ser-
ious; In her inglorious quest these last five years for the darkest light or the lowest high, she of-
tentimes found herself wallowing at the bottom of a metaphorical rubbish bin.
Yes, her soul was impatient with itself, as with a bothersome canker; Its unrest grew day by
day, forever the same; Little interested her; Less held her. Here too, her surroundings were re-
miniscent of the all-night culinary extravaganzas seen all across Asíā; She plucked foodstuffs
from stalls as she passed. Half a decade ago, Kiran would have been by her side, would have
dared her to throw her cinnamon roll at that statue of what’s-his-face, stick that roll right onto his
long, pointed nose. Back then, would she have taken up such a challenge?
Contrary to how it may soon appear, Kiran had not been in love with his mistress ever since
their first crossing paths; At first, they just loved to poke each other—armed by the logic of their
devotion, the pair had for a time made it their mission to get under each other’s skins.
She had drawn hearts emblazoned with her name on every one of his erotic novels.
He had retaliated by stringing her dildo and vibrator collection from a tree.
She had held him down and tickled him until he peed his pants.
All harmless hijinks which had demanded retaliation.
Was it hard to grasp why the Íslander had positively loved to behold Kālī’r Ysbaddes—Kālī the
Castratrix—exiting the lavatory last year, her platinum-grey hair gone altogether white?
Just as white, it very well may have seemed, as the rest of her upper body.
Oh Gods...  . “Kiran!” the klovn had bellowed, at the top of her lungs.
“Long gone, I’m afraid,” the woman had said, looking down at her with what seemed at first
to be an angry frown. An angry frown that, Guðdís could not help but note, was the only part of
her—besides her laughing eyes—not covered with a quite remarkable amount of flour.
The klovn recalled laughing, her hand moving forwards to help the woman, only to begin re-
tracting as she realized there was no helping her. “I cannot begin to express—”
“Don’t apologize!” the older woman had said, to Guðdís’ mild surprise.
Guðdís had nodded: “I wasn’t going to.” Then: “I gather you were paid a visit?”
“Oh, yes,” Kālī had replied, with no small measure of self-deprecation.
Then, too: “A hit and run. A devilish coward, I’ll wager; Now, nowhere to be found.”
Well, Kiran should not be far, Snorradóttir had mused: He would desire to see the results. “I
don’t suppose you heard anything when all that... .” Sneezing, perhaps?
A shrug; “It was hard to hear anything but the sound of the bucket.
“Here.” Kālī had pulled out a tube of liniment. “Go to his dresser. It should be one of the top
drawers—smear this in the crotch of every pair of underwear you can find.”
“I—” What?! The klovn had accepted the small, red-and-blue-striped tube.

37
 EUDAIMONIA

Kālī had said: “Yes, that’s right! Now, do as I have instructed.”

The klovn had then gone to her apprentice’s dresser, yanking open the top drawer on the left.
Empty. Men’s underwear and women’s chuddies had filled the two farthest right.
Kiran, sure enough, had heard the two of them depart long before he dared come out of hid-
ing. Their voices had been murmurs, the distant music conversations made when too dim to be
overheard. That’s right, ’ave a taste; Welcome back; Life is so endlessly delicious!
At least her apprentice would never have to worry that the reason she had acted so disin -
terested in everything these last five years was because of an irrational anxiety that she herself
was not all that interesting. Could any Erṓsopher—any Tantric—survive long without any real
interest in anything, as she had this last half-decade? She had not really cared about anything.
Not about sex or her cooking or anything. Did she have a hobby at all any more? She would do
things for a bit but then get bored. At times, Kiran thought that she could have been an actress.
That was an alternative she had not yet considered. In one way or another she had spent her
life impersonating other people, acting out fantasies with amnesiacs and paraplegics who had
spent their lives doing things. It was not the achievements that mattered, but their interest; The
interest that an amnesiac had in the world. A windup; A pitch; A miss; A sigh.
To her disinterest had been added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of a thinker who, ven-
turing inquisitive fingers beneath the velvet of a throne, comes on a frame of shoddy plywood.
And so it was that she had fallen victim to a still more dreadful despair: What was the point of
measuring the value of a human being’s life by conditions such as it merely not being painful?
A memory: “Promise me youer will nay spend so much time treading water an’ trying to keep
youer ’ead above the waves that youer forget... trewly forget... ’ow much youer used to always
love to swim!” The method Sanātana-dharma would like her to exercise was to make a decision
that naught was more crucial to her than that she feel good. The Berserker character-type was
more about chaos, humour and crudity than it was any longer about being a fighter.
The park which bordered ! Street was less a park than a thicket, continuing for what must
have been hundreds of feet opposite the harbour-ward side of the terrace; Hedges entwined with
glowing vines marked the paths between the swaying shadows of the trees. The sun was still
out, but its glow had by now fallen behind the looming darkness of the fjord and could not be
seen from Guðdís’ position. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder how much soil must have been
hauled up here to cover the stone deeply enough to let such a mighty ash tree grow... . Might
she no longer marvel at a lightbulb as her father oft did, knowing how it was made?
“Chemistry, engineering, metallurgy,” Úna had, at one time, informed her apprentice. “All of it
given life by torrents of well-organized lightning: Which is to say... electricity.”
That first time, the pair had walked in silence, around a wide turn, past hanging banks of arti-
ficial creepers and the imposing shadows of a grand, white-black cave. The smell of the artificial
greenery had arisen around them as they had strolled further inside—not unpleasant, but more
stale and more green, somehow, than the scent of any forest she could remember.

38
 KALIDASA

Soon, they were inside a walled and roofed garden, at least a hundred feet high, the artificial
Yggdrasil surrounded by artificial ash trees, shrubbery and mechanical tribespeople, the frost-
laden sprigs of the trees reaching up in arches of glass leaves to an artificial sky.
The roof itself? It had been scintillant, blue and bright as noon, with wisps of white “clouds”
drifting past half-visible between the branches. The “sun” had burned quite bright as Guðdís
turned about to stare around at the unfamiliar sight. It had sent rays of light down through sil -
houetted leaves. Everything that should be green had outdone itself in greenness.
“This is Sourcery for sure!” Glögg, sure, was not traditionally brewed with muscimol...
Úna: “Ninety per cent of most wizardry simply consists in knowing one extra fact. The ceil-
ing is glass; The clouds, steam; The sun is a voltaic arc surrounded by mirrors.”
Shock: Bright enough to keep such a forest alive under a roof?! D-Damn...
“It may indeed be bright enough,” her mistress had said, “but if you’ll look closely, you’ll see
that nothing under this roof besides ourselves is alive. It is a clockwork garden for a clockwork
pólis. There’s not a real plant in here in this little corner of Nyr Miklagarðr. It’s wood and clay
and wire and silk; Paint and dye. All of it engineered to our design; It took the engineers and
their assistants six whole years to construct it all. Our little glen of mechanisms.”
Incredibly, Guðdís had realized yet again that Úna had been telling the truth. Other than the
movement of white steam clouds far overhead, the place was unnaturally still, quite eerie. The
air of the enclosed garden was soggy, smelling of stale water and canvas; It should have been
bursting with forest scents, with the rich odours of dirt and flowering and decay. The light was
caught and reflected by the glass wings of countless artificial butterflies; A circle of mechanical
nudes made merry in the artificial sunlight, each of them wearing a dozen glass butterfly wings
in their hair. This corner of Valandvik was walled in with the largest insect collection Guðdís had
ever heard of, let alone seen with her own eyes... and all of it artificial...
Abruptly, a rustling filled the artificial garden. A current of air plucked at Guðdís’ short, grimy
hair and steadily arose till there was more than a firm breeze. The leaves and branches around
her swayed gently. A faint mist even began to descend, a ticklish haze of water that swirled in
ghostly curves throughout the imaginary greenery, enveloping the garden. Then drops began
to fall with a soft pitter-patter, dotting the surface of the green, leather-work grass.
A stronger breath of air began to beat the rain and mists against her; Guðdís was forced to
take shelter under the bow of a gigantic tree as the raindrops grew heavier and harder; She had
to shield her eyes to see. Clouds of thick dark mist boiled overhead, dimming the artificial sun.
The forest had come to life, flailing at the foggy air with branch and foliage, as though the faux
greenery was at war with unseen ghosts. But only after a fashion. Gradually, the flailing of the
forest died down to a soft rustling, and thence to stillness, and in a few mikroí the mechanical
garden was restored to near peace. Fingers of fading mist swirled about the trees, the “sun”
peeked out from behind thick “clouds” of steam, and the enclosure echoed with the not-unpleas-
ant sound of water dripping from a thousand branches, fronds and trunks.

39
 EUDAIMONIA

That first time, Guðdís had shaken herself, pushed hair out of her eyes. “It’s... Godsdamned
singular... I will give it that. I’ve never even imagined anything like this.” Why?
“As a reminder of what the method and minds of the Hellēnic tradition can achieve.”
“Any woman can fart in a closed room and say that she commands the wind,” Guðdís had
said. “Though I’ll admit, that whole garden is more elegant than I would’ve expected.”
Many persons could say things in a cutting way. Úna, however, was able to listen in a cutting
way: She could make something sound stupid merely by hearing it. One side of her face was a
leathery half-mask of wrinkles; When she frowned, the damaged side of her lips failed to move.
Frostbite and the Marklandshaf had taken a left hand and a right eye as well, her left eye do -
ing the work of two... and damn if the overall effect was not disconcerting.
Eventually: “Mock me as you must, but hear my words; Comprehend them. What you’ve just
witnessed,” Úna had explained to her, “required seventy men and women to achieve. Spotters
watching for people wandering down the gravel paths, chemists to tend to the steam-pots, and
crews to tend the turbines and fans that produce the wind. A modest army of trained workers
straining to produce a five-mikroí spectacle. And even that was not possible with the knowledge
of previous years.” Úna had touched her flesh hand to her leather simulacrum. There followed a
faint clicking. The fingers had uncurled one by one as it was manipulated. The red leather had
gleamed dully in the artificial sunlight as it had been held up for inspection. A naked, mechan-
ical lad abruptly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
“What more may we achieve, given time? What if thirty people could produce the same res-
ult? Or ten? Or just one? What if better devices could give stronger winds, more driving rain?
What if our mechanisms of control were to grow so subtle and powerful that they ceased to be
artificial at all? What if we could harness them to change anything, or to control anything, even
ourselves? Or bodies? Or our souls? Dḗmos had the right idea: Sansāra can be a nice place to
visit, but I would not want to have to live there. By the time the Héllēnes had made it to the New
World, the Old Sourcerers had been dead for millennia, but Praśnayāna can equal even myth.
Given decades, given time and thought, the Hellēnic tradition will eclipse all others.”
Back in the present: There was a man downslope; His beard was all colours, like a grove of
trees in autumn, woodland brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the
lower half of his face. He looked like a man she had known for many years: Meaning she had
ambled about, inwardly, outwardly, arriving nowhere of any particular use.
Guðdís sat down and tried to rest. She could not: Though she had been on her feet all day
and yesterday, she could not repose for an instant; She was too excited. A phase of her life may
close tonight, a new one open tomorrow. Perhaps she might meditate, at least. It was not as if
she had planned it; Guðdís had not woken up from some rose-coloured dream five or so years
ago, saying to herself: “Okay world, from now on I’m gonna see you only in greys.”
She was depressed, distressed and curious; She was amazed, grief stricken and pleased
with herself. She was all these things and could not add up the sum. She was incapable of de-

40
 KALIDASA

termining ultimate worth or worthlessness; She had too many judgments about herself and her
life. Was there anything she was completely sure of any more? Could that be why she talked so
much? One must be sane to think clearly, but one could think deeply and be quite deranged.
Did she strongly object to wrong arguments upon the right side? Did she object to them more
than wrong arguments on the wrong side? Whether it was ever formulated or not, whether it was
acknowledged or maintained in total silence, philosophy had a far-reaching influence upon the
life of a human being. Now, for the hitch in Guðdís’ philosophy. Had the reel of silk run smoothly
enough thus far? Must there come at last a final knot or wrinkle? The problem with walking the
streets of Valandvik, was it that one was basically confronted by a new breath-taking, soul-enrich-
ing, life-affirming sight every five Godsdamn mikroí? That could indeed be exhausting.
For a time, Guðdís had gulped down half-digested adventures as fast as she could stuff them
down. However, if her apprentice were to ask for a description of what she had done or seen or
heard or smelled or touched or tasted last week, he was likely to get nothing but a thin, sketchy
outline of some dozen of the things she had noted—and then too only what she thought worth
recounting. Was it surprising that a life so experienced appeared in a hundred shades of grey?
But what if Guðdís could answer him instead with: “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am
far too interested in what’s happening now!” Quality could not merely be the focal point around
which a great deal of intellectual furniture was endlessly rearranged.
A woman had come up to Guðdís last year and chuckled: “Ma’am! You’re drunk!” To which
the klovn had replied: “I’m drunk today m’Lady, and tomorrow I shall be sober—but you’ll still be
a bitch.” Kālī had been ambitious, particular, a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. She
was a woman to turn heads, to make the crowd gasp and so make sure they never forgot. Up
until that point in her life Kālī had spent her time hiding behind daggers she grew out of the tip
of her tongue. Many had called the woman cold when she had merely been in heat.
To be properly idealist one should have no body; To be properly Buddhist one should have
no soul; To be properly Hellēnic one should have no clothes on. Two of the klovn’s sümpatḗres
were to this day two old body builders and power-bottoms who were eternally on the prowl for a
top who could handle them and who blurted out “suggestions” that could not be anticipated nor
controlled; Within the bathhouses of Athēnai, eyes would fall easily on a cute pair of danglers.
The entry of a well-proportioned young boy would be greeted with applause.
And so, the klovn said to herself: Be still, wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the
wrong thing; Wait without thought too, for she was not ready for thought. Must she wait without
lust? Was it possible for lust to be lust for the wrong thing? To sit upon the branch of a tree and
listen to the mating calls of nude, mechanical boys was by no means a waste of time.
Five, ten, fifteen mikroí of deep breathing was enough to trigger the required response. She
fell into a state of floating awareness: Breathing and relaxing... . Breathing and relaxing... . Aortal
dilations... . Blood enriched with oxygen and swift-flooding... . Thoughts come and go like clouds
in the sky... . Just watch... . Do not get involved with any thoughts that arise... . Push away no

41
 EUDAIMONIA

thought, no matter how painful it be... . Neither try to recall a thought, no matter how pleasurable
it be... . The mind should be touched, not strangled... . If a thought arises, let it come... . If it re-
mains, watch it without getting involved... . If it wishes to withdraw, let it go...
Though the harbour was very nearly quiet, she would sense a change in the air before she
had fully awakened. It would turn out to be a sight the klovn would never in her life forget—the
viewless air had seemed to Guðdís to flock with hidden cachinnations. She was getting another
chance at happiness: It tickled, like swallowing a dozen fuzzy caterpillars.
She was under no obligation to be the same person she had been fifty mikroí ago.
“If youer supposed to be the very Spirit of Intellect, I nay ken why youer nay more obsessed
with sex! What kind of chef limits themselves to peeping into people’s kitchens?”
Kiran turned, threw a hand over his right shoulder: “Save it! I nay want to ’ear it!”
Children shot by, darting all around, little ones shrieking with excitement, tweenagers slipping
like shadows from pier to pier, both hands over their mouths to keep their laughter still.
Four of the five elements were shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone.
Smoking—kánnabēs, never tobacco—was as intimate as she could become with a fire without
immediate excruciation. Every pothead was an embodiment of Promētheǘs, stealing fire from
the gods and bringing it to humanity. To smoke was to capture the power of the sun, to identify
with a primordial spark. When she smoked she was effecting an adaptation of the fire-dance. It
was a ritual as old as lightning. It was not the giggles Guðdís sought, but the fire.
Most people did not like having to explain themselves, so she just shut up, lit a doobie and
watched the children. Guðdís had tried to quit smoking. By the end, she had been rather de-
pressed about it; She loved smoking, she loved fire, rolling a joint. The klovn adored the whole
scene surrounding it; To her it led into the surfer’s life. Might a human being tend to get cancer
from the thing that made them smoke so much, not from the smoking itself?
A disembodied voice carried by the wind reached her ears: “I could try composing music
but what would that do? Give people pleasure? Wiping tables gave my mother smiles! And when
people came to a clean table, it gave them smiles. Besides, do people die? Do stars? What
is any achievement, however big it might be, death itself being dead? Of course, if all I ever did
was wipe tables, then you’d say it was a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual po -
tential. But my mother chose to do it; It gave her pleasure. And...” the old man finished with a
laugh, “it’s a nice way of meeting people. So, where are you from, anyway?”

Half a hṓra ago: The sun had set by the time Kiran made it to the isolated courtyard with
the apple tree. All the windows were dark. He looked down from the roof, seeing nothing. The
courtyard was full of drifting fog. Ice covered many of the rooftops. Was he glad he did not see
sign of footprints? Eirlys did not own a pair of socks, let alone boots. How many Norsewomen
found bare feet preferable to a shoe that may become wicked at any moment?

42
 KALIDASA

What he would hear was but the melody of a child at play, nothing but that, but so limpid was
the air within the vapour that, with its blend of sounds—proud and minute, remote and magically
near, frank and divinely enigmatic—he only heard now and again, as if from far away, an almost
articulate spurt of quiet laughter or the slap of bare feet. Would more women be wise to let their
soles grow their own thick slippers of hard calluses? How many generations of human beings
had walked themselves to death in high-heels of silk, fur, wood and—
“You’re late,” came the vaguely petulant remark from somewhere down below.
“I’m sorry,” the klovn-in-training said. “I suppose youer want to come up?
“Thar’s nay much moon, at the moment,” he added, in a most encouraging tone.
He soon heard a rustle from the hedges below and then saw Eirlys scamper up the tree like
a squirrel. She ran around the edge of the roof, pulled up two-dozen feet away.
He guessed she was a few years younger than seventeen; Certainly no older.
She was dressed in tattered clothes that left her arms and legs bare, was shorter than him-
self by two feet. Part of this was simply her elfish frame, but there was far more to it than that.
Her cheeks were hollow, her face adorned with freckles. Her hair was so fine it floated in the air
like a flowing cloud. It had taken months to draw her out of hiding. It was wonderfully intimate to
let a woman light his reefer, leaning down so that she could hold the match to his lips; Pausing
to breathe in before he pulled back again only to look out to where the fjord was overflowing
with cargo steamers, barges or tug boats. It had been two months before Eirlys had joined him
and Guðdís on the rooftop were they had liked to smoke and watch the bedlam. One might al-
most think that at some point someone had decreed all clandestine meetings be held in aban-
doned warehouses! The girl looked half-starved. They had begun to bring food.
In time, the odd woman had even started talking. Kiran had expected her to be sullen or suspi-
cious, but little could have been further from the truth; She was bright-eyed and enthusiastic.
Though he could not help but be reminded of Berserkergang whenever he saw her, there was
little real resemblance. Eirlys was scrupulously clean and full of a tender joy. It had been a per-
petually puzzled Erica “J-19ζ7” O’Bran who had climbed up from the tunnels and, with an odd va -
cancy perpetually in her head, dusted herself off and headed for her clandestine meeting on the
other side of town. A torrent of images should have been crashing down on her, jackhammering
their way into her like the superego of a disembodied Goddess. Which was precisely what had
been taken from her: The implants the atomic blast had taken had been stuffed with sufficient
nanotech to run the entirety of the Earthling data-net, circa turn of the century.
Today, she was in no mood for bright lights or crowds. Kiran had not learned much about her
so far; She was still shy and skittish. When he had asked her name, she had bolted away and
had not returned for days. One might assume that he was a man who prided himself on being
easily awed by beauty. But other things would ofttimes awe him too: The world of the Tylwyth Teg
was the flame inside every wildflower, every bird that sang or frog that croaked. There was ma -
gic in bottles or thimbles, in bugs, stars, the wind; A deep, wild magic as old as smooching and

43
 EUDAIMONIA

that resided in all living creatures, be they ever so frail. Her eyes made a person think that she
heard things that nobody else had ever heard, and knew things nobody else ever guessed at.
Somehow, she did not seem quite human. In Brythonic folklore, the Gwragedd Annwn were fe-
male fairies of the streams and lakes, particularly the isolated lakes of high mountains, where
they served as avenues of communication between the Gaian world and the world of Annwn, a
land of otherworldly delights presided over by Gwyn ap Nudd, King of the Fairies.
And now, Eirlys came closer, stopped, waited, then darted forwards again. She did this a few
times till she stood in front of him. Standing still, her hair spread in the air around her like a halo.
She held both her hands in front of her, just under her chin. She reached out to tug his sleeve.
She pulled her hand away, stepped back: “You reek.” He had thought himself clean, for one of
the Peithwyr, no piercings or scarifications, no animal grease in his hair, few tattoos.
All the same, he grinned his best grin of the day: “Youer smell like a little girl.”
“I do,” was all she responded, with an air of self-satisfaction.
She stepped sideways, then forwards, moving lightly on the balls of her bare feet.
“What did you bring me?” she asked him with energy, as always.
“What did youer bring me?” the klovn-in-training countered, as always.
She smiled, and then thrust her hand towards his chest.
Something glowed in the light of dusk. A key! Eirlys pressed it into his open hand.
He took it. It had a pleasing weight in his hand. It glowed green. “It’s very nice.”
Kiran asked: “What does it unlock?”
“The moon,” she said, her expression grave.
Eirlys smiled: “This way, if there’s a door in the moon you can open it.”
A shrug: “Not that I’d encourage that sort of recklessly reckless behaviour.”
“I’ve an apple that thinks it is a pear too,” she said thence, displaying it in her palm. “And a
nut that thinks it is an alley cat. And a head of lettuce that thinks itself a head of lettuce.” Silence.
“Hardly,” she added with a snort. “Why would anything clever think itself lettuce?”
“Even if it is a lettuce?” was all the klovn-in-training could think to say.
“Especially then. Bad enough to be a lettuce. How awful to think you are a lettuce too.” She
shook her head sadly, her hair following the motion as if she were under water.
He squatted and opened his satchel. Kneeling, he brought out a bundle. “I’ve got some to-
matoes, bread, water and something special.” He held out the small sack. “Sea salt.”
“Why, this is lovely. What lives in the sea salt?”
Trace minerals. Calcium an’ iron an’ potassium... everything youer body requires but prob-
ably cun nay get from whatever youer manage to scrounge up while I’m gone.
“The dreams of fish,” he said, instead, “an’ sailor’s songs.”
“This is very nice as well,” she said graciously. The bottle seemed very large in her hands.
“What’s in the water?” she asked as she pulled out the cork, peering inside.
“Flowers,” he smiled. “An’ a part of the moon that ain’t gonna be in the sky tonight.”

44
 KALIDASA

She looked back up. “I already said the moon,” she said with a hint of reproach.
“Jest flowers then. An’ the shine off the back of a dragonfly. I tried for a piece of the moon but
blue-dragonfly-shine was as close as I could get on such short notice.”
She tipped the bottle up and took a sip. “It’s lovely,” she said, brushing back several strands
of hair that were drifting like filaments torn from a spider’s web in front of her face.
Eirlys spread out the cloth and began to eat. She tore tiny pieces from the loaf and chewed
them delicately, somehow making the whole process appear genteel.
“I like garlic bread,” she said, conversationally, between dainty mouthfuls.
“Me too,” he nodded as he lowered himself into a squatting position. “When it’s fresh.”
She nodded and looked around at the starry night sky and the crescent moon. “I like it when
it’s cloudy, too. But this is all right. It’s cozy tonight. Like the Underthing.”
Silence. Underthing? Eirlys had only on rare occasions been this talkative.
“I live in the Underthing,” Eirlys informed him, easily. “It goes all over the place.”
Tact: “Do you like it down there, all alone?”
Eirlys’s eyes lit up. “Holy God yes, it’s marvellous. You can just look forever.”
She turned to look over at him. “I have news,” she said, teasingly.
“What’s that?” the klovn-in-training asked.
She took another bite and finished chewing before she spoke.
“I went out last night.” A sly smile. “On top of things.”
“Really?” he said, not bothering to hide his surprise. “ ’Ow did youer like it?”
“It was lovely. I just sort of went looking around,” she said, pleased with herself.
Her smile burst out, making her look closer to ten than twenty. “Nobody saw me.”
Silence. At last: “I’ve been as patient as two stones together,” she said.
And then, too: “I could not be as patient as three stones!”
Kiran nodded. “I’ll ’ave to go early tonight. I’ll be away a while; But I’ll be back soon.”
Without pause: “How soon is soon?”
“Six weeks from now, maybe much more,” Kiran said, with honesty.
The woman’s tiny face pulled an even tinier frown.
“Six weeks isn’t soon,” she pointed out. “Tomorrow is soon.”
“Six weeks is soon for a stone,” Kiran reminded her.
“I think youer cun be a stone for six weeks,” he added. “It’s better than being lettuce.”
His little Lady of the Lake grinned at that. Then: “Yes, I suppose it is.”
After they finished the last of the bread, Eirlys scampered down into the courtyard and in a
few moments returned with a delicate porcelain teacup for him. She poured the water for both
of them, drinking her own in a series of delicate sips from a cup no bigger than half an eggshell.
She and Kiran shared the rest of their meal. He had brought a second loaf of brown barley bread
and a wedge of cheese. Eirlys had ripe apples and a half dozen brown-spotted eggs which she
had somehow managed to hard-boil. They both ate them with the salt. They shared most of the

45
 EUDAIMONIA

meal in silence. Some fly or gnat was sitting on her leftover cheese and this seemed to disturb
her. She breathed on it to make it fly away, which did no good. The tiny beast lowered its be-
hind, made itself heavy and struggled against the wind until its thin legs had bent. It was abso-
lutely not going to leave its place. It would always find something to get hold of and it intended
to stay exactly where it was until it decided it was the right time for it to leave.
“Why have we still not told anyone else?” Guðdís had asked Kiran once.
“It doesn’t seem to be anywun’s business,” had been her apprentice’s response.
Then: “If she wanted people to know she was thar, I imagine she’d tell them ’erself.”
“You know what I mean,” the older woman had insisted.
“I know what youer mean,” he had sighed.
He had shrugged: “What good would come of it? She really seems ’appy where she is.”
“Happy? She’s all alone and half-starved! She needs help; Food, clothing.”
“We bring ’er food,” Kiran had pointed out. “An’ we could bring ’er warm clothes too.”
“Why should we wait? If we just told someone...”
“I think that if asklepiádai came looking for ’er, she’d jest rabbit down into the tunnels. They
would scare ’er ’appiness away an’ I’d lose what chance I ’ave to enjoy it with ’er.
“Do youer feel sorry for ’er?” the Brython had asked her, in a rather sceptical tone.
“I certainly do feel sorry for her,” his mistress had nodded.
And then, too: “This is a human being and her world is ugly and cheap.”
“Wait! Wait! ’Ow cun youer say that ’er world is ugly an’ cheap?”
Who was Guðdís to be wiser than the foolish, or more happy than a simpleton? One should
not be of the misapprehension that a sewer urchin could not manage to be merry.
Over dinner, Eirlys told him that wind had been bringing leaves into the Underthing; Through
the tunnels. They had settled in the Downing, so things were all a-rustle there. A mother owl had
also moved in, made her nest right at the midpoint of the Grey Ten, bold as brass.
Between bites, Kiran asked: “She’s something of a rarity?”
A nod. “Absolutely. Owls are wise. They are careful, patient. Wisdom precludes boldness.”
She sipped from her cup, holding it daintily between a thumb and forefinger.
He hesitated, unsure as to how she would respond to his request.
“I wonder: Would you mind showing me the Underthing, when I get back?”
Eirlys looked away, suddenly shy. “I thought you were a gentleman,” she said, tugging self-
consciously at her ragged dress. “Imagine, asking to see a girl’s underthing.”
He held his breath for a moment, choosing his next words carefully lest he startle her back
underground. While he was thinking, Eirlys peeked at him through the halo of her hair.
“Eirlys,” he asked, almost knowingly, “are youer joking with me?”
She looked up and grinned. “Yes, I am,” she said proudly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Eirlys grew serious: “Now close your eyes, so I can give you your last present.” Kiran was
dear to her and this Erica wanted him to know she would always take care of him.

46
 KALIDASA

Puzzled, Kiran closed his eyes and bent at the waist. He felt her hands on both sides of his
face, then she gave him a tiny and delicate kiss, his laughter spilling out of his mouth and mak-
ing stutters of their kiss. “Thank youer, Eirlys. Youer very special to me, too.”
“Of course I am,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’m as lovely as a baby’s underthing.”
His smile grew wider and he looked her up and down, his eyes going half-lidded and mys-
terious. It was good she was eager. She had some cleverness and natural skill, but there was
much to unlearn. If it came time for her to walk among other Northmen, he would not have her
disappointed. Kiran drew her away from the ledge. She placed her slender finger on his lips and
said: “Are you ready for your lesson? I’ve been as patient as three stones together!”
She sat upon the chimney, placing her head level with his shoulders.
Her breath on his neck was ever so terribly enthralling.
Eirlys: “I call this the Hushed Hart. An easy lesson: You’ll enjoy it, I think.”
He trembled and twitched as she kissed the corner of his parted lips and the hot lobe of his
ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above them between the silhouettes of tall, thin chimneys.
Her legs—’er lovely, thin legs—were not too close together, and when his hand located what it
sought, a dreamy and eerie expression came over her childish features. She sat a little bit lower
than he, and whenever, in a soundless ecstasy, she was led to kiss him, his head would bend
with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was extremely joyful, her bare knees catching and
compressing his wrist and slackening again; Then his darling would draw away with a nervous
toss of her gossamer hair, and then again float near and let him feed on her open mouth. With
a generosity that was ready to offer her everything—his heart, his throat, his entrails—he gave
her time to hold in two awkward fists the massive sceptre of his waiting passions.
Kiran smiled at her then, his eyes older and knowing. And even before he pushed her back
against the chimney and began to bite the side of her neck, she realized once again that he
did not intend to teach Tantra; Tantra was not teachable. Unlearning the lover’s Art from him far
outstripped any curriculum ever offered at Harvard University. Theirs was not be the vigorous
wrestling that many Earthlings and a few Gaians still somehow thought of as lovemaking. While
vigour was a joyous part of it, he brought to her attention subtler places. The Norse in particu-
lar needed to unlearn their respect for sex education. It was worth it for a man like himself to
take time to demystify it. The woman would try to interest him the Closed Wrist; A Sigh Towards
the Ear; The Devouring Neck. Just the names she had for her techniques could fill a book, if a
book were not an improper place for such things; Tantra, real Tantra, was not about scribbling
notes onto pieces of paper or packing a suitcase. Such similes would be inapplicable to it in its
entirety; It was a lifestyle altogether belonging to its own idiosyncratic genus.
One should not, however, get the impression that all their short time together would be spent
in dalliance. He was in the prime of his life and she seemed almost to be an immortal, but there
was only so much his body could endure. If a living being could sit in silence with him for fifteen
mikroí and yet be entirely comfortable, he and that being could be friends.

47
 EUDAIMONIA

Contrary to popular belief, not all Brythons were Peithwyr. Amongst the Painted Folk, there
never had been any contracts or exchanges of coin: Among them and their elected guests, only
such liaisons as pleased the fancy were entered into. A woman did not tattoo her body in half-a-
hundred colours, or a man his phallus to look like a rocket in flight, because they dearly wanted
others to respect their privacy. Indeed, the arrival of a travelling troupe such as his adoptive fam-
ily’s in most townships of Eurṓpē was like to be seen as more of an event than a solstice and an
Olympiad put together. There were usually at least fifty wagons and several dozen entertainers.
There were cooks and belly dancers and musicians and tops and bottoms and children and the
elderly; Jugglers and actors and masseuses: A big, colourful, nudist family.
Many, meeting Kiran’s sümpatḗr or -mḗtēr for the first time, came to three conclusions: That
they were Brythons, that they were smart and that they were hornier than a tree-full of bonobos
on nitrous oxide, with full-body, blue tattoos and easy smiles. They were Peithwyr down to their
bones, and that, really, was all that needed to be said. To truly understand what it had been like
one had to understand that nothing could be so grand as a troupe showing off for one another.
How did one so entertain the very individuals who had watched one’s act a hundred times? One
dusted off old tricks; One tried something totally new; One hoped for the best. And, it must be
said, the grand failures had been just as entertaining as the great successes.
Little had Kiran known how cunningly he had been untutored.
He had been a cautious boy: Eager for more and not at all filled with a dozen questions. Had
it been hard for his birth-family to see, being his parents and all? This young man was bright. By
the time he was seven, there was little he did not know—from instruction as well as from ex-
perience—of the ways of the Court of Night Blooming Flowers. His aunt in particular knew how
to play with boys, tease them and strike them to give them the wiggles; It had been Kālī’s private
vow to fuck more lads in one day than the Holy Idiot. It was from his aunt that he had learned
how to kneel without discomfort for a hṓra or two at the proper angle for supporting a woman’s
bottom like a chair. These things Kiran had learned, and much more, by the age of seven, not
dreaming how small the sum of his experiences had been. Even now, to those who had never
yet beheld one of the Night Courts in all its splendours, he would say: “I weep for youer!” The
Brython had gone farther than he ever would have reckoned from his hometown, yet nowhere
else but in his homeland had he beheld such exultation in passion, and passion alone. It was this
that was, as nothing else was in all the world, quintessentially Sanātanist.

Half a hṓra or so after departure, Guðdís fell down hard into the embrace of her hammock
and began shrugging off her soggy bear-skin wrappings. They reeked of a sour cold from the
uniting of a body’s sweat with the frigid dew of an evening fog—smell was a potent Sourcerer
that harkened one back to all the places one had been. It was late. She had detached herself
from the group without a word to anybody, and therefore had caused anxiety to those who trav-

48
 KALIDASA

elled with her—not that walking the switchbacks of Valandvik alone was ever unsafe. There was
something calming and compelling in recalling roving anonymously at sunset.
She tossed her shawl into the corner under the tiny cabin’s single lamp. Gods, how tired she
was! But the fatigue stopped at her muscles, leaving her mind seething. She stared down at the
bamboo flooring, feeling its smooth texture against nine wiggling toes.
Soon, she stood fully naked, if not as yet attuned to her temporary nautical abode.
If a man or woman had to be oppressed by something, she supposed that a coaster was as
good as anything else, perhaps a bit better than most, now that she thought about it. A small
sailing craft such as this was not only beautiful, it was seductive; Full of odd promises and with
just a hint of trouble. Presently the pungent odour of saltwater pervaded, issuing harshly from
jewel-studded darkness to clash oddly, if amiably, with the lingering aftertaste of the repast just
concluded: Thinly sliced fried chanterelles and chopped chives, cheese, nuts, spices, bread and
a bottle of maple mead for afterwards—it’s a sad meal if one doesn’t lick one’s fingers! The wal-
nuts had been welcome, for the klovn suspected at the moment that tonight’s sleep would be
that sort in which she woke every hṓra and thought to herself that she had not slept at all; She
would recall dreams which would appear like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped: Her
sleeping mind touching the Kósmos rather lightly, for sure, but everywhere.
Skíðblaðnir was a shipwright’s masterpiece of gleaming, varnished wood apparently so tightly
fitted that its crew might just have been personally offended to hear it referred to as mere join-
ery. Iron men in a wooden boat, that was the expression; As opposed to the wooden men in iron
boats of today. Had the Captain’s rather arrogant attitude deluded the man into believing that
his ability to grasp a thing was the criteria for its legitimacy? “What, Ma’am, would you make a
ship sail against the winds and the currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck?”
“My steamboat voyage to Néa Spárta and back had turned out rather more favourable than I
had calculated. The distance from Valandvik to Néa Spárta is not all that great; We ran it in sixty
hṓrai, and back in sixty. I had a light breeze against me the whole way, both going and coming.
The voyage had been performed wholly by the power of the steam engine. We overtook many
sloops and schooners beating to windward and parted with them as if they had been at anchor.
The power of propelling such boats by steam is long since fully proven.”
Vinland had been greatly affected by the texts and philosophies brought over the Northwest
Passage from Asíā. Skíðblaðnir’s aerofoil and monohull and two retractable hydrofoils had each
been shaped from a composite of silk and bamboo; The grains of every paper-thin lamella of
wood glued down at odd angles to those before and after, cloth set between. In the Classical
Hellēnic style, to conserve weight and maximize overall rigidity, silk cables were stretched taut
between bronze rings imbedded in each opposing rib of its broad hull, as well as in the bow and
stern of the keel. Everything else was held together with wooden joints. The joints themselves
held together by compression: The tightness of the joints against the grains of the recesses in
the wood, without a single screw, nail, bolt or any manner of adhesive whatsoever.

49
 EUDAIMONIA

Contemplate the implications: Endless configurations; Endless inventive and useful arrange -
ments; A versatile design. The entire conveyance could, as its name suggested, be freighted
quite easily by rail, if the need were somehow to arise, completely disassembled.
Some time later, Guðdís would return to consciousness with eyes closed. Her brain seemed
≮
to echo with sunbaked laughter: There can be no friendship between our peoples. We live in
your nightmares and you are but a dream. ≯ At times, when she got hammered, she felt good
by the wee hṓrai of the morning, but this was just because she was still quite drunk.
After a mikrós, she threw off her furs. It seemed that recovery through the First Door was not
going to continue if the majority of the components of Guðdís’ noús were not getting sufficient
stimulation. Laypeople generally believed that stress was responsible for depletion, but apathy
and uninspired systematic repetition were equally responsible. Uninspired systematic repetition
produced as much stress and anxiety as anything else; Inspiration, and especially fun, had been
just as much a part of Diogénēs’ life as sleeping, drinking or whiling away the hṓrai pleasuring
himself in public. In no way was it ironic that to “inspire” meant to breathe, to instil life by breath-
ing. How did one tell if someone was alive? One checked for breathing by holding up a mirror.
She did not need rest; No, what she required now was a breath of fresh fun.
The essential dynamic underlying almost every elite or esoteric physical Art was work with
the breath. Breathing was the fundamental act of being alive. One could go without thoughts or
emotions or sensations, relaxation, talking or any other activity for a long time; Without food for
weeks; Without water for days; But, if one stopped breathing, one would be dead in mikroí. To
all this she would add, however, that it had always seemed unfortunate that so much work was
done with it, and not much play. Laughter had got to be the single healthiest activity one could
perform. Just think how healthy she would be if she could just sincerely laugh at that which op-
pressed her. She had always believed that one good measure of someone’s depth of spiritual -
ity was how long it took before a person became worried. Imagine laughing hysterically at the
aches, nausea and pains drinking provoked; At least she would be breathing well!
She could not prove it, but she would venture to guess that the vast majority of wave riders
rode crappy waves more than they rode perfect ones. After all, that was what made a session
epic; The very meaning of the slang term “epic” indicated that such conditions did not appear
very often. Okay, sure, wave rider culture threw around words like “all-time” and “classic” all too
freely, but her point was clear; Bad waves developed more often than good.
But that begged the question: What made for bad waves? She would agree that an unride -
able doldrum of tiny waves could constitute a downright crappy session; But closeouts, mush
balls, side-shore winds, on-shore winds or generally blown-out conditions—which were all tra-
ditionally considered undesirable—all offered a variety of options for riders with the right per-
spective. The mastery of anything was, more than anything else, the transformation of work into
play; Giving orders and answers, being around others with the opinion that one was great, and
above all, never making a mistake, had nothing at all to do with it. Most Praśnayānists seemed

50
 KALIDASA

to have a prejudice against failure. It was a concept that people associated with an accusation
or a kind of guilty-till-proven-innocent: One was not good enough till one proved it, the implica-
tion being that one would likely fail, and was thus imperfect. To reach for, and to fall flat on her
face: That was how she would define wave riding. She had been a believer in the magic of lan-
guages since, at an early age, she found out that some words got her into trouble while others
got her out of it. Guns, it occurred to her bizarrely, had been invented by boys. They had been
invented by boys who had not got over their disappointment that accompanying their own or -
gasm there was not a vast boom sound. What was the trick to recalling that “pistol” was femin-
ine? What qualities did a pistol share with anyone in possession of a cunt?
Both Berserkergang and wave riding were about acceptance of oneself in the moment. One
of the images to come down to her through years of wave riding was a parable of an encounter
between an enlightened master and an advanced apprentice during the course of an evening
meal. The apprentice, becoming more than a little fed up with the stress and the weeks of wait-
ing and his master’s apparent disregard, demanded a succinct explanation—without complica-
tions—of exactly how one went about becoming an Awakened One, a Buddha.
And so, the master had asked: “Have you finished your rice?”
“Yes,” responded the apprentice, sitting back patiently. There had fallen a silence.
The master had burped into his hand. “Then go wash your bowl.”
Supreme wellbeing, in other words, necessitated listening to what one was well aware of, and
then taking it seriously enough to act. If Guðdís awoke and felt the impulse to stretch, rise to her
feet and hobble down to the toilet to urinate with a sigh, that would be enlightenment!
Our bodies are our masters, we, their prisoners: Free the prisoners!
Yet, once up and emptied, she found that her only ambition was to be still again. She should
keep drinking. It’s traditional, in situations like this, yes? With difficulty, she collected a bottle of
mead from a sailor—wine seemed inadequately poisonous. What’s so unpleasant about being
drunk, anyway? A chuckle. Ask the glass of water! Her recent burst of activity now dwindled to
a rest in the tiniest cabin she was able to find: A kind of store room, that, but for a skylight, may
have passed for a coffin. It had a trunk fastened to its floor. After going to the trouble to find the
mead, she had not will left to open it. She sat down rather large on the tiny trunk.
She had crossed some kind of invisible line. She felt as if she had come to a place she had
not thought she would come to that morning. Guðdís did not know how she had got here. It was
a strange place; A place where a little apprehensive dreaming, then a little bit of sleepy, late-
night self-pity, had led to considerations of philosophy and... annihilation?
It was simply that she could not bear living right now. That balm of hurt minds, sore labour’s
bath, great nature’s second course, had refused to knit up her ravelled sleeve of care.
Along with the bottle, she had brought up with herself the bowl of water from her bedside.
She discovered, however, that if she drank none, she did not need to urinate as often. She did
not sleep, but soon her thoughts would slow; A thought a hṓra. That was all right.

51
 EUDAIMONIA

Light seeped into the room through a skylight, making the cabin glow. A circle of sun crept
slowly across the deck, as slow as her thoughts; Left to centre to right, then gone.
The sounds of the ocean outside softened with the oncoming twilight. So, her little bubble of
lugubrious darkness remained as insulated from the world as a cof—
Nearby voices were calling her name. It was her apprentice. She did not want to speak to the
man. She did not respond. If she said and did nothing, would he discover her?
Guðdís had not so much as grunted. Her bladder was acting up again.
Acting up! A peculiar phrase. It was what people said to minimize the gravity of their condi-
tion. It implied that the offending part—heart, bladder, liver or whatever—was a fractious, bratty
child, which could be brought into line with a sharp word; That one’s symptoms—tremors, pains
and palpitations—were simply theatrics, and that the organ in question would soon stop cavil-
ling about or making a spectacle of itself, resuming a placid, off-stage existence.
In the end, her ploy did not work. Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside the little cham-
ber. Kiran’s voice, shouting loud, hurting her ears: “I said in ’ere!”
More footsteps, a quick, light stride. The man leaned into her field of vision, blocking sight of
the roof and its skylight. The Brython frowned. “Guðdís? Youer in thar?
“Nay panic,” the Brython said. “She’s jest gone an’ got ’erself sensibly drunk.”
He picked up the sealed bottle. “Well... maybe nay.”
“Olofsson was right,” noted the sailor standing in the passageway.
“Nay... necessarily,” said the Brython, pulling the bottle from her limp grasp. “After about the
third time youer ken this, youer stop getting excited about it. It’s jest something she does. If she
were going to take ’er own life, she would ’ave done it years ago, I think.”
Silence. “So... you’ve seen her like this before?”
A shrug. “Well... per’aps nay quite like this...”
The Brython’s strained face occluded the skylight once again.
Kiran waved an open hand in front of Guðdís’ eyes.
Silence. The woman had not so much as blinked.
“Perhaps... we ought not to touch her. Don’t you think we should call for—”
The Brython straightened decisively. “Nay. Nay, I know what to do. Come on.”
“Is it all right to leave her alone?”
“Sure. If she ’asn’t moved in a day an’ a ’alf, she ain’t going far.”
They clattered out again. Guðdís’ slow thoughts worked through it, one thought per quarter
hṓra. They were gone; Good. Maybe, if she were lucky, they would not come back.
But then, alas, they did reappear.
A sigh: “I will take ’er shoulders an’ youer take ’er feet, all right?”
And then, too: “Nay, better pull ’er bearskin off first; It might stain.”
The sailor did so, saying: “At least she’s not gone rigid.”
No, quite limp. Rigidity would require effort. Her shawl slid to the floor.

52
 KALIDASA

Kiran removed his green silks, rolled up the sleeves of the tunic underneath, slipped hands
under Guðdís’ armpits, and lifted. The sailor took her feet, as he had been instructed.
“She’s lighter than I thought,” noted the sailor, lifting with little real gentleness.
The two of them toted her down the corridor and beyond the tiny galley. Perhaps they were
going to put her to bed. That would save her a heap of trouble. Maybe she would be able to go
to sleep. Maybe, if she were very lucky, she would not wake up again until the World to Come
when there would be nothing left of iatrics, or of anything of the past.
But they continued on past her cabin door, and bumped her through into the bathroom down
the way, the one that she had used for the emptying of her bladder. It contained an old, wooden
tub barely large enough for a small boy; It seemed to be at least a century or two old.
They plan to drown me. Even better. I shall let them.
“One, two, three, on three?” asked the Brython of the sailor.
“Just three,” responded the sailor, simply.
They swung her over the edge; For the first time, she glimpsed what waited for her below.
Her body tried to spasm, but her unused muscles failed her. She barely croaked.
The bath was full nearly to the brim... with many hundreds of ice cubes floating in it.
She plunged downwards into the crashing cold. Kiran’s long arms thrust her under all the way.
She came up yelling “Ice wat—” The Brython shoved her back in again.
On her next breath: “Gambla blombungr, sugandi tok-tik ma—”
“Ah, ha!” the Brython chortled. “I thought that would get a rise out of youer!” Kiran added as
an aside to the sailor, who had ducked away out of range of wild splashing: “Thar’s nothing a
’ound ’ates worse than a bath.” Then, too: “Down youer go, youer old Fuð’undr!”
She fought his way out of the Brython’s grip, spat cold water, clambered up, only to fall out
over the side of the tub. Ice cubes stuck here and there to her skin and slithered down her neck.
Her hand drew back in a fist, and shot up at the young man’s grinning face.
It connected with the Brython’s chin with a satisfying thunk. The pain was delicious.
Speak when angry and one will make the best speech one would ever regret. The circle of
light from the lamp and the hint of early morning sun coming through the porthole seemed to
drive the worst of the chills away, as hot chocolate set on the mantle did for the rest.
The danger, of course, was that nothing burned like the cold. That is, until it got itself inside
and started to fill one up. And if one did not have the strength needed to fight...
Kiran rubbed his jaw, brows rising. “Feeling better?” he asked, at last.
She answered with a spate of swearing, plucking up and throwing the few last unmelted ice
cubes from the floor at her apprentice’s head, along with an empty, wooden tumbler.
“Glad to ’ear it. Now I am going to tell youer what youer going to do, an youer going to do it.
First thing is, youer going to wait ’ere while I go to youer room an’ fetch clean clothes. Then we
three are going to walk up on deck to try an’ ’ook the first catch of the day.”
“I don’t want to go up on deck,” she mumbled, somewhat surlily.

53
 EUDAIMONIA

“Did I ask for youer opinion? Did youer ’ear me call for any such thing as a vote?
“Right,” Kiran continued, “I don’t want to ’ear it, an’ youer don’t ’ave a choice. I’ve got more
bags of ice in storage, an’ youer know I would nay ’esitate to use them.”

Erica moved quickly through the darkening galley, taking care to keep to one side, out of
sight of the kitchen, her nude body hunched down, her chromometric skin melding into the tawny
beige of the bulkhead; Even her thermal emissions matched the temperature of the bamboo.
The table that ran the length of the narrow space had already been laid for the last meal of the
day. The wooden trenchers and simple silverware caught what little natural light there was left.
Erica reached the head of the table, looked back at the kitchen door, and, seeing no one, took
the time to reach out and flick a large steel pitcher gently with a fingernail.
The sound rang out clearly but quietly throughout the modest space.
] I am glad to see you’re not taking this seriously, ^ laughed the Great Aiasheu.
The Old Sourcerer was currently in the form of a grin without a cat, a dark-yellow one so as
not to show up against the darkness of the Skíðblaðnir’s interior spaces.
They’re making too much noise to hear in the kitchen, was all she sent back.
But she put a hand over the ringing stainless steel. Aiasheu drifted back out of the chamber and
through a slightly open cabin door on the other side of the corridor.
] There’s no one in here, ^ he sent. ] But we should be quick, I suppose. ^
Erica darted with surprising soundlessness across the corridor and into the tiny cabin, where
she stood up and looked around. The klovn’s cabin was rather gloomy this time of day: Green
blinds shut out the sunset. No one sat at the desk or at the extremely modest table, on which
stood a mess of beer bottles, an empty coffee pot and a decanter of akvavit; The hammock was
piled with clothes; There was a big chest and a clock. The place smelled of sea-salt, sweat, a
dozen kinds of food crumbs and ever so slightly of kánnabēs. There was a cold fish stew in a
small cauldron, its feet socketed into the top of the table; The table itself had been made to rest
on ball-bearings that served to keep it level against the rolling of the ship.
She sat in one of the two wicker swing-chairs. Due to her small stature, it was so deep she
was more than able to sit upright and tuck her slender legs under her behind.
They do themselves well, don’t th— she sent, or began to send, because before she had
finished the question her wetware detected footsteps at the other end of the corridor.
] Behind the table: Quick! ^ sent Aiasheu, cool as a cucumber.
In a flash Erica was on her feet and crouching behind the table. The door opened, and the
light changed in the room: The incomer was carrying a lamp, which she put down on the side -
board. Erica could see the Íslander’s hairy legs as well as a single, pale, bare foot.
She could also see Aiasheu floating aimlessly about, although he made no sound.
For herself, the Earthling teenager was already more than a little excited.

54
 KALIDASA

What she saw next, however, changed things completely.

Erica had bifurcated her eyes to see into the infra-red and the ultra-violet. She watched the
older woman look around with two bright and mischievous eyes before quietly getting to work.
The klovn took from her pocket a folded paper and laid it on the table beside the digestif. She
took the stopper out of the mouth of the decanter containing green akvavit, unfolded the paper
and poured a stream of powder into the decanter before crushing the paper and dropping it into
the small bin. She took a wooden spoon from her pocket, stirred until the powder had dissolved.
She replaced the stopper with what seemed to be an exaggerated amount of care.
As Guðdís quietly departed, Erica sent: I suppose you saw that?
] Of course I did! Now, let’s hurry out, before—^
Aiasheu’s mother had once told him as a boy that she could tell who was coming by the mere
sound of their footsteps. Aiasheu had simply looked at her incredulously. And yet, on her depar-
ture, he had heard in her footsteps the very essence of Mum. The sounds men and women made
could be imitated and yet a Kamanitushit would always know the difference.
The pair of stowaways would dart to the bamboo chest, open it and slip inside.
] We’re
We’re going to have to stay here now. Why don’t you ever think to listen to me? ^
It’s a good thing I didn’t! We wouldn’t have seen her put poison in the—
] Now, now: You don’t know for sure it’s poison. ^
Petulance: Do you really think it’s not poison in that akvavit?
] It’s none of our business. I think it would be the silliest thing you’ve ever done in a lifetime
of silly things to give a shit. What has it to do with you? The concept of death is but the result
of the possibility of a shift in language from first- to third-person perspective. ^
Don’t be daft. I can’t sit in here and watch her give him poison!
] Come somewhere else, then. ^
Exasperation. At last: You’re a coward.
] May I ask what it is you intend to do? Are you going to leap out and snatch the glass from
hand? What is it that you could possibly have in mind to do? ^
his hand?
I didn’t have anything in mind, and well you know it! But now that I’ve seen what
she did, I’ve got no choice. You are supposed to know about self-importance! How
can I just fly back to the Underthing and twiddle my thumbs, knowing what’s going
to happen? He’s too important to mankind to do that, I swear it.
] A miraculous thing, is it not, to be able to watch the person you’re
you’re deeply in love with un-
un-
detected? Hiding and spying like a voyeur is for... splendiferous little children! ^
Exactly what I knew you’d say. Now stop talking.
Thence, the two were silent for a long while, Erica jammed up against the various things in-
side the chest and Aiasheu self-righteously twitching his temporary incisors on one of the tunics.
To consider consciousness an emergent property of the brain was either an appeal to vague-
ness, or the mere labelling of an unknown: In both cases, nothing was really explained. For the

55
 EUDAIMONIA

sake of preserving a minimum degree of empirical honesty, Erica had to remain grounded in the
primary datum of reality: Experience. Experience took precedence over all. It was the departure
point and a necessary substrate of every theory. No ontology in history was less metaphysical
than materialism. Unlike many spiritual or philosophical ontologies, the strongly “objective” realm
of materialism was, by definition, completely outside. It was a pure abstraction. All the properties
attributed to reality—solidity, smell, shape—were qualities of experience. As such, they were not
applicable to materialism. What was a thing but what she saw, smelt or otherwise sensed? It
had colour, flavour, texture; That brain damage could alter her outer environment, was it no more
surprising than the fact that a thought could change her emotions? “States of non-ordinary real-
ity.” That is what she called them: Meaning an unusual reality as opposed to the ordinary reality
of everyday life. In the context of Aiasheu’s Sourcery, they were deemed just as real, though their
reality was differentiated from “ordinary” reality. Provided one suggest a confirmation of the rul-
ing metaphysical hypothesis, it was startling how much inaccuracy philosophers could get away
with. Earthling society was very forgiving when the error was on the side of the reigning meta-
physical theory; A virtuous cycle tendentiously maintaining its ruling status.
The 13th century was already proving to be quite the odditorium! Those who lived there were
odd; The things they did there were odd; Even the “there” itself was odd.
] Humans make life so interesting. Do you know that in a Kósmos of wonders and terrors they
have somehow managed to invent bored—^ Shhh! I hear someone coming!
Erica watched as her lover boy entered, poured a mug of beer, drained it, then poured anoth-
er, draining that as well. She saw him in the ultra-violet and the infra-red, a man with eyes that
flashed and glittered with laughter. All his movements were cat-like and perfectly balanced, like
those of a wild animal. At the moment, his expression was distant and preoccupied. Erica sud -
denly felt her stomach lurch, for Kiran had taken the stopper from the decanter and was pour -
ing himself a glass. “No!” The loud cry had come out before she could hold it back.
The Brython had heard this and had spun around at once.
Eventually the Brythonic man would manage: “Who’s thar?”
Erica could not help herself. She tumbled out of the chest and scrambled up to snatch the cup
from his hand. The liquid flew out, splashing onto the edge of the table and the bamboo flooring.
The reservoir glass fell to the floor. She allowed him to seize her wrist and twist hard.
Shock: “Eirlys! What the ’El are youer doing ’ere?!”
“I just saved your life!” At which, the Brython again twisted her wrist.
They were still for a moment, the girl twisting in pain but attempting to prevent herself from
crying out. The man bent over her, frowning in a thunderhead of confusion: What?!
“I saw her put death in it.” At which, the Brython let go of her arm.
She sank to the floor. Eirlys was not like other young women: She had the rare gift of know-
ing where she needed to be before she had been to all the places she did not need to be. All-
in-all, might it be enough to make her cry? Was she even the sort of young—

56
 KALIDASA

There were footsteps outside. “Get back inside that thing! Since youer in thar, make youerself
useful. Watch the shadows closely when she comes in. If youer tell me something interesting
about them, I’ll keep youer from getting further into danger than youer already are.”

From that point, the last of the day slipped away in an amiable silence. It appeared to Kiran
that Guðdís walked along a fading line between jaded and wishful thinking, unable to laugh, or
engage in her old-time persiflage with those of her fellows, who, underneath their silliness, were
as primitive in their pursuit of a biological desire as the monkeys they had been before they had
shed their natural fur, donning wrappings made from the furs of other creatures.
Jaded? Nay, jade is comely. Guðdís had been rusted. He understood that of late the woman
had taken to so jamming the keys and tangling the rollers of a typewire that the ḍākinī made a
rather clever argument for keeping such dangerous weapons as typewires out of the hands of
the enraged. Ḍākinī: A Tantric concept that can roughly be described as the female embodiment
of enlightened energy—if Kiran could picture a Goddess bearing a crust of rage as soil bore a
hardened frost. Some days, it melted with warm persuasions; On others, it lingered as hollowly
as a cold fury. As a young boy, had he thought that females only did such things in erotica? He
could replicate in his head the exact sounds she brought out of the machine—the clack-a-clack
of the type striking paper—and that would be when things were going relatively well. He knew
as well that, having introduced elements of inconsistency into her relationship with her so-called
philosophy, Guðdís was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently.
It was said that many thinkers came to Aléxandros after his election to congratulate him; He
expected that Diogénēs ho Künikós would do so also. But since the man took not the slightest
note of him, merely continuing to enjoy his leisure, he went in person to see him. He found him
lying in the sun. Diogénēs raised himself up a little when he saw so many men coming towards
him, and fixed his eyes on Aléxandros. When Aléxandros addressed him with a greeting and
asked if he wanted anything, “Yes,” said Diogénēs, “stand out of my sun.” Thus was it said, that
Aléxandros had been so struck by this he said to Dḗmos, who had been laughing and jesting
at the old philosopher’s expense as they walked away: “But truly, if I were not Aléxandros, I would
wish I were Diogénēs.” Overhearing, Diogénēs had replied: “If I weren’t Diogénēs, I too would be
wishing to be Diogénēs.” Among the Norse and Brythons, where last names were but matronyms
or patronyms, strangers often picked up the habit of utilizing somebody’s nickname; The illustrious
duo had accordingly been introduced to each other as Guðdís Fuðhundr and Kiran o Fuellt, slip-
ping full tilt into an easy intimacy from which they had not recovered to this day. The system of
Guðdís the Cynic and Kiran from Buellt was erotic, not really kinky at all: Think of the difference
between using a feather in the bedroom and using whole chickens. Six whole weeks had been
sufficient for the young lad to find it far more fun to talk with a woman who did not use long, dif-
ficult words, but short, easy ones, like: “Hey, boy? How about a creampie?”

57
 EUDAIMONIA

Had it indeed taken over a year before Kiran had realized that she sometimes desired to eat
breakfast with her G-string on? She had dark, violet-blue eyes set against long, Íslandic features.
She had a slender neckline and round, athletic shoulders, her figure conveying a strong lupine
quality... if Kiran could imagine a wolf holding a smouldering reefer between its teeth, breathing
in, blowing smoke out through its nose. A recollection: Guðdís had smelled of unwashed female
body. She had had new bruises on her face, purple welts and faded green-and-red splotches.
Even battered, she had looked handsome. Yes, women could look handsome. A glass dragonfly
on a steel chain had hung in the hollow of her unextravagant cleavage; Her hair had fallen past
sunburned shoulders. She would inform Kiran that she had not selected that dress with any real
care, or that necklace; That she had not cared to wash her hair or her face in over a month. He
had not believed it: No one ever looked that ravishing by accident! The Hellēnic word for “return”
was nostos, the word for “suffering” was algos; Nostalgia was therefore a suffering which was
caused by an unpleasant yearning to return. Guðdís: “Now, leave me in peace! I don’t want to
be answering a string of questions while I’m eating. I want to think!”
“Good ’eavens!” the Brython had smiled. “Over breakfast?”
“Quality... we know what it is, yet we don’t know what it is. However, some things are better
than others: That is, have more quality. But when we try to say what quality is, apart from some
things that have it, it all goes poof! There appears to be nothing to talk about. But if we cannot
say what quality is, how do we know what it is, or how do we know that it even exists at all? If
no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t truly exist. But for all practical
purposes it really does exist! Obviously, some things are better than others... but what the fuck
is better-ness? Around and around we go!” More pepper—a sneeze. “Every Art, reduced to a
teachable form, and in like manner every action or choice, aims at some good of which a by-no-
means bad description is ‘That at which all things aim.’ A characteristic of the Hellēnic tradition is
such that whenever one asks for instruction upon how to do a job well, the instructor must fight
against a tendency to give only a single understanding of it—the Classical—with the presump-
tion that once a method is applied, ‘good’ would perforce follow. You will discover it most frus-
trating of all, believe me, that the truth might on rare instances be that though you treat a fellow
human being, give them your conversation and cooking, they nevertheless recover!”
It would seem but a matter of mikroí later that they were cycling up a switchback to abruptly
reach a height, seeing spread out behind them the vast, terraced megápolis, switchback piled
upon switchback. An auto had flown by, a horn had blared, people had filed past.
Kiran: A sad klovn is naything but a klovn ’oo ’as temporarily forgotten that as soon as they
’ave ’ad any thought—any thought whatsoever—they’d do best to laugh at it! A stiff upper lip is
really too much, after all: We cun nay live in such a constipated fashion forever.
Back in the present: The Brython would eventually amble back from the head as if nothing at
all had gone amiss that morning. He wore no clothing at all but a fur cock-sock and a customary
mocking smile. The Straumsfjord was so ornery, deep: Not at all like the Mere of Dead Men she

58
 KALIDASA

had grown up in. At first, had the calm horizon lulled her into thinking their crossing would be
smooth? By now, the unsteady sea seemed to him to have taken its toll: It seems that claiming
to ’ave Dylan Eil Ton for an ancestor is nay guarantee of freedom from seasickness. Íslanders
were in fact a society of Skandinavíans and Brythons who had immigrated there around the year
Ol. 400,1. Guðdís presently moved with an ageless look of confidence: There was something
about the way she touched her fingers to her toes, her eyes darting this way and then that. Was
she eternally watching when she should have been seeing? No, the woman saw the things she
brushed. She was a see-er. Maybe Kiran could write a monologue on human toes: The bottom
parts of the female body are jest as elegant as the top parts! Each chapter would focus on one
of the ten toes. Many would be curious to read it since it was the toes which went forwards first
and foremost, a toe which helped to tell them whether the bath was hot or cold.
Kiran wondered how he appeared in her eyes. Was Kiran as yet the exotic foreigner, lanky
and wild? He glanced down at his own naked body: Curse him for being all tight muscles, with
ivory skin and a mouth as soft as rose petals! Curse him for the worst mistakes of his life being
haircuts! Curse him for having the grace of a lynx and a cool touch! His first and last joys of the
day were before him again. He knew her wits and wiles, the scent of moistening at his ridiculous
manhood. Would it have been an advantage not drinking alongside such a heavy—
Guðdís Fuðhundr really knew how to belch: “I h-hate those clocks!”
Youer dislike everything nowadays. Yet, he took a moment to re-examine the clock; It was an
ironic timepiece all right, a circular face with two analogue hands and a geomagnetic trim. The
hands were priapean: Naked humans, done in red-figure style, one a brawny male with an erect
member, the other a roly-poly female with her legs spread wide. Each time the hands met the
man appeared to enter the woman. Well crafted, to be sure, with intricately carved woodwork
edges, the two figures at first appearing rather well-proportioned. All-in-all, it was just a clock.
But that would be before it was wound, before it began to tick; For then it became something
more. First of all, the colours transformed all across the face, transitioning from red-figure style
to black-figure style and back again. Meanwhile, the genitals of the figures expanded and con-
tracted, like the limbs of strange balloon animals, as if the hands were reaching a climax, lazily
and boorishly; The shrinking and growth of the man’s erection took hṓrai.
A shrug. I recall a time when youer thought the idea of ’aving an indoor toilet foul. Then: “First
youer drink, then youer drinking takes a drink, then youer drinking drinks youer?”
Disappointment. “Into bed then,” he said, in a sharp tone of not unkind command.
She obeyed, laying back with hands behind her head, letting herself be lulled by the pleas-
ant familiarity of Kiran’s movements. Her apprentice sat down by her feet, uncovered her midriff
and groin. The devil! Somehow, he had learned about the laxative; She was sure of it! She was
not often conscious of it, but there was a part of her body that was sensitive, somewhere along
her back; It was a soft, secret spot she could not reach herself. The first time she met Kiran, she
had felt an anonymous finger reach out, pushing down in silence that trigger on her back. In the

59
 EUDAIMONIA

end, Guðdís realized that she wanted everything to be as it had been when she was a little girl.
When one was very young, one did not know that one lived in a hovel in the middle of a swamp.
A leaky roof was nothing other than a roof. It had not occurred to Guðdís when she had been
very young to yearn for anything other than the cock that a man had to offer her.
Silence was only awkward to persons who compulsively verbalized. At last, Guðdís shook her-
self: Truly? That whole easy-going, cozy saunter across the cabin was for me? I am sorry, but
would you mind going back and doing it all over again? Slowly, this—
The low ceiling above had endless disadvantages, but it had one supreme advantage: It af -
forded an immediate topic of conversation. It made things start, quite literally, with a bang. Kiran
dipped his hand into warm oil. He drew a line down each of her bare feet. The Brython spread
the liquid out. It had an exceptionally clear colour. It wafted up pleasantly. Guðdís loved the feel
of the stuff between her toes—or to rub her feet, cunt and buttocks against wet grass.
Within her hiding place, Erica had examined the Brython’s dark-green eyes: Had they flicked
towards the far wall, if but for a moment? One of the most silly beliefs of the Old Sourcerers, was
it the notion that organic life was not the only form of life native to the world? To a Gaian, to be
alive meant to be a thought; For an Earthling materialist, to be alive simply meant to be an or-
ganism. Everyone knew that monsters did not exist; But, while that simplistic formulation might
satisfy the layman, it did not suffice for her scientistic mind, being far more concerned with what
might exist. The banality of existence had been so amply demonstrated to her that there was
very little need for her to discuss it any further. Attacking the problem philosophically, she had dis-
covered three distinct varieties of monsters: The mythical, the chimerical and the hypothetical.
Each was nonexistent, but each non-existed in a completely different way.
Over the next half-hṓra, all that there would be to be seen were the shadows dancing against
the opposite wall. Guðdís began a jest, her shadow throwing jagged black lines against the far
bulkhead. Sweeping, outré, the lines formed the head and body of the beings seeming to tower
above her. His aunt had told Kiran a fable wherein a plentyn cael had been given away because
the changeling’s shadow pointed the wrong way; Towards the fire, which had been tinged blue.
Rational human beings refused to honour agreements in which they did not participate; Nobody
ever asked Kiran if he would consent to be eaten by beings of a different kind of awareness. His
parents just brought him into this world to be food, like themselves, and that was the end of the
story. These fleeting shadows, were they the end of his rational life? He saw them everywhere.
Was he no longer capable of going to sleep in darkness? To sleep with the lights on had never
bothered him. At the end of the day, nothing in life was to be feared, it was only to be under-
stood. Now was the time to understand more, so that he might fear less.
If Sourcerers believed that whatever they were experiencing was in reality real, then Aiasheu
was right and a shadow could have as “physical” an effect as anything else. Amongst the tales
of shadows and ruin that came down from the days of the Old Sourcerers there were none in
which, amidst the terrors, there was no wonder, or under the yoke, no smiles.

60
 KALIDASA

Guðdís sighed: “What must it be like to pursue a dozen languages down an alleyway, only
to beat them unconscious with a pipe and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary?” English’s very
thievery and idiomatic complexity would, in the months to come, make it possible for the klovn to
say things, blunt things, which could not be said in any Gaian language. The words were on
their way, and when they arrived Guðdís would hold them in her hands like—
Kiran: “Nay logorrhoea? Nay a flux of the mouth? If the Whale ’ad ’is way, every little thing
the man ’as ever spit out would be a ’arbinger. Nay thing would be what it is: Everything would be
what it is nay. What is, it would nay longer be an’ what it would nay be, it—”
Guðdís scratched her armpit: “I-Is there any language in Manaw’r Brythoniaid that can be de-
scribed as the product of a Saeson shepherd trying to make a date with an Ængle bar-maid? In
my experience, emotions aren’t covered by single words. I want at my disposal complicated hy-
brid emotions, Teutonic train-car constructions such as, say: ‘The happiness that attends dis-
aster’. Or: ‘The exhilaration of sleeping with one’s fantasy’. Or: ‘Intimations of mortality brought
on by an ageing family member’, which once connected with ‘A hatred of mirrors that began in
middle age’. I would like to have a word for ‘A sadness inspired by failing restaurants’, as well
as a word for ‘The joy of getting to occupy a bed-and-breakfast with a minibar’.”
As he ran his fingertips over her bunions, Kiran was careful not to cause more pain: “They
carved ’im up good. They fixed ’im as best they could. ’Is mind seems to ’ave left us, gone wild
an’ deadly. ’Is thoughts swam left an’ right, ’idden under a table, disappearing altogether. So the
big man goes fishing, dangling ’is questions as though baits an’ lures.”
“Why do you, of all people, insist on speaking of parsimony and aesthetics as though two en-
tirely different things with—” Regarding the Brython’s foot rubs, the study of an anatomy text-
book might actually be advisable, for what he had begun to rub was not a bunion.
She soon burst into giggles. It was cut short, as if she regretted allowing him to make her do
so loudly; The fulfilment, however, was already his. Tonight, might every sigh, belch, every last
morsel of hers have its secret, bringing great pleasure to this well-hung lad who knew how to
awaken them? Was it odd for Kiran to be of the opinion that the clitoris was proof the Gods loved
women? A bubble floated past Erica’s vision, big, shaky and ripening to that blue they turned just
before bursting. Kiran diddled her, massaged her, licked her toes. Talk therapy was counter-pro-
ductive; Blowing bubbles was a far more sensible solution. Over her heart was a tattoo: Try Harder
You Lazy, Paraiatric Shitbag or I’ll Haunt Your Bedroom Forever! Hers was a body he knew better in some
ways than his own. The Brython had seen her afire with passions, awash in laughter, naked in
springtime, growling and thrashing in her slumber beside him—so comical the simple memory of
it could consume the man. Slumbering alone had never felt right. At times it felt safe, but it never
felt right. Although his body fit with hers like a puzzle piece, her mind was to him an ever-shift -
ing riddle he felt he could study for the whole of his life and never fully solve.
The shadows of the two drunkards would twist against the wall, one beast with two backs.
The shadows would dance back and forth across the ceiling too. The lantern swung from side

61
 EUDAIMONIA

to side, the blueish flame helping to warm the cabin without emptying it of the monstrous shad-
ows clawing at the walls. In some traditions, Erica knew, such blue flame would be a sign of ma-
gic. It showed bad air in mines, too. When a lamp burned with a bluish haze there was firedamp
in the air. Firedamp in a coal mine: Was that far more terrifying to the Irish than any shade? Was
it natural, therefore, that their shadows should fall on the wall opposite in such a way that when
they moved thus and so, their shadows moved otherwise? Standing erect, their shadows stood
otherwise; If they turned around, their shadow turned about otherwise.
Erica: What a grotesque woman she must be, to have such a dandified shadow!
In metaphysics, idealism was the concept that perception is the only certain form of realty.
Nevertheless, she at times had moments of despair. At times, she had begun to think she had
lost all sense of the scientific and the actual, since what was more, her daily flights of fantasy
were followed sometimes by appalling moments of intellectual adulthood. Without her halo of
electronics, Erica felt very small. Not the smallness she strove for every day; Not the smallness
of a shadow underground; And not simply small of body either: She knew there was not much of
her any more. When she thought to look more closely at her standing mirror, the girl she saw
was as tiny as an urchin living on the streets of Boston. The girl she saw was thin as thin; Her
cheekbones high; Her collarbone pressed tight against her skin. She felt less. She felt tamped
down: Dim; Faint; Feint; Small. Erica had used to daydream about slaughtering people, about
how easy it would have been. But of course there would have been individuals with their sneers
going “You are a monster! You kill people!” No fucking shit she killed people! She put holes in
mountains! How many types of processor were still in use fifteen-plus years after being made?
The 21st century had put a new perspective on everything. What was it like to be trapped in an
obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moved on? Saving the world was a hobby. Erica
took it up when the bottom of things had been knocked out of her. If it had been all down on pa-
per she would have enjoyed every bit of it. But when it came to running down a live Brython and
shooting her dead, it did not seem as if she ought to find it so damn—
Guðdís: “As I was saying... we must now vacate the firm foundation of facts in an expedition
through the murky marshes of philosophy into thickets of the wildest guesswork. I have heard
it said that language loss is a good thing, since fewer languages means easier communication
amongst the world’s people. Movable type or the typewire may well spell doom for thousands of
dialects, as mass-production has made deciding on a single language for a wide area a reason-
able choice. All that may be true, but it’s a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in struc-
ture and vocabulary, in how they express causation, pleasure or personal responsibility; Hence
in how they structure thoughts. There is no single-purpose ‘best’ language. Instead, different lan -
guages are better suited for different purposes. Is it at all an accident that Aristotélēs wrote in
Hellēnic, or Lǎo-Tzǝ composed in Chūng-wén? If Hellēnic ever becomes a true universal lan-
guage, it won’t be because it is the best language for criticism. All humanity might be said to
have developed language because of a deep-seated need to complain.”

62
 KALIDASA

Kiran sighed: “We worry because we feel unsafe an’ want to be safe. It is perfectly useless to
complain that we should nay want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names does nay get rid of it.
What we ’ave to discover is that thar is nay complete safety, an’ that when we find it, we don’t
like it. ’Umanity ’as advanced, when it ’as advanced, nay because it ’as been sober, responsible
an’ cautious, but because it ’as been ferocious, rebellious an’ even immature.
“I’m free, youer realize, nay matter what judgments beset me or my words? If I find them tol-
erable, I tolerate them; If I believe them too obnoxious, I deny them. I am free because I know
that I’m the brahman, an’ thar is no other; Nay even Kiran! I tell youer that I’ll accept any rule at
all, ’owever peculiar, that youer feel necessary to youer freedom. I ask, must thar be a yearn-
ing deep in ’uman ’earts to stop people from doing as they please? Rules, laws: Almost always
for other folk. A dirty part of us, something we ’ad before coming down out of the trees an’ failed
to shuck when we stood up, maybe? Since never in ’uman ’istory was it said: ‘Please pass this
law so I’ll nay be able to do a thing I know I shouldn’t; I’d like to stop.’ ”
Never in any nation had it been against the law to be an idiot. On the other hand, if one’s eu-
topian theory required humanity to undertake some kind of evolution, then did one really have
a theory... or naught but a dream? Poor human nature: What ugly deeds had been committed in
its name! The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness
or weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how could any philosopher speak of it in their day, with
every noús in prison, with every heart fettered or wounded or maimed? When one wanted to
teach one’s children to think, one began by treating them seriously when they were tiny, taking
their unseriousness seriously. That is, if youer want to teach them to think! The place to improve
the Kósmos was first in one’s heart and head, and gradually outwards from there.
Pre-Didáskal asklepiádai may be likened to poor plumbers, treating a leaking tube by clean-
ing up the water. They had been fairly adept at this, always inventing “better” methods. Dḗmos it
was who taught them how to close the tap. On average, humanity was more good than bad.
But this was not the point. They had been more or less ignorant; It was this that they called vice
or virtue. The most incorrigible vice: Was it to fancy one “knew” what one knew?
Normally, when Dḗmos had challenged the conventional wisdom that a present economic
or political system was the only possible one, the reaction he was likely to get was a demand
for a detailed blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its finan-
cial instruments, energy supplies and policies of sewer maintenance. If not, he was likely to be
asked for a detailed program of how this system would be brought into existence. This was ri-
diculous: “When has social change ever happened according to a blueprint?” It was not as if a
small circle of visionaries in Athēnai conceived of something they named “the Athēnian Golden
Age” and then put in place a program to bring it about. As far as Dḗmos had at the time been
able to see, the idea was so absurd he wondered how it ever occurred to any to imagine that
this was how change comes about to begin with. Which was all well and good, for Dḗmos’ plight
may otherwise have been that he minded what others were not permitted to do.

63
 EUDAIMONIA

The fatal error of most eutopian philosophers had been to subscribe to an optimism based on
the thought that a bloody revolution, an invasion of aliens or the extinction of half the globe—in
short, nearly anything but a facing up to the integral, irredeemable nature of their basic assump -
tions—could bring about eutopian situations.. It is amazing ’ow universal the delusion is that a
solution is a goodness! To combat her instincts, that was Guðdís’ formula for despair: As long as
her star ascended, its joy and its work were one; Yet, to believe that anything about iatrics was
worth preserving past the World to Come made it impossible to practice it rationally. The only
view that worked was that there were no solutions: Iatrics could not be fixed.
Guðdís: “NænniR says the Whale likes crazy people, likes the way they think.”
Kiran: “They think... badly. That’s the definition of crazy.”
“They’re not boring,” the woman replied. “That’s what Pienish likes.”
The pair of klovner had been speaking all this time in Vinlandic Norse, with smatterings of
Hellēnic Koinē thrown in. Travelling across Markland, making the decision to speak Hellēnic or
Norse based on someone’s looks was risky. If one had tried Hellēnic to no avail, try Norse. But
if one just assumed they did not speak Hellēnic, might one somehow give offence?
“Oh, you’re quite correct; Mental illness, as a category, dies out only at the moment when a
society ceases to regard as an illness any mode of being which is inconvenient to the system.
Fast do we approach the day when none will be able to find a way of defying the system that
does not give offence; I mean, what is so admirable about politeness, for example? A sane wo-
man who is untidy appears more crazy than a tidy woman who is insane? There is a big differ-
ence between a person like Dḗmos admitting that he faces difficult obstacles, and on the other
hand, those around him throwing their hands in the air and fatalistically declaring that the poor
will always be with us—or death, or taxes; Whichever. Such individuals did not know that they
were unsolvable. Had they even tried? Tried with feeling, with genius.”
How could tickling, though it cause joy, be torture? “I’m nay fool, my love!”
Guðdís’ jocosity would grow up and put bells on: “I never said you were!” Was she every bit
the grubby, wiggling, skeletal Goddess that had been promised by the bones of her feet? Once
again, the drunken woman’s shadow moved beneath the shadow of a drunken man, entangled
with it, a crisp shadow crawling into the four corners the room and seeming to stand up. They
were professionals at this on Ísland. No matter how good a drinker one may think oneself, do
not forget that an Íslander—any Íslander—could drink anyone under the table. As it happened, it
was totally okay with Guðdís if Kiran needed to keep a secret from her. She had been thinking
and so decided that a best friend was one who, even if they did not understand, still understood.
By this point, both of them were quite drunk. It was the only way Kiran could be certain of being
alone with her. As usual, he found that he had no wish to wake the thing.
Rumours spread like wildfire in a town as small as Buellt; Each started with a single germin-
ating event, spreading out until its permutations became senescent and exhausted. Imagine a
hilltop and a sober, Brythonic tweenager, running. Not running away from something, but running

64
 KALIDASA

just fast enough to keep ahead of a drunken boy; Though not so far ahead he had given up. From
out of dense fog the little girl had stumbled onto a rise upon which stood The Mirror.
They were about man-height and barely wider than a man. Somehow, they had not appeared
worth it. If there were a stone forest one must not go near, the imagination suggested that there
should be big, brooding trilithons, a maze of polished obsidian; Each of which reflected the truth
and none of which led anywhere. Not these stone lumps. It turned out that Kālī had been run-
ning too fast this time, the boy in laughing pursuit had got lost and fed up and so had eventually
walked off back to Buellt alone. She had not, at this point, known this. She had absentmindedly
adjusted the rose twined in her hair. It had been that kind of autumn afternoon.
She had known about The Mirror. She had never been “told” about The Mirror. She was not a
nice girl, as was generally understood. There was that glint in her eyes generally possessed by
those people who had found that they were more intelligent than most people but who had not
yet learned that one of the most intelligent things an individual could do was prevent others ever
finding this out. Thus, she was given to a piercing expression that was extremely disconcerting.
It was not a face one could talk to: Opening his mouth, a boy would be the focus of a penetrat-
ing stare that declared: “What you’re about to say had better be interesting.”
At some point she had begun to approach The Mirror, a little cautiously. It had not been the
caution of a rabbit about to run; It was closer to the way a hunter moved.
She had put her hands on her hips, such as they were. A pitch-black figure dressed all in shad-
ows had appeared inside the stones. The innermost cluster was wide enough to throw a stone
across, but somehow the figure seemed to approach from a great distance. Most people would
have run away; The girl had not. The figure in the circle was instantly attentive.
The slender Brythonic tweenager had spoken softly: “So you’re real, then.”
≮ Of course we are real. What is it that you want from me? ≯
“But... do you exist in the same way that I exist?”
≮ ≯ ≮
You do not exist. Silence. What is it that you want from me, little one? ≯
Silence. The girl had merely nodded. You could bounce rocks off her pride.
≮ And now that you know I exist, you want nothing? Last year you and I went all the way to
the Archipélagos to talk to a daímōn. Do you know what I wanted from him? ≯
“You may think that we are still your slaves, but Dḗmos—”
≮ ≯
Quiet, slave! The little girl had found herself frozen in silence at these words.
≮
The shadow gave a quiet chuckle. All the world is a stage, and all the men and women
merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, and one soul in its time plays many
≯ ≮
parts. Silence. Blood, bracken and bone, I wish you dull creatures had the wit to appreciate
me. Whatever else you may forget, recall what I just said. Eventually you will get the joke. You’ll
≯ ≮
laugh when the time comes, I promise. A sigh. You may speak. ≯
“You cannot come out of that thing, can you?” There had been a distinct impression that this
was the wrong question to have asked. The shadow had carefully ignored it.

65
 EUDAIMONIA

≮ Isn’t it dangerous to say something that ridiculous? ≯

“To be ridiculous and dangerous, a questionable alliance,” the girl had said.
Back in the present: “The adventures first: Is that it, Kiran? Explanations take such a dread-
ful time? Death by misadventure is as natural to a Sourcerer as childbirth!”
“They are nay fools either, love. Are youer telling me youer understand why permitting ’ealthy
people to eat a well-balanced, omnivorous diet was ever considered drastic, while Olofsson is to
this day considered indubitably iatrically conservative for cutting ’is patients open an’ putting
them upon vile-tasting concoctions for the rest of thar lives? Youer know, ’uman beings are the
only animals who ever in thar ’istory used to work; A wild animal makes its living by living alone.
It seems to me that the most important thing for most people in Valandvik is to ’ave the ambi -
tion to become a Bodhisattva, but right now I nay ’ave the least ambition to become anything at
all. It may be ’ealthy for youer to throw away that way of thinking an’ live an easy, comfortable life
with plenty of free time. Good friends, good books an’ a sleepy conscience: That is the perfect
life. I think jest now that the way the Polünēsiakoí live in the tropics, stepping out at dawn to ken
if thar are some fish to catch, taking an extended nap at midday an’ making love under the stars
at night, must be much ’ealthier. ’Ave youer nay ’eard the Naoist expression that ’umanity suf-
fers because it takes seriously what was intended to be fun? The klovn’s Art of iatrics consists
in nothing but entertaining the patient whilst the vile-tasting concoctions run thar course. Des-
troying two lives at once cun nay actually be said to be multitasking!”
Did some readers indeed hate stories with a “Be yourself!” message? Had they been told so
many times that they were kind of worthless? Obviously, they were not totally worthless, since
they still dealt with self-identity and knowing who one was; That was very crucial on a founda -
tional level. But it was an inwards-looking message. It usually did not deal with the pragmatic as-
pect of, say: “Okay, so I’m chatting with someone, now what?” According to a school that spoke
deeply to Kiran, the Shadow—an artefact of the subconscious—contained both constructive as
well as destructive aspects. Either way, it embodied those aspects that a person would not ac -
cept about themselves. So, the Shadow of a man who thinks himself kind might be harsh, while
the Shadow of a woman who thinks herself a brute might be gentle—despite a rather ghoulish
reputation, Úna might really have the heart of a young girl. Per’aps she keeps it in a jar on ’er
desk! Yet, according to the Tathāgata, at the core of all beings, there could be found no eternal or
essential or distinct anything to which “Myself” could reasonably refer. Truth was found neither
in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciled the two. When, in
due course, thesis and antithesis had reached a metaphorical synthesis, the place-between, oc-
cupied with tension for a lifetime—or a season, whichever—should it not become a well-spring
of balance, a gateway to an understanding of “Myself” as a universal referent? Must it be diffi-
cult for the Brython, all things considered, to exist as so many things at once?
Youer name is Guðdís; Youer female; Wun great joy of ’ome ownership is to fire a pistol in
wun’s own bedroom! Is it ’ard to be so many things at the same time?

66
 KALIDASA

Born into the Brythonic/Sanātanist emotive tradition, not the Norse/Praśnayānist cognitive tra-
dition, every fibre of him howled that the Self was not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be
experienced by playing it to the hilt. The trewth suffers from too much analysis!
One spring on the island of Epekwitk, betwixt the rolling hills of the pānoptikón there, Guðdís
had for three days chased a trio of Lordlings who had filched a suitcase, among whose contents
was her antique spangenhelm. In time, she had caught them, at which point their Gentlemen had
bid them surrender. What a brilliant feat! A defining moment in her years there. But what made it
noteworthy was that during that time, the girl had managed to read the entire Mahābhārata.
Kiran thought of this whenever he heard her say she had no time to read.
The stupidity of a novel could only come from having an answer for everything. The wisdom
of a novel, did it come from having a question for everything? Novelists, did they teach readers
to comprehend the world as a question? There might be wisdom and tolerance in this attitude.
In a world built upon hallowed certainties, novels as an art would be dead. Totalitarianism: Was
it nothing but a world of answers rather than questions? What did it say, that for most of human
history, what commoners would do upon hearing such high-sounding generalities was hew a
club or bar their door because they knew a storm of hypocrisy was brewing?
A grin: “Is it that youer propose that this, instead, is the real secret of ’uman life: To be com-
pletely exhilarated by an’ engaged with whatever it is that youer doing in the ’ere an’ now? Well
then, in the name of all thundercunts, stop a moment, cease youer ’esitations an’ look around!
Forget life in the fast lane: Myself, youerself, Mishtamek, let us all spend the next few months
going all-in for life in the oncoming traffic! I ken little reason why we all cun nay come out win-
ners. Aye, I do declare: Damn the system! Things are what they are; Goggling up at the stars at
night, who makes partitions between well- an’ badly-arranged constellations?” A thought: “Youer
know, actually, per’aps the art of living cun, in fact, be either breezy drifting or an engaged de-
votion, so long as wun remembers to be sensitive to each moment, regarding it as utterly fresh
an’ unique, an’ is open of mind an’ ’olly receptive. The only thing that a ’uman being must nay
under any circumstances do might well be to rely upon a partial feeling.”
Guðdís vomited, alert, at last, to the fact that her answers had not been to the man’s liking.
She found herself wondering if the Brythons knew what it was like to listen fearfully to their pil-
lows throbbing in the night? Probably not. It was assumed that humans were more intelligent
than dolphins because they had achieved so much—the wheel, iatrics—whilst all a dolphin had
ever done was swim about having a good time; Perhaps dolphins had always believed that they
were far more intelligent than humanity, for literally the same reason.
“How ironic that conventional wisdom forbids one to be satisfied with oneself, always sending
one away dissatisfied, whereas stubbornness can fill one with joys and certainty! Sure, if a man
can’t trust himself, he can hardly be said to be able to trust his mistrust of himself...  . And yet, I
should like to point out that we seldom realize how much our most private thoughts and emo-
tions were given to us by our society: We copy our parents, learning from them that excrement

67
 EUDAIMONIA

is supposed to have a disgusting smell or that murder is supposed to be objectionable. A mis-

trust of our nature and endeavours is also picked up from others. Our social environment has
this power since we don’t exist apart from society; Society is our extended mind and body. And
yet, the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force
to persuade the individual that they are capable of independent thought!”
For several mikroí she harkened to his hands on her inner labia. There was something civil-
ized about introducing long pauses into a conversation. Conversely, if, in the future, she decided
to hold back whilst they talked, her patient would ask soon enough: “What?”
Was it a horror to see her shadow suddenly stretch itself against the wall—even to the ceiling
above, so immense was it? What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that Kiran
knew that there had never before been anything which had chilled him with a fear that was bey -
ond shuddering and beyond crying and shrieking, beyond all possibility of comfort? Kiran sup-
posed that as kids human beings did See, often deciding it was so unacceptable that they did
not want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on their Sight, but every-
body else around dissuaded them from doing so. Yet, to be alive in the world was to enjoy what
was muted, marginal or existed in the darkness, what shouldered its way out of mud and scur-
ried along the sodden edges of what was most commonly praised. Kiran had asked: “What will
youer do, when it’s done? Will youer all rise up from the rubble an’ take the world in ouer stead?”
≮
The answer had been in the negative—few of them were interested in that. And besides, you
≯
will still be here. Kiran knew that what was meant was “you” in the plural: Your kind, human-
ity. There was nothing more difficult to plan, nor more dangerous to manage, than a new sys -
tem; For the initiator incurred the enmity of all those who had profited by the old institution, and
merely lukewarm defenders in all those who were to gain by the new one.
Kiran: “As I was saying, of what benefit would it be to be tolerant of another if Pienish is con-
vinced that ’e is right an’ the wun who differs is wrong? That ain’t tolerance, it’s condescension!
Where thar is to be creativity, a mind that is aware of its context is nay involved in being good, if
by that we mean denying the joy it takes in its existence in order to live up to a rule. Likewise, it’s
nay interested in being free, in acting wickedly jest to prove its independence. Trew betterment is
a peculiar labour. The world is often chaotic an’ vexing to us, an’ both zōēsophía an’ Sourcery
are nowhere spared this reality. To complicate matters more, we ouerselves are only ’uman, be-
ing distractible, an’ ’esitant an’ given to ouer concerns. It is little wonder it was for a long time a
maxim that nay asklepiádai could go wrong if they refrained from doing ’arm.”
A sigh: “Youer ’ave a good ’eart an’ so youer think the good thing is to feel guilty. In the dis -
tant past, guilt was a way for people to express to others that they were people of good con-
science. In the present, we of course believe that the unexamined life is nay at all worth living.
Which is jest an indirect way of saying that choice an’ value exist in the ordering of the soul.
But, I tell youer now that thar is often a genuine violence selflessness visits upon other beings.
Individuals rarely do a thing well unless they enjoy what they do.”

68
 KALIDASA

“Who was it who first observed, how, when one has an irrational grief that one does not wish
to acknowledge, the challenging of it by another will rouse one to a—”
The Brython had lit a doobie, handed it to her. She had inhaled, coughed, wheezed, gasped.
Considered vomiting, coughed and sneezed instead; Her muscles had ached; Thank the Gods
her nose was not an active mucus volcano! She grabbed for Kiran’s arm as her head spun. She
threw it away, certain the Great Perhaps could not possibly involve seasickness.
After such a prolonged struggle, it perhaps took Guðdís a moment to recall what her normal
face even looked like, but after several attempts she was able to settle upon a reasonable fac -
simile. For his part, Kiran carried everything he was presently thinking in the climbing arches of
his eyebrows; They climbed high, with more than a usual amount of arch.
At last: “S-Still, you’re right: What is it a woman has to give if she doesn’t enjoy her own worth
or labours? Can they then be enjoyed by anyone else? Ideally, the pursuit of wisdom is said to
be at the heart of the philosopher’s business, but this credits us too much or not quite enough.
As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself rather gratifying; However, its con -
summation often turns out to be elusive. A truth captured loses its glamour; ‘Truths’ which have
been long and rather widely believed have a way of turning false with time; Easy ‘truths’ may
bore, and too many of them become half-truths. Whatever a philosopher is too sure of, if they
are healthily playful, they begin to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of the life worth living lies
not in a pursuit of truth but in a never-ending quest for new uncertainties. Dḗmos summed this
this up when he said philosophy was the Art of turning answers into questions.”
By the time they had come to this point of their dispute, her apprentice would say, out of the
blue: “I wish youer luck.” She would be taken aback, the tone of his words typical, as would be
the subject matter; A delicate and uncomfortable background music to most of her time with him
the last five years. They argued because they liked it, liked the swift run of unfettered minds along
the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned, yet at this point the pleasure of
doing so ceased for her, as it had done for him. Later, she would realize that his words connec-
ted up with his love for her. They would not strike her as patronizing any more.
“Jæja! Next time we are alone together, remind me not to talk to you!”
Guðdís sighed. “I mean... how unnerving is it to you that klovner and physicians call what we
do practice? I tell you, I am so weary of this band-aid mess of iatrics which we have built up into
such a glittering structure that there is nothing left to see but all the glitter and all the routines of
maintaining it. Fact is, we heal only where we cannot yet prevent... and we prevent only where
we cannot yet improve! As Sourcerers know well, one cannot solve a problem in the same fre-
quency in which it was created. Have you noted how often the newspaper speaks of the mar-
vels of modern iatrics? Isn’t this attitude like reminding a baker they are a—”
Cursing; A thump, thump, thump, thump, thump: “Will you two shut up! People are trying to
sleep!” There were gaps in speech where a sailor simply had to insert a string of profanities. “If
you’re going to fuck, fuck! Don’t talk!” At which a rowdy laughter had erupted, and since Guðdís

69
 EUDAIMONIA

had always been of the opinion that humour was only barbed if one sat on the outside, she joined
in and accepted her star with as much quiet dignity as she was able to muster. It was that fla-
vour of dignity exuded by a woman who had made an earthy and simplified adjustment to her
environment, borne her young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. Guðdís was often
placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking little interest in the niceties of posture. She had a fervid
zest for the physical spectrum of food, sun, sleep, the needs of her slit, pissing, athletics. Even
now, there was an excellence about her: The sultry dignity of a she-wolf.
The Íslander’s philosophy had assumed the form it commonly assumed amongst Buddhists.
This belief was often expressed as perfection—samyak. Right now, it would appear to her the
word might actually have meaning after all. As a Praśnayānist, she was troubled by the ques-
tion of how to live better. To answer this, she must pursue her ways to perfection, yet she talked
like a girl made up mostly of foibles, stitched together by a great many victories.
In a bare room under an old library on a hillside in a town at the tip of a vast swampland on
a cold island so far from everything else, Guðdís had as a child met a little boy with a rather flat
nose who had been given the nickname “Flatnefr”. Guðdís, being older than he, had begun to
pick on him haphazardly, not really intending to do him any harm. But he had seemed to like her
in spite of everything she did to him. He used to follow her around, and even kept the secret that
she was responsible for most of the pranks that had so baffled the Centralizers. Yet she still
teased him. The little boy had only been four years old, and Guðdís six.
One day she had deliberately toppled over a standing blackboard. It had fallen on the boy.
The table at which he had been sitting had thankfully absorbed most of the impact, but still the
blow had messed him up badly. She had helped him up and had seen the pain in his eyes as he
had held onto her. The boy had screamed. The shock of seeing him in such great agony, with
a mangled face, had been more than she could bear. Over the previous year-and-a-half, Guðdís
had viciously wrestled against the other small boys and girls and she had almost always won.
Through means she still did not know to this day, she had succeeded in subduing all her rivals.
She had been totally victorious; When it came to wrestling she had no competitors who counted.
Now, at the very least this little boy’s arm would need to be cut off. Guðdís had felt sad not be-
cause the boy had died; She had felt sad because he had been a human being; He had lived
like human being and died like human being, perhaps not grasping that he was, before anything
else, a God. Therefore she had vowed, in whatever way a six year old was capable of, never
to be defeated. Would a time come when her waiting would be over and she would no longer
have to honour that vow? She had given up being defeated due to that little boy.
Guðdís yawned out of her body, out of the depth of all its cavities, the remains of yesterday.
The yawning was convulsive, as if her body wanted to turn itself inside out and so thereby rid it-
self of the sand and ballast, the undigested remains of the previous day.
Guðdís: “All this is equally exasperating for the person who does the pointing, for they want
to show something that, to them, is so obvious that one would think any fool could see it. They

70
 KALIDASA

must feel as we all feel when trying to explain to a thick-headed dolt that a negative and a neg-
ative make a positive. And here is something yet more exasperating: I’m sure that you too, for
a fleeting moment, have had a clear glimpse of what a finger was pointing at—a glimpse in which
you shared a pointer’s astonishment that you had not seen it before, in which you saw the whole
thing so completely that you ‘knew’ that you would never forget it... and then you lost it. Noth-
ing that grieves us can be called sane: By the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and
a mother’s loss of a child are events of the same size. Tell me, if tomorrow you should hear of
any lapse of mine from a proper state of infantile decorum, what will you do?”
Guðdís recollected the story of an old lady of the New Sourcerers who had died standing up
leaning against a mantlepiece, in order to prove it could be done. Then she recalled another
piece of information: The fact that adolescent sloths were so inept that they frequently grabbed
onto their own arms or legs instead of tree limbs, thus falling out of trees. Both these pieces of
data were pertinent to her current situation to a degree that was, frankly, spooky.
After a time, Guðdís felt for her joint: It had not scorched the bedding, that was something.
Then she felt for her pouch, and there was some kánnabēs in it, and that was something more.
Then she felt for a match but could not find any, shattering both their hopes.
A bitch always smoked, of course. A bitch was the opposite of a bimbo. A bitch did not need
anyone—if others were lonely when alone, they were in bad company; While a bimbo chatted
when high as if ever on the verge of breaking into giggles, and when they did, they sounded
like champagne bubbles would if they were capable of laughter. Bitch: Why should she object to
that term? In modern times, had not humanity learned not to fear words? With joy and laughter
let old age come! Guðdís and Kiran had eyes and had chosen each other. Asleep, she looked a
lot younger than middle-aged, but he had noticed Kalā looked younger when sleeping too. Kiran
had figured that everyone looked younger when they were asleep.
Guðdís possessed soft features, but her eyes could be rather measuring, demanding, wolf-
like. To be, or not to be: That was the question. To die: To sleep, and by this sleep to know that
one ends the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that mind was heir to.
The dream was always the same: Kiran saw a middle-aged woman running speedily and far
ahead of him down a dark slope, the side of some vast, inhuman hill. There was no sound. The
stars above the hill were no stars his eyes had ever seen. And yet, he knew the constellations by
their names: The Torso, The Kiss, the Helmet-Maker’s Wife. They were stars that did not set, and
were not paled by the coming of any day. He had followed the woman too far. Knowing this, he
found himself alone upon the dark hillside. It was always hard to turn back, very hard. He turned
slowly. Slowly would he set one foot forwards to climb back up the hill, and then the other. Step
by step he would go; Each step would be a little harder than the last.
The shadows would not have the shapes of men or of beasts. They were shapeless, scarcely
to be seen, yet they whispered to Kiran, though most of the time there were no words in their
whispering. They reached out towards him. They stood on the side of the living and he upon the

71
 EUDAIMONIA

side of the dead. Either he must go down the hill to the joy and peace of death or he must step
across the wall back into life, where these six or seven formless monsters waited for him. Was
it darkness itself that always appeared to be awaiting Kiran, six or seven unnamed predators?
They were beings that did not belong; Figures in black, with too-stiff robes or cloaks. Each with
a different head, twisting and unfamiliar to Kiran, hanging above a neckless torso. There, at the
boundary between death and life, they had found him. They seemed almost to have searched
for him over long hṓrai. They would find him here. When Kiran awoke he was always weak and
cold and his tattoos ached. When he dreamed of the shadows—or even so much as thought
of them—he felt always that same dread: Sense drained out of Kiran, leaving him dumbstruck.
The Brython raged at his cowardice; This did no good. He had read that the Old Sourcerers of an-
cient Tshishtashkamuku had been ill at ease as to when these predators had made their appear-
ance. They reasoned that humanity must have been complete at some point, with prodigious in-
sights, feats of Power which were mythological nowadays. And thence everything had seemed to
vanish and what was left was a sedated species. These unnamed predators were neither flesh
nor spirit, having, just perhaps, no existence but what an Unknower might give them. What a dis-
grace it was for a Tantric to pledge himself to something magical, only to spend all his time ob-
sessed with the possibility that it was all an intricately orchestrated delusion.
Kiran awoke in the middle of the night thinking he heard somebody crying, thinking he, him-
self was weeping, but his face was dry. Then he looked outside—it’s jest the rain. The beings
the dream described were not benevolent. They were heavy, gross, indifferent. He felt their dis-
dain for him. Had they broken humanity long ago, making the race weak, vulnerable and docile?
He took off his cock-sock, covered himself with furs in the empty hammock and laughed his head
off. He laughed at Dḗmos, at his ḍākinī, but most of all at himself: Never must a man fall into the
vulgar mistake of believing ’imself to be a victim if ever ’e should be defeated!
So fine was the night—except for a streak of rain here or there—that the sea and sky looked
all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the
sea. Getting to her feet and coming up on deck, Guðdís could not really decide when one colour
turned into another. It may well be on such a night of clouds and dark colours that there was first
brought forth on the earth such a thing as a potent and respectable insomnia. How did one tell a
dream from a nightmare? If it involved a book burning, it was probably a nightmare.
The moon had been observing Gaia close-up longer than anybody. It had witnessed all the
phenomena taking place—and all the acts carried out—but had remained silent. Guðdís raised
a bottle of mead: Have you gone to bed with a man in your arms lately? No answer.
Will you ever get tired of always playing it cool? Again, no answer.
If the Kósmos had been arranged such that the stars should appear in the sky only on one
night in a hundred years, how would others have looked past that dark, maddening firmament
that would be a vast, featureless sea, endlessly deep in all directions, and read in a forgotten text
the memory of the City of God that had been shown? Thank God that most nights these envoys

72
 KALIDASA

of beauty came out and lit the Kósmos with their wonderful smile. To Guðdís, there was noth-
ing like a fair night sky to put everything into perspective. The moon and stars shone beyond
the overcast sky, even if she could not see them. Wind gently kissed the foil.
Guðdís recalled a blue line drawn in pastels across every wall of the house. “What does it
mean?” her sümpatḗr had asked her. “A Víkingr needs the sight of the sea,” she had answered.
Then she had tilted her helmet back, turned and sailed quickly away. What a sight, the butt of
an eleven-year-old girl in authentic chainmail a dozen years to large for a tween.
She had grown into the sort of girl who was always up a tree, a magnet for mud, a princess
of frogs, an artist at burping out the alphabet: Just you double-dog dare me!
Whatever was worth saying could always be sung; The ocean called out to Guðdís in a form
which could not be put into words, yet could not remain silent. Hearing voices at sea was not at
all a pathological condition; It was common. Welcome to the wonderful world of drunkenness at
sea: Of mirages, looming, towering, stooping and sinking; Of a moon which changes size, a sun
that changes shape, horizons that bend, lights which change colour, sounds that play hide and
seek, waves that speak, that kind of seasickness which waxes and wanes.
By the time Erica had slid out on deck, Snorradóttir’s shadow was just that. Had Aiasheu not
said that a perfectly natural shadow was a rare thing among human adults in the 13th century?
Once upon a time, a little girl dreamt that she was a shadow, lying in the sun beneath a cloud, to
all intents and purposes a shadow. Science was something she had learned long ago. She had
studied it before she came to know the shape of the world—before she had known the key to
being small. She had learned it well. She knew its hidden roads, the subtle ways that made one
skilled. So many different ways: Some folk inscribed, some described; There were symbols; Signi-
fiers; X-rays; Photographs; Formulae; Machineries of mathematics. But now she knew much
more than that. Much of what she thought she had known had simply been little more than a
clever way of speaking to the Universe. They were a bargaining: A plea, a call or a cry. Under-
neath, there was a secret deep within the hidden heart of things. For a long time she had been
conscious only of science, unaware that there was anything else. Then, she awoke; Here she
was, all herself. For much of her life, she had not known whether she was a girl dreaming she
was a shadow, or whether she was in fact a shadow dreaming she was a girl.

73
 KALIDASA
The story, as apocryphal as it may be, goes that when Dḗmos, who had been lodging with his
father’s family during Sōkrátēs’ arrest and trial, at last learned of Sōkrátēs’ self-execution, he fell
into a fury such as his grandparents had never before seen: A young man enraged, he struck out
at those who wished him best. Had Sōkrátēs not denied having found some new wisdom, being in
possession of no wisdom at all? When his grandmother had told Dḗmos that she had admired the
courage and wisdom of Sōkrátēs, a man who found time in his old age to learn to dance and play
music and thought it time wisely spent, Dḗmos had laughed: Did she not know that the Athēnians
had four words for freedom of speech? “What a dunce, Sōkrátēs! To uphold the law at the cost of
his own life. Why? Simply to be ironic?” In his autumn years, Dḗmos would assert that the act
had actually been a result of a secret embarrassment regarding his hideous nose! And it occurs to
me that this may be the very reaction which Sōkrátēs desired, for it is still to this day rumoured
that the actual reason he did not flee was because he secretly believed the right time had come for
him to die. Had Sōkrátēs truly been executed if the deed was done with his consent?

—from The Circle of the World by Snorri Sturluson

“Ah that I had, like he, done a thousand more. Both he and I were quite ambitious. When that
the poor have cried, Dḗmos hath wept: Should ambition be made of sterner stuff? To this day, I
yet curse any day wherein I did not such a goodness as speak a brutal honesty, or else keep an
open-minded silence; Free a nation of slaves or plot the way I might do so; End a deadly rivalry
between two houses; Pay an impoverished people’s debts. I admit to an appetite for unsolvable
questions as well as for a monstrous creativity; If you would know who controls you, look to see
who it is you may not criticize. To this day, I do not know if the people of Athēnai would vote for
superior men if they ran for office, but I have no doubt that such men do not run. Why, Dḗmos, he
did bestride the world like a colossus, each of us little children walking under his legs, peeping
about! He was less than a man but more than a God! My privilege has been merely to talk non-
sense and yet to have my nonsense well-received. It is difficult enough to remember all my opin-
ions, without also remembering my reasons for them! Together, we dared a thousand ambitious
things as willingly as one might fuck a lass. Naught grieves me more heartily but that I shall not
do ten-thousand more! So... be patient till the last, Athēnians, southern neighbours and friends!
Hear me for my deeds and be silent, that you may gauge; Believe me for mine honour, have re-
spect for me, that you may believe; Censure me, but first awaken your senses. The more I read of
Sōkrátēs, the less I wonder that you all convicted him. Few have agreed with what we have had to
say, but I will defend to my death the right to make an ass of oneself!”

—Aléxandros III’s “Apología” monologue from the history-play Dḗmos

In the autumn of the year of the 503rd Olympiad the Paidasía returned to Norandras, which
was called Sheshatshiu in the People’s tongue: An antediluvian village by the sea.
Traditional village architecture did not flourish in Sheshatshiu. There was not even a central
street. What solid structures were there were sometimes widely spaced; Many were shaped
and built to fit intimately with the natural shape of the landscape. The People built sensibly, hiding
such buildings as those from the cold. Their stone structures were built into the warm sides of
hills, or inwards from the leeward walls of a cliff. A few were even dug downwards. A few others

75
 EUDAIMONIA

dangled from the high limbs of old trees. Most of them, one could hardly see unless one were
standing right beside them. One exception was a group of old, wooden buildings clustered close
together a little distance from the town. Others were constructed of the same stone as the land-
scape, blending into the surrounding hills. One was made from uneven slabs pieced together
like a jigsaw. It lacked mortar. A visitor might just tap one with a knuckle, wondering briefly if it
were all a single, massive piece of stone carved to look like so many fitted together.
The woods were more carefully tended than was usual in this land of hunter-gatherers. There
were few streets, but rather, covered walks, tunnel-like, which in summer one may walk through
or on top of as one pleased. The buildings therefore sat every which way, chaotic, in a profuse
prodigious confusion that suddenly culminated in splendour. All the buildings were deep-foun-
ded, weatherproof and waterproof. In winter, nothing of the houses but the roof might stick out
above the snow—a winter-door may be set under the eaves or in the roof itself. Even in places
such as these the wealth of Gaia was quite obvious. Would this soon be a good topic for specu-
lation: That the variation of human history this one deviated from would have been horrible? The
worst mistake of First Contact, made over and over throughout human history by persons from
every continent, had been a dreadful habit of making unwarranted assumptions.
In the mind of Dḗmos, should a family living in a dirt-floored wigwam with but a few sticks of
furniture and a tiny firepit view themselves as unfortunate? But one step up from paupers? And
yet, while most of the People’s permanent structures were simple, they were not the same sort
that were constructed of sod and logs chinked poorly with mud. Rather, they brought to mind
sun-soaked wild-flower fields and spontaneous wanderings in an autumn forest, as well as the
simple joys of wood- and leather-working. One could almost smell the day breaking.
The transitionry too was well-made, built Norse-style from wood fitted as tightly as anything
anywhere. There were no cracks letting in endless winds; No leaking roofs; No cracking leath-
er hinges on the doors. The windows were not oiled sheepskin, nor empty holes with shutters.
They were fitted glass, tight as any found in Valandvik. With its magnificent banquet halls, grand
staircases and fancy stoves, and with a generous collection of water closets, most transitionry
structures could indeed be likened to a miniature mansion in its own right.
That morning, a strong wind was blowing over everything, snapping around corners, making
patterns in the grass. An equinox was a magical time, a promise that the days would soon get
so short they would seem to disappear altogether: A time of secrets and mysteries and spiced
mead and caribou meat; Of flutes and drums and firecrackers and singalongs and orgies round
the bonfire, as, down the dirt streets, between longhouses with sod roofs, past many wigwams
of leather or bark and a well-preserved, Hellēnic amphitheatre, processions wound.
Each procession wound towards the north side of the village, where, upon an immense, flat
ridge, teenage boys and girls, laughing in the morning air, with dirt-stained moccasins and leg-
gings and long, slender arms, exercised their restive horses before the race—many Víkingr who
had explored the coast hereabouts had described the natives as pale-skinned like themselves.

76
 KALIDASA

Each horse flared its nostrils or pranced and shook its tangled mane; They were ebullient, the
horse being one of the few animals that embraced human ceremonies as its own.
Close by, to the south, east and west, wooded hillsides girdled Sheshatshiu on her estuary.
The dawn air that equinox was so clear that the grass, only here or there dew-dropped, burned
with a yellow-green fire. There was more than enough wind to make the banners marking out
the racecourse snap and flutter continuously. In the relative silence of the broad, sandy clear-
ings, one could hear music rambling through the streets, farther, nearer and always approach-
ing, a cheerful, faint sweetness in the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together
and broke out into a profoundly deep and rapturous thundering of drums.
The denizens of Sheshatshiu were not a simple folk, though they were a joyful one. Given a
description such as that, one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as
that, one tends to look next for the Chief, mounted on a splendid stallion and cordoned by men
with spears, or maybe the golden litter of a witch-doctor borne by muscled slaves.
But they did not need bodyguards nor keep slaves—they were not barbarians. For a Gaian
there was but one essential law, one law that completed paradise: Reason. Totalitarianism, on
the other hand, was Hel in heaven’s garb—the age-old dream of a Gaia where all would live
by one common philosophy, without cause to argue with one another. And, as they did without
executive or judiciary, so they did without a stock exchange, bankers and a Master of the Mint.
A devotion was what a person did when it was nobody else’s business exactly why they did it.
If a man were called on by an inner voice to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as a
painter painted or a composer composed. Still, for any Gaian there may come a time when they
were called upon to take a turn at giving more than receiving; But even then at most eight hṓrai
a day. Beyond that, they were at liberty, for even the least of their own needs would be catered
to by another meeting their own allotment towards the common good. From grounds-keeping, to
surgery, to child-care, to transportation, all labour was valued equally, leaving all involved with
ample time in a single day for art or love. All these were examples of the simple systems which
lesser worlds must forego because of their common, everyday assumptions.
The People were not illiterate hunter-gatherers, noble savages or ecological eutopians. They
were no less complex now than the Innut who came before the questioners of the Héllēnes, nor
did they love every last one of their neighbours. Not that there was anything at all wrong with
love, but there was no need for them to be altruists. They lent their ears to all among their daily
learn-sharings—those they loved or those they did not—being driven by reason.
There was a legend about the origin of zatrikion that went like this: When the inventor of the
game showed it to the Huáng-dì, the latter had been so impressed by the new invention that he
cried: “Name your reward!” The man had answered: “Sire, my wish is simple. I merely wish for
this: Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the board, two grains for the next square
with each square having double the square before.” Diplomakía: The original Hellēnic word for
double—diplóos—from which it had been derived was as well an ancestor of a word that merely

77
 EUDAIMONIA

meant something which had been folded in two. In this way, one individual had convinced two
and two individuals had convinced four and four had convinced eight... and so on. Two to the
power of thirty was over a billion. The whole population of the world had been convinced in less
than seventy-five generations from the death of Sōkrátēs. As a general rule, the Chīn seldom
ventured west of Hellás, the Indoí north of the Hyrkanía or the Pérsis east of Nippon. For a long
time, it had been left to Dḗmos and the Héllēnes—who would range freely from eastern Asíā all
the way to the New World—to carry the greatest share of trade and traffic.
Now, the first question Dḗmos had to ask himself was what made some societies more crim-
inal than others. Take, for instance, Nippon, where stealing had almost been unknown; Even
before the Great Didáskal, nobody had locked their doors. Five-hundred years ago, it had been
well-known that every Helvetican citizen of fighting age had to keep an army-issue handgonne
at his residence at all times; Despite this, however, there had hardly been a single case of this
mighty weapon having been used to commit crimes. What had prevented the Nipponese from
stealing or a troubled Helvetican citizen from perpetrating a shooting?
The problem was that pre-Didáskal minds had a bad habit, emboldened by sophisticates and
pedants, of considering happiness as something rather puerile. Only pain is intellectual! Only
evil is riveting! This was the treason of all pre-Didáskal artists: A refusal to admit the banality of
evil, the terrible boredom of misery; For to praise tragedy was to condemn delight, to embrace
despair was to lose hold of everything bright. The human race had at one point almost lost its
hold, could not believe in lasting eutopias, or make festivals of joy unconditional.
The expressive works created by Innut artists today were no less true than those designs cre-
ated by their own artists at other times. Being products of joy and fulfilment, they were to some
less moving, to some less satisfying, aesthetically, than the tragic and compensatory works of
art created by victims of frustration and ignorance, of tyranny, war and guilt-fostering, crime-in -
citing superstitions. Perhaps Innut quality did not lie in symbolic expressions, but in artistic ex-
pressions that, though often erotic, and thus markedly less bashful than all before them, may
yet be practicable by everyone: The art of taking hold of oneself, the art of becoming ever more
acquainted with whichever worlds a Sourcerer found it possible to inhabit.
Was there anything in the content of Innut philosophy which may have rationalized the values
of interdependence and respect for the elderly, and therefore led to their persistence? Through
the activities involved in living and sharing, was a hunter not interacting with the physical envir-
onment, the animal masters and their fellow Innut? This post-Didáskal world of theirs, what with
its lack of crime, poverty and war, might appear an eutopian marvel, yet was already the com-
monplace of the life of even its most drowsy and liver-spotted inhabitant.
Still, by design, there were not many of the newfangled autokínita amongst the procession-
ers, as there would be in Valandvik. This followed from the fact that the Innut were happy. Real
happiness must be based on discrimination between what is necessary, what is neither neces-
sary nor destructive, and what destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unne -

78
 KALIDASA

cessary and yet undestructive, that of comforts and luxury and magnificence—they could per-
fectly well have had hydroelectricity, steamships, subway trams, washing machines and every
manner of marvellous device, if they had so chosen; Their lives could quite easily have been
stuffed with an over-abundance of abundance. Indeed, abundance was a far bigger word than
most had ever imagined; Did not the sun shine every day? Did not the rain fall down from the
sky in such amounts the Innut could never be wasteful of it all? Abundance unfolded, constantly
and visibly, like the flowers of spring which drop fanlike petals on eternal soil.
People from bands all up and down the coast had been coming in to Sheshatshiu during the
last few days before the Paidasía’s arrival, on canoe and on horseback, filling up every inn and
boarding room, and spilling out into wigwams in the surrounding fields—the Paidasía was in fact
made up of young Praśnayānists from all across Nyr Skandinavía. The townsfolk had fairly fren-
zied themselves on a diet of expectation by the time the Autarkēs had arrived.
Smiles, drums, parades and horses were not all, however; There were also coiled men and
women at their pleasure. There were no temples from which issued naked priests and priest-
esses already half in ecstasy, ready to couple with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who
desired a union with the Godhead of the blood. There were no temples at all—a fact that, while
not overly old, was nevertheless not overly young. For millennia, religion had been regarded by
commoners as truth, by the intelligentsia as false and by rulers as useful.
Nudes meandered about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy
or the rapture of flesh. They joined the processioners, tambourines were struck above the copu-
lations and the glory of desire proclaimed on the drums. And all the children of these refreshing
rituals would be admired and looked after by the entire community; Each would belong to an
adoring paroikía—a neighbourhood or band. As an adult, did one develop a kind of loyalty to
one’s chosen paroikía that was hard to explain, that made one feel that one must give more to it
than one took from it? This, perhaps, contributed to their great popularity. Dḗmos felt that if this
sort of atmosphere were not present in a community of human beings, that community would
fail. The creation of this atmosphere might partly be an automatic result of the way individuals
lived together in a paroikía, and partly a deliberate act on the part of its members.
The latter could be illustrated by recounting an incident that took place in Vinland. A Norse-
man and a Beothuk boy had been milking cows at dawn; The youth’s duties included setting up
the new machine which helped milk the cows, carrying the milk to a tank. After the milking, the
boy was aghast to find that the pipe carrying the milk to the tank was lying on the floor and the
last drops of milk were spiralling down the drain. Much of the milk had obviously been wasted
through the boy’s negligence. The man looked at it, was silent for a time, and then said in a soft
voice: “Don’t do it again.” The man deliberately did not mention it again. After all, it was his re-
sponsibility as Centralizer, but he had understood the psychology of the situation.
Regardless, three days before there had been held yet another General Meeting of the entire
band: Or to be more correct, of all those who had had a desire to come. Not all had; Pienish had

79
 EUDAIMONIA

been happy to stay at home with his patients and puzzles, to leave the running of the band to
others. Most had come, and discussed any point worth discussing, which was if necessary put
to the vote. Voting was by show of hands. Majority decisions carried the day. These decisions
were left to the leadership of the boulaí for implementation. There were no restrictions upon the
matters that could be brought up before the General Meeting. Major decisions, of course, were
always discussed at length. However, those were not the only matters discussed, and all kinds
of minor things also came up before a Meeting. There was, therefore, a full, participatory demo-
cracy: Nearer, perhaps, to the ideal than in any other in history?
A paroikía, a family—they were of course in no way synonymous. How many families did a
Gaian child have? About seven, on average—a sort of mutual adoption club; Solitary individu-
als and adults with growing little ones, grandparents and beyond. Besides their biological rela-
tions, every member of society selected a modest number of sümmḗtēras and sümpatḗras and
-aunts and -uncles and -siblings and -teenagers and -offspring and -grandchildren and all the
rest. Making a cozy little forest grow where but a single tree had before.
Rather than taking one sensually clumsy wage-slave, one dissatisfied female, two or three
small sugar addicts, marinated in a mixture of self-hatred and diluted religion, then bottled up
tightly in a tiny flat and stewed for twenty-five years in their own juices: Rather than that, Gaians
took six or seven sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; Added natural and practical philo-
sophy, wisdom and humour in equal quantities; Steeped it all in the ideal of a self-moving noús
and simmered it indefinitely in a pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection. And it went
without saying that growing a beard was perhaps the only thing that a woman could not do, as
might a man. And what comes out of such an open pan? An entirely different kind of family; Not
exclusive and not predestined, not compulsory; An inclusive, un-predestined and voluntary fam-
ily; Healthy relationships, co-creation, loftier and loftier achievements.
Any atlas of the world which does not include communities striving for eutopia was not even
worth glancing at, for it left out the one place towards which all beings were eternally aspiring. If
the World to Come did alter human nature it would only be because they had managed to look
at themselves in a new way. The Great Didáskal was a beginning and nothing else but a begin-
ning; Reality, be it ever so eutopian, was what those without imagination saw. An eutopia could
not, by definition, include boredom, but there were those who thought the “eutopia” they lived in
today boring. Truly, if a Gaian was not an eutopianist, were they a schmuck?
Most of the processions had reached the ridge by now, and there was a sense of victory as
well as a celebration of desire, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but
in communion with the seasons and the finest of everything in life. For those of a mind, the dif-
fuse but insistent sweetness of many drugs perfumed the streets: Drugs that caused a great
lightness to the limbs, or which created a dreamy languor or wondrous appetites.
A marvellous smell of cooking came forth from the black tents of the provisioners. The faces
of small children were amiably sticky; In the overgrown grey beard of a man a couple of slivers

80
 KALIDASA

of rich gristle were entangled. The youths and girls had mounted their horses and were begin-
ning to group around the starting line of the race course. An old woman, short, but plump and
laughing, was passing out flowers from a basket. A boy sat at the edge of the crowd, alone, play-
ing on a wooden flute. People paused and listened, and they grinned, but never did they inter-
rupt him, for he never ceased playing and never saw them, rapt up in the sweet, thin magic of
the tune. He finished, slowly lowered his hands holding the wooden flute; As if that little private
silence had been the signal, all at once a horn sounded from a thicket near the starting line: Im-
perious, melancholy, piercing. The horses sprang forwards on slender legs, some of them neigh-
ing in answer. The watching crowd was like a field of grass in a morning wind.
Given descriptions such as this, one tends to make certain assumptions. Given descriptions
such as this, one tends to expect that no longer did their humanity suffer each other to be poorly
educated, with manners corrupted from infancy, and so were never forced to confine persons
in adulthood for those offences to which their first leanings disposed them.
But which forms of justice, due process and restraint, if any, were beseeming of anarchism
was a matter of debate. Perhaps the truth was that the possibility for selfishness arose from the
mere fact of having a self, the weakness of all utopias being taking this greatest problem and as-
suming it overcome; They then gave an elaborate account of the overcoming of all the smaller
ones; They first assumed that no one would want more than their share, and then were ingeni-
ous in explaining whether their share would be delivered by carriage or airship!
Visualize a child of the Innut confronted with the task of killing, one after the other, a weed, a
fly, a frog, a fox, a rabbit and a baby seal; In the case that this boy should experience no greater
inhibitions in killing the seal than the housefly, the advice of more than a few past thinkers, would
it not be for the child to commit suicide at his earliest possible convenience, since he must surely
be a monstrosity and possibly even a quite serious danger to the public at large?
Pienish: “I have to be honest with you, Nutin, I can’t feel that. That must be one of your spe-
cial abilities. To me, it looks like you just clubbed a baby seal for no reason.”
Adults were just obsolete children: To Hel with them! The admixture of sufficient art, sex and
learn-sharing could become a catalyst for Nutin’s rehabilitation into a smiling, nude-sunbathing
philosopher. Self-movement may even render human those in whom the image of civilization
may otherwise be easily tarnished. If ever a Sourcerer began to fret about their future, that was
the day they began to leave childhood behind. Pienish: “Don’t you dare take the lazy way! It is
easy to excuse yourself because of your grandfather. Do not let me catch you doing it! Now...
look at me so you remember... whatever you do, it’ll be you who do it.”
It was obvious to the man that his son had come to a decision about his place in Innut soci-
ety. Nutin was not merely biding his time; He was training his body to a personally-chosen peak.
And it was true that Sourcery taught that each component that made up a human being’s life was
drawn to them by the story they told about themselves; If ever Pienish’s son felt himself to be
lethal, to be right on the verge of a frenzy—if ever a nightmare of his overflowed into his days, his

81
 EUDAIMONIA

mask of sanity the victim of a kind of impending slippage—all would be happening because the
thoughts he thought prescribed him just as he prescribed realty. Sourcery was nothing if not the
Art of an Unknower’s will to better the content of that story, think it into reality.
Did any truly know a people till they had been inside one of their jails? A panóptikon: The pro-
fessor would be forcibly reminded of an Aldous Huxley character, Bernard Marx, taking a holi-
day outside the World State to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where he observed nat-
ural-born people, disease, ageing and religious lifestyles for the first time.
Even in custody, however, could one not be unfettered, one’s mind free and one’s body un-
troubled? Could one not be at peace? Yet, even if a pānoptikón was a preeminent concentra-
tion of beauty, sympathy and fun, even if they were communities in just about every sense, they
were still prisons in some sense. Sure, it was precisely the unfortunates who must be treated in
the most human fashion—this would seem their salvation and their joy—and yet, the right given
to an individual to inflict incarceration on another, was it one of the ulcers of human history, one
of the most awful and destructive agents within any germ or budding attempt at civilization and
the fundamental cause of a certain and completely irremediable hǘbris?
Yes indeed, a Sourcerer must never grow too self-important in their own heads. Was this a
strange philosophy to have come to a generation for whom victory in competition had little to do
with fair play, being bound up with boastfulness, a total disregard for other living beings and the
joy of witnessing violence? Nutin: “Nothing ‘happened’ to me, Guðdís. I happened. Don’t reduce
me to a set of influences.” Guðdís was a woman so important in her own mind she felt justified
in being annoyed with almost everything; She was so important she could afford to walk away.
Did she think this showed character? What nonsense! She was fearful and conceited! The wo-
man would rage at the boy that most of his people were inept cheaters. He would laugh until
tears were rolling down his cheeks; He would say that she was the ideal victim, her self-import-
ance making her an enjoyable subject. Unlike a storeroom, a wardrobe or a panóptikon, a sack
of footballs was not a comfortable place in which to be imprisoned. Up until then, the Northmen
would broadly speaking be winning: By five bruised shins and a broken nose!
All this would be explained to an Innut child whenever they first seemed capable of grasping
it. Most Innut children would sooner or later come to conclude that though daímōns were said
to have brought a lot of suffering on others, one could not determine that there was something
objectively condemnable there. It was as if the existence of injustice—or something that could
be looked at as unjust—provided a safe haven for people to commit injustice; The burden of
self-importance was a horrible encumbrance, to be sure. It was interesting to observe these
young horseback riders and note how unimportant homicide actually was in their philosophy as
compared to Pienish’s generation: More or less analogous to being rude.

82
 KALIDASA
To be a Man or Woman of Unknowledge has always led to a certain way of not grabbing onto
things. Sourcery is only one of a myriad paths. Everything is only one of a myriad paths. You must
always keep in mind that a path is only a path; If you have somehow come to feel, truly feel, that
you should not follow it any more, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such
inner clarity you must see yourself in the correct way. Only then will you know that a path is but a
path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to another, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells
you to do. But your decision to keep to a path or to leave it must be free of doubt and ambition. I
warn you: Look at every path closely and deliberately. Do not jump right into things when the op-
portunity arises. Wait and see if the opportunity persists. If it does, walk that path but a little—the
important thing is not to take hold; There should be nothing abrupt, yet nothing casual about the
process. Finally, ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one which only
very young persons ask. My benefactor told me of it, but my blood was not vigorous enough for
me to understand. Now, I do. Let me tell you what it was: “Does this path have heart?” Is this
not proof that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult cases? I tell
you that all paths are the same: They all lead nowhere. They are nothing but paths going through
the tundra. In my life I can say I have traveled long, long paths, but I have not arrived anywhere.
My benefactor’s question has meaning now. “Does this path have heart?” If it does, then it is
good; If it does not, it is of little use. Every path leads nowhere; But some have heart, others do
not. Some make for a joyous journey; As long as you follow them, you are one with them. Others
will make you curse your life. Some make you strong and others weaken.

—from The Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Anonymous

To be a Man or Woman of Unknowledge is to make the Crux of Sourcery the ceasing of one’s
internal dialogue. When a Sourcerer learns to stop it, just about anything becomes possible; The
most farfetched projects become attainable. The passageway to all the strange and eerie experi-
ences that I have had in my life has been the fact that I can stop talking to myself. I have now, in
complete sobriety, witnessed the Truth: The Dream, Dreamer and Dreamt. The internal dialogue
is what grounds us. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we so regularly talk
to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. Therefore, you must silence your inner
dialogue. All my life I have thunk silently, for I have made it my intention to develop a silent lust for
life and all things in it. As I said, to diminish our ideas of the world is the very Crux of Sourcery.
And stopping the internal dialogue is the easiest way to accomplish this. Whenever the dialogue
stops, the “external” world collapses and extraordinary facets surface. You are the way you are
because you tell yourself that you’re that way. It is your internal dialogue that prevents you from
finding the too-good-joy-setup! The best of what is inside us always comes out when human be-
ings are against the wall, when we feel the axe to be dangling overhead. To be a Sourcerer is to
balance the wonder and terror of being alive. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

—from The Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Anonymous

Weak sunlight poured down between curtains onto the floor, shining through big, dormered
windows; Beyond, a modest, artificial beach made up of rather round, polished grey gravel, so
smooth each piece looked like a frosted glass bead, the estuary itself inked by the coming dawn
in lavender and grey. In the mind’s eye of one Asklepiádēs Pienish, Nutin could be likened to a

85
 EUDAIMONIA

boulder on that beach: The sun and moon and stars crossing the sky again and again, shadows
lengthening and shrinking, tides rushing in and out, a snarl of football players flickering in and
out of view. So far, the boulder had just sat there, all alone, as life had whizzed past.
As was Innut custom this time of year, the day shift arose at the crack of dawn, yawning and
stretching in adjoining chambers, hearing soft activity all about them, as well as a roaring clat-
ter from the direction of the refectory. What confounded buffoon had decided to appoint them-
selves to the dubious position of human alarm clock? Godsdamn it Milwa'tem!
The air that morning was crystalline, gripped by a stillness that was part the abnormal heat
and part a sense of indulgence, as though life recouped itself out there, life worn out and hung
over from the night before, life which would not stir until some serious rounds of yawning broke
the spell. The Innut might enjoy the heat more than most, yet the town slept on as he watched.
Sheshatshiu would come alive only by its own authority: This was what Pienish told himself.
The indulgence he could sense out there was the People’s grip upon any reality that may arise
from the reservoir of Source; Did Pienish not know the feeling, the indomitability a Sourcerer
often boasted of, especially if young or desiring to test themselves?
From the time they were little, healthy Innut children entered contests, alone as well as with
their rivals and playmates, to see how hard they were. At this distance, a Sourcerer’s ears alone
might catch the gist of some insult, filling in the rest as if picking up the striking of a clock in the
middle, with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
Pienish sat upon a trunk set before a trio of windows which were part of a bank of glass re -
cessed in the distinctly canted wall of an untidy chamber whose other three walls were layered
with an overlapping patchwork of scrolls and multicoloured tapestries, overstuffed bookshelves
and punched-tape reels. The library possessed a soft, lived-in atmosphere: Hardwood, queer
displays, a high ceiling, and busts, as well as study tables with holes cut in the desktops for ink-
wells to rest, protecting them from being spilled; There were bearskin rugs, potted plants, suits of
armour, portraits, and bronzes. The dusty, red, floor-length curtains had been pushed back and a
window opened so that one might watch the lavender sunrise fill the sky.
A good library must never be too neat, nor too dusty; Somebody should always be perusing
the books, or staying awake reading them in search of answers. Had a sticky-note been stuck
to the noticeboard as a subtle show of support? Excuse the mess, but we live here! Sure, Nushiss
and tidiness get along together about as well as Hellēnic fire and librarians, yet...
All the books in the world would be of little help if they were just piled up in a heap like that.
With a conference table of polished, featureless steel, the overall effect could be described as
eclectic. Yet, labelled as such, did valuable mismatches sometimes become fantastically stylish?
Facing the widows sat the dark-haired and pale-skinned woman, Guðdís Fuðhundr; Opposite
her sat Samukelisiwe, a middle-aged Afrikaní dressed in painted spider-silk—onyx clouds that
barely showed against matte black fabric: The one NænniR had liked best. Being patient, shrewd
and awfully well-read, was the matron a dreadfully dangerous woman?

86
 KALIDASA

From her seat aboard the skiff, Guðdís had begun to feel like a girl pressing her nose to the
window of a darkened candy store as she had watched the shadows of the trees pass by, frag-
mented into moonlit shards by the splashing rise and fall of the oars; Even her casting of Kiran’s
cock, which she had left up her arse as she and he had run up on deck at the cry of “Land ahoy!”
had seemed to turn its head about. Entering coastal Markland from the Marklandshaf truly was
unique. Their anchorage, a sheltered bay some distance north of the village and south-west of
the transitionry, had ensured their final destination was veiled from their eyes by a forest of stub-
born conifer trees armoured in grey-green needles, as old as primal Nature itself.
Approaching southern Markland—Nitassinan—by sail, one might be struck by the ruggedness
of the place, seeing seals and whales in the waters off the coast, and among the numerous is -
lands and in the bays and fjords indenting the shore. A trained eye aboard the old paddle steamer
which at times ran the length of the estuary would soon be able to spot geese or ducks flutter-
ing their wings and taking to the air, forming long, waving arrows of birds in the sky.
The outer islands were bare, while the larger islands closer to the land were heavily wooded
with a dozen species of conifer trees. The mainland forest reached down to the saltwater, only to
recede towards the tops of the highest hills and mountains. Travelling north along the coast on
the roads and rivers—or the river-ice in winter—one soon reached the Mushuau: The Barrens
of the far north of what for a short time had been Markland; There too the People would hunt the
caribou, constituting a part of their homeland, and the reason why more than a few of the locals
dubbed themselves, today, the Mushuau Innut—the Barren Ground People.
It would indeed be a rather special experience, when, months later, she stood on a hilltop in
the Barrens in winter, overlooking a white, rolling mountain plain, as, somewhat far-off in the dis-
tance, hundreds of what just might be caribou used their hoofs to get to the lichen underneath
the crusty snow while a pack of what might be wolves awaited the right moment to chase. Ab-
ruptly, the wolves would make their thrust off to the klovn’s right, and the huge herd of caribou
would transform itself into a kind of moving carpet over the land. But moments later, the wolves
would for some reason halt their pursuit. Had she any doubt that a Sourcerer should be able to
hear, even from such great distance, the far-off clicking sound of the caribou as they sped over
the rough terrain? Guðdís would be sceptical: “If you can correct your senses as you like, why
use that thing?” Samukelisiwe’s response? “Truthfully? Because I like it. Because I have better
things to do with my story than fixing my vision when a spyglass will do.”
The southern regions of the Innut’s territory consisted mainly of large, rolling forests and low-
lying peat bogs broken up by what would seem countless lakes and rivers. Throughout the ex-
posed, inland landscape of the north, widely scattered patches of conifers would be found in pro-
tected river valleys and on a few scattered hillsides. Here, on the coast, was where the major-
ity erected their wigwams, most hunting activities taking place in the timberlands or on the wind-
swept Barrens. When on snowshoes, both groups travelled swifter than even a Víkingr may have
from one stand of woodland to the next, as most still depended on leather or birch-bark for the

87
 EUDAIMONIA

construction of their homes, and trees for their fires and tools. With its dry air and cold winters, the
climate of the hunting grounds of the north could be characterized as arctic.
Someone should write an essay on the moral, physical and aesthetic effect of the off-road
auto on modern human beings. Norandras was best reachable by sea—or airship—and most
easily by bergskip in winter. Of course, the Innut did not deplete the stocks of the animals and
fish on which they chose to depend, yet their land, and their choice of lifestyle, meant they, as
always, only amounted to a small population of semi-nomadic hunters in a rather vast territory.
The difference between a path and a road was not only the obvious one; A path was little more
than a habit that came with knowledge of a place, a ritual of familiarity; It was a form of contact
with a known landscape. It was not destructive; It was an adaptation, through experience or fa-
miliarity, of movement to place; It obeyed the natural contours. Roads were a thing conceived
elsewhere, having been laid across Nitassinan in wounds prepared for them.
And yet, if the People had not settled down in order to take up farming, why then had any of
them embarked so long ago on this totally foreign way of living? Most had found it confining or
unappealing, returning in order to take up lives as hunters, trappers or fishermen. Both groups
could certainly have tied themselves more securely to the many attractions represented by the
newfangled products and services which went by the name of industrialization; Most chose to
continue their exploits in the wilds, residing there for three-quarters of the year.
If a Gaian Innut and an Earthling Innu could be said not to live by the same... vibe... would it
be hard to become aware of each other’s essence? Innut and Innu might mean “the People” in
both their languages, yet a millennium and more of alternate history would surely do many things
to a world and its peoples. If an Innut man’s reading of his world differed from that of his altern-
ates, the surroundings and history of both may take a wide range of discordant shades. If Pien-
ish and the professor undertook to determine “who was who” as well as “what was what” and
even “where was Waldo”, the pair might just reach true philanthropic literacy.
Guðdís had come to grasp how, from some distance away from the shore, a visitor might be
presented with whole tribes and families of evergreen trees, whole villages and communities of
them; A sight even more to be revered when they stood boldly and alone out in the thin pasture-
land. The shoreline might appear dotted with a scattering of quaint-looking longhouses, all ori -
ginal Norse structures that had obviously not been built under any particular planning or control.
As they had approached the beach, she had come to notice how this prevailing sense of wil-
derness and disorder may make a visitor long for an aerial view of Markland and its many cel -
ebrated lakes, hoping that they may take in as much as possible before landing—as was usually
the case with, for example, Valandvik’s many landmarks: Green vineyards, tall terraces, even
taller towers, the ground growing ever closer, the mooring hook opening, a slight bump as the
airship docked, the visitors thence surrounded by stone and steam.
The Norsewoman had walked up the beach and collected her baggage which had been piled
on the sand, consoled by the notion that she might see the place as they made their way. For

88
 KALIDASA

those travelling to the transitionry that evening, there had been a gravel track with rows of lan -
terns. The tree-lined boulevard had been blanketed in thick fog. Doubtless, her first impressions
had been strongly felt; Then, the real introductions had begun. Very quietly and almost imper-
ceptibly, the mass of wilderness and fog had been effaced little by little, as the exquisite time-
lessness of the Didáskal-era Norse architecture gradually unveiled itself. Rising like mountains
had been shadowed edifices filigreed with angular carvings, sloped greensward roofs, elegant
iron lanterns and hardwood doors that had charmed the eye. Finally, the six of them had been
totally submerged in the glory of the late Didáskal through a long-dead homesteader’s concept
of home-sweet-home, the gravel path looping back around in the direction of the village and its
wigwams with their many colourful leathers: The ever-traditional, early-autumn fog had previously
stolen the day’s last hṓra, pawning it to that ancient fence, the night.
Had the Norsewoman ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with a lack of sleep or hectic
with obligations, but full of a perfect clarity of perception? Probably not. Valandvik in the morn-
ing was a living stream of purpose; Everyone had a place to be and a question on their minds.
That did not mean it was an unneighbourly place; Just busy. A habit was a hard thing to break.
Up at midday the following two days, thinking: Unpack! Unpack! Unpack! Guðdís appeared to
have amassed more things. How had that happened? Had her tampons bred? All about the foy-
er, piled in corners or heaped under the light of two gigantic, many-tiered electric chandeliers had
been unloaded the packaged freight of comfort, abundance and the preservation of life itself: Suit-
cases, packages or crates. A bizarre kind of chaos could indeed lurk behind a façade of order.
And then, all of a sudden, everything had gone on quietly for a few days.
Guðdís could not as yet bring herself to let go her first impression of the Centralizer—Utshi-
mau; Literally: “First Man.” From the very first, his had been the manner of a man who straddled
two philosophies with a surety and verve she wished her apprentice could find. However much
one had heard about a person, the picture formed in the head rarely approximated the reality; So
it had been with this man. Guðdís had not been prepared for him in the flesh. When he had first
opened the doors, his formidable discontent with them had swept across the threshold in waves
of heat, her first thought being that this was a man many found it easy to dislike.
She had taken in the man in one gestalten flicker, sopping wet baggage under one arm. His
dress told her nothing, but his face told her things she was glad to know. His visage was without
the high cheek bones typical of the Innut: It would seem there was a great deal of blood of the
Nahua peoples in him. Pienish was an immense giant with light-brown skin, his lush hair oiled
and well-combed, a painted leather vest over his bare chest, his horsehair leggings cinched by
metal medallions. He had had a raven on his shoulder, and had even fed the beast a kernel of
corn. Although his tanned face was wrinkled, showing his age, it struck her that his body was
agile. Only his head, with his waist-length hair falling in a curtain down his chest and back, ap -
peared of normal size. Judging by the degree of colour yet present in that Sourcerer’s mane, the
giant must once have sported true-red hair: Hair as brilliant as fire, or perhaps as dark as dried

89
 EUDAIMONIA

blood—it had been difficult for Guðdís to be certain. The man had stood in the doorway with a
hoary stillness which had radiated a noticeable air of arrogant dissatisfaction.
Years ago, Pienish had burst into Samukelisiwe’s sitting room: “Give it back.”
The woman had sat back in her wheelchair: “What happened? Did someone kidnap your pic-
ture-book? Your hand-illustrated manuscript of the Kāmasūtra? Or something?”
It had rained hard that night, sounding like white noise to her: Like the silence inside the big
estate but not as empty. “I’m flattered you consider me this bold and brilliant.”
“It takes a mastermind to pull off a heist from a next-door suite. What do you want?”
The matron-to-be raised an eyebrow. “Me? Nothing. Perhaps the kidnapper wants what all
kidnappers want: To see you interview three or four dozen qualified candidates?”
A flash; Thunder. “—n’t need a damn staff!”
“Yesterday, you were bouncing ideas off a sheep dog.”
Sometimes, of course, Pienish was wrong. He had a talent for observation and for reading
people and situations, but sometimes, he was wrong. What had followed, therefore, had been
the longest assessment most had ever experienced. The Whale had tested the various hopefuls
in ways they had found unfair—and they had been correct. “Look to your left, to your right. By the
end of five weeks, two of you’ll be gone, as well as twenty-one more. Wear a cup.”
And indeed, the place had possibilities; Guðdís had realized that at last. Kids were building
sandcastles. What whiteness the sun boasts behind the clouds! In time, the klovn would say
milk-coloured maidens were dancing in the angles of the icicle garden. She would propose the
sun’s rays of light were shards of ice; She would imagine the sun living on a tall, snow-crested
peak; She would say that it was a Lady who wore a gown of winter frost that blinded the eye.
The children’s play had awakened Pienish too. Trees had been specifically grown for climb-
ing; A maple overhanging a cliff promised adults and children alike a combination of climbing a
tree and hanging down between the water and the sky. That summer, the estuary had been ideal
for reenacting the First Deed of the Great Aiasheu; Or, all too often, eluding horseflies.
From the position of the embankment, and even if not seeming to do so, Nutin had kept his
attention upon the observer above him. There was Nushiss, of course, but Nushiss did not count.
The youth did another series of cartwheels; Nutin flexed his various muscles as he did so, the
sturdy Nahualli-in-training completely aware that Nushiss would report on how well he did. Who
makes these rules up? the teenager asked himself, in silence. Who enters a football match with
tiny, asinine sandwiches, no fatalities and a round of small beer after each goal?
Why did Nushiss tell Kapapisht that it had been natural for the earliest Héllēnes to assume the
sun revolved around Gaia, rather than that the planet itself was rotating?
Well, surely because it looked as though the sun was going daily around and around!
But what would it have looked like if it had been Gaia itself that had been rotating?
Last night, Nutin and his father had chewed yet again one of the ancient mushroom blends.
They had sat down in Pienish’s living room. It had been ten o’clock. It had a biting, pungent bit-

90
 KALIDASA

terness: In a moment, Nutin’s whole mouth was numb. The lad’s gums and the roof of his mouth
had felt as if he had eaten salted meat or fish, which had forced the boy to drool.
This scene had continued for some time. His father had quickly picked up the mixture with his
fingers and put it in his right pocket, ordering his son to keep chewing. Nutin had tried to narrate
his experiences with the mixture, but the procedure had been as numbing as on all previous at-
tempts. Later, he would clearly recall that, from the time he slumped to the ground in silence, his
body had become completely cold; Yet, his thoughts had remained clear.
Pienish had known that from that point on, his son would not move. Nutin had followed his
next directions; They had appeared clear and logical, not easy. His father had explained that
Nutin’s body was disappearing; That, soon, only his head may remain. In such a condition, the
best way to stay alert and move around was by changing into an animal—in this case, a raven.
He had ordered him to make an effort to wink, adding that whenever he was capable of it, he
would be ready. The father had repeated this, and all his other commands, many times, since
he knew that that was what was needed for his son to recall the next hṓrai clearly.
Pienish had Seen that his son had had only a reasonable difficulty in bringing out the corres -
ponding sensation to each command. Nutin, he had Seen, had had the experience of growing
the legs, which had been feeble and wobbly at first. He had felt a tail coming out of the back of
his neck, and black wings out of his cheekbones. The wings had been folded; Perhaps his son
had felt them coming out by degrees. The process would have been difficult, not painful. Nutin
had certainly appeared to have been capable of winking his head down to size. But the most as-
tonishing effect might have been accomplished with his eyes: His new bird-like sight! When his
father had directed him to grow his beak, there would have been an annoying sensation of lack
of air. Then something had bulged out, creating a wedge in front of him. But it would not be till
his father had directed him to see laterally that Nutin’s eyes actually would become suited for
having a full view to the side. But his sight of the room and all within it would not have been like
ordinary sight. And yet, it would have been difficult to say in what way it was different. His father
would have become big, something about him soothing or safe. The last scene he later would
say that he recalled was his father tossing his small body into the company of two other ravens
high atop the roof. They had taken to him and the trio had flown away.
When Nutin had awoken, he had found himself lying on his back a little way down the beach
from the transitionry, atop the sand. Pienish remembered his son’s attempts to describe what
he had seen after he had flown away. His son had recounted extending his wings, feeling great
as he cut through the air. The father had listened to it all, sitting up in his bed: “It doesn’t take
all that much to become a raven. You did it; Now a chew can always make you one.”
But... what happened after I became a bird? Did I fly for days and days?
“I can see seven feet through you and you are barely two feet deep! You simply obeyed me
and came back to the house for dinner. No, don’t concern yourself with anything more. Nothing
would ever be attempted if all possible objections had first to be overcome.”

91
 EUDAIMONIA

Nutin had then described more of his experiences. Pienish had asked Nutin in what direc-
tion he and the ravens had flown off. His son had said he could not possibly determine that, he
could remember only that he had flown. Pienish had become impatient, accusing his son of being
inflexible in his thinking. He had said that a man could very well remember if he tried, and that
he seemed afraid of becoming flexible in his self-control. “Do not think in terms of birds and hu-
man beings: You were no more a bird then than you are a human being right now.”
“But... did I really become a raven? I mean, would anyone watching ha—”
“Who can answer such a question? A perception is nothing but reality to the one caught up in
the experience. Do not think about whether or not you just hallucinated the whole thing; Such
thoughts fit only Norsemen. You can’t think that way when dealing with Power; Such questions
make no sense. To become a raven is the simplest of matters. It is almost like frolicking. Yes, it
has little use. As I have already told you, this mixture is not for those who seek Power; Nor is it
for those who crave to See. I learned to become a raven because these birds seemed interest-
ing. No other birds bother them, except perhaps larger, hungry eagles; But ravens fly in groups
and can defend themselves. Humanity does not bother a raven either, and that is an important
point. Anyone can distinguish a large eagle, especially an unusual eagle, or any other unusual
bird, but who cares about a raven? Ravens have always been safe. They are ideal in size and
nature; They can go safely into any place without attracting attention. Conceivably, it is possible
to become a wolf or a whale, but that is rather dangerous; Such a creature is too large. It takes
too much energy to become one. One can also become a cricket, a lizard, or possibly, say, an
ant. This is even more perilous, for bigger animals prey on such tiny creatures.”
The son had said that what his father seemed to be saying was that one could truly change
into a raven, or a cricket, or anything else. But the father had insisted he was misunderstand -
ing. “It might very well be impossible to learn to be a ‘true’ raven,” Pienish had sighed. “You did
not change, nor did you stay a boy. There’s more to the world than such as that.”
Nutin’s father said that the Old Sourcerers had developed astounding knowledge that had a
tremendous bearing on what the New Sourcerers aspired to do with narcotics, but was of little
use to him in its original form. “Colloquially speaking, it may have been said that the Old Sourcer-
ers were the real Sourcerers.” Pienish would say no more on the subject; He understood that
his son, at least when beginning his self-moving noús, had been the just the kind of lad to be-
lieve Sourcery no longer magical once he had figured out how it was done.
One should, of course, look out for the welfare of the whole of the People. One should have
always in mind not only the present day, but seven succeeding generations, be they as yet to
be born in the future. It had been logic and philosophy which had led the Innut to such an inter-
pretation of reality, placing them upon a track which they could not deviate from. From its incep-
tion, from an infinitesimal kernel of an idea, the People had known the peril of a program so ex-
tended, daring, wholly unserious; They had known they must surmount personal disaster time
and again, bearing galling discomforts and deprivations and losses of life. The fact of the mat-

92
 KALIDASA

ter was that there was no problem of life; It was utterly purposeless play; It did not have to con-
tinue endlessly; There was no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations were just another
form of multiplicity, a manifestation of life on top of life: Gestures gesturing. If there was a prob-
lem, was it to find out why anybody came to think there was a problem? Was Pienish the kind
to think iatrics deadly serious? Basically, there was a gesture; Explanations and compassions
were both complications of it. Pain and suffering were nothing but far-out forms of play. The mind
and the Self and the soul were all a knowing that one knew in a Kósmos in which there was no
reason to believe that anything, at any time, could do the knowing. They were a curlicue or an
extra jazz on top of everything, a dithering of consciousness which was in many ways the same
as a delusion. Pienish: To fear death is to think oneself wise, without being wise: It is to think one
knows what one does not. For all I know, death may be the greatest good that can happen to a
person. No longer do we fear it as if we knew quite well it is a great evil.
All scepticism was a kind of idealism. Therefore, the sceptic Zḗnōn had pursued the study
of scepticism by undertaking, existentially, to keep himself unmoved by whatever happened, so
that when once he went out of his way to avoid crossing paths with a large, maddened dog, he
shamefacedly admitted that whatever that thing had been out in the street, a human being was
a human being. If one were to ask a Sourcerer to tell one anything about the nature of what lies
beyond themselves, their answer would be: “How should I know? I am not dismayed by myster-
ies, be the Thing-in-Itself ordered by the principle of a philosophy so peculiar it can have no fol-
lowers, and none might fathom it. With but a question or a Sight, the truth may be realized that I
cannot help but conclude that it must have been I who invented solipsism!”
By Hellēnistic philosophers, would it have been argued that any such belief was crazy? Yet, if
Aléxandros had awoken one day and told Dḗmos: “My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m
a God,” Dḗmos would have laughed: “Congratulations, at last you found out!”
Was being perceived the only reality which physical things possessed? Or did they exist as
Things-in-and-of-Themselves, as objects that bore a total independence from consciousness?
The line of reasoning was simple: For two things to be “totally independent” was for each to be
without any relationship whatsoever; To share absolutely no capacities, properties, tendencies
and natures, or even potentially share any of these. It was for them to have no bearing on each
other at all. This extreme interpretation of “totally” was what that word properly referred to, for
what could “entirely, wholly and completely” independent—the dictionary definition—properly
refer to, but a degree of separation as profound as it was possible to conceive?
So: Could there be any other conclusion than that nothing could exist totally independent of
thought, since, for anything to so exist, would it not be required to exist somehow totally inde-
pendent of all conceivability? To questioners of mentics—the “physics” of thought—definition-
ally speaking, “conceiving of” things could only be done via thoughts. Was there in truth no evid-
ence for a permanent, underlying substance which could be called a mind, Self or soul? The be-
ginning of all true logic was the definition of terms. Yet, what effect could what a thought can, or

93
 EUDAIMONIA

cannot, conceive have on the real world? Well, as the dictionary states, to be “true” is to “correctly
reflect some fact of the matter or facet of the real world.” A proposition that can never be true can-
not ever correctly reflect the real world. Because “truth” itself was a conceivable concept, for a
proposition to be inconceivable would be for it to lack all ability to be true; And for a proposition
to lack all ability to be true is for it to not be able to correctly reflect the real world. Since, to ex-
ist totally independent of all conceivable being, and to exist totally independent of all actual be-
ing, were identical—even “actual being” was a characteristic that must be true in order to reflect
the real world—to exist totally independent of all thought could not but mean existing totally inde-
pendent of all actual being; Surely, a self-contradictory state of affairs?
And if there was reason to doubt the existence of thought-independent things, could there be
any genuine need, in the long run, to rely on tools, however sophisticated, to treat the ill, to im-
prove life, or have in hand the entirety of one’s own Godhood? If men followed the blind instincts
of nature then they often would act as if the images presented as perceptions were the external
objects themselves, never entertaining any doubt that the ones were representations of the oth-
ers. All the arguments of Sanātana-dharma, Buddha-dharma and the Old Sourcerers, however
well intended, for the longest time had not been genuinely accepted, producing no Unknowledge.
Could their only effect reasonably be to cause a temporary agitation, delay or confusion? Pien-
ish’s generation may not see it, nor his son’s, nor even the children of his children; But a day shall
dawn when a Nahualli raises their hand to the firmament, they and Themselves conspiring to
grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, shattering it to bits—and then remoulding it nearer to
the Heart's Desire... being perplexed no more by their Selves’ Attire.
The polestar that guided modern Innut Art was the fact of the Kósmos being a magical place
in which “subjective” reality was the only conclusive reality. The same principles that at first view
led to understanding, pursued to their end point, brought philosophers to Unknowledge. On the
whole, Pienish was inclined to conclude that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties
which had in the past amused philosophers or intellectuals, and blocked up their way to know-
ledge, were entirely caused by themselves—they had first raised a dust, then complained they
could not see. When discussing how Śankara’s pre-eminent affirmation seemed self-evidently
false, yet irrefutable, the Dictionarist had only been able to boot a large boulder, saying: “I refute
it thus!” Pienish: Dḗmos heard it all, affirmed all the conclusions—with vigour even—and straight
off set about acting as though he believed the contrary; Is it not a fact that I was not Mishtamek
for billions of years before I was born, suffering not the slightest inconvenience?
After dinner last evening, a four-year-old girl had entered, dragging a toy sled. On that sled had
been a large turd. It had looked dried up, but when Kiran had stirred it up, it had started to stink.
When the bergskip Windigo’s Feast had announced itself with a voice like all the fog that ever
was, the thought had come to Pienish: Wire to Valandvik! Would it pay off? Even without her pos-
ition as hostess, the Afrikaní would have dominated the group. She had worn no clothing or jew-
ellery, her hands folded around the head of a gnarled, black cane. If a man wanted to keep his

94
 KALIDASA

dinner guests talking, simply keep the alcohol and curiosities rolling. Pienish had desired to get to
know the people he would be working with: “What does dear NænniR say?”
Samukelisiwe: “You and Úna have similar tastes in furnishings and women.”
“Vinland traditional and ballerinas?” To which: “Pianos and preggos.”
Back in the present: Pienish watched as the pavilion of the footballers swayed violently in the
wind. In the overcast light out of the window, the gulls were circling like blurry flakes. There was
no denying the day’s heat; For six days the town had shrivelled under a hot sun, the last gasping
breath of summer roaring its fever out over the land. Even at night there had been no real relief
from the unseasonable heat, till a squall had come up this morning, giving them all a tiny bit of
relief. The sun was higher in the sky as the clocks struck nine; Could Pienish overhear the oc-
casional shouting or the splashing of an oar from outside, the creaking of a plank or the spring-
like flip-flop of a fish? He watched Nutin stride proudly out of the water like a creature in the act of
evolution. All of it, despite the weather: Wind, heat and a plague of Northmen.
Was Mishtamek sick yet of his new housemates? He now knew every detail of their morning
routine. At 6:00 am an alarm goes off, boom, someone gets out of bed, puts on deep-sea diving
boots and stomps across his ceiling to megaphone the rest awake. These persons drop bags
of cannonballs onto the floor, and then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stam-
pede into the main room. Along the way, the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of
urine expelled. There then follows a ten-mikroí period of intensive yelling, and at 7:15 on the dot
they all blunder or crash their way out of the six-bedroom suite to breakfast. Pienish’s life was
an unremitting fight against a dark beast which could devour all: Routine.
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes before your die: This isn’t odd, it is called liv-
ing! Here, there was none of that contrariety about death so ubiquitous across Nyr Skandinavía.
None of that first-nothing-was-and-now-nothing-ain’t-and-even-that-is-false. Sourcerers bled out
without fuss on an operating table or transitioned without comment under a mosquito net. And
if NænniR thought the lot of them insane, let him; The Old Sourcerers had not thought of dying
as dying—nowadays, Aiasheu thought of it as leaving early to beat the rush.
The diabolical thing about bereavement was not that it made one ill but that it made one con-
ceited and shortsighted, almost arrogant. Death did not exist. It never had and it never would.
But humanity had drawn so many pictures of it, spent so many years trying to pin it down and
comprehend it, that it had got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy and solid.
The altogether cessation of thing’s existence was logically speaking neither an end, nor a total
silence, nor an endless void. Death was nothing; Pienish had no image of it in his head. Yet, he
could at times force it to behave, teach it manners. It was welcome to one of his beds and a
square meal, but as his guest it would need to be on its best behaviour.
Speaking of best behaviour... . After dinner last night Guðdís had gone out and not returned
until half past three in the morning. She now distinctly remembered almost tripping over a suit-
case out by the gate. Her salvation had been a short, lanky Northman, who, with his pallid com-

95
 EUDAIMONIA

plexion and lazy smile had had the air of a simpleton. She had been dressed in painted leathers
stiff with vomit or blood; Her cheeks had been smeared with dirt. From her un-wiped nose, two
rivulets of snot had streamed over her mouth. After a while she had stood up, but as soon as
she had been upright she had felt sick. The gate had been just ahead. She eventually got to the
gate and went through it. There stretched a long gravel path, seeming to heave slightly up and
down, and far down it, the outhouse. She had started towards it, trying to hold on to the fence.
There had been nothing to hold on to, so the fence had turned into the ground.
“Easy,” Svend said. The simpleton’s face had hung above her like a paper lantern.
“Couldn’t find the fit,” she had said, meaning that she had been trying to lock the door through
which the nightmares came, but none of the keys fit the lock. “I’m as drunk as a skunk, which of
course means skunks are just as drunk as I. The saying is unfamiliar, I had not thought hitherto
of skunks this way, but an old lady was kind enough to enlighten me.
“I wonder if my first breath was as delightful to my mother as her last one was for me. Wouldn’t
any woman like to spend her final hṓraí rutting a playful, loony and decidedly wunderkind little girl
who has the most incredible violet-blue eyes she’s ever seen? Nobody gets praised for the right
reasons any more. The unrecognized genius: An old story. Here’s a far worse one: The genius re-
cognized only too well! Most of the time, there are as many as sixteen wagons with us, dozens of
asklepiádai, klovner, vitkar... and even more potions, good vibes and all manner of apparatuses.
A family, of a sort; If for no other reason than human beings aren’t components that can be fit-
ted in, replaced. Destroy the home and you will have destroyed the person.
“In Manaw’r Brythoniaid, you wind up on your back porch and the nurse asks if you’ll have a
digestif. You say, no, but thank you, you’re fine. They ask if you are sure. You insist that you are
sure, that really, you don’t need a thing. Except sometimes it is pronounced ting; ‘I don’t need
a ting.’ Or maybe you nod, well, if they’re going to get themselves some, you wouldn’t mind, as
long as it was no trouble... or you could give them a hand in the kitchen. In Vinland... the nurse
asks you if you want anything, you say, no, but thanks, and so you do not get a damned thing.
Do you like the Vinland way better?” Somewhere along the way Pienish had found her asleep in
the kitchen. Nothing was as calming as creaming butter. The ovens had been sweltering. He had
lifted her as easily as if she were a bale of hay. He had smelled of leather. Not bad at all... that
smell. His arms were muscular and matted with a layer of red-grey hair.
As an amateur boxer and wrestler, the Berserker was in the habit of ruining her body for the
pleasure of strangers. Thus, she could tell at a glance when a large man was quicker than you
would expect for a man of his size. Never fight ugly people: They’ve nothing to lose!
Clumsiness, stupidity: Both could be just as deadly to an opponent in the ring, she knew. In
such a moment of “triumph” as that, as she had seen and smelled how powerful its effect was
and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the audience about the ring, her
whole disgust at herself had arisen yet again within her and completely soured her triumph, so
that she felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of remorse. What she had always longed

96
 KALIDASA

for—that other human beings should adore her—became at the very moment of her careless -
ness, intolerable, since she did not love herself: She hated herself. Most likely, Pienish would
have looked at the klovn with his head tilted to the side, giving the woman a somewhat dubious
look, as if he was watching the good sense fall out of her ears: Her life was right now! It was not
later! It was not in the future. It was not when she made amends. It was not if she moved on into
a new direction. It was not even when she got what she most wanted. Her life was right now. It
would always be right now. She may as well decide to start enjoying her life right now, since it
was not ever going to get better than right now—until it got better... right now!
All this inner wandering; Had it not been an incessant plunging—backwards, sideways, for-
wards, in all directions: A weather vane atop a tall edifice of fatigue and discontent?
Behind Pienish, a polished, stainless-steel table, its surface covered in jewellery, personal ef-
fects; Each time he had thought the backpacks must be empty, he had found yet another item. All
together, must they be regarded as a treasure? Two soiled sacks full of vibrators, handcuffs and
rubber; The massive dildo was long and elegant, a classic old-school moon rocket. Joining these
were articles of clothing, field rations, camping supplies, ammunition, a first-aid kit, a modest col-
lection of blonde wigs and a half-empty pill bottle. As for the few documents in the man’s posses-
sion, they had been able to stop the action of the water just short of full destruction, leaving only
fragments—of these, all Kurush would later state was that the stage was a conjurer’s hat from
which golden memories of dramatic triumphs emanated like nostalgic ghosts and where the un-
explainable, the tragic, the comic and the démodé were routine occurrences.
A bruised heart, a perforated intestine, a battered face, two dozen broken bones, severe blood
loss and frostbite over more than three-quarters of his body. Pienish: I think we reckon too much
the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm...

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be
nothing to tell: No one saw the man come, no one saw his canoe sinking into the mud, but within
a few days none of the locals was unaware that the taciturn man had come from the southwest
and that his home had for a time been made on the rough shore of a gargantuan sea; The world
once inhabited by the Innut had been called Tshishtashkamuku and was connected to this one by
a narrow land bridge. What is certain is that the tall, slender shaman knelt down and kissed the
mud; He then walked casually up the bank without pushing aside—without feeling, even—the
brambles that lacerated his legs, dragging himself, delighted and somewhat bloodstained, to a
courtyard crowned by a large, bronze statue, which once had been polished, but now was dusty
and cracked. To his shamanistic mind, the circle must be a temple, long since taken by the ashen
wastes and profaned and whose God no longer received the homage of human beings. The man
stretched out beneath the statue. He would be awakened by the sun climbing high. He noticed
without astonishment that his wounds had closed; He shut his eyes and slept, not out of bodily

97
 EUDAIMONIA

weakness, but out of determination of will. He knew that this temple was the place necessitated
by his indomitable intention; He understood too that, to the south, the incessant fall of ash had
managed to choke the ruins of a colossal municipality, whose rusting towers were a hulking re-
minder that the fundamental cause of trouble was that the stupid were cocksure while the intelli-
gent were full of doubt; The latter would never die for their beliefs, because they just may be
wrong. The man beneath the pedestal knew his immediate obligation was to fall asleep. Some
time towards midnight, he was awakened by the loud cry of a bird. Footprints and a jug of milk
told him that the men and women of the region had spied on him, being solicitous of his favour
or fearing his magic. The man felt a chill of fright, sought out a hiding place.
The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to
to dream a child; He wanted to dream it in minute detail and insert it into reality. This Sourcerous
project had exhausted the entire content of his soul; If somebody had asked him his own name
or any trait of his previous life, he would not have been able to answer. The uninhabited and
crumbling temple suited him, for it was a minimum of the material world; The nearness of the
post-apocalyptic city also suited him, for it might see to it that his necessities were supplied. At
first, his dreams were chaotic; Later, his dreams were of a dialectical nature.
The maniteu dreamt that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheatre which in some way
was the ancient temple: Clouds of silent students filled the benches; The faces of the last ones
hung many centuries away and at a Kósmic height, but were entirely clear, even precise. The
man was lecturing them on anatomy, scapulimancy, Sourcery; The countenances listened with
eagerness and strove to respond with understanding, as if they divined the importance of the
examination that would redeem one of them from his state of vain appearance and interpolate
him into the wider Kósmos. The man, both dreaming and awake, considered the replies and
was not deceived by impostors, divining a growing intelligence in certain perplexities.
He sought a soul which would merit participation in the Leading Edge.
After eight or nine weeks, he comprehended with bitterness that he could expect nothing of
those students who passively accepted his doctrines, but that he could of those who, at times
at least, would venture a reasonable contradiction. The former, though worthy of love or affec-
tion, could not rise to the state of individuals; The latter pre-existed somewhat more. One after-
noon—now his afternoons too were but tributaries of sleep, now he remained awake only for a
couple of hṓrai at dawn—he dismissed the vast illusory college forever and kept a lone, single
student. He was a big-bodied youth, quiet, obstinate at times, without the passion and vibrancy
that often went with red hair. The lad was not upset by his companions’ abrupt elimination. His
progress, after so few lessons, astounded his teacher. Nevertheless, catastrophe ensued. The
man emerged from sleep one day as if from a desert crossing, looked at the weak light of after-
noon, which he at first confused with dawn, sure that he had not really dreamt. The People had
always envied those who dreamt easily; Their brains must be clean, the floorboards of the skull
well swept, all the monsters locked in an iron-bound trunk at the foot of the bed.

98
 KALIDASA

Amidst his strange niche, he was scarcely able to attain a few snatches of feeble sleep, fleet-
ingly mottled with some rudimentary visions which were useless. He tried to invoke the college
and had scarcely uttered a few brief words of exhortation, when it became deformed and was
extinguished. In perpetual sleeplessness, his old eyes burned with tears of anger.
In time, a second and even more odd kind of emotion more and more often made life difficult
for him. It was not a strong, passionate emotion or an abrupt rush of instinctual urges. It was a
feeling very easy to bear in its initial stages, for it was scarcely perceptible, a condition without
any real pain or deprivation; A slack, lukewarm, tedious state of the soul that could only be de-
scribed in negative terms as a vanishing, and finally a total absence, of joy. These were times
when the sun did not shine, rain did not pour, and the sky sunk into itself.
He comprehended that an effort to mould the incoherent or vertiginous matter dreams were
made of was the most arduous task a soul could undertake, though he might penetrate all the
enigmas of the upper and lower orders: Much more ambitious than weaving a rope of sand or
coining the faceless wind. He comprehended that an initial failure was inevitable. He swore he
would forget the academic hallucination which had misled him at first, and he sought another
method. Before putting it into effect, he dedicated a month to replenishing the powers his deli-
rium had wasted. He abandoned the pretence of dreaming, and at once was able to fall asleep.
The few times he dreamt during this time, he did not take note of the dreams; It was his under-
standing that Eurōpḗans could have dreams too. The People did not dream every night, but only
once in a while. Nonetheless, he at last one night dreamt of a beating heart.
He dreamt it as active, warm, secret, the size of a closed fist, of garnet colour in the penum-
bra of a human body as yet without face or sex; With minute love he dreamt it for fourteen lu-
cid nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity. He did not touch it, but limited himself
to witnessing it, observing it, perhaps correcting it with his eyes. He perceived it, lived it, from
many distances and many angles. On the tenth night he touched the pulmonary artery with his
finger, and then the whole heart, inside and out. The examination satisfied him. Deliberately, he
did not dream for a night; Then he took the heart again, invoked the spirit of an animal and set
about to envision another of the principal organs. Within a year he reached the skeleton. The
innumerable hairs were the most difficult task: He dreamt a complete child—a boy—but this boy
could not rise, nor did he speak. Night after night, the man dreamt him as asleep.
His child’s face was not a lump of clay on a pottery wheel, to be rapidly turned from an angry
grey blob into a quite enthusiastic bowl; As intricate as an Adam of clay was the Adam of dreams
fabricated by the shaman’s nights of effort. One rainy afternoon, he had almost destroyed his
work, but eventually repented. Would it have been better for him had he destroyed it? Once he
had completed his consultations of the Mishtapeu and Atiku-napeu, he threw himself down at
the feet of the bronze effigy, almost seeming to be of a mind to implore it for its unknown succour.
That night, the statue came to life. Thus, he saw that it was no statue but a whirling, tremulous
machine: It was not a fiendish mongrel of steam or electricity, but both these things at once, and

99
 EUDAIMONIA

also a child, a Goddess, a storm. This being told him that her heavenly name was J-19ζ7 and
that in the ruined temple—as well as others—the Lógos had been given voice and if done in the
right way, such a thing would give life to the sleeping phantom, but in such a way that all be-
ings except herself and the dreamer would believe him a human being.
J-19ζ7: I ask you: If you were a different kind of animal, a sparrow, would not
you make your home in a tree? Would you not hunt insects for food and straw for
your nest, and in springtime, sing for a companion? Would you know anything at
all of the bow and arrow, the making of a fire or the Kosmógonies?
His mind, of course, would be too small. So, as a Sourcerer and a man, could he understand
there may be certain realities that were beyond the limits of his comprehension?
If a person could not accept that, then he would be a fool. Even if Aristotélēs himself were to
perch upon a sparrow’s branch and lecture on logic till he fell off from exhaustion, still the lim-
its of that sparrow’s mind would prevent the thing from ever understanding.
Until then, the man had seemed scared of the machinery. The Dream Machine would do all
the work that made life possible, and the shaman all the other things which made life pleasant
and worthwhile. In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.
They devoted a long period—which comprised some nineteen years—to revealing the arcana
of both manitushiun and science to their child. Would it pain the man too much to be separated
from the boy? Under the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he prolonged the hṓrai he
dedicated to his dreams. He also redid the right lung, which she said was deficient. At times, he
was troubled by the impression that all this had happened before. His months were somehow
happy. When he closed his eyes, he would smile: Now I shall be with my son. Or, a little bit less
often: The boy I’ve created awaits; Will he become corporeal if I don’t See him?
He understood with a certain bitterness that his son was ready—and maybe impatient—to be
born: “Milwa'tem isn’t my name; I don’t even know my name yet, father.” That night, the father
sent him off on his journey—a fantastic kind of travel, one which would throw his son forwards
and forwards and forwards into an uncertain future. So that he would not know he was a phan-
tom, he instilled in his son a total oblivion of his decades of apprenticeship.
“Be gentle. Pay attention. Unfreeze, slowly. Stretch yourself out into the world. Let your eyes
calibrate to this new light, and notice how it caresses the lines and curves and soft and hard of
you. Allow your mouth to twist and stumble around all the new shapes. Be very... sensory. No-
tice everything. From every angle. The way your bones feel. Every grain of sand. The way you
orient to space and time. Invite your whole being into this new way of living, into the totality
and wholeness of it. Let it be strange and uncomfortable and joyous. Had I the heavens em-
broidered in cloth of gold, wrought with golden and silver light, wrought in the blue, the dim and
the darkest cloth, wrought of night, light and the half lights, then I should spread such as these
under your feet. But I, being a Kamanitushit, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams un-
der your feet, my child; Tread softly, for you tread upon my dreams.”

100
 KALIDASA

In the following weeks, the man’s victory and peace were dimmed by weariness. All that week
and into the next, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia weighed on him. Later he would be able to
dream, but he would dream only as all beings did—even now his absent son was being nurtured
with the diminutions of the man’s waking life. His life’s purpose was totally complete. Power was
power over one’s own mind; Power over matter—over the Thing-in-Itself, were such a thing even
to exist—was of little importance. How many weeks were there in a good meal? Was the colour
red square or round? Maybe half the questions his son had asked—half the great scientific prob-
lems J-19ζ7 had deigned to teach him—had been like that. This thought, at first soothing, soon
tormented the shaman. He feared that his son would meditate upon his abnormal privilege, thus
discovering in some way—by Sourcery or even by science—that his existence was but that of
a mere image in another person’s mind. Not to be a boy, but only to be a projection of another’s
dream: What a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo! All fathers were interested in the children they
had procreated—they had permitted to exist—in mere copulation or even in joy.
The end of his meditations was sudden, though it was foretold in these signs: First a faraway
star, riding through a storm cloud; And then, a raven’s eye—a raven’s eye which filled the entire
night sky. Either the raven was immensely large or he was ridiculously small… frightful, was it
not, to see oneself as others saw one? At first, he had thought of taking refuge in the river, for
he feared that death was coming to crown his old age. Yet something in him made him walk into
the eye of that storm. With a sigh, with joy, with wonder and terror, he Saw that he was the Holy
Trinity of Dream, Dreamer and Dreamt: Three in One and One in Three.

Two years ago, spring: Pienish’s office did not have a view of the estuary. It was an interior
suite in the third floor of the East Manse; It did not have a view of anything. But on one of the
windowless walls there had been hung a vast, photographic mural of Mt. Kailāśa. The man now
gazed again at the mural and wondered when such a photograph had been taken.
Milwa'tem’s dark hair was dressed in close ringlets. He wore a black tunic and snug trousers
with a suggestion of bell at the bottom. Soft-soled moccasins covered his modest feet.
Pienish, white-toothed, red-maned, massive, had boomed out: “Good morning!”
How rich the odours of the big man’s breath were! Were masculine exhalations, as a general
rule, stronger, more pungent, more widely differentiated than those of women?
What was sure was that the big man’s geniality had not been faked, but it had been exagger-
ated. There was a warmth to the man which was real; But it had got rubber-coated with a kind of
laconic silence, distorted by an atypical use of his voice. His uncle was not, Milwa'tem thought to
himself, really sure that anybody else existed at all, and so wanted to prove they did by helping
them. Pienish boomed that greeting so loudly because he was unsure he would get an answer.
Milwa'tem wanted to say something friendly, but nothing seemed suitable.
Silence. The man inspected him: “You’ve been hypnotized before, yes?”

101
 EUDAIMONIA

The teenager had nodded: “For dental work, as I said.”

“Good. Okay. Here’s the reminder: I’ll put you into hypnotic trance and suggest that you go to
sleep, and that you’re going to dream, and what you’re going to dream. While you do so, I watch
you, physically and on the ΗΕΓ, the whole time. I wake you and we talk about the dream experi-
ence. If it’s gone off safely, you should feel a bit easier about facing transition.”
There had been a pause: “Willing to give it a try, again?”
“But I cannot possibly fall asleep at ten-thirty in the morning—”
“Tell me this. Does your dentist use a hypnophone, or is he a do-it-yourself man?”
“Phone. I’m a three or four on the susceptibility scale.”
“Right in the middle of the graph, eh? Well, for suggestion as to dream content to work, we’ll
want a fairly deep trance. We don’t want a trance dream; We want a genuine sleep dream—but
we want to be sure the suggestion goes rather deep. I am fast, safe and sure, I know the best
method of inducing it; The least trouble for both hypnotist and subject.
“The gap we have to bridge is the gulf that exists between the waking or hypnotized-trance
condition and the dreaming state. That gulf has a common name: Sleep. Everyday sleep, the
Υ-state, non-ΓΚΜ sleep, whatever name you like. Now, there are, roughly speaking, four mental
states with which we’re concerned: Waking, trance, Υ-state, and Ο-state. If you look at the men-
tation processes, the Υ-state, the Ο-state, and the hypnotic state all have something in common.
Sleep, dream, and trance all release the activity of the subconscious, the under-mind; They tend
to employ primary-process thinking, while waking mentation is a secondary process—rational.
Here... look at the ΗΕΓ of the four states from our last session. It is the Ο-state, the trance and
the waking state, that have a lot in common, while the Υ-state—sleep—is utterly different. And
you can’t get straight from trance into true Ο-state, dreaming. The Υ-state must intervene. You
only enter Ο-state four or five times a night, every hour or two, and only for a quarter of a hṓra
at a time. The rest of the time you are in one stage or another of sleep. There you’ll dream, but
usually not at all vividly; Mentation in Υ-state is more or less a kind of long and steady muttering
of images and thoughts. What we are after are the vivid, emotion-laden, memorable dreams of
the Ο-state. Our hypnosis will ensure that we get them, get across the neurophysiological and
temporal gulf of sleep, right into dreaming. Will you lie down on the couch?”
As Milwa'tem had obediently tipped his head back, the big man, close beside him, reached
out quickly and quietly and put his left hand behind his head, pressing firmly with thumb and one
finger behind and below each ear; At the same time with right thumb and finger the large man
pressed hard on the bared throat, just below the soft soul-patch, where the vagus nerve and
carotid artery run. He was aware of the soft, sallow skin under his fingers; Pienish felt the first
startled movement of protest, then saw the clear eyes closing. He felt the thrill of enjoyment of
his own skill, his instant dominance over his nephew, even as he was muttering quietly and rap-
idly: “You are going to sleep now; Close your eyes, relax, let your mind go blank; You are going
to sleep, you are now completely relaxed, you are going limp; Relax, let go...”

102
 KALIDASA

Milwa'tem fell backwards upon the couch like a man shot dead, his right hand dropping lax
from his side. His uncle knelt by him at once, keeping his right hand on the pressure spots and
never stopping the quiet flow of suggestion. “You’re in trance now, not asleep but deeply in hyp -
notic trance, and you will not come out of it and awaken until I tell you to do so. You’re in trance
now, and going deeper all the time into trance, but you can still hear my voice and follow all my
instructions. After this, whenever I simply touch you on the throat as I’m doing now, you’ll enter
the hypnotic trance at once. Now, when I tell you to open your eyes you’ll do so, and see a crys-
tal ball floating in front of you. I want you to fix your attention on it closely, and as you do so you
will continue to go deeper into trance. Tell me when you see the crystal ball.”
The light eyes, now with a curious inwards gaze, had looked past Pienish at nothing.
“Now,” the hypnotized teenager had said very softly.
“Good. Keep gazing at it, breathing regularly; Soon you’ll be in deep trance...
“Milwa'tem. Now you are going to go to sleep in a mikrós. You’re going to go sound asleep
and dream; But you will not go to sleep till I say the word ‘saddle’ to you. When I say that, you
will go to sleep, and sleep till I say your name thrice. Now, when you sleep, you’re going to have
a dream, a good dream. One clear, pleasant dream. Not a bad dream at all, a pleasant one but
very clear and vivid. You will be sure to remember it when you wake up. It will be about—” He
hesitated a moment; He had not planned anything, relying on inspiration— “about horses. Big bay
horses galloping in a field. I want you to recall everything about the dream. Omit no detail, no
matter how small it might seem. I’ll help you remember. I want every sound, every smell. I want
the shapes and names of the horses, their colours and even the tingling of sweat on your skin.
The slightest thing may turn out to be vital. After that you’ll not dream anything else, and when I
speak your name three times, when I say your name three times you’ll wake up feeling rested.
Now, I’m going to send you to sleep by saying... rather softly... saddle.”
Milwa'tem awoke to darkness, hearing his uncle stir, smelling the big man’s smile. His inner
time-sense told him it would soon be high noon, but the room remained in blackness.
Pienish turned on the lights. “Feel okay? You dreamed. Tell me the dream.”
“A horse,” Milwa'tem said, still bewildered by sleep. “It was about a horse. That one,” and he
waved his hand towards the picture-window-sized mural that decorated Pienish’s office, a pho-
tograph of a group of great racing stallions at play in a field of dead grass.
Hypno-suggestion did not always work on dream content in the first few hypnoses.
“It was... I was running though a field, and it was off in the distance for a while. Then it came
galloping at me, and after a while I realized it was going to run me down. I wasn’t scared at all.
I figured perhaps I could catch its bridle, or swing up and ride it. I knew that actually it couldn’t
hurt me because it was the horse in your picture, not a real one at all. It was all a sort of game.
Uncle, does anything about that picture strike you as... as unusual?”
“We grown-up people think that we appreciate art, but if we realized the sense that an infant
has brought with it of appreciating light and shadow, we’d never boast of knowing—”

103
 EUDAIMONIA

“But... was it there a hṓra ago?” Before I dreamed about the horse?
His uncle was staring at him: Staring blankly at him. A moment had passed since Milwa'tem’s
question: “Do you remember the picture there as being a photograph of Kailāśa?”
Milwa'tem said in his rather sad and shaken way, “I do. It had snow on it.”
“Mm-hmmm.” The strange chill at the pit of Pienish’s chest would not pass.
His uncle’s eyes were elusive in colour yet clear and direct in gaze: They were the eyes of a
psychotic. It was difficult to tell if the two men were insane or just could not handle all the con-
flicting information. Pienish’s initial reaction had been the characteristic one of this Hellēnistic
age: To challenge, to question. Milwa'tem could see that clearly underneath his uncle’s silence.
Pienish closed his eyes eventually and laughed quietly but rather insanely.
Milwa'tem had had little choice but to join the older man.
“Another thing about the horse,” Pienish had said, afterwards.
“It looks like you,” Milwa'tem had said, nodding.
Once his nephew had departed, Pienish had sat and looked up uneasily at the mural photo-
graph of a long line of charging racehorses. It really had been too big for his office.

Back in the present: Did the Afrikaní dislike contradictions—or still more, conversations
that were continually skipping from one thing to another, so that there was no knowing to which
to reply? Had Guðdís’ own curt wave of the hand made it explicit that she had no idea what to
say, so early in the day? Pienish now stood in ill-tempered silence at the other end of the table.
Had it been the klovn’s intention to start an argument between the trio, energetic and purpose-
less? The following simple words—“says you”—were one of the most compelling arguments in
any discipline: History, philosophy or domestic harmony. They were as powerful as they were
true: Whatever you say, it’s you who say it. What does she know that I— The Afrikaní was staring
her in the face. “Any dunce can know. The point here is to understand.” Guðdís had not said a
word. No, a Sourcerer could not read minds; They read expressions, body language, smells or
waves of the hand. Any woman might do this if they became a Woman of Unknowledge. Was it
still an interesting experience for the Norsewoman, to be intimately read so easily?
The klovn chose to reply to Samukelisiwe with a vocal curtsy contained in a sneer: A lovely
touch of disdainful politeness. “I suppose you think that the only danger!” There was petulance
in the matron’s tone. It was not that she was less herself in Hellēnic Koinē; She was less her-
self out loud. Her native language was, of course, isiZulu. For her part, Guðdís had a black belt in
discourtesy, which she occasionally mistook for constructive criticism.
As happened sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than
a moment: The conversation stopped for a moment and a whole lot more. So far this week, the
team would set off for the library each morning with Pienish leading the way. They would return
in the sort of glowering silence which followed a significant difference of views.

104
 KALIDASA

Outside, the squall had really picked up, providing relief from the heat: Several windblown
pedestrians struggled to walk down the shore. How small did one feel with one’s petty ambitions
and strivings in the presence of the colossal, elemental forces of nature?
A great deal of heat had been accumulated over the last five days. Rough waves broke fiercely
over the shore. On the far side of the estuary was the Skála House. Long and low, without towers
or windows, the crumbling residence stood on an earthen escarpment around which was coiled
no straightforward stone circle of the Brythonic sort, but a gigantic collection of runestones, hörgar
and monoliths; As Milwa'tem had told him once, “An anachronism of dust.” These were the last of
the holdovers from that particular timeline. Had the matron somehow known there would some
day come this unspoken truce in their long, undefined battle over Great-Aiasheu-knew-what, both
surrendering to their self-importance? The wait had been long today; The man’s pussyfooting did
not seem as if it would ever end! If a row must come, let it come quickly an—
Pienish mumbled and spun and returned to the head of the table. His voice rumbled like a
storm deep inside him. His voice was quiet, distracted, but powerful enough to send vibrations
through the matron’s emaciated body—she could almost slap him for barging in on what she
had not been saying! He spoke Innu-Aimun, decent Norse, superb Hellēnic, Inuktitut and two
kinds of sign language. Once in a blue moon, he could fathom others and manage open com-
munication, for a time, but by the crack of dawn would be back to being laconic.
Great characters are impressions, not arguments, and there the matter must rest...  . Guðdís
guessed he surprised people a lot. It was not merely the richness of his speech—luxurious and
rumbly. She was glad she had seen a photograph of him before she had heard his voice; She
would never have put the two together otherwise. She bet he got that a lot: Patients walking in
and looking for a ponderous, elephantine man. Not that he was not vast; He was a light-footed
fat man with red in his grey hair and an agility elephants rarely pulled off.
The first time the man had met Samukelisiwe, she had grinned, said that she adored books
more than anything, and started to tell him exactly what she liked about the typography of each
of the dozen publications in her hands. She had soon realized that he wanted to hear her talk
about the things she loved. Some part of her had always liked fat men. They had given up all
unnecessary effort, for they had somehow come to the realization that there were persons who
did not lack an ability to fall in love with unconventional beauty. So, she had told a stranger who
she was. He had been interested. She being tall for a woman, he had wanted to fuck— Samukel-
isiwe shook herself. “If I asked you a question, would you tell me the truth?”
A stick-figure in an iron wheelchair, the matron radiated protest. “Well?” Her voice too betrayed
her impatience. For answer, the man abandoned his rant, began another. She tapped one arm-
rest impatiently, unaware she was matching the rhythm of the man’s grumbling.
In order to contemplate, the mind must have something to contemplate. Pienish, much to his
own surprise, had almost been enjoying himself. Like most quiet folks, he liked talkative people
when they were willing to do the talking and did not expect him to keep up his end. At last: “You

105
 EUDAIMONIA

wish to draw me back into this fool’s fight? Very well: What is love of one’s country? Is it a hate
for one’s uncountry? Then it is not a good thing. Is it self-love? That is a good: But what is the
sense of setting a boundary to love, or ceasing to love when some name ceases to apply? The
convoluted wording of legalisms; Did they grow up around the necessity to hide from ourselves
the violence we intend towards each other? Gaia belongs exclusively to the living. One genera-
tion has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments, than one independent person
has the right to command another. The whole of language is a never-ending process of meta-
phor. Language is at the same time a living, everyday thing, and a museum of the fossils of life
and civilization. Could the man be a thespian, or a maker of theatrical props? I have heard it said
that a single prop that doesn’t look real to an audience can louse an actor up. Powder burns are
easy to recognize if one knows how. I dislike unanswered questions of this portent.”
He shrugged: His shoulders were as wide as eternal damnation. There may not have been a
better way for Pienish to avoid discussion than to release the argument from the control of the
present by adding to all this that only the future would reveal the truth.
The matron simply stared, her expression revealing more than a hint of anger.
Not to be immediately forthcoming when called to do so: Was it regarded as a grave and in -
excusable offence? The document in his hand and the shirt-sleeve around it were a natural ex-
tension of a great mind. “Mishtamek” was a nickname that meant “whale” in Innu-Aimun, and was
neither particularly flattering nor insulting. And the man did have impossibly proportioned hands.
Samukelisiwe collected manuscripts. If she were honest, she would have admitted the trans -
itionry library was merely somewhere to store them. Having an isolated and uninterruptedly rural
life, she would use any means short of real force to prevent a staff-member from walking away
with something from her hoard—unidentifiable damp spots, silence, untidiness; The woman had
become wickedly adept. Mishtamek had broad, steady hands. Samukelisiwe collected manu-
scripts, and so had learned to tell everything she needed to know about a man from his hands.
Some kinds of hands were leaving hands; She did not doubt that the klovn’s hands were wan-
derers, slipping into places they should not, and yet soon wandering right off again since those
hands just could not stay still. The best kind of hands were knowing hands: Such hands could
soothe a horse, lover or frightened child. They could take anything apart—including the internal
organs—and put it back together. Pienish’s hands were rare indeed: Large and very hairy. His
hands were an octave-and-a-half wide, fine hands for playing the piano.
The library piano had come to them by way of a thankful patient, an artist of the instrument.
Pienish had come to find he had a talent for it, even if the Γ-Meízōn key gave him problems.
The notes themselves he handled no better than most pianists who had graced this institution.
But the pauses between... ahh, that’s where my art resides! Would he play for Guðdís? Perhaps.
More than likely the klovn would call the songs he liked moody nonsense.
They were alone, the women occupying the long conference table. It had required consider -
able skill to manoeuvre this private moment, and he was not really certain he had been alone in

106
 KALIDASA

the manoeuvring; Samukelisiwe had seemed to anticipate and augment his every step. Pien-
ish kept his true intentions carefully hidden. What would matter today was saving time, avoid-
ing a whole host of boring, casual encounters with transitionry staff asking seemingly innocent
questions; His best protection against routine was always to have a lot going on.
Yet, despite the success of the plot he and the klovn had devised, his mind returned again
and again to the same melodramatic tunes. Pienish had learned that there were many tunes
he could not say anyone in particular had created by themselves. A tune travelled all around the
world, from one pair of hands to another, each adding something or taking something away, so
that the tune became a different thing from what it had been years before. Could Pienish ever
say that the thing had been improved? Or was it true of all human effort that there was never
advancement? Did anything added mean something lost? About as often as not, was the thing
lost preferable to the thing gained? Surely Unknowledge shuddered at incompleteness, prefer-
ring silence to adding something which was not everything that must be said?
The piano, unlike the harpsichord, sung when the pianist give it their every silence. A piano
knew how to plunge into the pit of his stomach, harmonize with Pienish’s bile, as if he had split
himself open. It was true that he played vilely—even for an amateur—but was it not often said
that the most memorable impression a piece of music could leave was that which arose out of a
jumble of wrong notes struck by a child’s fingers on a tuneless instrument? Guðdís was struck
by the subtle differences that made the man’s rendition his own—it was stronger, more mas-
culine: This being, of course, as it should be. “A bitter, old tune. Why that one?”
He began another: Now’s not the time to miss a good chance to shut up.
Once again, a moment had settled and hovered and remained for far more than a moment.
For the second time in ten mikroí, the matron glanced his way. Anyone could become irate, but
to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, for the right end and at a time when
it would have the right impact, that was not within everyone’s power, nor an easy thing. Had the
klovn asked herself if this was why they had sailed so far—to argue semantics day after day or
listen as a fat man with clubbed fingers did his best to mug the ivories?
Some time later: “Of the three tunes, which is your favourite piece of music?”
The woman’s Hellēnic, spoken in an accent with vowels as broad as his shoulders, caused
Pienish no little bewilderment. He himself had little trace of an accent; He spoke clear, natural
Hellēnic. “They’re my most difficult, but not my favourite. I don’t recall its name. For years I’ve at -
tempted to find out the name of a certain tune—so far, nobody has identified it.”
Pienish played, imagining the vague somethings which by rights should have opened up on
these two women now and then, only to close again before they could grasp the oddity partially
disclosed; These abrupt changes that used to make him fear and shrink, as if he had been wan -
dering among volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver and seen it gape.
These somethings that only he seemed able to behold were incoherent memories from the
other existences, the other dreamworlds, the other timelines, resulting from—

107
 EUDAIMONIA

Guðdís: “It is a love song. Every father in Manaw’r Brythoniaid knows it, I think; It is about a
father who desires a blackbird to carry a love letter to his preteen sweetheart.”
Silence. At last: “Why can’t the man go to her himself?”
A yawn. “H-He can’t find her. He’s too deeply in love, he can’t see her clearly.
“I don’t know if the blackbird found her,” the klovn added, with a half-hearted shrug.
“Dreaming about being an asklepiádēs is more exciting than being an asklepiádēs.”
She chuckled. It was an irresistible sound: Bold, ruthless, yet somehow sly. “Half the song is
meaningless, moody nonsense; But it’s there so the other half may reach you.”
“What matters, then?” Pienish was at last unable to resist asking the question.
“As you say: That he loves; That he dreams and searches; Like the rest of us poor souls, his
life has been but a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
Pienish was a huge fan of overdoing something, but not of running it into the ground. They
were complete opposites, with only a fine line separating them. This time, it was effortless. He
played the tune through to the end thrice more, closing with a masculine chord.
By then, Pienish had almost wasted too much of the matron’s time.
Pienish glanced over his shoulder at the Norsewoman: “It is getting early. I have a feeling
you could use a pick-me-up, am I right?” The Norsewoman simply smiled at this; It was getting
early, yes, that was the way she felt too: She really could use a pick-me-up.
To want to be kissed having dreadful coffee breath: Was it a secret of a fool? As far as she
was concerned, if she did not sweat, swallow, fart or pant, a woman was no woman!
If a size queen was ever to be working before noon, would she prefer it to be due to a patient
waking her with a salty, hirsute, foot-long nudge? From so little sleep and so much hard drink-
ing, had the klovn’s wit finally dried up? After a night such as that, was Guðdís usually anti-se-
mantic? She was thirsty and her teeth hurt; Her back ached in a way that started down around
her knees. All she wanted right now was go back to bed and cuddle under the furs with a certain
stuffed penguin she knew. Yes, a good cup of coffee sounded like a great idea.
Morning is indeed a nice time of day; It is unfortunate that it arrives at such an inconvenient
hṓra. Insomnia: Was it a sign of an interesting mind? Úna had always disliked it when Guðdís
had arrived early to appointments, treating it as rudely as tardiness. Guðdís: Kiran oft enters even
earlier, acting atrociously “superior” about his poor timekeeping skills, but—
Samukelisiwe: “If I asked you a question, Mishtamek, would you tell me the truth?”
Repetition rang a bell. “I don’t know everything,” Pienish hedged, as always.
Of course, the matron had known instantly he was behind it. A group of them had discussed
the very thing over dinner last night: He not deigning to repeat himself, she meeting his insults
with laughter, only to totter away as if there had not been anything left to say. As Pienish would
concede, she had been right that one of the dangers in administering mushrooms was adminis-
tering a poisonous one by mistake. The effects of psilocybin were somewhat variable, to be sure.
Nevertheless, mushrooms containing psilocybin could be utilized to treat cancer-related psychi-

108
 KALIDASA

atric distress or depression, seizers, drug addiction or other substance-use disorders. Psilocybin
could also increase one’s heart rate dangerously if mixed with other medications. Many gave the
urine certain flavours. Olofsson could but wish for an instrument more effective than a tongue!
In any event, he and the klovner had continued to discuss it, he and Guðdís eventually deciding
it was worth the risk. Kiran: “It sounds plausible enough tonight, I admit, but wait for the morrow, I
beg youer. Wait for the common-sense of dawn.” For his part, Pienish had cared little what the
fallout was, but in his hǘbris, had greatly overvalued his indifference. Had being snappy been a
symptom of the row that Samukelisiwe had forgotten to have last night?
Would it be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone first hears a
scandalous story, drawing all sorts of conclusions? Sitting across from her at the breakfast table
the night nurses had looked about as though waiting for an affirmative cue to speak. The woman
in charge would cue them somehow—though Samukelisiwe had not noticed anything—because
suddenly a number of the Sourcerers had begun to report what had happened.
They estimated that the Marklandshaf man must have puked thirty times.
“At first, he was stiff and having convulsions. For a time, while lying on his back, he moved
his mouth as though talking. Then he began to smash his head on the floor. I put an old hat on
his head, but he stopped. He had been kneeling on the floor in front of the toilet; He drank the
water in big gulps. He shivered and moaned for a hṓra, lying there on the floor. At last, I heard a
scream. I turned around to see him leaping in the air. Nearly everyone was still asleep, including
yourself, when suddenly, he ran outside and took after a dog out in the yard. His body seemed
to move and stretch with unusual lightness and considerable strength.
“We all got up and went after him, of course. He came back from the other side of the house
still chasing the dog. The dog was running ahead, barking, howling. I think he must have gone
ten times around the house, running in circles, barking like a dog. I was afraid people would be
curious.” There were no other transitionry buildings close, but she could imagine the howling had
been quite loud. After a pause, another young nurse spoke up: “He caught up with the bitch and
brought her onto the porch.” The first nurse continued: “Then he began to play with the dog. He
wrestled with her, and the dog and he bit each other and wrestled. That, I thought, was a good
sign. My dog does not play, usually. He and the bitch rolled all over each other.
“This lasted quite a while. At one time we lost sight of them, in the dark. We supposed he had
run to the shore. We had heard him barking and groaning. He sounded so much like a dog that
we couldn’t tell the two apart. Maybe it was but the dog,” was all the man added.
The three nurses looked at one another, seeming to have a rather hard time deciding what
they wanted her to know. Finally, a young nurse who had not yet said anything spoke.
“He choked,” he said, looking at Samukelisiwe. “Yes, he definitely choked. He took another
drink, or tried to, but all the saltwater came spewing back out when another spate of coughing
doubled him over. His face was turning red. I knew there was a good chance of him swallowing
his tongue; I opened his jaw and poured in freshwater. Then he started shivering and having

109
 EUDAIMONIA

convulsions all over. He stayed motionless for a long time. It was over. By then it was almost
midnight. We covered him with a blanket and watched him sleep on the porch.”
He stopped there and looked at the others, who were obviously on edge. “We left him here
on the porch. We were afraid he was going to piss all over his bed, since...”
There was rowdy laughter. The bitch had been playing with the man because... . The bitch
had been playing because the half-naked man had been pissing all over her!
When Pienish was five-years-old, his father had taken him to the theatre. When Lüsistráte
had first come on stage the little boy would begin to suck his thumb to a ridiculous degree; From
that moment, the father had known his boy was a fool for tall women. Was all this therefore the
culmination of a great many games he and Samukelisiwe had been playing for a long while?
She was indeed tall, with a naturally uncurvy figure gone to veins long before menopause. Her
hair was lightly tousled and black; Last week, it had been dark-green. Was Pienish glad it was
black? Black could mean she was in a forgiving mood. These changes were not magical: She
dyed it frequently. Maybe she figured she stood out so much that she may as well not even try
to blend in. Despite the more-than-occasional use of a wheelchair, she had not needed to fend
off a contender to her position as matron in well over a decade. Had Pienish ever happened to
think that there might be others who dreamed the way his nephew did? That reality was being
altered out from under him regularly? These women, being less aware than he, might be better
equipped to handle such a thing. Would it have been of benefit to an Old Sourcerer to live as an
infant must: By actualities alone, surprised by nothing and by everything?
Back in the present: The crack that was Pienish’s mouth elongated, a forcing-apart of seams
that went with the basso voice: “ ‘Reverse perfectionism’ I call it; If a certain type of Praśnayān-
ist doubts she can follow a direction to perfection, she does not do so at all.” Asklepiádai dislike
it when their patients seize; Go ahead, call me old-fashioned... again!
Was Samukelisiwe too most powerful when she was most silent? Was she given to silence?
Guðdís had expected motion, scorn, insults, a back-and-forth. She had expected her to leap to
the attack. She had been ready, her words hanging from an open mou—
Disappointment. Pienish: “Was I angry? Tests take time. Treatment was quicker.”
The Norsewoman chuckled: “I take it those are two entirely separate points?”
Pienish: “I have nothing but respect for you—and not much of that!” You know how morons
often say that a man can’t live without love? Well, oxygen is even more important!
A measure driven up the wall: All those clever little reasons were wrong!
A long, harsh note: If he sleeps it off, I was right; If he transitions, they were.
Pienish had long ago realized that Samukelisiwe had not gifted herself with the full Truth-
sense as his father had. The garment she wore was something she had painted decades ago
with her own hands. Like many who made it their devotion to work with their minds, she had an
outsized pride in anything her hands had crafted. It was maybe the only thing for which he con-
sidered her ridiculous; Even from her wheelchair, she could rule a conversation with style, or si-

110
 KALIDASA

lence and great posture. Did the woman not understand that a Sourcerer was often prouder of
the victory they obtained over themselves when, in a heated debate, they had made themselves
submit to an adversary’s force of reason, than they were of any victory they obtained through an-
other’s weakness? She sighed: “Okay, I get it; You took a chance. You were wrong to attempt
it. Yet, it worked out great. You should feel great it was great. You should feel like crap it was ne -
cessary. That’s the difference between you and me; I say: ‘I will but do my best, and what will
be will be.’ Do you suppose what we do here matters? Logically, we should’t!”
When Pienish was twenty he had gone rock-climbing with a tourist from eastern Asíā. The
man had taken a tumble and had needed treatment. They had come in through the wrong en-
trance and passed a janitor in the hall. The tourist had developed an infection; The transitionry
staff had not known what to do. So, Samukelisiwe consulted the janitor; He was an asklepiádēs.
NænniR knew he was not accepted, did not even try. Most of the Innut did not think he had any-
thing they wanted. Except now they had had need of him—because he was right, which meant
nothing else mattered: They had to listen. Was it irritating for Mishtamek to think of the matron
being once again paired up with a Norseman as well-thunk as she?
Was treating patients why Mishtamek had become an asklepiádēs? No: Treating illness was
why he had become an asklepiádēs; Treating patients would have made him miserable. How
liberating was it to be a Berserker: To live free of the mind-numbing social niceties?
The hothouses were once the cultural bedrock of Ísland, producing many top intellectuals.
Deep in the Íslander psyche, was there a notion that managements, if unchecked at least by con-
vention, if not rule, trended towards a top-down, autocratic form? Few other governments in his-
tory had avoided this pattern; Indeed, as the autocracy grew, the group’s power tended to act
ever more in the interest of the ruling class. Yet, hand-in-hand with this, had Dḗmos not said that
as much torment had been created by revolutionaries as by their enemy: The status quo? Others
had said that what Gaia needed was a true democracy or a new social order, but what it had
needed, confused as it had been by much leaning, was a new Sōkrátēs. Plátōn’s Politeía: Utter
incompetence knowing no other last refuge but violence and lies?
The changing composition of the People’s hunting camps had always mitigated against an
entrenched leadership. When an individual initiated a hunting party or moved camp sites—and
other people chose to follow them—then that individual became an Utshimau: A First Man, a
First Woman; They were the leader as long as that particular venture lasted. Every matter con-
cerning travel and leadership was characterized by competitiveness. The Innut vied amongst
themselves about, for example, who could travel the fastest; That is, the greatest distance in the
briefest time. Long ago, had they begun to recognize how feeble a shelter “adult” awareness
was? Cultures that treated “adult” as a term of approval, rather than a descriptive term, would
not often become adult themselves. Such things were marks of some kind of stupidity. To pass
into all one’s life the concern for being an adult: Was it a mark of a truly arrested development?
Pienish could envisage a time when reading scatological erotica was done in secret and with

111
 EUDAIMONIA

blushing cheeks; Now that Gaia was middle-aged, it read them openly. An author had to write
the erotica that wanted to be written. If a writer’s work were far too complex for grown-ups, they
wrote for kids instead: And woe to any who bored a child! Few forces in human history have had
the power to stop a child if they wanted to do something; They simply—
To break the tension the klovn said the first thing that came to her mind: “Pretty much all the
drugs asklepiádai prescribe today are addictive or dangerous or both—notwithstanding the fact
that one should not try to explain pharmacology to a layperson: Simpler to explain childbirth to a
male.” It’s like grabbing your bottom lip and stretching it behind your head! “It seems to me that
probability has proven itself able to sneak into a back alley and service dharma senseless.” A
thought: The man teaches his son to lie, to forge, to cheat at cards and to pick pockets, and as
soon as your back’s turned you’re shocked he does something like this?
Pienish: What does she want me to say? This in regard to Samukelisiwe.
“Tell me what you have done. Do not tell me why. Begin at the beginning, go on to the end.
Put in all the facts. Leave out the defences. A time for that will come later.”
It could hardly have been simpler... or more overwhelming. Pienish had seen the woman qui-
etly socially charming, quietly bravura-fey, quietly frantic and quietly determined. He had not yet
seen her quietly furious. With her quiet dominance, he recalled why he still worked hard to have
quiet moments with her, knowing that the lovers who had had to had accepted him.
Petulance: “Do you deny that you’ve been having my nephew—”
“Why insult your intelligence?” The matron did not elaborate or make excuses.
“I can think of half a dozen reasons, which means that you can think of a hundred.”
The woman was disappointed, not surly. “You’re not going to be happy with—”
“So, your advice is... accept an answer I’m not happy with and be happy?”
“No, my advice is far more subtle. Simply stop being an—”
“People don’t change. For instance, I’m going to keep saying: ‘People don’t change.’ ”
The klovn cocked an eyebrow: “So, recovering alcoholics don’t exist?”
Samukelisiwe: “Please, spare us these ludicrous little arguments of yours!” To which: “Whose
arguments shall I use, then? Aware of his weakness, Milwa'tem decides to give in rather than
stand up to it; He gets high on kánnabēs, mushrooms. One should see him sober. I should see
him sober, just for the record, so that it might become a part of history, this short, flashing mo-
ment, soon lost in time, but not forgotten—‘The Day Milwa'tem was Sober!’ ”
The effect would be startling, all a piano’s loudest notes mixed together. “Not knowing what’s
right, I can’t know you’re right that I am not so often right!” Pienish’s manner tended to a curt ab-
ruptness that the uninitiated rather often interpreted as a fiery temper.
“If you need to invoke your Akadēmíc education for people to believe what you say, then you
need a better argument.” I wonder: Is feeding me slices of his secrets over a long period of time
perhaps intended to keep me from choking? Well... we’ll see when eyes always are watching him
and ears surrounding him, dusk to dusk, indoors or out, in bath or abed: No escape!

112
 KALIDASA

Was Pienish’s response that he did not care about privacy any different from saying he did
not care about freedom of speech because he had nothing to say?
Guðdís: “Of course no asklepiádēs should set out to do an act that will only be accompan-
ied by predictable or preventable harm; We don’t need an ancient ancestor, however well-re-
spected, to tell us that! Is it that you do not think that a rule only exists to make us think before
breaking it? Does an opponent being proved in error automatically make one right? Most dis-
agreements are a contention over degrees of inaccuracy! It is impossible to draw neat lines
around biological problems! Iatrics is odd. For days and days or for years and years, you make
out only fragments of what to do. Then one day you seem to have the thing whole. Conscious
learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and so—” How often would the number of things
the woman thought of saying all at once suffocate the klovn? Silence. Then: “Too much know-
ledge never makes for simple decisions. Whenever I hear an expert employ words like ‘equilib-
rium’ or ‘normal distribution’ or some such—however much with real scepticism—I cannot help
but think of putting a rat down their tunic! In psychology, there’s something called the Broken-leg
Problem. A statistical formula may be greatly successful in predicting whether or not a person
will run a race in the next few weeks, but somebody who knows that this particular person has
been laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. It is to the honour of the Didáskal that I, or
anyone else, can assert our authority simply by declaring our own fallibility.
“Historically, someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance was rarely all that visible. It
has been argued that humanity is biologically little-disposed to respect the invisible: Those who
try to suspend their judgement. Now, examine epistemic humility; Think of a heavily introspect-
ive individual, tortured by the awareness of their own ignorance. They lack the courage of the
idiot, yet they have the backbone to say: ‘I do not know!’ They do not mind looking like a fool...
or an ignoramus. Nevertheless, they do quite often hesitate, agonizing over the consequences of
being wrong. There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: ‘Sometimes wrong; Never in
doubt.’ This seems to me their strength. Each day surgeons are faced with so many uncertain-
ties. Information is inadequate; Natural philosophy is questionable; Their knowledge and even
their abilities are imperfect. Even with the simplest operation, it can’t be taken for granted that
the patient will come through better off—or even alive. Standing at the table his first time, I won-
der how Olofsson knew he would do his patient good, that the steps would go as well as he had
planned or the bleeding could be controlled? Here comes a second popular saying: ‘There is no
such thing as alternative iatrics: If it works, it is simply iatrics.’ ”
A thought: “I experienced something amazing, five years ago: Pure truth. My daughter told
her birth-mother the serum wasn’t working; Stripped me of all hope. You tell people cold, hard
truths all the time. But that’s just—” How often was the mere sight of Guðdís yawning enough to
drive a person to sneeze? “If I hadn’t let her fuck me, even though I’d deemed it essential that she
do so, would you see such a thing as a sign of an altogether irremediable—”
Again, the lower half of her face disappeared in a vast, rancid yawn.

113
 EUDAIMONIA

They who did not understand Mishtamek’s silence would probably not understand his words.
Samukelisiwe was being more kind than he had expected, no doubt, but she had also orches-
trated this conflict to emerge right in front of the klovn, and the only reason to do that was so she
could check his hǘbris. It was troubling, pernicious, the act of a petty tyrant and not at all an ac-
cident. There was no foreign word for it. What followed was a moment of clarity; Much was said
without a need for words, both understanding what was in each other’s mind.
Samukelisiwe: Tell me, do you trust this foolish drunkard? Be honest.
Mishtamek: Nutin says that she laughs at all the wrong things.
She nodded: This smelly, no-good drunkard is no smelly, no-good drunkard.
The matron turned to face the klovn, shrugged once. True forgiveness was when an individual
could say: “Thank you for the experience!” Easy forgiveness: That was often the way of it when
one was part of one big, rowdy family as they were here amongst the People.
Behind every Sourcerous act possible, is there some folly? A flashback: Samukelisiwe had
opened her eyes as rain streamed down her face: “Mishtamek... I had a dream I was an old wo-
man.” Standing above her as she lay half immersed in mud, he said: “Well... you’re welcome to
my damp little shack.” However, as he had said those words he had smiled joyously for what
would seem no reason; Therefore, she had Seen he was exercising controlled folly: He had not
cared that his home at the time had been a shack. She adored Mishtamek very much, despite
his enormous conceit. His arrogance was so blatant it somehow ceased to be self-importance
after a day of bombastic displays of strength and wild declarations of his genius.
Samukelisiwe had become so fragile that, whilst they had sat beneath a tree, were a leaf to
fall and drift down and touch her skin, it might leave a bruise. So, as they had sat outside in the
evening so many years ago, he had had to chase away all the leaves that fell.
At the time, a Sourcerer would read another Sourcerer’s thoughts to perfection: “I will do so.
What I’m going to do is touch every inch of you till I know what makes you sigh and what makes
you giggle and what makes you beg me to never stop. I’m going to make you shudder, so that
you may see the bruises and know exactly where my hand has been.”
People said that he talked briefly, in that way sometimes called laconic. A knock would come
at the door, he would answer, and the person would ask if they had woken him up. It was good
Samukelisiwe counted herself mightily patient, provided she got her way in the end.
Samukelisiwe: This is exactly what arthritis is like: It is as if a big cow has got into my house
and won’t go away. It just sits there, taking up space, making everything more difficult, mooing
loudly from time to time and making cow pies, and all I can do is edge around it, a middle-aged
hag become too arthritic to come out and play; To sprint; Swim; Carve a canoe; To climb atop
a tree; Or to get cold and soaking wet. Should I consider every day a waste on which I have not
danced at least once? Am I to become bitter, wondering in the dead of night if I may ever again
be blind, mistaking love for laughter or laughter for love? If I’m sincere today, does it matter if I
regret tomorrow? Have I the tendency to become paralysed, wanting to make a better decision

114
 KALIDASA

or afraid to act for fear of doing something wrong? Except, of course, that the purpose of life is
to explore contrast, to do and experience things I do not like so as to figure out what I do... and
pursue that! Therefore, I cannot get it wrong. I can’t get it wrong because no matter what takes
place at any moment or segment of my mortal existence, it is an exploration of contrast, and it
is exactly this that’s all-important. Yet, if a Sourcerer believes in everything, if everything has its
meaning, if they cannot get it wrong or ever get it done, then all is possible, and surely nothing
else than happiness has any importance! When I ask Milwa'tem how he adapts to a tidal wave
of new thought, what do I hear? “It’s only new if it happened after I was born!”
Ohh, yes, indeed I am in dread of the exhausted and smouldering cinders of life. Life should
not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved
body, but rather skidding in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out
and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!” Indeed, a Berserker should concede that much, I
believe. Might iatrics someday know its Art well enough not to be so damn anxious to’ve just pre-
served something, provided only that it quivers? We’re all alone, born alone, die alone, and we
shall all some day look back on our lives and See that in spite of such fine company, we were
alone the whole damn ride. No, I don’t say lonely, not by any stretch of the imagination, but lo-
gically, and gloriously, alone. There is something glorious about kneading out into the doughy
firmament the depth and breadth of one’s inner Kósmos, in rendering the colours of a sunrise
whose limit may as well be predicated on the limits of an Unknower’s imagination.
Samukelisiwe chuckled. Had it occurred to her that she had not enjoyed herself so much in a
long time? If Guðdís were several mnâs plumper, a lot more difficult, much better organized, less
chatty and more inclined to play the piano, the woman may have made a perfect lover. As a little
girl in Afrikē, she had had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility.
She had deliberately chosen an honest arrogance, and had rarely regretted it.
Did Mishtamek know what she had seen out of her window the other day? Ducks. Hundreds
of them, all migrating. Have you ever seen them so early in the year? Something about flying in
a V must make it easier. That day, they were not flying in a V: They were flying in a straight line.
So eerie. I could see they were struggling, without the efficiency of their normal formation. Many
were dropping from the sky. They fell straight into the bay. I must say, I wouldn’t mind making the
rest of the world live in my dreams, but I’m not yet sure I like living in anyone else’s.
Now... take my cousin—he was mauled to death by a bear whilst duck hunting. When the
boy had arrived he was almost dead, but his body was so strong it kept moving. I stood in front
of him and advised his travelling companions not to move him; They listened, standing there
surrounding his stretcher, looking at his mangled body. Over the next six days, I smoked him
so I’d See his self-importance disintegrating: He was not; He was; He would not be; He would
not care. Well did I recall the time he fell off his pony. I had lifted him up onto the kitchen counter
and washed his bloody knee, cleaned the tears and snot from his face, told him funny stories
and tickled his hairless danglers. I did such things; Still do. I recall him lying on a transitory bed

115
 EUDAIMONIA

too. I saw him open his eyes with that mischievous grin of his, seeming to be happy to have got
the better of me—we all know of course that any Sourcerer who stumbles upon a petty tyrant is
most fortunate. Never again would I see his fine figure pacing the earth. So it was that he presen-
ted to me a last, greatest gift: An event over which I would have little control.
One would expect Pienish’s relief to be a vast, silent emotion. It had not been. It had been a
niggling thing. A quarter of a hṓra had passed by with little to note but how hard the klovn could
fetch a breath. A primal snore, hers had not been tamed. No one had been able to curb its wild
excesses by means of a kick, a jab in the ribs or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had time to
perfect the knark, the graaah and the gnock, gnock, gnock, impervious to all the blows and at-
tempts at murder that often moderated snorers over time. Pienish had been told that napping
was tricky for an asklepiádēs: There was a small window in how long they could nap that may
leave them feeling refreshed. If they napped less or more than that, they ended up feeling like
crap the rest of the day. And thereafter they may just end up with ins—
Just then, the large, oak double-doors across from the big man were forcefully kicked open
and a whistling, whipcord-like figure strode through, preceded by a wooden tray piled precari-
ously with earthenware mugs and a rather immense pot of steaming coffee.
The intruder trundled his way down the table, bending to slide the tray off his arms midway.
Just there, Nushiss had stood before him naked as her name day; He had been as rock hard as
the roof beams above them. He had been inside her several times by then, but each time out-
side, atop furs, with others all about. Adolescence, such a sweet, sexual time!
When you got right down to it, was Milwa'tem’s dick the one organ that had not presented it-
self to his awareness through pain over the last seven years? Modest yet robust, it had always
served him faithfully; Or, he could argue, he had served it—if so, its yoke had been more than
easy; It never gave him orders. Although it sometimes encouraged him to get out more, it en-
couraged him humbly, without bitterness or anger. Yesterday, it had interceded upon Nushiss’
behalf. It always enjoyed good relations with her. First we forked, then we spooned!
The matron knew that ten mikroí would rarely pass in which Milwa'tem did not hackle, pick
his nose, or wipe a bogie onto some snot-encrusted sleeve. The robes he wore for mushroom
hunting were seldom washed; They constituted a collection of odours he gathered rambling in
the woods. Still, he had a lovely colour; A ruddy glow that came with heavy smoking engulfed
him. She was now familiar with the teen’s morning dress code: Tangled hair, a bath robe, san -
dals and lots and lots of feathers and beads. He looked so damn effervescent! In the hierarchy
of age, newborns had the highest rank, then infants, children, tweenagers. As for adults, they
were virtually condemned to the ground floor of the pyramid of excellence.
In a carved wooden trunk on his sitting-room floor Milwa'tem had two bags of grass, fifty pel-
lets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and
a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of
jenever, a case of rum, a case of mead, a pint of raw ether and a dozen amyls.

116
 KALIDASA

As he sat, the doobie he had been rolling exploded out of his hands. He clutched at it futilely
before he awkwardly fell down rather hard into a kind of fucked-up-question-mark posture. He
hated to waste Low Lands weed. He loved the speech of the Low Lands, had sampled a lot of
languages; This, his favourite. He therefore rattled off a few choice expletives; He did not once
repeat himself in his use of profanity; He named the chair-in-question’s faults, in dubious and
overly-insulting detail. Like wiping your butthole with fleece! I love it!
Suddenly, he began to laugh in that peculiar way of his which was both violent, and yet, by
necessity, soundless. His delicate, reclining frame heaved to and fro. Milwa'tem had the shape
of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; As he bent to the ground and kicked his feet up, he looked
as coordinated as an unattended firehose. His uncle? All he could do was sort of defy gravity
with a thud. No sounds emerged; Nor did the teenager’s mouth open. The spasms grew weak-
er, and when the natural sandy colour of his face had finally returned—his corked-up laughter
had turned it dark red—he began his rolling again in earnest. He coughed.
Guðdís scratched her hair and yawned, a great deal of dandruff filling the air. Did she at all
look like a MILF who wanted to live in such a way that when she awoke some time about mid-af-
ternoon, Hel herself said “Aw shit, is she up?” Guðdís had had two-hundred blow-up dolls placed
all over the transitionry; As a result of this it did not seem that there was a single patient who had
to worry about a lack of female companionship. The dolls presently stared out from virtually every
corner, their wide eyes and let-me-suck-you mouths taunting everyone who passed by. Such
things happened when Guðdís was drunk and in the grip of Berserkergang.
There were times when Milwa'tem was able to dream effectively without his uncle’s assist-
ance. Last night, he had dreamt of horses yet again: He had seen a cubical stall. The horses in-
side had been restless. One of the horses shat a tremendous pile of shit. It had been brown and
steaming. It appeared kind of like Kailāśa, resembling a diamond surrounded by a dark, flat land-
scape of rugged, dry straw. The steaming pile of crap had been all over his—
Suddenly, a smell had shivered Milwa'tem awake, underneath a hundred aromas of a thou-
sand things. Was it the twang of pine needles, or the smell of sex? Was it the sour rot of mush-
rooms? Was it the spice of oak: Meaty and analogous to herbs? Was it blood, disinfectants or
faeces? Was it the gunpowder scent of chocolate? Whatever it is, it is close. Many vapours had
invaded his nostrils, his hair rising. His eyes had been as heavy as manhole covers, so he had
let his nose wonder: Peanut-butter with a hint of saffron? Was there even such a thing as a hint of
saffron? It was the loudest understated spice, like a soft-spoken man he could not stop listening
to. In the mind of one Guðdís Fuðhundr, was this the next best thing to being allowed to hold the
youth up against a wall and play a cruel game with a bag of peanuts?
As far as Milwa'tem had been concerned, the library had smelled like peanut-butter snaps as
he had walked through the door, although it was still anyone’s guess whether real peanut-butter
snaps were actually involved or if it was just the smell of lies and Berserkergang.
“There have been fads in smells,” the teenager began, seemingly out of nowhere.

117
 EUDAIMONIA

“Perfumes or essences,” he added. “I recall all the scents of my childhood and adolescence.
Even the most disgusting smells are mine. Eurōpḗans used to use underarm oils and crotch oils
to mask their natural odours: Did you know that? Of course you knew it!
“People knew instinctively that their pheromones betrayed them,” Milwa'tem winked.
“You’d like to mine me for my riches,” the young man added, his tone not at all angry.
And then, too: “I’m sorry I don’t speak mumble. You have requests?”
Guðdís: “Blame my curiosity. Tell me, what’s it like to be a pussy-hound?”
All three Sourcerers were well aware that the Íslander had lately begun ovulating.
Am I the most avid people-watcher who ever lived? It is as though I sense everything close-up.
My hearing and vision are acute; I have as well a sense of smell extremely discriminating. I can
detect and identify pheromones at thirty parts per million. You cannot hide much from a Sourc-
erer; Any Sourcerer! Would it horrify you what we can detect by smell? Pheromones tell us what
others are doing or are prepared to do. And gesture or posture! I stared once for half a day at an
old man sitting on a bench in Brattahlíð. He was seventh-generation descendant of Eiríkur Rauði
and had not seemed to know it! I studied the lightness of his complexion, the flap of skin below
his ears, the cracked lips and moistness around his nostrils, the wisps of once-red hair creeping
out from under the hood of an over-tunic. He had not known he was being watched. Eiríkur might
have known! This old fellow had simply been waiting for somebody who never came. He thus
got up, tottered off. He was sore after all that sitting. I knew I’d never see him again—his leuk -
aemia was close to killing him. His hǘbris was soon to be rewarded.
In the midst of the light, iron fragrance of menstruation and of the odd smell of peanut-butter
snaps, there was the smell of elderly men and women and the sickly stench of vomit, antisep-
tics and suchlike which marked the zone of any transitionry. As far as he was concerned, au-
tumn was heavy with its endless scents, but even those fragrances were this morning not as
strong as those of afterbirth or peanut-butter. Milwa'tem had read a cancer booklet. The book
had tried to pass off depression as a side-effect of terminal cancer. But depression was not a
side-effect of terminal cancer. There was no definitive evidence of life after death, but there was
no evidence against it. Soon enough, Milwa'tem would know... so why fret?
So, one basic difference between an ordinary person and a Sourcerer was always that the
latter took everything as a delight, while the former took everything as a blessing or as a curse.
The latter would never grumble or regret anything; Their lives were endless delights, and a de-
light could never be good or bad, it could just be good or better. To seek after just such a per-
fection of spirit was the only task worthy of human temporariness, and so, to seek joy was the
only driving force a Sourcerer could ever know. There was very little of the melancholy element
in Milwa'tem. He was never sad but when he slept; And not even then, for Guðdís had heard
the youth say he too dreamt of unhappiness, only to wake himself with laughter.
The Sourcerer smiled over at her understandingly and much more than understandingly. It
was one of those rare smiles with a quality of refreshment which one came across four or five

118
 KALIDASA

times in life. It concentrated on her irresistibly in her favour. It understood the woman just as far
as she wanted to be understood, believed in her just as much as she would like to believe in
herself; It assured her it had exactly the impression of her she had hoped to convey.
The groove was mysterious. All living beings were born with it; Many human beings some-
how lost it, the world splitting before their eyes into square and cool. The klovn was grateful to
those who were keepers of the groove, the infants and the grandmothers, who hung onto it and
helped her recall that any kind of laughter was better than no laughter at all.
The four of them would for a short while have one of those exchanges that made no sense
on paper, which one could not for the life of one repeat, nor even really remember. Dialogue
alone could concentrate meaning; A conversation merely diluted it. Milwa'tem: “Coffeemakers
are supposed to be automatic, and yet you have got to push a big, red button.”
Thus far there had always been an essential continuity, a coherence, amongst all the exist-
ences resultant from Milwa'tem’s dreams. He had always been some kind of smoker, had al-
ways lived on the coast of the Marklandshaf. Even in that life that had ended on the concrete
steps of a burning library—he recalled how the flames had rippled over the pages, catching first
the older books with the paper whose smell he had loved so much—even in that life, up until
there were no more people and no more books, those continuities had held. He had managed
to repair all the damage that had once been such a fact of life: An enduring legacy from the end
of that particular timeline. Geography was stable again: The continents were where they were.
So too were the bodies of the solar system and human nature. Throughout all his innumerable
lives, however, the majority of important things had remained constant. If his uncle had sug-
gested he dream up an immortal race of humanity, he had failed to do so.
Still, Pienish was learning how to run his dreams a bit better. These last two sessions had
changed things quite radically. He still had his suite on the third floor of the West Manse, faintly
scented with years of kánnabēs smoke; But last time he had worked as a bureaucrat in a large
building downtown. Yes, Sheshatshiu was again changed beyond all recognition. No longer was it
as impressive and skyscraping as it had been, yet to his mind it was now much more handsome
and natural. Things were being managed differently now. He recalled the world as it had been
so vividly from so many existences that he had refused to accept, till he got to the library, the as-
surances of his present memories, which simply lacked any skyscrapers at all. The Research
and Development Coordination Building should have shot skywards from among its lawns and
quadrangles. He had not even bothered to look for the Medborgarhuset Building.
Milwa'tem could not recall the name of Nushiss’ workplace exactly; Was it Birger, Bjørn and
Halfdan, or was it Birger, Einarr, Bjørn and Halfdan? She might still exist, but bear a different
name. Her mother might have given her another name. Then, he had to face another possibil-
ity: If she wandered in right now looking for him, would he even recognize her?
Yesterday, she had been born a brown yet again. A light brown, like Eystrasalt amber, or a
cup of strong tea. But last week no brown people had been seen: No black people, no white, no

119
 EUDAIMONIA

yellow, no red. They came from every part of the world to work at the World Planning Centre, and
thus had all worn different styles of clothing, and yet underneath each had been the exact same
shade of grey: Grey skin, grey hair, grey eyes; Even their scleræ had been grey.
Pienish had been elated when this had happened. It had been their first session of the month.
He had stared at himself in the mirror for a long time, chuckling. “This time you appear to have
done it the economical way! By Aiasheu, I believe your brain’s beginning to cooperate with me!
You know what I suggested you dream, eh? Nobody in the entire history of the human race has
suffered for the colour of their skin! You and I are the only people on Gaia who recall the human
race as it was. Do you know why we encouraged the world to think of us as Sourcerers? It was
prudent to do so; It served to attract interest. You yourself told me that a disciple of Iēsoús said
to him once, ‘Lord, I believe; Help thou my unbelief!’ The time you and I seem to be returning to
took place millennia, or even hundreds of millennia, before recorded history.”
Back in the present: At ten o’clock, Gregweneesh led a long line of men and women, North-
men and Sourcerers, into the room, most of the transitionry staff looking blithe, if sleepy, followed
next by the Diplomakía team, an air of excitement among them. In his hand Gregweneesh held
a tray with two more immense stone kettles on it—fluted naked female shapes, pregnant. He set
these down to the right of the coffee service Milwa'tem had brought in previously.
The smell of both yew and raspberry tea, as well as roasted coffee beans, wafted across. All
three were common ways of stealing time which by rights belonged to one’s older self.
Milwa'tem poured, toting two over, rattling them upon their saucers. How helpless could one
feel if one had a full cup of liquid in each hand and suddenly had a need to sneeze? He held in
the sneeze, though, by thinking of the word cucumber, which always worked for him.
To Samukelisiwe: “Drink up. This should restore your inner bitch.”
Arriving at a General Staff a hṓra early, Mishtamek had looked generally disgusted. By the
end of the day, Samukelisiwe hoped, he would look specifically disgusted.
It was Pienish’s firm policy that every decision of importance should be dominated by general-
ists. In his opinion, a committee that consisted only of experts or specialists would degenerate
quickly into chaos; At least as long as each assigned priority to their own field. Whilst certainly
well-intentioned, such a group would be a source of endless, useless nit-picking, the ferocious
quibble over a comma—each member looking backwards into the narrow breadth of their own
understanding. An expert was someone who had made all the mistakes possible, but in a nar -
row field. Sōkrátēs had been a philosopher: That meant he knew virtually nothing about virtually
everything! Specialization was an offence to Pienish. It was too neat, like a preconception. One
thing one could be sure about any preconception was that it was wrong. One may find this diffi-
cult to believe, but Pienish did not know why he had sent for these Northmen.
It had been an instinct, or a basic intuition. There had been a long and rather hard knocking on
the door of his suite in the dead of the night: “There are two heavily bandaged men and a woman
at the gate who want to see you, and they’ve brought a patient with them!”

120
 KALIDASA

From his vast four-poster Pienish had considered this. At last: “Is she tall?”
A pause. A slightly muffled conversation. Then: “Umm... yes?”
“Then why’re you standing there sucking your thumb? Let her in! Let her in!”
Shaking himself, he first took a sip of tea, putting on his usual mask of quiet efficiency. Lean-
ing forwards, he commanded attention with a knuckle rap against the table: “Twenty years ago I
too might’ve slapped myself in the face with a great deal of satisfaction, except that forty years
ago I found out I was not Śiva, and ten after that that I wasn’t even Śankarāchārya.”
Dry chuckles sounded all around, and Guðdís noticed with more than a passing appreciation
that Pienish had said precisely the correct thing, in precisely the correct manner, to accent the
mood here. Even the touch of exasperation underneath his voice had been right.
“South-East Manse first again today, I think,” rumbled Pienish.
Asklepiádēs NænniR Olofsson: “I’ve a dermatological matter to go into after my...”
Might the good Norseman display a solid example of the habit of expressing himself in terms
of modest diffidence? Never would he use, when he advanced a thing that might possibly be
disputed, the words “certainly” or “undoubtedly” or any other that might give an air of positive-
ness to his opinions, saying: “I conceive” or “I apprehend the thing to be so” or “It seems” or “I
should think it so for such and such reasons” or “I imagine it to be so” or “It is so, if I’m not mis -
taken.” This habit would be of great advantage to him if he ever had occasion to inculcate his
opinions to persuade people into measures that he had been from time to time unable to pro-
mote. And, as the chief ends of conversation were to inform, or to be informed, to please or to
be pleased, he might wish two well-meaning, sensible klovner would not lessen their power of
doing good by assuming manners that seldom failed to disturb, to tend to inculcate opposition
and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech existed; To wit, giving or receiving
information and pleasure; For, if he were to inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advan -
cing his sentiments might provoke contradiction or prevent a candid attention.
Amongst the agalmic entrepreneurs of the 21st century, nerds often took offence if someone
began to utter declarative sentences, because they would read into it the assertion that they, a
Neo, did not already know the information imparted. The older generations had far less self-im-
portance, and besides, understood that frequently people needed just to think aloud. A more ad-
vanced nerd would furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents
were for the most part known to all present was part of the process of making conversation, and
thus should hope that their words would not be thought a micro-aggression under any circum-
stance. As Kurush often said: “Now, now, let me finish, then interrupt!”
This nonagenarian Neo, Dr. Kurush X. Mehta, had been busy all morning just staying alive.
His sleeve, unbearably compressed and stretched by his nocturnal activities, was at last some-
what relieved by the softness of the nest into which it had been snuggled.
For example, poor blood flow to the intestine caused by a blockage in an artery had caused
the GI tract to become perforated; A punctured lung involved air escaping from the lungs into

121
 EUDAIMONIA

the space in-between them and the chest wall. Self-treatment for a pneumothorax involved his
wetware lessening pressure on the affected lung, allowing it to re-expand. Surgery had but lately
been performed to repair the perforation. Nevertheless, his wetware constantly had to monitor
the air pressure in his pleural space and his heart rate, as well as his body’s response to infec -
tion in case of septic shock. After a Neo’s artificial heart had been so badly damaged as this, ar-
tificial stem cells would be moved into action, the organ therefore reconstituting itself. If not for
The Adon, would Kurush’s face now bear a dozen grisly, white scars?
It had begun suddenly, globally, some years ago: A significant minority of those near death
had spoken of... something; North; South; East; West; Storms breaking—great, ugly whirlwinds of
weeping, death and implausibility. What The Adon had not been prepared for was how many in-
ner doors the act of recording had marked with an X without being able to unlock.
Years ago, Kurush had been led to a door. Two infantrymen had opened it for them, the pair
entering a vast, whitewashed chamber, hidden somewhere underneath the Columbia University
Irving Medical Center. Doctors, nurses and droids had bustled about.
“This is not humanitarian work,” The Adon had said, walking slowly. Those they had passed
looked to him with no little fear. The spymaster had led Kurush to an alcove of beds, each with
a sick person in it. There had been nurses standing to one side. Draining blood!
A droid had stood near the beds, waiting or possibly videotaping. What? Such had been all
Kurush could think. “I don’t understand...” he had begun, watching in horror as the patients had
grown rather pale. There had followed a pause. “You are killing them!”
“Who needs real blood nowadays? It is but a way to kill slowly.”
Kurush could not speak: He could not voice his disgust and revulsion. In front of him, one of
the victims—a boy—had expired. So many had not been adults, but children.
“You will still yourself,” The Adon had said. “You will shut up and return to my side.”
Kurush’s wetware had done as its master required. What were a few more deaths?
“You see,” The Adon had begun, “I don’t send men to do bloody work for me. I do it here. I’ve
personally held the needle and released the blood from the veins of one man.”
Just then, one of the bleeding children had started speaking softly.
“Who dares misery love and hug the form of Death? Follow the boundless stretch of her arms
towering into the night and that wild hair infinitely flying: She dances this way—what joy! She
dances that way—oh, the pain, the hideous fear, the desolation! Oh, Kālī Mā!”
Shrieking, the boy had arched his back, then had fallen suddenly still, his eyes dead.
Up until that point, the professor’s stay at the Irving Medical Center had been tolerable; In the
shower, he had whistled away his unease, running soapy hands over his new body. His chosen
sleeve looked as if it was in its forties, with an intellectual’s build and what felt like some military
custom carved onto its nervous system. As a teen, he had dreamed of escaping his ordinary
life, but his life had never been ordinary; He had just failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
Likewise, he had not thought silence something that he would ever actually miss.

122
 KALIDASA

Back in the present: Kurush’s condition had stabilized; His wetware had observed him long
enough to assure itself that he would not die if its attention were elsewhere—though the doctors
treated him, leached his blood and doped him up, his body would recover.
Once finished, his wetware set a portion of itself on guard, withdrawing the rest.
“His blood pressure stabilized again... mmm... ten hṓrai ago,” concluded Olofsson.
Pienish said: “What have you done for him; Or to him?”
“Nothing. Your instructions...” A shrug. The physician snuck a small fragment of peanut-but-
ter snap out of his briefcase and he popped the confection into his mouth.
Pienish nodded somewhat grimly: “Go ahead. What is your diagnosis?”
Another confection. “I don’t wish to sound off about a situation I know—”
“Never mind that. I asked for your diagnosis.”
“Very well... . Shock... atypical, sure,” he hedged, “but shock, leading to transition.”
“Catalepsy?” asked one of the Centralizers, a woman seated to the man’s left.
Kurush’s wetware had been aware of this latest visit by the witch-doctors, yet since they did
not seem inclined to subject its charge to any more narcotics, it let them be. It simply waited in a
fashion which might be described as “patient” only because human language did not embrace
the “emotions” nor “attitudes” of highly developed, late 21st-century expert systems.
Under normal circumstances, an expert system would expect to be asked to accept human
input and to be overridden by a human doctor at moments of their choosing in order to maxim-
ize its efficiency and to keep trained, human intuition in the decision-making loop.
Milwa'tem glanced at his uncle, back to Olofsson, ventured a query.
Pienish remembered yanking out yet another fragment of glass as his assistants had washed
out the wound. He had pressed his fat fingers to the side of the tiny puncture, inspecting it. Once
again, there had been but a tiny welling of blood that had stopped almost immediately.
Olofsson faced his questioner: “Ultrafast coagulation? Add it to the list.”
The matron appeared to wait for Mishtamek to say something. He had nothing to say. Was
Pienish what was called a lucky man? One cloud had dissipated, another had gathered. Would it
occur to him that they should thank each other that every hṓra had its little tyranny?
B
Samukelisiwe: If I asked you something, would you tell me the truth? B
Might it be better to tell these stories close to the water than in a conference room? Words
accumulated indoors, trapped by walls, ceilings or closed doors. The weight of what had been
said could lie heavily on what might yet be said, and suffocate it. By the shore, the air carried the
story on a journey: One apology drifted away and thus made way for the second. Had the klovn
not yet known the matron well enough to give her argument much lift?
Pienish pinched his index finger gently, all the way to the tip and back, as if checking or dou-
B B
ble-checking for a kink or a lump. I don’t know everything, he hedged, as usual.
A Centralizer interrupted the Norseman: “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
Olofsson was a little taken aback by the question: “I didn’t think of it before.”

123
 EUDAIMONIA

Pienish remembered how he had earlier tackled his own failing of eating excessively. He re-
membered that his mate had suggested he first tackle the biggest part of that habit, which was
connected with his devotion; The man could not think well, love well, sleep well, if he had not
dined well. He had expected his mate to tell him what to do, but she only smiled and made fun
of him, saying that as soon as she might mention something he should do, he would fight not to
do it. Pinamenish had said that was the way some people were: They loved telling others what to
do, but loved much more to challenge one another and not do what they had been told. Though
he was First Man, Pienish had been second in bed to the mother of his child.
Forgive me for being a liar and a fool and a totally worthless outdoorsman.
As it happened, Pienish would describe what he had done with an absolute honesty—per-
haps that would be of help to him in understanding it? Yet, a thought was a living thing; Like all life
it must wax and wane, withstand trials and undergo change. This would be the case with the
victory Pienish would achieve. It would be lubricious, visible today, absent tomorrow. At first, as
near as a candle carried in a hand; Later, as remote as a star in the autumn sky.
Scowls creased many a Northman’s brow, but there were also irate murmurings. Pienish knew
the most effective way for a man to face defeat was as a Sourcerer. He was here due to his in-
herent intelligence and forcefulness, yet it was his controlled folly that had made him put up with
this. A Sourcerer, or anyone else for that matter, could not ever wish to be somewhere else: The
former because they lived by delights alone, and the latter because they could not predict where
death would find them. Only under such conditions could a man’s internal dialogue acquire the
jejune humour to withstand the pressure of that which was unknown.
She didn’t permit me. She just couldn’t stop me. It had been the big boy’s first titanic clash of
wills. His mother had refused to let him jeopardize himself. He had made no argument; He just
refused to be stopped. She had undertaken to confine him to their home; He had smashed the
door off its hinges. In the end, she had given in and he had paid for it in other ways. Was it any
wonder then that his father was a liar? To this day, for a daímōn to show their true self was to
be branded a public danger—or any number of other negative consequences—simply because
they did not share the same worldview as the vast majority of the human race.
Of course, to a Sourcerer, injustice was a potent tool; Perhaps the most potent.
Pienish and his father had spoken about many things in their time. But most of it was a blur
to the old man now. Of all their campfire transactions, he remembered only the first with any real
clarity. But then inaugural thoughts always burned the brightest: Like beacons.
Even at the age of sixty his father’s eye had not been dim, nor his vitality diminished: “When
the Innut cross the mountains, we always use the same trails, is that not so?”
The big boy, one bushy red eyebrow raised, had simply nodded.
His father had gestured. Silence. Then: “But... why?”
“Because the trails are mountain passes; There is no other way.”
“And when taking our sheep to pasture, we always cross at the same spot?”

124
 KALIDASA

To this the young Sourcerer had naught but shaken his head.
His father had abruptly begun to laugh, flawless in its cadence: But... why not?
“Because we cross open ground. The ways of crossing are without number.”
“Exactly!” his father had smiled. “And does our familiarity with the world, which we perceive
so greatly, not compel us to believe we are surrounded by objects, existing as Things-in-Thems-
leves?” His father would tell him, that from the beginning, the New Sourcerers had had a formid-
able barrier of tradition to overcome. When the Didáskal had reached the New World, none had
known which traditions were right and which wrong, assuming everything their ancestors had
done should be open to criticism. “And yet, if ever Sōkrátēs had been so bold as to think himself
a victim, would the Kósmos not make him a victim? If Dḗmos had thought the same, should his
belief in his so-called philosophy be unobjectionable? To be an object is to be a thought; To be
poor is to be a thought; And so is to be hungry or to be in pain or to hate—”
Even as a child, the big-bodied lad had been excellent at frowning: So what?
“So, if all things humans do are a thought, I ask, why are your ways—the arguments that set
out what you think it is moral to do—like mountain passes? Why do you ride the same mountain
trails, over and over again, when ways—and so, destinations—are without number? In the face
of contrast, a Sourcerer is adventurous. It is its quality to give to them a sense of hope or hap-
piness. We feel robust and even exhilarated. Even the apprehension that it arouses is very ful-
filling. Do you not yet know that a man is at his best in the face of so-called defeat?”
For some reason, that question had thrilled the ten-year-old. The words were so audacious
he had felt bold for just hearing them, and so compelling that he had felt heady, as though they
had touched a place that ached to be touched all the more because it was forbidden.
Later, he would make himself a vow: He would promise his father that he would live to destroy
him. He had carried that promise with him for decades. Then his promise had changed; He was
no longer interested in destroying anyone. He did not hate his father; He had learned that the
countless paths one travelled in one’s life were equal. Oppressor and oppressed would meet in
the end, and the only thing to say would be that life had been altogether excellent. Pienish was
at peace. His father had made his mother a superb gift when he raped—
“I asked you a question, Mishtamek!” The matron’s voice was the crack of a whip.
“What?” The man pulled his attention back: “What do you want me to say?”
Outrage: “ ‘What do I want you to say?! What do I want you to say?!’ ”
Did everyone seem to have something belittling to say to the hapless Centralizer?
Soon, the altercation began crackling merrily like a tiny, kindling bonfire.
“This is not a game,” Olofsson would mutter, more than a little matter-of-factly.
Actually, it’s more like dancing. To the point: You don’t like me? I’m sure I’m not going to like
you. Nothing personal: I don’t like anybody. This is as it should be: Mean young men are trivial
and kindly old men are tiresome. I think of myself as a misanthropic, irascible old fart with the soul
of a fool which often makes me screw up at the most inconvenient moments.

125
 EUDAIMONIA

Pienish shook his long hair: These quarrels, which seemed so singular each time, could they
be reduced to a dozen questions, rebukes and phrases, repeated over and over? Amongst the
Inuit did there exist a word for the opposite of déjà vu? If so, perhaps it could be translated best
as jamais vu—a notion describing the way in which, despite having met the same individuals and
places, conflicts and controversies, again and again, each time would conspire to feel like the
first; Everyone about always a stranger, no machination ever truly tired.
The Ear-Pull was an Inuit contest in which two competitors sat facing each other, their legs
straddled and interlocked. A two-foot-long loop of string—similar to a kind of thick, waxed den-
tal floss—was looped behind their ears, connecting right ear to left ear. At the signal, the ath-
letes would lean backwards, away from each other, pulling the loop of string tighter and tighter
behind their ears. Their faces would contort in pain. Their ears would turn bright red and purple
and then stretch and crumple as the string cut in deeper—till the string slid off or one of the two
gave up. More than one such competitor had once come to Pienish for stitches.
It was quite enough to have saved a life; Anything more would be greedy.
Guðdís: “I disagree; Never argue with fools, they’ll drag you down to their level and—”
“And I suppose you never tried for more than seven lights?!”
“Heard that one did you? Úna Helgudóttir caught me at nine... or was it twelve? My punish-
ment was sufficiently embarrassing that I won’t tell you what she did.”
A recollection: Guðdís had soon caught her own reflection multiplied a thousand times in the
crystal prisms of a fencing mirror swinging in the arms of a target dummy. Prisms had glittered.
The target had spun clockwise. She had followed with the tip of her knife, thinking as she often
had that the thing almost seemed to be alive. But it was only clockwork created to lure the eye
from danger. She had had nine lights alive in there by then, the thing becoming far more danger-
ous. It had rotated faster with each light, offering new areas of confusion.
Then something had flashed past her shoulder, slipped through and tripped the deactivation
stud. The lights had darkened. A dozen actuated arms had slowed gradually to stillness.
Guðdís had whirled, blade in hand, furious at the intrusion, but her reaction had been thrown
off by awareness of the skill which had hurled that knife. It had been a throw timed to exquisite
nicety: It had struck a spot the size of a grain of wheat within a rotating target.
She had found her own emotions and tensions running down in a manner not unlike that of
the dummy. She had not been surprised to see who had thrown the knife.
Úna had stood just inside the door, Guðdís’ sümpatḗr behind. When one told somebody to
dress for unhindered movement, going naked often seemed like the best option.
Úna had cut Guðdís’ sümpatḗr short: “This isn’t the time to talk of why we came.”
Silence. Úna said: “Are you blind?! This one must have a mate!”
Back in the present: “All told, the incident was enough to start a steady stream of rumours. I
would take advantage of it. Reputation is like a lovely suit of armour—or a weapon to brandish, if
need be. If I was going to be a Berserker, I may as well be a well-known Berserker!

126
 KALIDASA

“Almost immediately therefore my finely-tuned eavesdropper’s ears would begin to pick out
bits and pieces of the various stories people were telling. It would only be then, hearing it from
others, that I realized what I had done. I was used to people talking about me; For you see, I’d
been actively building a reputation. But this was different; This was real. People were already
embroidering details or confusing parts, but the heart of the story was still there. I even started
several rumours that were pure nonsense, lies so outrageous that people would repeat them
despite the fact that they were undoubtedly untrue. I had Blóðughadda’s blood in me; I could
see in pitch darkness. I would talk in my sleep, speaking a strange language—”
A shrug: “I say again, that’s why there are rules: So you think before you break ’em!”
Stalemate? “What if I promise to defer to the best judgment offered in these—”
There it was again; That horrible-beautiful moment where Samukelisiwe knew that the man
was bullshitting them but he was doing it with such Godsdamn conviction.
B B
I remember a timeline where you couldn’t get her to shut up, signed Milwa'tem.
B B B
I think I like her better this way. Pienish: I think that I do too.B
B B B
Then: I was just kidding. To which: No, you weren’t. B
Olofsson, with eyes for Pienish: “You’ve yet to convince me that one of the keys to the well-
functioning of a diverse and greatly opinionated group isn’t a bad memory.”
Samukelisiwe did not scowl exactly; It seemed as if she was getting all the pieces of a scowl
together in one place, just in case she required them in a hurry. “His father has a way about him
too. As a girl I had real venom towards oppressors. Would a lesser mind, taught the things the
Great Aiasheu had known, set himself up as some kind of pipsqueak God? Imagine my surprise
when I found myself seeking out the company of petty tyrants as a grown woman!”
Silence. “Why can’t we all just not get along?” muttered Pienish, somewhat surly.
“You think me an old fool,” Samukelisiwe sighed, “and this confirms it, eh?”
What I think is that my nephew can’t, or his unconscious can’t, imagine a world without dope.
“Remember when Guðdís said things are difficult to explain? That hasn’t changed.”
Samukelisiwe: “Let us not bandy sophistry: Every past religious and governmental question
has had one single implication: ‘Who will exercise the power?’ All else was pretence, as most
thinking persons came to realize. Thus, all that I suggest for today is constant surveillance: He
should be watched at all times. I will see to it it’s done unobtrusively. Nushiss would be the ideal
choice for the task.” I seem always to be calling on her for special assignments. “There’s a lad I
have been fucking in town who might be ideal to send as replacement. The night nurses would
like, I think, to receive major punishments. You see, in the past, judicatures had seldom been
helpful to those who were to be punished. I cannot say what the specific elements of such pun-
ishments would be. It will most likely be quite different for each of them.”
B B
I shudder to think that I’ve come between you two, uncle, signed Milwa'tem.
Was the big man in a foul mood? Milwa'tem would receive explicit instructions on how to meet
B
this new obstacle. Nobody imposes on me against my will, so relax. B
127
 EUDAIMONIA

Milwa'tem: “He’s always been willing to admit when a mistake causes problems.” What kind of
incompetence is this, leaving two dangerous boys like that alone to cause—
The matron merely shrugged: Try; Or try not; There shall be no do.
“Let us discuss something else for a moment. Have you not heard the theory that we have a
group of predators that came from the depths of the Kósmos and took over the rule of our lives?
These predators are our lords and masters. They render us docile. If we desire to protest, they
suppress our desire. If we want to act independently, they demand we stop.”
Milwa'tem had focused on Samukelisiwe’s gap-toothed smile. The problem with being surroun-
ded by bright people was that they expected his mind to be as nimble as theirs.
“These predators took us over because we are food for them; They squeeze us mercilessly
because we are their sustenance. Thus we are held prisoner all our lives. The Old Sourcerers
of ancient Tshishtashkamuku had found this to be quite the enigmatic fact.
“Why not?” the old woman asked calmly, after a moment. “Why not? Because the idea is fant-
astical? You have not been told all the claims yet. In order to keep the human race obedient and
meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre—stupendous
from the point of view of a fighting strategist, of course; A horrendous manoeuvre from the point
of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! The predators give us their mind, which
becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is serious, cruel, unmindful, unfathomable and is often
filled with the fear of being discovered any moment. A dog’s world, by contrast, is simple and
fathomable: ‘I want to go out, drink something, lie down, fuck.’ There are no ulterior motives with
a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no negotiations, no self-reflection and no guilt trips
if a request is denied. Truth is, we do not need to be taught Sourcery; There is nothing to learn.
What we need is a story to convince us of our incalculable Power. Many on the path to becom-
ing Women of Unknowledge think to themselves, at one time or another, that they’re learning
Sourcery. All they are doing is allowing themselves to be convinced of the Power locked in their
being; That they can reach it. Children make up the best stories; Better than grown-ups. Kids
are always working on stories and throwing them away, like little origami trifles or a paper aero -
plane. They don’t care if they lose it: They can always produce another one.”
“There is a lesson in there somewhere,” was all Milwa'tem said.
“Is there? At the end of the day, I think little of what passes through your head and out of your
mouth. But we must—where are you going?” This last was addressed to Pienish who, as she
had been speaking, arose and lumbered off towards one of the side doors.
Pienish: “I am going back to my weight-lifting and my mathematics and all the other pursuits
that are far more interesting to me at the moment. You undertake to take these actions against
my will. Should I not find such a discussion highly distasteful? Either I, as Centralizer, will make
all the decisions from this point, or you can find yourselves another asklepiádēs.”
A dark flush spread from Samukelisiwe’s neck up across her cheeks.
With extreme politeness, Pienish now turned around: I’d like an answer.

128
 KALIDASA

Kiran passed his gaze across the two participants in this confrontation, seeing the genuine
lack of expression on the big man’s face. Samukelisiwe seemed to hesitate. It was obvious to all
that Pienish was now perfectly willing to accept any outcome from his throw of the dice. Kiran
decided that he quite admired the big man’s poise, seeing many things in this confrontation that
could be of value to him later. There could be little doubt of the Sourcerer’s truthfulness in point-
ing out that there were other things that interested intelligent men. There was no mistaking the
calm in his eyes as he stood there, ready to accept any decision. Thar will be a screaming fight
once the two of them get out of ’ere, Kiran surmised. I do believe ’e’s won.
How had the big man known the time had come to make his move?
Without the veto, voting was to a heterarchical process what the bludgeon was to the totalitari-
an state. In a heterarchy, everyone was equal, holding both a vote as well as a veto. The group
must work to decide upon goals that will be of best benefit to all. All members were protected
from losses by their vetoes. Could a punishment be reasonably endured for a moment longer
than it depended wholly upon voluntary support—for surely it was of benefit to the accused, at
least, that asklepiádai replace judges, or clinics, prisons? To claim that majorities possess the
right to rule minorities—or that the accused themselves, let alone the jury, have no right to judge
the health of the law, which, at best, was a product of some majority—was to say that minorities
received, ought to receive, no justice, except as a majority was willing to allow.
A hṓra later, all that Samukelisiwe’s expression would reveal to the world around her was that
she dearly needed to take a piss. Truth was, there really had been not all that much to discuss.
Yet, just as the woman could see the question “Does anyone have any other business?” coming
over the horizon, somebody said: “I would like to raise a minor matter.” And with a horrible burst-
ing feeling in her bladder she knew the meeting would go on for twice as long as it already had
so far, with many references back to things said in previous meetings.
The chorus of exasperation which greeted this had an odd effect on the vitki. He lowered his
head and clasped his hands together, but not before the matron saw them tremble. When the
man peered upwards again, it was to look at them all from beneath heavy brows. The matron
would feel abruptly sobered. In that moment, it was as though a terrible boot had crushed the
man’s ego into submission. There was watchful waiting in his dark-brown eyes. She wondered to
herself: Are these the meek who shall out-wait us all and inherit the Kósmos?
An odd fellow, was all that Pienish thought to himself. Grilled me all night long about the Old
Sourcerers, knowing full well he isn’t at all like what a vitki is in the Snorra Edda!
“What were they like, these Ice Age thinkers?” the soft man had inquired, yesterday.
A finger had touched his shoulder and Pienish had turned to notice a short man smiling in
the sunlight. He had worn an odd hat, his bearing childlike, as if everything were happening for
the first time. Ḥayim was often excited or chastened by little things, crossing his fingers before
uncertain events, like tasting a new flavour of ice cream or putting a letter in a postbox. At the
time, he had grinned behind a beard which had been a tangle of autumn vines.

129
 EUDAIMONIA

“They had an adage which may encapsulate their essence,” Pienish had begun, “ ‘You should
never be in the company of anyone with whom you’d be unwilling to die.’ ”
And the man’s response? He had said that the first man of that mould he had ever met had
been an Innut man. It was interesting to note that though his life bore little resemblance to that of
his ancestors, his performance of his craft and his ability to observe remained flawless: “It is far
more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a
person has.” Ḥayim: The Khristianós who dreamed of becoming a true vitki? Pienish did not
think so. Most likely, were the Great Aiasheu to have met such an individual, ‘Boneless!’ he would
have said; ‘Weak!’ Aiasheu would have had naught but contempt for any—Pienish, Iēsoús or
even the Autarkēs—who dared in ignorance to liken themselves to a true Sourcerer. Pienish
himself was not a Sourcerer: Not truly. He was a poor creature who lived on philosophizing and
hǘbris, trying to retain some small part of an ancient wholeness. And all the while, that lost reality
slipped farther and farther from his grasp. What had been created here? The New Sourcerers
were lost to everything except an easy way of life and a vigorous debate of foreign words they
did not understand and which they very likely did not even pronounce corr—
A disturbance at the door derailed this train of thought. Kapapisht sidestepped through the
double-doors there, hurried down the table; Bent down towards Pienish’s ear.
A wave of the hand: “Speak up: Information parity would be best, I think.”
Milwa'tem studied Kapapisht, marking the efficient movements, a swiftness of reflex which
made him such a difficult huntsman to emulate. Kapapisht’s gaze shifted to Milwa'tem, painted
eyes giving no hint of recognition. Milwa'tem recognized the mask of placidity over excitement.
The group turned to the man with what was clearly exasperation. Oh you poor man, Milwa'tem
thought, if you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hang yourself with.
Men and women like Kapapisht often liked muscular boys; They would even rather often like the
butts of brawny boys whose souls thought nothing of killing and eating them.
Languages became ugly and inaccurate whenever the thoughts of its speakers grew to be
too foolish; But any slovenliness in their language also made it much easier to have such foolish
thoughts. Historically, a bad usage of language could spread by tradition and by imitation even
amongst people who should have and had known better. Kapapisht reached into his tunic and
brought out a sheath with a black-ridged handle protruding from it. Few of the lessons and in-
sights that young men needed—how to conduct relationships, understand oneself and commu -
nicate effectively in an emergency—had not been taught Kapapisht by—
“Keep that blade in its sheath!” The voice came from the open door: An oily yet penetrating
voice that brought them all up, staring. A tall, robed figure stood in the door. A moth-eaten robe
of red and black rags enveloped the man, except for a rather tiny gap in the hood.
The figure swept into the room, stood at the far end of the table.
The third thing most people noticed about Asiniiwin of the Windigo’s Feast was his height. He
was well over six feet tall, somewhat thin, like a normal-proportioned person modelled in clay by a

130
 KALIDASA

child and then rolled out. The second thing that people noticed about Asiniiwin was his eye. His
ancestors had come late over the sheet ice from Asíā and had evolved the distinctive feature of
milky eyes—not just dark of pupil, but grey of eyeball. It made it difficult to tell where he was
looking. As a boy, his face had been like a greyish mask beneath eyes like holes. The first thing
people noted however was his stench. The Great Windigo was not a healthy man. It was only be-
cause nature was unkind that Milwa'tem did not attempt to grow a beard; Asiniiwin had weeping
sores instead. A lack of hygiene only added to his power: He did not need to threaten. The man
gave Kiran the feeling that his personal space radiated a dozen feet out and that anybody ap-
proaching him was intruding on something important. Underlings fifty years his senior felt apolo-
getic about interrupting whatever he was thinking of. One did not ask individuals like this what
they were thinking of in case they turned around and hoarsely whispered: “You!”
Looking at him, was it obvious that there was little in this Kósmos that a man or woman had a
more irrefutable title to than their own discomforts? It was far more than that Asiniiwin and his
disciples needed to receive great pains and humiliations to orgasm. Hurt, but do not harm? Was
there even a difference? Kiran: ’Urt is a bruise on the outside but ’arm is a bruise on the inside?
If one was a Pithophiliac, might not torture feel like bliss? Nay being ’urt is what ’urts the most?
Praśnayānists often demanded rigidly-defined areas of doubt and certainty; A daímōn desired
to sabotage other human beings; A Pithophiliac desired to be freed from the burden of self-im-
portance. Was there in fact a substantial difference of opinion between the three?
Two years ago: New Year’s Day coincided with Atsuko’s eighth birthday, having been born on
the spring equinox. Thus, she was not to leave Valandvik without seeing the Night Court in all its
splendour. All sixty Houses had taken to the streets. The first touch of the lash had been the most
exquisite, the rough thongs laying rivulets of pain coursing across the child’s skin, awakening a
fiery shudder at the base of his spine. Once, twice, thrice—had he thrilled for weeks at the ec -
static pain, nursing the memory of it? But the chastiser had kept on, and the rivulets swelled to
wide rivers of pain, overwhelming and engulfing the boy as Atsuko watched.
Kiran: “Youer said those who ’ave tried to break ’er all failed.”
“But I can help you with a few hints at why they failed,” Atsuko’s mother had said.
She talks of ’ints, Kiran had, at the time, reflected, she nay knows anything.
The woman had merely snorted. “Very well: ‘That which submits, rules.’ ”
Kiran had felt astonishment; She had been talking about such elementary things as tension
within meaning. Did she suppose that the Brython had picked up nothing at all?
She shrugged: “We aren’t here to bandy words or quibble over meaning. The willow submits
to the wind and prospers till one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind.”
Thar would ’ave been a way for ’er, ’er strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of ’igh value.
For those with charm, wit an’ an extraordinary nature thar is always room at court.
That night, the Adepts of Dahlia House had come dressed as monks, smelling of lotuses, as
Paannaaq House, in its madcap genius, had entered as a company of troubadours, singing, play-

131
 EUDAIMONIA

ing and tumbling. Sigurrós had challenged Valerian, festooned with whips and chains. Valerian
itself had vaunted the exotica of a hundred-and-fifty shades of grey, clothed in long, oily hair and
bloodied rags: “Whip us ’till we’re bloody on the floor, we’ll turn around and ask for more, we’re
Windigo’s Boys! We like to bruise, we love to bleed, daily floggings do each of us need, we’re
Windigo’s Boys! Man or woman we don’t care, give us twins we’ll take on the pair. Just because
you can beat us, doesn’t mean you can defeat us, we’re Windigo’s Boys!”
One might suppose, and rightfully so, that Atsuko would have been most curious regarding
the Adepts of Valerian House. It was there, as Guðdís had advised, that Atsuko could have gone
if she had had a mind. And curious the girl had been at times, sufficiently so that some things she
had learned. “I yield,” was the motto of the House; Its Adepts had had the predilection to take
pleasure in the extremity of pain and were trained in the receiving thereof; Logical. But the mag-
net was drawn to iron. The young girl had dismissed the men, women and children of Valerian
House, thrilling instead at the sudden arrival of the Erṓsophers of Azalea House. They had struck
a deliciously sinister note that New Year’s Eve: Black velvet, like a moonless night, and silk like
a bouquet of flowers; Bronze masks, horned and beaked, at once both beautiful and grotesque.
Kiran had seen a shudder run through Atsuko’s body, heard the sound of glassware smashing.
Not the little girl’s own serving platter; Atsuko had looked about: The perpetrator had been a nude
serving boy. Had she seemed to pity his punishment... and yet also to envy it?
Back in the present: Milwa'tem had listened to everything without seeming to do so. Had this
shown that he understood his business? What a shame it would be to run out of tea before one
had run out of predicaments! Asiniiwin would now explain that the sun had climbed high as Nutin
and the others climbed the landward hull of the bergskip. Their chosen segment was smooth, yet
covered with a sheet of ice-melt that glistened wetly. Nutin’s section had been darker to the eye.
All the children had been well equipped; Their intention must have appeared quite plain. They
had coils of hempen rope and boots of supple doeskin with massive bone spikes jutting from
the toes. Intermediate-sized steel-headed hammers had hung from each of their right hips, a bag
of iron stakes from the other. Ískrete could be treacherous stuff, even at the best of times, and on
a morning like they had had today, when the hull was weeping, the warmth of the climber’s hand
might be enough to melt it. The hull would always be frozen rock-hard inside, but a thin outer layer
could be slick with morning dew and with runnels of melted water trickling down. Asiniiwin had
been told that one of the children had looped his rope about a wind-carved pinnace and was us-
ing it to support his full weight when the whole jagged thing suddenly crumbled and came crash-
ing down. Now that must have been a nasty bit of business indeed. Had that boy’s harness not
been fastened properly? Should one not think that a Nahualli-in-training would have seen some-
thing? Two observers would shortly appear above the remaining competitors.
Asiniiwin did not often go down these days to observe the Adepts at play. At most, he sent
down instructions, received reports—a masochist, like any human being, could not really con-
trol what flipped their switch. But special circumstances had merited his attention.

132
 KALIDASA

At that time Asiniiwin had been sitting alongside a bench on which lay what was still, tech-
nically, the trembling body of Sasho, formerly someone akin to his personal secretary.
The Windigo had glanced up at Asklepiádēs Agnodíkē, who nodded.
“What are their names?” The Windigo had repeated.
A cough; Choking. Sasho: “D-Don’t... k-know...”
“I know you five gave ĸύ Fjalar copies of my correspondence! They’re perfidious daímōns.
That man has many plots—plots within plots. Give in to one of his ambitions and you could ad-
vance another of them. The man downright reeks of secret decisions.”
“I d-d-don’t know... a-any n-names...”
A smile. “I trusted you, Sasho. You spied on me.” To which: “N-No names... .”
Standing by the door, Centralizer Dà Míng and two of his Gentlemen had sighed.
The Windigo had noticed one of Sasho’s fingers curling and uncurling under the manacles.
Beckoning? “Yes?” the Windigo had leant closer over the man’s bloody face.
Sasho had opened his one remaining eye with difficulty.
“I’m g-glad I’ve b-been such... a... a... d-disapp-pointment.”
The Windigo had stood up: You have no idea...  . His expression seldom changed if he did
not want it to. Dà Míng had observed with what might have been amusement.
“I see,” was all the Windigo had said. Agnodíkē had then motioned to the nurse.
Thin as a cypress, she was far taller than he. It had made Svend feel strange.
The Windigo had seemed already to derive amusement from the simpleton’s company.
More and more often, he would ask the Northman rather odd questions.
“How far have you walked today, in total?” To which: “Twenty and seven—”
An eyebrow: “But how... how do you know?”
That was just the kind of question Svend could not answer.
How did he know the sky was blue? It was just something in his head. One could not think
about how one thought; It was like opening a box with the crowbar that was inside.
A sigh: “And how long did your journey across the Norandvik take?”
Without hesitation: “Very little over sixty-nine mikroí.”
Centralizer Dà Míng had laughed, and the autistic savant had wondered why.
The puzzle was not why he had remembered, it was why everyone else always forgot!
Asiniiwin: “Did your mothers and fathers have this remarkable faculty?”
A silence had fallen. “Did they learn to do it as well?” rephrased Dà Míng, helpfully.
“I don’t know. It was only me and Samukelisiwe, until Pienish arrived.”
It sometimes took a long time for an idea to form in the Svend’s mind, but one had been form-
ing then. It was something about the way Dà Míng stood, the expression on his face. Could there
really be a martial art in which one downed an attacker with nothing but a smile?
Centralizer Dà Míng: “I suppose you’ll have to find a new secretary.”
Asiniiwin: “Then you do not seek to understand this conspiracy?”

133
 EUDAIMONIA

The Gentleman had not hesitated: “You comprehend it secrets?”

“I was there when the Skála House was the residence of ‘Earl’ Hrafnkell. Or maybe I wasn’t.
Memory is such a fickle thing. Do you think it safe to keep him in this high state another night?
Do so! Do so! It is, after all, Agnodíkē’s duty to preserve life for as long as possible.”
Dà Míng had cocked an eyebrow, understanding little of what the man had said.
The Windigo always promised his disciples three things: That they would be fearless, absurdly
happy and in constant trouble. Why had he shown his “Does-this-make-me-a-daímōn?” face to
his father alone? He had not really had any perplexities about his nature, but, like most, was
indisposed to be lectured to. His father had not been the kind of man to lecture him.
Back in the present: “Under torture,” the Windigo was saying, “an individual is as if under the
dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you
have read returns to your mind, as if you are being transported, not towards heaven, but towards
Hel. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might
please them, because a bond—this, sweetly, is diabolical—is established between you and them.
I’d already taken one of the man’s eyes to get him to turn back from the precipice, and when he
had at last told me the truth, I had his tongue cut out and the stump improperly cauterized. Fetch
the boys, I pray you; They speak naught but sweet nothings. Fie on them!”
The room was suddenly silent. Into this void the Windigo threw: “He may walk like a sexy brute
and talk like a sexy brute, but don’t be fooled, your son really is a sexy brute.”
Once again a charged silence fell. The Wingido glared down the table, then slowly pulled aside
his veil, only to reveal a large, loose hood hand-stitched from poor quality, rancid leather. The
stitching was simple and child-like. There were no holes for the ears or mouth, and only the sin-
gle eye hole. It was a hideous mask, rather ancient looking, cracked and yellowing where paint
had been splashed over it by a crude hand and with a horrid, desiccated and hairless head be-
neath. The smell of sweat and helléboros wafted out strongly as the man scratch—
There was something wrong with the man’s hands: His veins pressed against the surface of
his skin as if he were lifting a vast weight. Had Kapapisht somehow forgotten that Nutin dabbled
in rare poisons, explaining the noteworthy side-effects to anyone willing to listen?
As a newly minted asklepiádēs, Pienish had once worked with lepers: Not to help them, but
to overcome that fear in his life—that it worked out good for others was a by-product. The truth
is this: I did it to overcome fear. “I am in your debt. I tell you this because I want you to grasp the
nuance of Innut hospitality. If there is any way I, personally, can ease your stay here, you have but
to name it: The most deplorable obloquy, sodium thiopental. You understand?”
Kiran stirred, spoke as though to nobody in particular, directing his words over the heads of
those seated across from him: “When we are in control of everything an’ we’ve great big panels
of push buttons whereby the slightest touch fulfils every wish, what will we want? We will even-
tually want to arrange to ’ave a special, bright red button marked ‘surprise’ built into the panel.
Touch that wun an’ what ’appens? We abruptly disappear from ouer normal consciousness to

134
 KALIDASA

find ouerselves in a situation very much like the wun we’re now in, where we feel ouerselves to
be a little bit out of control, subject to the whims of an unpredictable Kósmos.”
The robed stranger was now staring at the Brython so intently that it seemed to Kapapisht
as if he was reading the lad’s thoughts off the back of his skull. Olofsson gripped the wrist of a
man who had reached to wipe a spot of wetness from the table with a bare hand.
Asiniiwin looked Kiran in the eyes, hesitated just long enough for the Brython to see it com-
ing, then said: “Maybe I’m a tad odd and perverse, but I’ve always thought there something quite
off-putting about a compelling argument.” At which, silence soon fell once again.
“Ho-ho-hoo!” It was Kapapisht, head thrown back, laughing with abandon.
Immediately, nervous chuckles sounded around the long table.
Pienish turned to Kapapisht: “How came he to be unobserved?”
“His friends came equipped with knives concealed in cunning pockets; Tied us up.
“I must beg your forgiveness,” the man added. “I took me half a hṓra to—”
“Oh, shut up and stop acting the fool. If you made a mistake, it was in overestimating Nutin.
His devious mind came up with a simple trick; We didn’t count on simple tricks. We both know
something of the training they give a Gentleman of the Kōdōkan, and yet the truth must be far
greater. If a human being sets out to destroy themselves, no power on Gaia can stop them. Just
be sure to learn the lessons this day has to teach; That will be more than enough.”
“No, you don’t under—” would begin the rather disheveled Kapapisht.
“I’ll hear no more of it,” Pienish said, gazing into the man’s eyes. After lunch would come the
questions... being hurled at him... like balls from a bat-and-ball pitching machine, one after the
other after the other, without any care or concern where they went—but Pienish would not be
able to hit them, he would not have a bat: He would not even have a toothpick!
All the Windigo said was: “A mouse can fall down a flooded mine shaft without injury; A deer
falling the same distance would break its bones; A human being would simply dive.”
Asiniiwin started to turn away. “Will you not stay for lunch?” Pienish asked him.
Asiniiwin turned back around, lifting his veil in place with two trembling, long-fingered hands.
Guðdís had imagined knitted bandages up to the man’s elbow or cracked red skin exposed to
the open air and oozing fluid from hideous blood blisters as big as roaches.
“Is there reason to stay?” the Windigo asked, eventually.
“We would honour you,” Pienish said, shrugging.
“Dishonour requires that I be elsewhere soon.” Asiniiwin was so tired. He had worn himself
down—to nothing, really—with all the cuts, corrections and emendations.
Asiniiwin: “True forgiveness is when a man can say: ‘Thank you for the experience!’ ” He shot
a glance at Kapapisht, whirled and strode out the open door at the end of the room.
When Nutin had first been diagnosed, the Gentlemen had made it plain, two students of hu-
man nature to another, that many daímōns were known to be adept at discerning the vulnerabil-
ities of their victims, for possessing the required degrees of ruthlessness and for being able to

135
 EUDAIMONIA

conceal their aggressive intention. Sourcerers were wily, educated and Sōkratic; They were by
no means religious. They were trained to See and not to conjecture; As always, a conjecture
could be manipulated: Only knowledge was secure. Make no mistake about it, a perfect storm
was brewing and it was coming the Windigo’s way. Pity the uninitiated who for any reason sought
to “break” or “discipline” an Ojibwe Sourcerer such as Asiniiwin without his express consent. The
best-case result in such a scenario would involve a great deal of frustration and humiliation for
the former; The worst-case outcome was likely far too gruesome to contemplate. Pienish knew
that his son often commented on his desire to kill babies, children or cute animals, and he did not
even need to laugh or smile for people to think he was joking: The truth of the matter was that
there was nothing one could do to end another being’s life against its will.
Pienish suppressed a delayed shiver of fear at recent events. Must I counsel Anikashi and
Meshkanau and the others not to play such dangerous games? Was it their intention that Nutin
should pull a knife on them and— Suddenly, Kapapisht sighed: “I’m the one who’s got to trans-
ition when it’s time for me to transition, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
Pienish faced Kapapisht: “You understand what you’re to do?”
The young man nodded. They heard his footsteps drumming down the hall.
It ended in confusion... again, was all Pienish would think as he stared at the backs of the
last to leave; Most moved hastily, balling up in knots of confusion. Staff had always in the past
ended on a decisive air. And with a quarrel to top it off! Samukelisiwe, even in her worst incarna-
tions, had always been altogether suited to his own disposition. She would scold him, argue with
him, pester him and laugh at him as often as may be. He recalled how the she had acted the last
two days; This Samukelisiwe was deeply troubled by something. Calling it Unknowledge makes
it easier to know that I know what I know and I do not know what I do not know.
There she sat, a fiery, recalcitrant and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

It was the end of the day and in his vast suite Pienish moved about restlessly, tired but all-
too-full of anxious energy to let sleep take him. Yawning, he went to the window, looked out at
the moonlit rooftops, but there was little to see: Few sounds, no movement. He could smell his
own sweat, and the thongs of his leggings and loincloth beneath his caribou pelt felt suddenly
itchy and galling. He opened the window a crack, permitting a rather cool breeze to enter the
second-storey suite. It would have been hard for Pienish to say exactly when it was that the trio
of silent, avian shapes on the rooftop opposite had transformed from intriguing to disturbing. He
undressed quickly. He took his time brushing down his mane: The scalp produces natural oils.
Brushing dry hair redistributed them more evenly. Last, he lifted a figurine from his neck, laid it
aside. It was all about the quality of the worry: He had cheerier worries than he used to. Sigh-
ing, the big man closed the door to his bedchamber. He used the chamber pot.
A raven hopped back and forth across his wide shoulders, crying: “Corn!”

136
 KALIDASA

Pienish did not believe it: He had just fed him! He shook the glutton off; It nipped at a long
strand of red-grey hair. The yearling flapped its wings, hopped down to the dresser.
He had tried to worry that something painful had happened to the house pet, but had not be-
lieved it for a moment; Nothing terrible ever seemed to happen to those whose ignorance was
enküklopaideíc. Was the man starting to think that it was time it damn well did? If nothing terrible
happened soon, maybe he would intervene himself? Now there’s an idea...
Pienish reached up to feed it, but it merely hopped onto his head, fluttered its wings and flew
across the bedchamber to alight above the door, well out of reach. Pienish chastised himself.
Eventually: Do you never get exhausted of being so wholly unbearable?
“Tǘrannos!” It was as though a trumpet had suddenly become articulate. “Tǘrannos,” the bird
repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. “Tǘrannos.” And then: “Corn! Corn!”
“Ohhh, please, shut the fuck up,” growled the enormous man.
After a moment’s hesitation, he gave in, moved to his bedroom door and opened it, listening
to the darkness. He was two hundred mnâs of muscle, beneath a hundred mnâs of stout, pro-
tective fat. He closed the door, snuffed the lamp, slipping easily into his bed.
Erica J-19ζ7: Say Nevermore! To which ] Fuck you! ^ was Aiasheu’s response.
For about half a hṓra, Pienish lay restlessly under the furs of his sweet-smelling bed, tossing
repeatedly from side to side. Silence: It flashed from the furniture; It smote him with a dreadful
and total power, as if generated by a vast mill; It arose from the antique furniture, up out of the
wall-to-wall hardwood flooring. He had often felt its austere approach—when it came, it burst
without subtlety, unable to wait. Not any more; Not now that it had virtually won.
He sat up, looked about the room; Had everything he owned been taken away and replaced
by an exact duplicate? With the lights out, did he feel somebody behind him, hear them, feel a
knife against his throat? Turning his head about, there was nothing to see. He sighed.
What do you get if you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? Someone
who stays up all night torturing himself over whether or not there is a Dog!
At last, after a dozen more bad jokes, he sighed, threw off his covers. He relit the lamp with a
safety match and climbed back out of bed. Then he walked over to the heavy chest of drawers
under the window; He shouldered the chest up against the door and tied the window shut with a
length of rope despite supposing it to be a little too small for a man to fit through.
Then he climbed back into bed, snuffed the lamp again and deliberately fell asleep.
It was near pitch black in his bedroom when Pienish awoke with something soft against his
face. He thrashed wildly: More a reflex than a real attempt to get away. His startled outcry was
muffled by the hand clamped firmly over his mouth. After his initial panic, he went quiet, even
limp. Breathing lightly through his nose, he lay there, both eyes wide in the dark.
A young man’s voice was low and insistent in his ear: “It’s jest me!
“I jest want to talk.” Kneeling beside the bed, Kiran looked down at the dark splotch Pienish
now made in his bed, all twisted up in his overlapping furs. The relative positions of their bodies

137
 EUDAIMONIA

would give the Brython a vast advantage in any struggle. A state of shock was produced when
an expectation was not met. Pienish supposed that it was three hṓrai before dawn; He briefly
wondered to himself if death would be too high a price to pay for a full night’s sleep.
Kiran: “I’m going to light the lamp an’ youer nay going to make any loud noises. Okay?”
Slowly, Pienish mulled this over. He nodded against a sweaty palm.
A moment later a match flared, filling the chamber with jagged, red light. The acrid smell of
sulphur returned to the bedroom. Gradually, gentler lamplight welled up.
Moving casually, Pienish sat up in his bed and put his back against the headboard. Completely
naked, he let the many layers of his blankets slide down to his calves. Seeing his precautions
by the light of the oil lamp now glowing softly at his elbow, did he feel embarrassed?
Kiran followed his gaze. “If youer act like prey, the Kósmos will act like a predator.”
Pienish surveyed the open window, the young man’s muddy tracks, brought his gaze back to
the youth. There was no need for words. The youth lowered his eyes.
“What do you want?” Pienish demanded, his voice hoarse, but quite firm.
The Brython flailed his hands frantically towards Pienish’s face. “ ’ighsht!” he whispered. “We
’ave to be like mice under the roost of a gyrfalcon. She ’as ears like a ’awk’s!”
“Wha—” Pienish grunted softly, paused: “Hawks don’t hunt with their ears.”
And then, too: “You said she has ears like a hawk’s; That doesn’t make any sense.”
Kiran shrugged, waved a hand: “Youer know what I mean... . She carn know that I am ’ere.
She’s jest upstairs!” The Brython’s accent was so strong that the klovn-in-training would be able
to build a bridge with it and know it would outlast the civilization that spawned it. And it was true
that Pienish had been able to perceive the sound of conversation and ruckus music—as well as
the smell of mead, coffee and vomit—from the direction of the alehouse.
Was it inhumane, in Guðdís’ opinion, to force those who had a genuine iatrical need for beer
to wait in line behind those who seemingly viewed it as a kind of recreational activity? Stumbling
upstairs, she had felt for the wall as if it would escape her unless she kept in touch with it. Her
bedroom door had escaped her. The klovn was exhausted and discontented and near enough
to the heart of a human being’s lifetime. She was lusty, plastered and in rather good company.
If she could be said to be anything, she would be a kind of paranoiac in reverse: She reckoned
that everybody she knew was ever so slyly plotting to make her happy.
Pienish met Kiran’s eye. The main advantage of playing dumb: Was it that it postponed the
moment of confrontation, when both would have to confess to each other that they were on op-
posite sides, giving them both a chance to reach for a weapon, as it were?
As always, the large man asked himself: What will happen if I say nothing?
A thought struck Kiran: “What would youer say to a Berserker whose deepest fear was nay
that she was inadequate, but mighty beyond measure? For whom it was ’er light, nay ’er dark-
ness, which shocked her: Who is she to be the world’s best shoulder to cry on?”
A memory: Opening her arms, Guðdís had laughed quietly: “Disappear here!”

138
 KALIDASA

Silence. At last: “Tell me, ’ow is it a man cun grieve for that which is still in motion?”
Silence. “I know more about Yrsa Guðdísardóttir than any other person in ’istory, save wun.
I know enough about ’er world to ’ave been a part. I walked with ’er on damp, luscious an’ lonely
moors, imagined ’er straining to write upon miniscule scraps of paper, only to ’ide ’er words from
prying eyes; I wept alongside ’er mother an’ participated in ’er creation.”
“I guess I can understand a man feeling stuck in a rut... . But, to use a Brythonic phrase, I don’t
see what your mistress’ foul mood has do to with the price of butter.”
Kiran’s eyes flashed: “It ’as everything to do with the price of butter!” he hissed. “An’ it is a
damn sight more than a bad mood, youer ignorant, wretched—” Silence.
Kiran closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, obviously trying to adjust himself.
“This talk of a potential Eschatonic event in the newspapers these last few years is on point. If
ever the newspapers were to publish stories of war instead, an’ people to begin to believe an’
talk of wars in thar daily lives, would we nay all find ouerselves at war? People get that which thar
minds dwell on, and this applies equally to a group as to an individual! Every action ’as its con-
sequences. Indeed, thoughts themselves ’ave consequences. Due to the operation of the Law
of Attraction, do Sourcerers nay know that thoughts in general ’ave consequences?
“Youer jest don’t understand what’s what,” the klovn-in-training explained, speaking to him-
self as much as to Pienish. “That’s why I came... to explain; I’d been ’oping for something like
this to come up. Anything! Even a Lordling come to settle old scores would be preferable to ’er
jest wasting away. But this thing is better than I ’ad ’oped. Sourcery is perfect!”
Silence. “It’s like... ’ave youer ever read The Tale of Maldwyn Maskmaker?”
The older man shook his head and Kiran emitted a frustrated sigh. “What about plays? ’Ave
youer ever seen The Falada an’ the Goosegirl or The Copper-Penny Crown?”
At last: “Is that the one where the Jarl sells his crown to an orphan boy?”
Kiran nodded. “An’ the boy becomes a greater ruler than ’e was; The goosegirl dresses like
a ’etairai an’ everyone is stunned by ’er grace an’ charm.” Kiran hesitated, trying to find the cor-
rect words. “I believe that thar is a fundamental connection between seeming and being. Youer
ken? In my family, everybody knows this, but youer analytic types rarely do seem to ken. We
understand ’ow dangerous a mask cun be; We all become what we pretend to be.”
Pienish sensed familiar ground: “You dress a beggar in fine clothes and when people treat
him like a Jarl he lives up to expectations. That’s basic psychology, no?”
“Let’s pretend it isn’t,” sighed the klovn-in-training, “and see what ’appens. It’s like... every-
body tells a story about themselves inside thar ’ead. That story makes youer what youer. We
build ouerselves out of that story. Úna spent ’er childhood pretending to be good; Now, she is in-
distinguishable from a good woman. Relentless ’ypocrisy became the trewth.”
Confusion. Pienish opened his mouth but Kiran held up his hand: “No, listen. I ’ave got it.
Youer meet a girl: Shy, self-conscious. If youer tell ’er she’s beautiful, she will say youer sweet
but she won’t believe youer. She thinks ’er beauty lies only in youer be’olding.”

139
 EUDAIMONIA

Kiran’s eyes flashed: “But thar’s a better way. Youer show ’er she is a Goddess. Youer make
mirrors of youer eyes, prayers of youer ’ands against ’er body. It is ’ard, very... but when she
trewly believes it...” The klovn-in-training snapped: “Suddenly, the story-line she tells of ’erself
changes. She transforms. She ain’t seen as beautiful: She is beautiful, seen.”
“What the Hel is that supposed to mean?! You’re spouting nonsense.”
“I am spouting too much sense for youer to understand,” Kiran said, testily. “But youer close
enough to ken the point. Are thar nay Innut women who cun deliver themselves of a child while
out ’unting or gathering in the Barrens, an’ after doing the few things necessary to ken that the
baby is safe, warm an’ comfortable, resume thar previous activity? On the other ’and, the ‘civil-
ized’ woman ’as to be put abed an’ ’eavily taken care of an’ thar, surrounded by asklepiádai
an’ by nurses an’ innumerable gadgets, force the babe into the world with prolonged contor-
tions an’ excruciating pains. It is trew that antiseptic conditions prevent many mothers an’ ba-
bies from dying, but why cunnot we ’ave the antiseptic conditions an’ the natural, easy way of
birth? Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I mean is: Making love, to me, is amazing. The ab -
sence of commas in speech nearly transformed me into a fertility God!”
Nothing strengthened incredulity as much as silence. Kiran: “What is it I believe? I believe the
purpose of life is bliss. I believe its basis is freedom. I believe its result is expansion. I believe
thar ’as never been an injustice anywhere in this reality, or any other, for that matter. I believe
to ask about good an’ evil purposes would be like asking: ‘Why does a Polünēsiakós ride the
wave on thar surfboard, what is the practical purpose for it?’ Well, they do nay do it because
they’re trying to smooth out the ocean! So, why are they doing it? Because of the exhilaration
they get while they do it! Is every woman guilty of the good she did nay do? Guðdís ’as given
birth to a thought—an’ this thought now itself thinks. Now that it exists—now that it’s been fo-
cused into being—now it is alive. The fact is, everything that is known is a thought. In actual
fact, thar is naything known that is physical: Everything that is known is naything but a percep-
tion. An’ a perception is itself a thought! When I say: ‘I think!’ what I’m really saying is ‘I, who am
but a thought myself, am thinking!’ Or, in other words: ‘I’m a thought that thinks!’
“I ask: Am I, then, but a succession of similar thoughts an’ impressions of that which I’ve an
intimate memory or consciousness? But, as the Praśnayānists say, who is this ‘I’ that ’as this
memory or consciousness of a succession of ideas an’ impressions? Is it naything but the suc-
cession itself? I ask if this succession of related ideas an’ impressions intimately recalls an’ is
conscious of-itself, thinks, of-itself? Consider the idea that a particular thought might think that
thought: Might a belief that it is a cloudy night believe it is a cloudy night tonight? Does a dream of
white sheep dream of white sheep? Does this mean that Sanātanists cun nay accept many of
the things we’re inclined to about personal identity? This ’owever, is evident: That successions
of ideas an’ impressions on the ’ole, are nay merely conscious, but also attract observations an’
dreams. If common sense cun nay ascribe such things to individual ideas or individual impres-
sions, I would be very glad to know what else youer consider nonsense.”

140
 KALIDASA

Panpsychism is the ’ypothesis that all things ’ave a mind or mind-like qualities. Taken liter-
ally, panpsychism is the notion that everything is enminded, all of it, whether it be a brain or a
tree or a rock... or a thought. “We feel ouer actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, an’
involuntary when they ’appen without. But if a decision itself were voluntary, every decision would
’ave to be preceded by a decision to decide. Oddly, if we ’ad to decide to decide, we would nay
really be free to decide. In other words, it matters which thoughts cun think thoughts! What if it
were possible for a thought itself to become a well-respected thinker?
“That Dḗmos fed the beggar, that ’e forgave many an insult, that ’e loved ’is enemies—all
these were undoubtedly great virtues. But what if ’e ’ad discovered that the least among them
all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, that these are within ’im, an’
that ’e ’imself stood in need of the alms of ’is own kindness, that ’e ’imself was the enemy who
must be loved: What then? Then, of course, thar is nay more talk of democracy. ’E ’ides from the
world, ’e denies ’aving met this least among the imperfect in ’imself. ’Ad it been the Tathāgata ’im-
self who drew nearby in this form, ’e would ’ave denied ’im a thousand times. ’E was nay picky
about what ’e said an’ ’e was nay picky about what ’e wore an’ ’e was nay picky about what ’e
put in ’is stomach; ’E was right to want us to be picky about what we think! Do youer nay know
that the ’uman race fears thought as it fears nothing else in the world? Thought is seditious an’
revolutionary an’ destructive. Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions an’ ’abits.
Thought is anarchic, rude, indifferent to authority, cares naything for well-tried wisdom. Do nay
say to youerself that a Bodhisattva ’as ’ad the idea to lead all sentient beings to Nirvāṇa. Why? If a
Bodhisattva were to announce: ‘I will bring all living beings to the shore of Nirvāṇa’, wun cun nay
call them a Bodhisattva, since thought ’as demonstrated that although Nirvāṇa exists, nay anywun
ever attains it! The early Praśnayānists in particular did nay tend to embrace misfortune all that
well. If they could ’ave accepted the value of it a little bit sooner, rather than immediately jumping
to the conclusion that the ’uman race ’ad done something so very wrong or that it was so damn
important that they all recognise that thar was something which they needed to learn to get it
right... it was nay like that. It was nay remotely like that at all.
“ ‘The Delight of the Divine—the voice returns thence without being able to describe it, an’
neither cun the mind grasp it. Who knows the Bliss Absolute? Such a wun shall fear naught, in
this world or in the next. Verily, remorse an’ torment shall nay burn ’im up.’
“Do ’umans want ‘remorse’ and ‘torment’ in their lives? Nay! A million times nay! Under such
conditions, who would come into the physical realm at all? Wonder an’ terror are all very well
in their place, but thar is a lot to be said for regular meals an’ freedom from pain! We are es-
sentially beings of thought. Yet, a part of us ’as indeed come into the physical realm in order to
experience contrast! If thar were nay contrast, we’d nay know what we don’t want; As a res-
ult, would nay know what we do! It is only by knowing what we do nay want that we bump into
what we do. An’ ouer growth depends on ouer wanting better things than we ’ave till now experi-
enced: The eutopian candy melts away to reveal a ’ard centre of fantastic reality! Once upon a

141
 EUDAIMONIA

time thar was a lunatic who passed the time sitting in the dark an’ beating ’imself upon the ’ead.
When asked for ’is reasons for this ’e replied: ‘Well, it feels so good when I stop!’
“It’s important to value contrast! When we understand the value of contrast then we do nay
leave ouer ātman. Contrast does nay feel like negative emotion an’ it does nay feel like defeat, it
feels like an opportunity. It does nay feel like confusion, it feels like clarity. It does nay feel like
something ’as gone ’orribly wrong, it feels like something is going right.
“Everything is valid an’ everything is trewthful, because the brahman lets all things be. The
question is nay whether a thing is right or wrong, or whether youer approach is right or wrong.
It ain’t whether ’er approach is right or wrong: It ain’t wrong! The question is: Does ’er own ap-
proach feel good to ’er? An’ if it doesn’t, then it is ’er choice to choose a different one! If youer
’ave the ability to want it, Source ’as the ability to clothe youer in it. Youer’ve jest gotta line up
with what youer desire: Meaning, being as ’appy as youer cun be, as often as youer cun be an’
let everything else in the Kósmos take care of itself. She is always on ’er way somewhere. The
key is to find a way to be ’appy wherever she is on ’er way to where she wants to be. It does
nay matter where she is: Where she is will always be shifting constantly!”
Silence. “ ’Ere we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. This is why.”
Pienish had not spoken for several mikroí: “I’m still not sure what you want—”
“I know it cun work!” Kiran whispered to Pienish vigorously, groping for his right wrist. “I tried
something desperate a couple of months back: I convinced ’er to start an Edda.”
Pienish pulled his wrist away. At last: “Guðdís Fuðhundr wrote an Edda?”
“Started an Edda,” the klovn-in-training said. “She was so excited; Talked about it for days
an’ days: ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft aright!’ After one week of writing, she
was back to ’er old self again. She looked four feet taller with a quarter of the day spent with
something inside ’er. When the world set its limits outside that she could nay ’elp but ken them as
arbitrary.” Kiran sighed. “But something ’appened. One day, she read what she ’ad written an’
fell into a stormy mood. Called the thing the worst idea I ever put in ’er ’ead.”
Kiran made a crumpling motion with his hands, tossing the imaginary papers away.
“Couldn’t you just have...” Pienish waggled his fingers, “you know, tided them up?”
Kiran shook his head emphatically. “She was furious after she read them.”
Guðdís’ loathing of imperfection was so intense that it had extinguished the very love from
which it was conceived. Thus, she ceased to feel. Daily, she would awake and cast downtrod-
den eyes on the estuary and would say to herself with more than a hint of regret at her hitherto
lack of indifference: “All a damn illusion, is it? Surely it’s foolish of me to think joy needs mean-
ing?” She spent her days staring at the clock, wondering how to pass the time away if everything
were a thought. She concluded there was no best way to pass the time. Unfortunately, a resolu-
tion to dispassion did not suit her; She soon became rather dangerously bored.
When, as a child, Guðdís had been staring off into some far-off place, one could be sure of
one thing: That it was a place everyone else would try to get away from. And if anyone asked

142
 KALIDASA

her why she was doing it, she might answer: “Today I’m a Valkyrja and ever since I became
one I have allowed myself the luxury of choosing which souls should be saved.” The basis for
activity was lack of imagination, the last resort of those who knew not how to play. The key to
seeing the world’s soul—and in the process awaking one’s own soul—was to get over the false
confusion by which one may suppose “facts” were real and imagination illusion.
In imagination, one sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores, where lost
Atlantís and Ēlǘsion lay, with the evening star for pilot. One was richer in those dreams than in
reality: For things “real” passed away, but things that were “unreal” were eternal.
“I suppose you know best,” was all Pienish could think to say. But—
Kiran gave a nod. “Exactly! That’s why I came: I know best. The worst thing that cun be said
about a woman is that she is unselfish. That same right ’and of ’ers that cun write a beautiful
poem, cun also knock youer out cold—now that’s what I would call poetic justice!”
Pienish swallowed hard. He appeared to regain a little bit of his composure: “What I mean is
that she’s a human being. Nothing is more debilitating than to care about something you can’t
do anything about. And you cannot do anything about other people. You can desire better for
them, and maybe even begin to provide something for them; But in the long run, you cannot do
anything about someone else’s existence other than hold them in the best light that you can and
then project that onto them. Sometimes, distance is what makes this possible.”
Kiran continued as if the older man had not said a word: “We must remind ’er that nothing is
more important than that she feel good; An’ remind ’er as well that all is well. She did nay come
’ere to fix a broken world; It ain’t broken! She came ’ere to live a glad life. If she cun learn to re -
lax an’ let it in, she will begin to see that Source presents ’er with all she ’as asked for—good an’
bad.” He pushed himself to his feet and took several steps back from the bed. “Does she ’ave
a responsibility to force the world to beat to ’er drum? It could nay be done! She beats ’er own
drum, an’ it is Source that responds to the drum that she beats. ‘Wherefore, if God so clothe the
grass of the field, which to day is an’ to morrow is cast into the oven, shall ’e nay much more
clothe youer, oh ye of little faith?’ The only Justice is the Justice of Wellbeing. Norse, the Innut an’
Sanātanists, Khristianoí as well as the rest, each of us are free to allow that wellbeing to flow to
us an’ through us, or we cun pinch it off. It is ouer call—every time.”
He abruptly rubbed his face, sighed. “She ’as the ability to control the power of ’er thoughts.
She ’as the ability to control the power of ’er mind—’er reality. She ’as the ability to make dom-
inant the attraction which matches ’er desires. So do youer! That is all it takes. That is all any
successful person ’as ever done. It is all a Nahualli who achieved anything ever did.
“So, if ’er alignment with wellbeing be first an’ foremost, an’ all else secondary, nay only will
she ’ave an eternally joyous journey, but everything she ’as ever imagined will flow effortlessly
into ’er experience. Thar’s nothing she carn be or do or ’ave—if she follows ’er inner Bliss; If
she genuinely is ’appy. All the doing an’ all the ’aving an’ the sharing of the good will come into
alignment once she ’as come back to this trewth she ’as always known.

143
 EUDAIMONIA

“Do youer nay ken that youer are trying to reach progressive, ’umanitarian goals with a tool
nay suited to the job? Who ’as ’umanitarian dreams?” Pienish said nothing, and showed no reac-
tion, so Kiran simply went on. “Trewth ain’t a thing we cun grok; It ain’t a thing we cun under-
stand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of what it is they observe—merged or blen-
ded or integrated or whole: A loss of identity in group experience. ‘Knowledge’ is a condition that
is prevalent only so long as wun does nay See. To grok this thing means as little to us—because
of ouer assumptions—as colour must surely mean to a man who is blind.”
Silence. But, how can I feel comfortable with such a... vague... proposal?
All the energy of Kiran’s exasperation went into his laughter.
“My plan ’as both good points an’ bad, as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as
much on execution as it does on concept. Tell me, as an asklepiádēs and a Sourcerer, is it nay
possible to cause the boy to dream up a world in which she cun nay be un’appy?”
“Corn!” the raven cawed sharply, interrupting the two men. “Corn!”
As it happened, the Great Aiasheu was smart and unusually subtle for a being his age. He was
powerful, unserious and totally able to control his life and what happened in it.
Pienish’s chin lifted a bit, his expression hardening. “I will do as I see fit,” he said.
Silence. Kiran’s expression was incredulous: “Youer think I’m playing a game?” His expres-
sion hardened: “ ’Ang youer merit. I do nay seek anywun’s approbation!”
Despite his size, did Pienish find himself at the other’s mercy? At last: “Do you know that in
the time of the Old Sourcerers... which word was the plural of Sourcerer? ‘War!’ ”
Exasperation: “Is it disagreeable to diagnose a disease? My only intent is to ’eal! Surely youer
grasp that I ’ave a certain natural concern over the progress of this disease? And maybe youer’ll
grant that the lad ’as certain abilities along these lines?” Silence. “ ’Ow cun we trust each other?
Well, as for youer: We will be setting Nushiss to watch over youer. Both of youer! Youer under-
stand? An’ as for me, youer will ’ave to take me on faith. But perhaps youer begin to suspect
that thar are some things that are for me to know an’ youer to find out?”
A memory: Kiran had feared that his aunt would get up anyway and turn off the lights, which
she had. Kiran had screamed his head off. Not only had he caught a glimpse of those fleeting im -
ages but he had heard a buzzing in his ears. His aunt had doubled up with laughter as she had
turned the lights back on. “What an excitable fellow!” she had said. “A total Sanātanist, on the one
hand, and a total pragmatist on the other. What matters is not to be unthinking in one’s cruelty!”
Had it appeared to her that this guise was the most befitting one to welcome into the world a
radically different stance towards those things most humans spent their lives trying to avoid?
This would involve learning to enjoy pain, embracing distress, becoming familiar with failure and
loving disaster. “ ‘Negative’ situations need not trigger negative emotions!”
Secrets had an immense attraction to Pienish. Was this perhaps because he seldom could
keep one himself? As a kid, he had enjoyed the sort of quiet thrill he had experienced when he
went and told another living human some secret after having faithfully promised not to. Pienish

144
 KALIDASA

was smart in most ways—a pretty good vocabulary, solid at mathematics—yet, as far as he was
concerned, he just might be the stupidest smart person there was. Was he going to be the worst
uncle in the history of dying nephews because he did not actually have much of a moral com-
pass, unwilling to rely on anybody else for guidance? How messed up is that?
The Brython took several steps back from the bed, coming to stand at the edge of the lamp’s
flickering light. “Listen, thar’s no reason we carn be friends,” he said, somewhat matter-of-factly.
“Thar’s no reason we carn all get what we want. Cun youer nay ken that? Everywun wins. An’
a few months from now we all go ouer separate ways, pleased as peaches.”
≮ When I told you what I told you, how was it that you imagined you would not benefit from the
≯
situation? The question caught Kiran unprepared. He stood up awkwardly and for a moment
was entirely still. For a time, it seemed as if the Brython would burst into tears. Youer know what
I want! I want my ḍākinī back. I want ’er back the way she used to be.
Kiran recalled her and him entering their neighbour’s house through a window and leaving a
pink beach ball sitting on the man’s bed. She did not want to rob Kalā, just to mess with him. In
the weeks that followed, the duo had snuck into that same apartment again and again, leaving
birdcages, gravel, open umbrellas and even a watermelon upon that bed.
A capacity to be alone was a capacity to love. This might sound paradoxical, but it was not.
Only those who were capable of being alone were capable of love, of sharing completely, of go-
ing to the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming de-
pendent upon the other, without reducing the other to a thing and without becoming addicted to
the other; They allowed the other absolute freedom, because they realized that if the other left
forever, they would be as happy as they were now. Their good spirits could not be taken by the
other, because they were not given by the other. Always, a human being could choose how they
felt, or they could let their feelings choose them. Maybe it was true that those were always the
options humanity had. How could any Sanātanist somehow get the idea that he did not have
absolute freedom, hating anybody telling him he had options he did not, since he mistakenly be-
lieved his mind was an object for sale, any feeling able to pick it up and own it?
There was a moment of silence. Kiran scrubbed his face with one hand and swallowed hard.
“I ’ave been gone too long,” he said abruptly, walking to the window and opening it. He paused
with one leg over the sill and looked back at Pienish. “Cun I bring youer anything before youer
go to sleep? A nightcap? More—” Pienish shook his head and Kiran waved as he stepped the
rest of the way out of the window, closing it behind him. The Brython would be accompanied by
his shadow all the way to his bed, preceding him like a welcoming innkeeper.

145
 KALIDASA
“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they
are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

—from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

“For, after all, how does a human being know that two and two make four? Or that the force
of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist
only in the mind, and if the mind itself is more-or-less controllable, what then?”

—from The Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Anonymous

April 4, 2084, 1:11 am, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador.

The militiamen grunted, lifted, removing a two-tonne slab which concealed a passageway
down into the old, subterranean complex, part of the long-decommissioned Canadian Forces
Base Goose Bay. Kurush, Chandrā and Viktor stood awkwardly as the militiamen were working.
Black bags had been draped over their heads, their backpacks nevertheless as yet over their
shoulders. The head-bags were one of Dr. Kleiner’s designs: Even echolocation would not have
told the civilians that a camouflage cover was being rigged for the new opening.
Lightning flickered, Second Moon sneered through a gap in the clouds. What was the rela-
tionship between lunatics and the moon? Must it be a strong one for the inconstant moon, who
monthly changed in her circled orb, constant in all her phases, invariable in her variability, bring-
er of omens of tempest or of silence, to be used to describe the insane?
And Chandrā reflected: We’ve done it, we’ve made it at last!
Three militiamen took their elbows, pulled them apace down a spiralled staircase.
Chandrā’s heart was thumping so hard the teenager could not speak. We’ve done it, we’ve
made it to safety at last, was all she could think. It had been odd for Kurush to suggest travelling
here at all, and sheer folly to arrive in town together. Though it was true that Viktor had arrived in
town by one path, Kurush and herself by another, only being approached by a militia contact the
following day, merely to walk into such a place as this required an effort of the nerve.
A dim UV glow came alive ahead, illuminating for their guides the metal steps. Silent militia -
men were all about them, pressing downwards. They were led around corners, eventually com-
ing to a downwards-slanting concrete ramp and beyond that, a vast chamber.
O’Bran loomed before them, the grey of his double-breasted business suit only vaguely vis-
ible in the shoddy, UV lighting which was the former workshop’s only illumination. His face, bent
down in thought so that his troops could distinguish only the tip of his nose, a shadow amongst
shadows—would it look formidable as well as intelligent to anyone who could see it?
Special-Agent-in-Charge Aonghas O’Bran frowned, stepped into the light: Why meet these
three? It’s the most desperate thing I’ve ever done. It could doom us all with them!

147
 EUDAIMONIA

Had Kurush known something was off that day? The man had made an error he would never
repeat throughout his days as one of the most wanted men in the solar system; He never used
open source encryption software, he only did so that day in Boston—something about the title to
two new patents passed to the Free Intellect Foundation; Two more bright ideas successfully
salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the ocean of
memes. In Boston some seven years ago, Kurush had visited a model aeroplane convention. In
general, it had been a good place to be put down on an FBI watch list—the FBI had had a tip-off
Manfred Marx would be there—besides, flying models were old hacker shit: Add cameras and
a neural network to a carbon-fibre flyer and one had the previous generation of military stealth
drones. At times, O’Bran wondered about Mr. Alan. O’Bran caused pain out of necessity, but
the Deputy Director... I swear the asshole takes a positive delight in it!
O’Bran saw Hikagi nod. The trio were jolted to a stop. The tragedy of a knife was its hilt; The
tragedy of a rifle was its trigger. Hikagi was neither: He could not be gripped nor fired. He was a
Breen. If the USSF officer could hear all the whispering, glaring, pointing and judging, would it
bother him? Etiquette was a domain of those whose power was contingent on another’s respect.
O’Bran waved for the head-bags to be removed, noticed the worried glances. Had Hikagi anxiety
for his own flesh as well as that of O’Bran? Hikagi should be well aware whose throat would be
slit if ever harm befell his father-in-law’s newest patsy while under his care.
O’Bran kept his attention on the sheaf of lose papers in his hand. “A gift.” The professor had
made that much clear all right. The Colonel stepped further into the light.
These thoughts flashed by with a decision hard on their heels: I will be the judge of the
danger here. O’Bran gestured once again for the bags to be lifted, saw his personal guards
come up on the balls of their feet, poised and alert, but remaining where they were.
Chandrā’s implants adjusted instantaneously: Tables down two sides, walls of stone; Racks
of assault rifles lined another wall, crates, grenades, AAGWs, sixteen masers, ten plasma rifles
and two 3D printers. She saw cages with small birds in them stacked against the wall.
O’Bran turned his regard to the unfamiliar third man. Viktor, Viktor te Colenbergh, the man’s
name was... yes—an ex-brother-in-law of the professor’s. Viktor te Colenbergh stood, swaying.
His right hand was balled into a tight fist. Even in the midst of exhaustion there remained clear
evidence of an Alter’s precise movement; Blood had clotted on the back of his head; A swollen
gash ran across the front of his neck. Everything looked oddly low-definition in the dim, UV illu-
mination. The Dutch-Canadian unclenched his right hand, glared down at bloody marks where
fingernails had bitten into palm. Soon, it may be the job of an NCO to look after such a raw re-
cruit so that Colonel O’Bran could figure out how to get them killed. After Black Mesa, did the
Deputy Director at all suspect that O’Bran had turned the organization rogue long ago? It was
tempting to drop the matter, buy back Deputy Alan’s trust with these three.
The professor drew back, O’Bran noting that the man had been assessing him: What kind of
fighting man would let himself go to fat? The Colonel presently displayed that kind of pot-belly

148
 KALIDASA

that came with a few too many steaks. Not that that was to say that all the militiamen present
here were not products of profound programs of Alteration, capable of muscle and nerve con-
trol Mother Nature rarely produced. O’Bran had chosen a round-faced appearance for this meet-
ing: A vast bald spot, long grey hair. The man was a chameleon, and the human shapes he wore
often caused an observer to judge him too lightly. What is more, the contract O’Bran had with
the FBI also had a re-life clause: He had uploaded his neural state vector into a clinic’s secure
store and the FBI had provided a bond; If O’Bran did not reappear every year to update it, the
clinic would go ahead with the procedure—remove the brain from the body of a newly-minted
clone, suspend it in a jar of life-sustaining liquid and encase the whole thing in an android body
that would provide it with the stimulations a Neo’s brain normally received.
Something or other brought O’Bran’s attention back towards Mr. te Colenbergh. Despite ex-
haustion, he was measuring the defensive preparations about him, keeping his hand upon the
butt of his machine pistol, scowling at the buzz of militiamen from under a stetson.
What was it the Texans said? “All hat, no cattle!” Mr. te Colenbergh spat blood.
By contrast, many a militiaman it had been who had come to realize, first with some kind of
astonishment, then bitterness and finally resignation, that ideals were not the most important
thing here; Not flesh, but graphene; Not free will, but TATs. They join up with enthusiasm and
good will, but Dr. Kleiner does everything he can to cut that out of them.
A vague, distant sound abruptly hummed away to silence. Into this void there intruded a thin
cooing from a cage at the back. It was cut off abruptly, as though in embarrassment.
The Franklinesque militiaman rose from his revery, advancing. Despite but one other meet-
ing, his expression seemed grimmer than usual to Kurush, as though he was displeased at being
disturbed. At first, he had thought him to have been outfitted with two, mirrored contact lenses.
Then he had realized that these polished, black lenses grew from under the wrinkled skin of his
eyelids, marked by an absence of eyelashes. He recalled a William Gibson character who had
sealed her eye-sockets with vision-enhancing mirrored lenses that required an adaptation to her
tear ducts: They had been re-routed to her mouth, so she needed to spit or swallow her tears
whenever they came. In any event, the exhilaration he was feeling was abruptly shot through by
a streak of quite intense fright. It appeared possible that they had made a stupid, fatal mistake.
Dr. Mehta had no reason to trust the dossier The Adon had shown him but a cocked eyebrow
and an unspoken remark; Beyond that, nothing but his own terrified imaginings.
O’Bran opened his mouth, but was cut short by a technician who emerged from some side
passage off the chamber and caught his commanding officer’s eye: “Sir, the field-generator equip -
ment is not working. I’m unable to mask our transmissions from detection.”
B
Exasperation. Eventually: Can you repair it? B
B B
Not quickly. The parts... The technician shrugged.
B B
We will do without then. Also, get a Stirling engine for air out to the surface.
B B
Immediately! The technician spun about, hurrying away.

149
 EUDAIMONIA

O’Bran glanced at Viktor: “We’ve only outpost medicine, but you’re welcome to it.”
B
The Colonel nodded to one of his men: Inform Colonel Kleiner. B
O’Bran indicated a nearby hallway: “If you please?” Colonel Kleiner, Colonel O’Bran, Colonel
Hikagi: We may not have enough weapons or men but we’ve plenty of Colonels!
Kurush permitted himself a heavy sigh before following, saw Viktor straighten himself, force
himself to move, only to be pulled back into the arms of a Mitsubishi synthoid.
The long passage, three metres high, lined with unmarked doors; Beyond the sixth, an office
illuminated by the harsh light of an LED dangling naked from the ceiling.
Kurush and Chandrā stepped inside, lowered their backpacks to the floor. The door closed
behind them. They studied the place: About six metres on a side, walls of crumbling grey con-
crete, broken by metal filing cabinets to their right. A desk with a milky glass top shot full of yel-
low bubbles occupied the room’s centre; Four plastic folding chairs faced it.
O’Bran pushed between the two Canadians, held out a seat for the young lady.
She sat, noting the way her great-uncle now examined the chamber.
Kurush remained standing for another few moments. A faint anomaly in the room’s air cur-
rents told his wetware there was a secret exit to their right... behind the filing cabinets.
He sat, staring the militiaman in the face. And then the pale-skinned militiaman’s expression
broke down into what may have been the beginnings, but only the beginnings, of a smile. With
a habitual gesture, he raised a thumb as if to resettle a pair of HUDs on his nose.
“Shall I ask it or will you say it?” offered O’Bran, eventually.
Kurush froze, realizing for the first time the ugly vagueness of The Adon’s design. Even now
it was somehow conceivable that the Colonel was simply a busy man wondering irritably why
he had been interrupted. And since Kurush did not in fact know what kind of help he could ex-
pect from this man, it was not easy to lie as to why they had come here at all. It dawned on him
that a terrorist’s whole life was playing a part, and that he must surely feel it to be unsafe to drop
his assumed personality even in such private moments as these. National security experts ac-
cused anti-government agitators of paranoia and sensationalism, yet spun around and claimed
that militias spoke in coded phrases, had underground bases and were conspiring to take over
the world and to enslave minorities! They said that it was insanity that generals at the Pentagon
could conspire, yet they were certain that militiamen in the mountains were plotting at this very
moment. There was a theory going around that much of the western world was a gigantic plot
under the control of a group known variously as the Freemasons, the Illuminati or the Yəhi-Or.
Kurush was aware that what he was about to say sounded feeble and pretentious.
“I believe that there is yet some conspiracy, some secret organization, at work against Big
Brother and that you are involved with it. We want to join it and work for it. We are, to use Or-
well’s term, thought-criminals. Chandrā and I are also lovers, for whatev—”
The professor had stopped, turned around sharply in his chair, thinking that the door had si-
lently opened. Sure enough, a short but fat man with a surgical mask dangling about his throat

150
 KALIDASA

had come in carrying a tray. The man had on a decent white smock and a hairnet pulled over
brittle, white hair. He reeked of gin; It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat. Kurush
could almost fancy any tears that welled from his eyes would be pure gin.
Some men were born mediocre, some men achieved mediocrity, and some men had medi-
ocrity thrust upon them; With this man, must it have been all three? Even among men lacking
all distinction, he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and
people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was. All men were cre-
ated equal, but this particular man was more equal than others. Chandrā found that she could
not ignore the doctor’s presence, and so she began to survey his sweaty-faced visage for any
sign or possible clue as to the purpose of his having been invited.
Kurush wet his lips, glanced from the Colonel to the doctor and back: One tall, fat and ex -
hausted, the other short, fat and exhausted: Both with dark, mirrored inserts for eyes.
Relief: “S-So... there is such a plot. It isn’t simply a propaganda invention.”
“Indeed. It’s real. If we accept the three of you among us, you’ll never know much more about
it than that it exists and that you now belong to it. Circumstance suggests there might be value
to me in saving you three. I can see possibility in an Altered woman: She is as yet an adoles -
cent and may learn; But what of yourself?” A look: “It’s well that you see my meaning. Whatev-
er happens, your grandniece will have my countenance. But as for you—you understand there
would be things you would be forbidden to recall? You must have divined that this compound
is underground, as well as the colour of the cavern complex: That would be enough for a clev-
er mind. You three ought never to’ve come so far together. And when... if... you leave, you will
do so separately.” He blinked to call up a countdown in his virtual-vision. “At the moment I have
only about half an hour at my disposal. I think it best to begin by asking you certain questions.
Tell me, in general terms, what is it you three are actually prepared to do?”
“Anything we’re capable of,” declared the professor, simply.
“Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has power. You might find the line
between life and death amongst the Brotherhood to be sharp and quick.”
O’Bran had turned himself a bit in his chair so that he was facing Kurush. He almost ignored
Chandrā, seeming to take it for granted that Kurush spoke for her. O’Bran began to ask ques-
tions in a hard and expressionless voice, as though all this were but a routine, a sort of catech -
ism, most of whose answers had been made known to the Colonel some time before.
“Are you, Dr. Kurush Xerxes Mehta, prepared to give your life?”
The professor nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“Are you prepared to commit assault and even murder at my behest?”
“I am.” Viktor, Kurush knew, had always hated games; They made the world look too simple.
Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way that the pawns went off and
slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns
would unite: The whole board could be a democracy in less than a dozen moves!

151
 EUDAIMONIA

“Are you prepared to commit acts of sabotage, to cause the deaths of innocents?”
At last: “Perhaps... No—Yes. Yes, I’m so prepar—” the professor vacillated.
O’Bran held up his right hand, inhaled: “You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, even
to distribute habit-forming drugs, or to encourage prostitution, or to disseminate a new sexually
transmitted disease... in sum, are you prepared to do anything which is likely to cause demor-
alization and weaken the grip of our governments and the oligarchs they serve?”
“I suppose, if it were absolutely—” began the professor.
“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid into a child’s
face—are you prepared to do that?” The gaze O’Bran turned on him was measuring.
Chandrā uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise; The professor felt filled with the
ache of not showing his fatigue. He felt in that instant that his dearest dream was to live out his
days in a remote mountain cabin, never again to think of deadly necessities.
All the professor was able to do was nod weakly.
“Are you prepared to lose your identity and live out your life as, say, a Bertie?”
Kurush cleared his throat, once again gave an answer in the affirmative: “Of course.”
“Are you willing to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so? More importantly, are
you willing to separate, and if need be, never lay eyes upon each other again?”
“No!” Even in the midst of shock, Chandrā was too taken aback to hold her tongue.
It seemed to Kurush that a long time passed before he spoke up. For a moment he seemed
even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue seemed to work totally sound-
lessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then the other, endlessly.
“No,” the professor agreed, after what might have been half a minute.
A nod: “You did well to tell me. It is necessary for me to know everything.”
He turned towards Chandrā, adding the following in a voice with somewhat more humanity in
it: “You understand that even if your great-uncle survives the operation, it might be as a differ-
ent person? We might be obliged to give him a new sleeve. He’s already had a good start, but
we all know how much more you both need... and that desperately. Yes, you yourself very well
might have to become a different person. Our surgeons can Alter a person beyond recognition.
At times it is necessary. At times, we find it necessary to amputate a limb.”
Kurush had got a finger cut off when he was in his fifties. OHIP had paid for a replacement, a
fully-functional index finger. He had got hooked. Such things happened. Someone got a limb re -
placed, they wanted more of that kind of strength. His grandniece’s face had turned pale. She
withstood the man’s patronising boldly. Both mumbled words which did for assent.
Dr. Kleiner placed his cigarette case on the desk. After a nod of approval, O’Bran took one.
He pushed the case towards his guests, who declined. He stood and began pacing. Some part
of the Irish-American wanted to tell the Hebrew man a joke. It was a story about a Jew riding a
streetcar in Germany during the Third Reich, reading the BEOBACHTER. A non-Jewish acquaint-
ance sits down beside him, saying: “Why do you read that shit?!”

152
 KALIDASA

The answer? “Look, I work in a factory all day. When I get home, the wife nags me, the kids
are sick. What should I do on my way home, read a Jewish paper? ‘Pogrom in Russia!’ ‘Jews
Murdered in Poland!’ ‘New Laws Against Jews!’ No; A half-hour a day, on the streetcar, I read
this. ‘Jews the World Capitalists!’ ‘Jews Control America!’ ‘Jews Rule Great Britain!’ That is me
they’re talking about. For a half-hour a day, I’m somebody. Leave me be, okay?”
It came to O’Bran that without alcohol and nicotine, there might not have been any recovery
for the doctor. The mind-control nanites of the late 21st century were mind-rot on a leash; Big
Brother lost maybe thirty-five per cent of conversions. In the wider scheme of things, zip-head
crashes would be but an occasional inconvenience. There were secret universities to generate
replacements, secret clinics for Altering newly created specialists. Within luxurious stations lost
in the Brazilian rainforest or upon asteroids of the inner system, experts were indefatigably at
work; Technological progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not long
survive in a rigorously regimented society. The man had been Yəhi-Or—born and raised in the
Crèche. The life of the international terrorist had not turned out to be what he had imagined.
Here, the rot might grow unbounded till it crashed the man’s entire neural net.
A TAT—a Transpositional Attitudinal Tweak—ennobles! That, surely, would always be the slo-
gan. It was one of the keys to Big Brother’s success, and a more subtle thing than a layperson
could imagine. It was not just that Big Brother had invented psychoactive microbes and brain-
computer interfaces and the like. Today, the growth of neurons in the brain could be controlled
with nanometre precision, and once put into place, the new ensemble could be guided with an
equal precision—even if augmenting the higher-order, people-oriented skills had been a losing
proposition for a long time. The wetware of the first half of the century had tended to cut out the
sensibilities necessary to managing people; In rare cases, everything should have become a
kind of dream, time slippery, all things outside one’s narrow speciality a blur; One might still ob-
serve and touch all the things that once had given the Alter pleasure in life, but they would no
longer appear meaningful. Today, however, DARPA could lift a person’s consciousness to new
heights: They could take a human being and transform them into a drone or into a genius. In the
Crèche, in O’Bran’s and Deputy Alan’s own households, the Altering process was spread over
the first few decades of life, intensifying the education experience to create genuine genius; All
guided by quantum-computers or more conventional brain diagnostics.
Given this, was it at all surprising that it was amusing for O’Bran to watch the professor take
hold of himself? “You want to take down a quasi-post-Singularity empire,” he should have ex -
claimed, “an empire with nanotech, with just a handful of men? That’s...” Words for such insanity
should by rights have failed to come, man and woman staring him in the face.
“Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that feels un-
manageable.” That was a basic rule of terrorism, right? Lift no finger for a lost cause.
In O’Bran’s opinion, his current strategic situation was highly dangerous. The fight he faced
had a force disparity unprecedented in the history of warfare. Through informal meetings or in-

153
 EUDAIMONIA

teractions, O’Bran had attempted to gauge, as best he was able, the level of defeatist thinking
currently present, as it began to spread ever more swiftly among his underlings.
The mentality of a titanic proportion of his underlings consisted of terror towards the enemy
and a lack of confidence in the future. The source of this defeatism stemmed from the worship
of technology and the underestimation, or complete dismissal, of the role of initiative, and of the
unexpected, in warfare. It was a development as well as an extension of techno-triumphalism
and the “Weapons Decide Everything” theory that had cropped up amongst first-world societ-
ies in the last century. The trend was especially prevalent among the highly educated, to whom
the only logical course seemed to be passive waiting, and a belief that the outcome of the war
depended on scientists and engineers; Some of O’Bran’s lieutenants having come to believe
that prior to breakthroughs in their attempts to duplicate the basic research of their enemies, or
the theft of key technologies, the Red Coast Operation—let alone victory—was a pipe dream.
A group of these had even gathered everybody they could at the Independence Hall—the loc-
ation on the Earth’s surface most often associated with the birth of the United States—where
every last militiaman had sworn a blood oath to defend the Constitution, letting Big Brother know
that there would be no Norwegian Quislings or Pétain-style rollovers here. On the surface, this
may appear positive: A desire to throw oneself at the enemy. But it was essentially just another
form of defeatism. Lacking confidence in a total victory, and doubting the quality of life for all fu-
ture forms of humanity, a revolutionary’s fervour became the only pillar supporting thought and
life. It appeared that today they were travelling thousands of years into the past, to a time when
the champions of the age fought tooth and nail to achieve their Eternal Glory. Others displayed
something of the opposite: Strong doubts about the fervour of revolutionaries, or a belief that
the revolutionary’s traditional moral code was no longer meritorious and that fighting to the bit-
ter end counted for little; They believed that a revolutionary’s fervency had little to no meaning
if there would be no one to remember it, for when the war ended in complete defeat and there
were no more Americans left capable of thought, martyrdom lost significance.
Having worked together with Dr. Kleiner for two years, and at length knowing each other well
enough, O’Bran had come to fathom the doctor’s strong technology complex as a wetware ex-
pert, a technical type, or, if one wanted, a scientist. This, in itself, was not a bad thing, but un-
fortunately, the man’s military thinking—such as it was—was over-reliant upon technology; While
he did not come right out and say so, he earnestly believed that technological advancement
was the primary, and maybe the sole, determinant of combat effectiveness, and he completely
neglected the human role in conflicts, particularly in such a man’s misunderstanding of the ad-
vantages, formed in their forces, by rather stark asymmetrical conditions.
To make things worse, anti-intellectualism had long been a constant thread winding its way
through US political and military life, nurtured by the odd notion that democracy meant “My ig-
norance is just as good as your knowledge!” The world of today was a totalitarian place com-
pared with the world which existed before... 2032? 2001?1917? The Boiling Frog was a fable

154
 KALIDASA

describing a frog gradually boiled alive; If the frog were put abruptly into boiling water, it would
jump out, but if the frog were put in tepid water which was then brought to a boil slowly, it would
not perceive the danger, and be cooked to death. O’Bran knew that there had been demonstra-
tions to thank Uncle Sam for increasing the Universal Unconditional Income to five-thousand a
week; Only two years ago had it been announced that the UUI would be reduced to five-thou-
sand a week. Could the US swallow that, after only two years? A really efficient totalitarian state
would be one in which an all-powerful oligarchy and their façade of managers control a popula-
tion of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their existence. I do not want
JOY: I want philosophy, I want an education, I want to read, I want free speech, I want to offend.
Our concern with the basic condition of freedom—the absence of some physical constraint—is
unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible to be under no
physical restraint or duress whatsoever and yet be a psychological captive.
It had been a long time since O’Bran had shared any optimism that some group of malcon -
tents was making real progress, that they had taken an honest road, and that their best men in-
evitably would make it over the top. Had he come to feel that he was a poor player, strutting and
fretting his hour upon the stage, only to be heard no more thence? It was the tension between
these two poles—the total elimination of poverty on one hand, and a present sense of impend-
ing doom on the other—which kept him, as well as everyone around him, going. Perhaps thirty
people personally known to O’Bran had disappeared at one time or another.
Thus it was that a force he did not feel poured into O’Bran’s tone: “I wish you to know what
you’d be getting yourselves into. What we fight is a shadow war. Thus, you’ll always be fighting
in the dark. You will receive orders and obey, without knowing why. Later, I’ll send over a mne-
monic from which I hope you’ll begin to glean the general nature of insurgent warfare. Under-
stand, however, that between the general aims we fight for and the immediate challenge of the
moment, you will never know much more. I inform you that the organization exists, but I cannot
tell you whether it numbers three-thousand members... or thirty-thousand. From your personal
knowledge, you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as three dozen. As this
was your first contact, it will be preserved. As long as I live, when you receive orders, they will
come from me. When you are finally captured, you’ll confess; You’ll have little to confess, how-
ever, other than your own past actions. In all likelihood, you will not even be able to betray me.
For by that day I might already be dead, or might live a different life altogether.”
Despite the corpulent bulkiness of his disguise, as O’Bran paced, there emerged a remark -
able grace to his movements. It came out in the way in which he thrust his hand into his right
pocket, or manipulated his cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of fer-
vour, an understanding tinged with irony. Even when he had spoken of murder, suicide, STDs
and amputated limbs or Altered faces, it was with an obscure air of persiflage. “This is unavoid-
able,” his voice seemed to say: “This is what we’ve got to do, unflinchingly—but this is not what
we shall be doing when life in our two nations is worth living again.”

155
 EUDAIMONIA

O’Bran continued: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Caution in handling generally-accepted opinions is es-
pecial for a historian in modern times; If you have imagined anything more about us than IRA-
style car-bombings, have you pictured a vast host of disaffected, poor, rural, right-wing, Chris-
tian white supremacists, assembling secretly, recognizing one another by codewords? Nothing
of the kind exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the
ordinary insurgency sense. Nothing holds it together but The American Dream, which is indes-
tructible! You will never have anything to sustain you except that. You will get no comradeship
and no reward. When finally you’re caught, you’ll receive no help. Were you to escape by your
own wit and resources, your only reward will be an execution. We hold a funeral for every cap-
tive; By necessity, we act as though such a one were already dead.
“So... you will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a
while and then you will be caught, confess and be executed. Those are the only results which
you will ever see. There is little possibility that a general insurrection will take place within our
own lifetimes. We are the dead. We shall only take part in the future as fistfuls of dust. But how
far away that future lies, we do not yet know. At present very little is possible except to extend
the area of sanity bit by bit. We can’t act collectively. We can only spread knowledge outwards
from man to man... generation to generation. In the face of vast indifference, there is no other
way. Whatever rumours you’ve heard about us,” he amended, “the truth is greater. If I wished
to destroy The Adon, or most other single individuals, few could stop me.”
In the words of Shakespeare: Had The Adon made it his heaven to dream upon the crown?
And yet, a great many obstacles stood between the old bastard and his home. And—like one
lost in a thorny wood, that would rend the thorns and would be rent by the thorns, seeking a way
and straying from the way, not knowing how to find the open air, but toiling desperately to find it
out... ; From such torture would The Adon be able to free himself... or hew his way out with a
bloody axe? Why, he could smile and murder while he smiles; He could cry “content” to every-
thing that grieves his heart; He could frame his face to all occasions; He could slay more gazers
than the basilisk; He could play the orator as well as Nestor, and deceive more slyly than Ulysses
could, and, like a Sinon, take another Troy. The man could add colours to the chameleon; He
could literally change shapes with Proteus for advantages, and set the murderous Machiavel to
school. Could any man do all this, and somehow fail to catch a crown?
For decades the Oval Office had held out promises of stability in order to hide its intention of
creating a state of permanent instability. The Canadian security services too had been sending
agents across their country by the battalion. The guards outside the provincial parliaments have
been replaced with their men; The Supreme Court bailiffs too. Guards were everywhere, as well
as security cameras. The Great White North had never been so well armed. The fruits of this
un-Canadian security crackdown? If the US DOJ put an individual in a detention camp and if he
made a successful escape, say, up to Canada, DOJ Canada would place him in an internment

156
 KALIDASA

camp instead. The police-directed foreign policy which had brought O’Bran to his present posi-
tion functioned mostly independently of the elected governments of both nations, often organ-
izing terror attacks on their own citizens, having achieved a strong position. As far as the FBI was
concerned, it was far better that ten innocent persons die than that one guilty person ever es-
cape. Half a dozen Killjoys, guilty of crimes against the State, had been put to death in Dallas
that evening, O’Bran remembered. Such things happened about once a month, and could be a
popular spectacle. Children at times clamoured to be taken to see it.
All this told him, even if intuition and simple common sense had not, that sure-as-shit seven
months from now he would be waking up in a freakishly young, teenage body with no recollection
of the last few months of this existence. The FBI had promised it would pay a substantial fee to
insure an employee’s conscious-continuity when growing them a re-life clone.
It would seem that even from the greatest of horrors and oppressions, irony was seldom en-
tirely absent. Historically, men and women have been taught that killing is evil. And now I take a
militiaman or -woman and put murder in their hand and say: “Use it wisely and well.” I even re-
ward them for killing, because it is a violation of a Bertie’s first learning.
O’Bran sat, steepled his fingers, smiled: “Last chance: After this, there’s no turning back. You
take the blue pill: That’s it: You awaken in a ditch, believing whatever we want you to believe.
You take the red, you stay in Wonderland; I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
Kurush: “My brother? My niece? My ex-wife? All their families are dead?”
“The Thoughtpol believe it. Where such things are concerned, I am inclined to trust them.”
The Colonel’s smile widened. “But it’s about the only trust I give them.”
And then: “Trust your own abilities. Whose decisions brought you this far?”
The night dragged on. Would it have been better for him to have made a thousand plans, ima -
gining every possible fork in the conversation? The professor had felt more and more anxious
until the moment had arrived. Kurush presently did not know what to say.
“We can always use more Neos... in these turbulent days more than ever before.”
Kurush: “He’s followed me this far, but neither of us are trained solders. He’s lost everything
except his life in helping us. I would prefer that he decided for himself in this.”
“Now is no time for you to falter,” O’Bran pointed out. “If he’s followed you this far...”
The professor sighed somewhat forcefully: “Might he make his own decision?”
“His own,” O’Bran said. “Understand, we’ll know if his cooperation isn’t altogether willing. All
that can wait, however. For now, I’ll simply see to it you receive a token of—”
Chandrā experienced sudden anger: Fatuous old bastard with his mouth full of pop-philo-
sophy! “You think Viktor or myself may be useful. You talk and talk, but you’ve not said a thing
about what to do to help my mother. You talk as if she’s dead. Well... she isn’t!”
“Even if there were a thing to be done for her, we would not attempt it. We might be able to
save you. Tricky, but possible. But for your family, or any other unperson, not... a... thing! When
you’ve learned to accept that fact, you’ll have learned a lesson in realpolitik.”

157
 EUDAIMONIA

Kurush saw these words shake his grandniece, grasped her hand. She glared at the militia-
man. How could any of them say such a thing? What made him so sure?
Seething, Chandrā turned towards her great-uncle; There was a single tear upon his cheek.
The tear was more unnerving than any roughness on the part of the militiaman.
And what she “ought to do” seemed on the whole so pleasant, so many monetary aspirations
were allowed free play these days, now that there were no more wage-slaves. And if ever, by
some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen to her, why, there was al-
ways JOY to give her a holiday, to make her patient and long-suffering beneath all the electronic
surveillance, no-knock laws, detention camps, gun control laws, ubiquitous internet censorship
and “terrorist” attacks that establish the need for such things in the public mind.
After everything O’Bran must have been through, the last thing he should do was apologize
for his paranoia. At the present time, this enthusiasm for paranoia was centralized in the figures
of Dr. Breen and The Adon, two powerful members of the Yəhi-Or. Maybe a Colonel on whose
watch the better part of two-hundred-and-fifty militiamen had been lost could well be expected
to feel urgency about preventing further losses? Above all, we must not fall into a siege men-
tality, immobilized, while our enemies attack wherever they will; If that happens we’ll have lost
the initiative: Which means, sure enough, that we’ll have lost the war.
Not for the first time, the man contemplated the possibility of defeat—not thinking about it in
the abstract, but facing up to it due to a sober assessment of their situation.
The Mossad, like the FBI, often fostered the guise of others being responsible for an action.
But anybody with a big enough brain could play that game. How does it work in the Crèche?
Who thinks these schemes up? The Baron had wanted to know if he fancied the House of Breen
headed by a fool? When had he ever failed to tell O’Bran all that he should know? Dr. Breen had
said that The Adon could be relied upon to open the odd e-mail: If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you atomize us, do we not die? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
O’Bran was aware that exploiting a narrow window of opportunity could lead to mistakes: The
kind of mistakes that got cells wiped out. Dr. Breen: “When you see him you’ll know. Meet him
and you will know.” Presently, the Colonel would look Kurush in the eye and know that he was the
tool required. The Adon could not trust a traitor, be the Colonel of his own creation. Like a cari-
cature of one Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, The Adon would encounter a small tooth.
O’Bran looked towards Dr. Kleiner. A flicker of something passed between them.
O’Bran: Don’t give it straight, make them work for it. Fuddle, contradict yourself and double
back. Do not give way to anything but doctrine. Half the time a militiaman doesn’t know the pur-
pose of their duties; And when I do explain, I just may lie. I can’t act less fascist than the opposi-
tion just because my personal ideology is humanitarian. You are dead anyway. But you will get
close to the man before you die. He’ll believe you stupefied by drugs beyond any dying effort at
revenge. You’ll have been beaten and tied. But attack can take strange forms. And you’ll recall
the tooth! The tooth! This was not despair, for despair was only for those men and women who

158
 KALIDASA

saw the end beyond all possible doubt. Operation Red Coast II: A personal contingency plan for
the Brotherhood’s previously-failed contingency plan’s contingency plan!
The doctor’s eyes held little sympathy as he bent over Kurush, holding his mouth open wide
with one hand while injecting his gums on the bottom right side with the other. Kurush now smelt
the rubbery tang of cheap latex, felt a sharp stinging—but the latter was remote.
The sound of steel clattering on steel was overloud in the underground office. O’Bran spoke
softly as they waited for the anaesthetic to take effect: “Be silent, please. You might be able to
speak, but I’d advise against it. You see... we have done our homework. That peg tooth put in
your mouth after the tumble in NorCal—that tooth must now be replaced. In a few minutes or
so your mouth will be fully anaesthetized and my man will replace that tooth.”
The doctor plucked a pale object from the tray, displayed it in one fat palm. Kurush leaned
closer, smelling gin on the man’s breath; Perspiration stood out on his double chin.
O’Bran: “Let it be thus: Dr. Kurush X. Mehta will keep the weapon he shall soon possess as a
mark of his allegiance. We believe that it will escape all but a most wary of searches. But if you
bite down on it with a great deal of force, it crushes. If you then expel your breath sharply, you
fill the air directly in front of you with a poisonous gas—most deadly.”
A freezing coolness had begun growing across the professor’s lower jaw.
The doctor lit a cigarette off a laser scalpel. Kurush had seen cancer cured in his lifetime: A
cigarette: Useful for getting through those events one doesn’t want to get through!
O’Bran: “I should warn you what to expect: Remember that each militiaman will have a false
toenail or two which can be combined with other items secreted about themselves to make an
effective STR card. You might be implanted with more than one false tooth. You will need to get
used to weaving coils of carbyne in your hair—so fine one can barely detect them, yet strong
enough to garrotte a man and cut off his head in the process. Soon, the Thoughtpol must come
to learn that when it comes to members of the public, they must search each thoroughly, both
by hand as well as by X-ray; Cut off every scrap of body hair. And when they are through with
all that, be certain that even then they’ve not yet discovered everything.
“It is written that we should all be loyal to the nightmares of our choice. But there’s a chance
you will get close to your interrogators before the end. They will believe you stupefied by their
concoctions beyond a dying effort to attack them. You will have been hobbled—and even tied.
But attacks can take strange forms. And you’ll recall the tooth. The tooth, Prof. Kurush Xerxes
Mehta: When all goes against you, as indeed it must, you will remember the tooth!”
At this, Kurush’s numb lips formed words without sound: How... save... her?
“By making it appear she were dead; By secreting her among people who spit at hearing a
G-man’s name, who detest G-men so much they’ll burn a chair on which a G-man sat, salt the
ground over which a G-man walked.” Dr. Kleiner: “Can you feel your lower jaw?”
The sense that this was his last chance, that the professor would think him a fool, whatever
O’Bran should say: Had it given the man a lash, adding fire to his voice? While he doubted, he

159
 EUDAIMONIA

had had hope. Now there is no hope left, and all the same I doubt everything. It seemed that no
matter the side one desired to see victorious in war, the process of recruiting solders involved
hoodwinking. This hoodwinking was not as difficult as some thinkers supposed: Most people
wanted to be led. It was difficult to think for long about the strange single eye crowning the pyr -
amid that had once been found on all one-dollar bills, and not begin to believe. There were deep
social instincts—powerful unconscious motivations—to account for this. Yet, the natural reaction
when you began to recognize how easily you had been led into pain and death was to look for a
way out. Did a part of O’Bran scream for a way out? How easy was it for O’Bran to justify to these
desperate men the shaping of living blades to thrust into an enemy’s vitals?
Stubbing out his cigarette and donning again his surgical mask, the doctor picked up a wide
black box, his fingers twitching as if he were typing on an invisible keyboard. As the doctor in-
terfaced with the professor’s wetware, Kurush grew aware of a tingling in a corner of his mouth.
Later, the doctor ordered Kurush to open his mouth yet again, the doctor’s hands soon coming
up into view with a bloody, pale object held tightly between closed pliers.
B
The militiamen exchanged looks: We’re behind schedule: Act first, lie later. B
The doctor’s dark eyes flickered over their faces; First Kurush’s, then Chandrā’s. There was
not a trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their appearances, but felt no in-
terest in them, or at least seemed to feel none. It occurred to Kurush that a black market sleeve
was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking or giving any kind of sa -
lutation, the doctor exited, slamming the office door shut rather loudly.
O’Bran: “That will do for now. Later we will arrange something more. For the foreseeable future
you might as well be my guests. Consult my quartermaster—Cubbage. Tell him that it’s my wish
you receive extra bandwidth during your stay. I’ve some business to attend to. Now...” the mili-
tiaman added, “are there any urgent last questions you wish addressed?”
There did not appear to be any further questions he wanted to have answered; Still less did
he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected
with Big Brother, the Brotherhood, or America’s Most Wanted, memories floated into his mind.
Kurush remembered having stood on a rugged but elegant platform made from wood and steel
that was perched upon the edge of a tall escarpment. He had been talking with a female diving
instructor with black hair and purple skin over hard-looking muscles. She had worn a blue body
suit with a tiny belly pack and had been in the middle of strapping herself into a wing harness, a
complicated device full of compressed, slatted fins that covered most of her rear surfaces, from
ankles to neck and down her arms. About sixty people—half of them also divers—had been dis-
tributed about the platform, which had been surrounded by a forest canyon.
The professor had not known what to say. “But you might die,” he said at last.
The woman had smiled: “That’s the whole point.”
Silence. At last: “Really? I see,” the professor had said.
“No, I don’t think you do, do you?” To which: “No.”

160
 KALIDASA

The woman had laughed and continued to adjust the flying harness.
Chandra: “What about you and Viktor?”
Viktor had simply shrugged. “My sleeve is too heavy.”
“ ’Fraid so,” the woman had said. “Too heavy to do it properly, at least. We could fit him with
a float harness, I suppose, but most people would consider that to be cheating.”
Viktor: “I thought the whole point of this sort of exercise was to cheat... ?”
The woman had looked up from tightening a strap round her thigh. “Did you?”
“Cheating death. Risking it, totally and forever.” Every single one of these base jumpers had
been socialites for whom no recording of their mind-state existed to revive them if they dived into
the ground and were killed. It had given him an uneasy feeling just thinking about it.
“So why bother with this?” Viktor had rephrased, indicating the cliff.
And then he shrugged: “Fly up here. Not use a floater harness—”
“Why take the risk when you could do it all in VR?” The woman had laughed.
A raised eyebrow: “Would it be any less false?”
“That’s not the question. The question is: Would it be any less real?”
The woman had nodded vigorously. “Abso-fucking-lutely!”
Her hair had caught in a sudden updraught, swirling above her head like dark flames.
“So you only think it’s fun if there’s a certain degree of reality involved?”
“It’s more fun,” she had shouted. “Some people base jump as their main recreation, but they
only ever do it in...” Her voice had been lost as a gust of wind roared all around them. “There are
VR base jumping purists who make a point of never doing the real thing!”
Memories could warm him up from the inside, but they could also tear him apart.
The front door had already been opening when Kurush raced towards it, scattering gravel.
There had been a house-droid—a Jeeves—holding up The Book. He had grabbed it and had run
up the stairs. The grandfather clock had begun to mark the arrival of the hour of six.
Chandrā had been in her cot when her eighty-three-year-old great-uncle strode in.
A thirteen-month-old Chandrā had pulled herself up against the cot’s rails.
Kurush recalled stroking her hair. It was funny, really. He spent the day yelling and shouting
and lecturing and bellowing… but here, in this quiet time smelling of soap, he never knew what
to say. He was tongue-tied in the presence of a thirteen-month-old infant. All the things he thought
of saying sounded horribly false, as though he’d got them from a book. There was nothing to
say, nor, in this ever-so-soft pastel room, anything at all which needed to be said.
A contented silence had enveloped him, but it could not last. There was The Reading Of The
Picture Book to be undertaken. That was the meaning of six o’clock. It was important that no
one else was here. This moment in time was just for the two of them.
It was the same book, every day. The pages of the book were rounded and soft where she
had chewed them, but to one person in this nursery, this was the Book of Books, the greatest
story ever told. Kurush did not need to read it any more; He knew it by heart.

161
 EUDAIMONIA

It had a very simple title: Where’s My Cow?

The un-identified complainant had lost their cow. That was the huge mystery.
Page one started promisingly: “Where’s my cow? Is that my cow?
“It goes ‘Baa!’ It’s a sheep! No, that’s not my cow!”
Then the author began to get to grips with their material.
“Where’s my cow? Is that my cow? It goes ‘Nay!’ It’s a horse! That’s not my cow!”
At this point, the author had reached an agony of creation and was writing from the racked
depths of their soul: “Where’s my cow? Is that my cow? It goes ‘HRUUUUUGH!’ It’s a hippopot-
amus! No, that’s not my cow!” This was a good way to end the evening. Chandrā would soon-
er or later be grinning widely and crowing along with the sensational plot.
Eventually, the cow would be found; It was that much of a page-turner. Of course, some sus-
pense was lent by the fact that all other animals were presented in some way that could have
confused a kitten who perhaps had been raised in a darkened room. The horse was standing in
front of a hat stand, as they so often did, and the hippo was eating at a trough against which
was an upturned pitchfork. Seen from the wrong direction, the tableau might look for just one
second like a cow. Chandrā had loved it. It was the most cuddled book on Earth.
He had recited it all, while wind had rattled the windows, and the little nursery, with its pink-
and-blue peace, its creatures who were ever so very soft and wooly and fluffy, had seemed to
enfold them both. On the nursery clock, a lamb had rocked the seconds away.
Back in the present: Kurush hugged the fingers of his grandniece’s right hand desperately.
He shoved the memories away. He was vexed thus from time to time.
O’Bran had allowed a moment of contemplation to unfold, but now cleared his throat: “It will
be necessary for you to work overseas: At least for a year. There has been way too much me-
dia attention. Am I correct in concluding that the three of you have a great deal of money at your
disposal? Kangeraatisaaq is one of dozens of villages along the Greenland coast that the G60
policies of the 1950s and 1960s rendered obsolete. At that time, it was believed to be much too
costly to provide these villages with the services they had not asked for in—”
But at that instant, the door behind Prof. Kurush slammed open. Chandrā had seen it, un-
fortunately: For the Colonel there had been a moment of fear, yes, but no surprise.

162
 KALIDASA
“I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Tre-
bon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled
from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moon-
light that others fear to speak of during the day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and writ-
ten songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.”

—from The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

“I’m an intelligent daímōn. I don’t have problems with drugs, I don’t commit offences, I don’t
hurt other people and I do not typically have relationship problems. I do have a complete lack of
empathy, but I consider that an advantage: Beautiful words are not always truth. Do I know the
difference between good and bad, and want to be good? Yes: A peaceful world is a better world for
me; But not for everyone. Do not be deceived: Metaphysics, if it doesn’t make sense, corrupts good
morals. The basic conceptions of traditional morality are on the surface very clear, but metaphys-
ically they are rather confused, and one can easily make the obscurest assumptions in this field
without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. The world we live in is
far too complicated for the neat rules we make to try and keep it orderly.”

—Úna Helgudóttir to Pieniss “Nutin” of Sheshatshiu

Eleven years ago: Out of a small window in a stone wall was a baby-blue spring sky. There
were eleven infants in the chamber, most of them cooped up in cozy, padded pen-cots in pairs
or trios, now settling down, with little commotion, into their naps. The two eldest had remained
at large: A lumpy, buoyant one with slimy fingers and toes mouthing a cherry-wood block, and a
plump one sitting in the square of sunlight from the window, staring up at the sunbeam with an
earnest and contented expression. Both were males, bare-chested and swaddled.
In the anteroom, the nurse, a Zulu woman with lengthy, bright-pink braids, conferred with a
broad-shouldered and sad-looking Innut man of approximately thirty years of age.
“The mother doesn’t want him? Perhaps, she wants him to stay here—” The nurse’s mouth
had formed an “oh” with loose lips as if laying a duck’s egg from a chicken’s rectum.
A sigh: “Shall we take him into the nursery full-time, then, starting tonight?”
“Yes. I made the last arrangements this morning. I’ll be gone for at least a year.”
“Don’t worry, he knows us all here! But surely once you’ve returned...” a wave of the hand.
“Since that had been the plan, as far as I was told, and you’ll both be asklepiádai?”
“Yes; But, she... she... . The Akadēmía tēs Zōēsophía desires her exper... . I’m not of that... .
She... . We can work together but we just can’t work with each other.”
The nurse nodded. “Of course...” she said, without energy, adding nothing more.
The father’s regard had been on the butterball infant, who had not noted his presence in the
anteroom, being preoccupied with light. The knobby one had at that moment been coming to-
wards the plump one rapidly. He had approached out of boredom or sociability, but once in the
square of sunlight had discovered it was warm. He sat down, crowding the other.
The plump one’s blank rapture thus gave way at once to a scowl of rage.

165
 EUDAIMONIA

He thus pushed the knobby one back into the shade, shouting: “Go ’way!”
The nurse watched in silence, seeming curious as to what the child would say next.
The plump infant stood up. His face was a glare of sunlight and rage. His nappies had been
about to fall off, then dropped. “Mine!” he said in a high voice. “Mine sun!”
The nurse kept watching, perhaps making sure no serious harm ensued. Then for some un-
fathomable reason, the woman picked the plump infant up with gentle hands and set him in his
father’s arms, out of the square of light. In the world in which toddlers had existence, whosoever
brought them up, was there anything so finely perceived or felt as injustice?
A beginning was the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances were correct.
What was a common fallacy taught children by adults? That adults knew better than children!
Was it at all possible for a Gaian to screw up a little boy’s life so unintentionally? In the past, the
common way this was accomplished was by what had once been called parenting. A toddler
was more than an adorable little thing upon whom one could blame one’s farts! To have hidden
Sourcery from the learned and the studious and yet revealed it to newborn babes... whoever
took the humble position of a newborn was the most powerful of all human beings.
What they had against them was no simple predator. It was conniving. It followed a devious
system to render humanity useless. Adults, the magical beings they once had been destined to
be, were no longer magical; They were pieces of meat. There were no more dreams for adults
but the dreams of an animal being raised to become a piece of meat.
Samukelisiwe: “Go. I’ll try and make the time to see you off tomorrow.”
“I’ll drop him off.” Kánnabēs: When it came time to go to his farewell party, as one at times
might feel obliged to do, Pienish would stride into the middle of the library, shout: “Ha! Ha!” as
loud as he could, consider himself to have done his duty, and stumble home.
“Bye-bye, Nutin, Little Wind. Tomorrow, listen, tomorrow we’ll play sled-and-driver.”
The infant had not forgiven her, might not even truly know what forgiveness was. And so, he
fumed, clutching his father’s neck, and hid his face in the darkness of a lost sun.

Back in the present: A band of musicians had reserved the amphitheatre that morning and
a group was stomping the Katshitushku Stomp all around in the main village green, so those
engaged in learn-sharing sat in a circle on the grass of a sun-lit meadow. The last volunteer, a
big thirteen-year-old with ample hands and feet, stood up, his posture perfectly erect. His pale-
skinned face was somewhat stern, then blanked. He had true red hair. His hair was cut short.
If left to its own devices, it stuck up, made him look as if he had been set ablaze. His face ap-
proached so near to brutishness that none had ever denied such an assertion.
“Louder,” put in the Utshimau, a slender man with a gigantic Adam’s apple.
The boy nodded, outwardly chagrined. A learn-sharing was a place for embarrassment and
enquiry both: A question, unlike an answer, for the most part did not have to make sense.

166
 KALIDASA

The boy’s name was Pieniss. He presently possessed that deep gravity and seriousness that
only old salts or jungle gorillas had ever been able to pull off. Had Pieniss, in particular, not as yet
understood Sourcery? Was a heathy teenager an unserious creature in a fairly serious Kósmos?
Must seriousness always preclude joy, warmth, spontaneity and fun?
Nutin: “Well, see, I was thinking, let’s say you throw a rock at something. At a tree. You toss
it and it goes through the air and hits the tree. Right? But it cannot. Because...  . May I have the
slate? Look, here’s you throwing a rock; Here’s the tree. That’s supposed to be a pine tree, and
here’s the rock. See it, halfway in-between. To get from you to the tree, the rock will have to be
halfway in between you and the tree, doesn’t it? But, even then, has it to get halfway between
halfway and the tree? And then still has it to get halfway between that and the tree? It does not
matter how far it has already been able to travel, won’t there always be a place, only it’s prop -
erly speaking a time, that’s halfway between the last place it was and the tree?
“What would you say if I told you a rock always has to go half of the way which is left to go?
That there is always and forever half of the way left to go? The flight of the rock also presents a
deeper problem, in that it would seem to contain no first distance to fly, for, however small, any
possible first distance, couldn’t it always be halved, and hence would not really be ‘first’ after all?
The counter-intuitive conclusion being that travel over any distance cannot be completed or be-
gun; All motion therefore being an illusion.” He nodded: Hóper édei deíxai—ΟΕΔ.
Was this perhaps an unexpected philosophy from the mouth of a thirteen-year-old? Would
any Gaian be shocked to find one of them laughing at a subtle interplay—wordplay—between the
sexes? Teenagers, it must be said, had one kind of silliness, and grown-ups, another; To grow up
meant always to say: “Things are complicated!” If Nutin could no longer laugh at himself, was it
time for others to laugh at him? Contrary to popular belief, never in his life had the Great Aiasheu
believed in being serious: ] Life is far too serious to be taken seriously! ^
Nutin: For motion to take place, must a rock be seen to move? The rock occupies the space
it occupies at any moment: It cannot be but where it is! And yet, places don’t move! At any giv-
en moment the rock cannot move to where it is not, because no time will have passed; And it
clearly cannot ever move to where it already is! At any possible instant wherein it is possible to
ask: “Is this rock moving?” no motion is ever observed. All things are motionless when they’re
wherever they are; Time is composed only of the present; So motion must be impossible since it
is unobservable in the present. The past too is of course unobservable.
A memory: The arrows went a variety of places; Guðdís never hit the target. Nutin had laughed
so hard he would write Please stop! Can’t breathe! in the dirt. Had the woman not seen that an arrow
must fly an infinite number of flights, or no flight at all? Guðdís: “You’re very intelligent for a boy
who can go a whole day without speaking.” Nutin: That’s why I’m intelligent.
What could a noús contemplate with complete certainty? Itself! Nutin thought entirely about
himself. Nutin remembered himself and an ex-girlfriend talking for a while together about their Un-
knowledge of matter; That the only certain thing in the Kósmos was one’s personal perceptions.

167
 EUDAIMONIA

If he were speaking to an entirely philosophic audience, Nutin should explain that he ought to
describe himself as an Unknower; He did not think that there was a decisive argument by which
he could know for certain most things—which was not the same as knowing nothing; Knowing
nothing took as much stupidity as knowing everything. At ten years old, the boy had pretended to
fall in love; The bitch had tried to make him feel. Nutin had begun day-dreaming of strangling her.
One moonless night, he had been ready. Instead, she had knocked him out cold.
Nutin: “Stop your whining, girl! If I frightened you, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts pred -
ators—and you’re clearly not prey.” His jaw really had been sore. The tweenager had laughed.
No longer had it been the silent laughter from before. This boy who a hṓra ago had carried him-
self like a lynx, had had then the placid aura of a cat bathing in the sun.
It had been neither the first nor the worst attempted murder of his life, but it had taught him
a valuable lesson about how non-people were akin to a species of animal... from the largest of
predators to the tiniest of scavengers, most “people” can only be pushed so far. And it was true
that there would have been something perfect about kneading into the doughy throat of a small
child such as that the depth and breadth of his Kósmos; To throttle a witch whose limits might
have been predicated only upon the bounds of the Unknower’s imagination.
Must it be said that Nutin did not like to fuck; Did not like people, for that matter? He only liked
spiders; How many of the poor things had the fatal affliction of possessing far too much power for
their size? What good was handsomeness—a brutish handsomeness, and yet handsomeness
nonetheless—if it cloaked such hǘbris, indifference and naked bile?
Among materialists, would Unknowledge be spoken of as a term for some kind of madness?
The situation was ambiguous and capable of at least two explanations. Nutin now saw nothing
but sentiment obliging him to reject Unknowledge. Having received a letter from a philosopher
saying: had Dḗmos
been cured of solipsism for life? If Nutin could not prove whether anything or anybody either did
or did not exist outside himself, would it be logical to go on believing that any of these persons
sitting before him either did or did not possess an actual consciousness?
The klovn would ask Nutin at one point: “But, if they’re not people, what are they?”
“Honestly, if you were any slower, you would be going backwards!” Nutin had Seen, with the
help of a chew, that there was no reason to think Guðdís herself was a person.
The woman would ask if they were ghosts, spirits, or souls of the departed.
Nutin would say he did not know what a ghost, spirit or soul was.
Nutin: “Perhaps they are forces, neither good nor bad? Forces that a Sourcerer can learn to
harness? I’ve read that to the Old Sourcerers real people looked like luminous eggs when they
Saw them. Non-people always looked like people, or they looked like dogs or a cloud of flies or
anything else which they had been pretending to be. Everything else had its own way of being
when Seen.” The thirteen-year-old would suddenly shrug. “Free-thinking atheist is an oxymoron.
Atheists once chided Sanātanists for being narrow-minded. No one is more narrow or closed-

168
 KALIDASA

minded than someone who claims absolutes based on what they’ve learned, as if there is noth-
ing more to learn. I applaud agnostics, they having the intellect and the openness to declare that
they don’t know! At least they admit there might be more to know!”
“Do you mean that some of the people I see in the street are not real people?”
The teenager’s statements would seem preposterous to her, yet the Berserker would not ser i-
ously conceive of him making such remarks simply for their effect, telling him the whole thing
sounded like a fairy tale regarding beings from another plane of existence. The Unknower’s an-
swer to the klovn would be that he did not care to explain himself any longer.
Guðdís: But... why must I think every person in a moving crowd is a real person?
At which point she would observe that she could not explain why, except that she was ha-
bituated to believe it as an act of faith on her part. Milwa'tem would add that the Old Sourcerers
had liked to watch busy places, and among the crowd would report Seeing but one or two who
appeared like luminous eggs. “On the other hand, the New Sourcerers need not be so positive.
Unknowledge, like agnosticism, need not assume any kind of actual burden of proof.”
That winter, a wasted Guðdís would say to Milwa'tem over and over: “I stink, therefore, I am!”
rocking back and forth upon her naked bum. Someone would arrive to hear this. Milwa'tem would
tell the boy: “This woman isn’t insane; We’re simply practising philosophy.”
Was it a fact that modern philosophical arrangements offered very few opportunities for bully-
ing—and anarchism, in particular, made it practically impossible to dictate on a truly big scale?
Yet, was it also true that these children were being trained to a very high level of awareness and
recognition of the unimportance of an Unknower’s existence? The question was not merely one
of making things difficult for the Great Leaders, not to mention all the bandits of the past dumb
enough to get labelled criminals. How did one harness the enormous power such people gener-
ated: Set it to work, or at least prevent it from doing harm? To paraphrase Aléxandros III: “No
person can possibly think deeply and conquer a nation at the same time!”
Nutin had come to realize from very early on in childhood that his people saw homicide differ-
ently. Indeed, more often than not, it helped him. To be a Sourcerer was to treat all the serious
things of life with sincere and studied triviality. Daimṓpathy too was like a medicine for the won-
der and terror of life; Taken in moderation, it could prove extremely beneficial. It alleviated a lot
of existential ailments to which one would otherwise fall victim, since fragile psychological im-
mune systems were just not up to the task. Still, if one took too much of it, if one overdosed on
it, there could, as was the case with every medication, be unpleasant side-effects. When it came
right down to it, had the Utshimau been able to See these little boys and girls of his grandson’s
generation as petty tyrants? Not quickly; Not completely; Not all that often.
Had Nutin any need to understand that he was not entirely at the mercy of his manipulative
impulses? If he was disturbed by what was going on in his head, he could do something about
it. It was all a question of being shown what to do and then practising, the way one learned to
fish or paddle a canoe. Was it important to learn-share with children not just the foundation of

169
 EUDAIMONIA

Aristotḗlian logic, but also rather simple balancing techniques for the mind-life—techniques that
might develop, in adulthood, into a self-moving noús? Not total self-movement, of course; But
half a loaf would be a great deal better than no bread. These techniques would not lead to a dis-
covery of Nutin’s Buddha Nature or Kārmic Liberation or anything of that sort: But they would
assist him in preparing for such a discovery—if he desired it. Nutin had long since been liber-
ated from all ghostly painful memories or anxieties about himself. In the months to come, the
best lies about Nutin and the Great Aiasheu would be the ones he told himself.
] Poor thing! Must the boy spend all this energy just to confound me? ^ 
To Aiasheu, was not anybody else something like a mathematical expression: Like the square-
root of negative one? While they may be said to have an existence, was it not true that to cast
eyes upon them, as Things-in-Themselves, would it not be akin to casting eyes on the illogical
elements of Earthling mathematics? All-in-all it had been useful, when he was young, to learn
the difference between certain things; For instance, if something happened literally, it really had
happened, but if something happened figuratively, it only felt like it had happened.

Two years before, spring: His father had held up a stone a bit bigger than Nutin’s fist, one
bushy, red-grey eyebrow raised: “What do you think will happen if I let this go?”
Nutin had thought for a bit. Simple questions during lesson time were seldom simple.
Finally, the eleven-year-old had given the obvious answer: “It’ll probably fall... ?”
His father had raised his eyebrow further. Nutin’s father had been getting a wrinkle above his
eyebrow because he just could not stop lifting it. He did not care who knew it.
At last: “Probably? You sound like a Praśnayānist, my boy. Hasn’t it always fallen?”
Nutin had stuck his tongue out. “Don’t try to boldface your way through this one.”
An upraised finger: “That’s a fallacy. You taught me that yourself.”
His father had grinned. “Fine. Would it be fair to say you believe it will fall?”
A nod: “I want you to believe it will fall up when I let go of it.” His grin had widened.
Nutin had tried. It had been like doing mental gümnastikḗ. At last, he nodded.
“I want you to believe this rock will float away. Believe it with a faith that’ll move mountains or
churn oceans.” His father had paused, taken a different tack. “Do you believe in God?”
What was it the Khristianoí said? If a man had as much faith as a mustard seed, he could say
to a mountain: ‘Move!’ and it would do so, and nothing would be impossible for him?
The eleven-year-old had shrugged: “Which God?” At last: “I don’t disbeli—”
“Not good enough. Do you believe in your friend, Anikashi... or me?”
Nutin had painted on a smile that was rather wan. “At times. I can’t see him right—”
His father had snorted, unhooked the slapstick he used to goad his two mules if they were
being lazy. “Do you believe in this, Little Wind?” He only called Nutin “Little Wind” if he thought
his son was being wilfully obstinate. Pienish had held up the stick for inspection.

170
 KALIDASA

“Good.” His father had slapped the side of the wagon rather hard.
One of the mule’s ears had pivoted about at the noise, uncertain as to whether or not it was
directed at it. A smile: “That’s the sort of belief I want. I want a riding-crop belief! When I drop
this stone it will float away, free as a bird.” His father had brandished the slapstick a bit. “And
none of your Unknowledge or I’ll make you sorry you ever took a shining to it.”
Nutin had nodded. He emptied his mind with one of the tricks he already knew and had borne
down on believing. In no time at all the eleven-year-old Sourcerer had started to sweat.
After what may have been ten mikroí Nutin had nodded again.
His father had let go of the rock. It had fallen. Nutin had begun to get a headache.
His father had picked the rock back up. “Did you believe that it floated?”
“No,” he had sulked, rubbing his temples. Sourcery was not an Art for the inflexible.
“It doesn’t matter. Try again.” He had shaken the rock firmly in his clenched fist. “If you’re go-
ing to impose your will on reality, you must have control over what you believe.”
Nutin tried and tried. It would be the most difficult thing he had ever attempted.
Finally, his father had dropped the rock, Nutin retaining his belief it would not fall. This, des-
pite all evidence to the contrary. His father had picked up the rock, eyeing it.
“I did it,” the eleven-year-old had said calmly, looking more than a little smug.
His father had looked at him out of the corner of his eye, as if he did not believe him but did
not want to admit it. He had picked the rock up from the ground, then shrugged and had held
it up again. “I want you to believe the rock will fall and that it won’t, when I let go.”
Nutin had gone to bed late that week. He had had nosebleeds and a grin of delight.
He had held the two contradictory beliefs loosely in his mind and let their discord lull him into
senselessness. Being able to think about two disparate things at once, aside from being won-
derfully efficient, was roughly akin to being able to sing a disharmony with oneself. It turned into a
favourite game of the eleven-year-old’s. After two hṓraí of practising he had been able to sing a
trio. Soon, he was doing the mental equivalent of palming cards, juggling knives.
There would be many other lessons, though none would be quite so pivotal as this.
His father would teach him a game he had called Seek the Stone.
The point of the game was to have one part of the mind hide an imaginary stone in an ima-
ginary room, then have another, separate part of the mind attempt to find it.
Practically, it taught Nutin valuable mental control. If a Sourcerer could play Seek the Stone
well, they were developing that sort of seething mind which was needed for Sourcery.
Still, while being able to think about two opposed things at the same time was terribly con-
venient, the training it took to get there was frustrating, and for some, quite upsetting.
Nutin would recall a time searching for the stone for almost a week before consenting to ask
the other half of his mind where he had hidden it, only to find he had not hidden the stone. He
had merely been waiting to see how long he would look for it before giving up.
Had Anikashi ever been riled and pleased with himself at the same time?

171
 EUDAIMONIA

Another time, the eleven-year-old would ask for a hint, only to end up laughing at himself. It
was no wonder most Sourcerers one met were eccentric, if not downright cracked.
As a matter of fact, “eccentric” or “bright” did not begin to cover the lad; Not by half. Anybody
who spent time with him could see that. Why need anybody make a point of it?
The Autarkēs had had, in the course of his thirty-seven years on Gaia, a few encounters with
serious people, which had not at all been good for his impression of them. That evening, the
Autarkēs and Pienish had become involved in a debate regarding Nutin. The Autarkēs: “I don’t
think you understand me. How long ago did he learn to play the piano?”
Pienish had thought back to when he first learned to play, recalling how old he was. He re-
called the sort of struggles he had had. For a long moment the old man lived at a little distance
from his body, regarding his own past acts with dubious side-glances.
Nutin had learned each note, each piece of music, after being shown once, no stumbling and
no complaining. If he had made a mistake, it had not been more than once.
Pienish would seem perturbed: Sure, but he did have trouble now and again...  . But he had
not stalled for long. Had it merely been his chubby fingers? Nutin did everything that way, quick
as a whip, hardly ever making a mistake. Pienish bet that the youngster knew every tune he had
ever played for him. He knew more about what was in the store-room than the Apothecary did!
Pienish would suppose he must have grown up, never having noticed before.

Back in the present: “Let’s play a game. Shut your eyes and pretend you’re looking at that
yearling who comes to the rookery by day to feed. Can you see his itty-bitty beak?” They could.
They did not think there was anything odd about anybody acting a little odd.
The Utshimau: “See him just as clearly as you saw him at dawn at flight. And do not stare at
him; Make no effort. Just see what comes to you, letting your eyes shift from his beak down to
his tail, from his dark, round eye, to his stumpy legs, to the sounds he makes.”
“I can hear him!” a little girl volunteered. “He’s saying ‘Tǘrannos, Tǘrannos!’ ”
“No he’s not!” another child said, indignantly. “He’s saying: ‘Corn!’ ”
“He is saying both those,” the Utshimau assured them, “as well as other words. But now we
are going to do a bit of pretending. So... pretend that there are two small, yearling ravens. Now
there are three; Three tiny, black yearling brothers. Can you see all three of them?”
The thirteen-year-old listened to their laughter, as well as to his heartbeat. And since he did
not care for ravens, except as stuffing for a pie, he turned his mind to the Square.
It was made of numbers, and numbers were always firm; He had Seen the Square a while
ago, a design-space like the designs music made in time: A square of nine boxes of the first nine
integers. However you added up the rows, columns or boxes they came out the same, equality
balanced. It was a joy to look at. A Nahualli did not deafen themselves to the raw cacophony of
their Sourcerous senses. Nutin counted everything: Odd numbers and even, in multiples of ten

172
 KALIDASA

and twelve. Awaking, he counted the ticks of the clock; He counted the number of strands in a
spider’s web; He counted the beats of his heart as well as the number of times that he blinked or
exhaled over the course of a day. A memory: Nutin had spotted the sign beside the door to the
dining hall immediately: 1729. Olofsson had remarked that the number was a dull one, and that
he hoped this was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” the Nahualli-in-training had disputed, “it’s an
interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two differ-
ent ways. Excuse me.” Nutin had then stopped and jumped off his bicycle. He had lifted the rear
wheel from the dirt road, given it a spin with his free hand. The chain of Nutin’s bicycle had one
weak link, and the rear wheel had one bent spoke. When the weak link and the bent spoke came
into contact with each other, the chain would always fall off. This did not happen on every revolu-
tion of the wheel—otherwise such a bicycle would be almost useless.
Yes, Nutin had indeed taken to mathematics, its unyielding nature. Even were he to chop a
number down to half or a tenth or a thousandth its former self, it would still exist; It was whole and
incorruptible. Nothing said in words ever came out whole. He knew that all words could be twis -
ted together. The boy really did know how to lie well, having come to like it long ago. In no way
must it be said that this should scare him; It excited everybody. He was a prisoner of Plátōn’s
Cave, watching the shadows, fraught with a desire to hunt whatever cast them. And yet under-
neath, at the centre, as with the centre of the Square, on the level of pure mathematics, it all came
out right. Everything was changed, yet somehow nothing was lost.
The Utshimau: “Now the four are at the corners of the square and a fifth is in the middle. And
now let’s make them change colour. The heads might be blue, red or yellow. Great Aiasheu, what
is happening! There aren’t five; There are ten, twenty, hundreds and hundreds!”
A clap. “Or if hundreds and hundreds is too many, make twelve... or ten. That’s still a lot. And
now...” the First Man went on, when everyone had conjured up all the purple ravens that each
was capable of, “now... they are all gone,” The old man clapped his hands again. “Gone! Every
single one of them. There is nothing there.” He clapped his hands once again. “All gone! This
time it’s Samukelisiwe and that funny-looking young man with the tattooed pecker who strode by
yesterday; Seven of each of them; Masturbating in a tight circle in the amphitheatre. And now
they are dancing the Katshitushku Stomp. ‘So stomp it out! So stomp it out!’ ”
According to Sourcery, every child was born with the natural understanding that they created
their own reality—in the sense that it was the Innut’s experience that everyone created their own
experiences, these being, in the end, all that reality could possibly consist of. This knowledge
was so basic that when a force attempted to thwart one’s own creation, one felt an immediate
discord deep within oneself. All beings were born knowing they created their own reality—and
though the desire to do so pulsed deep within in a very powerful way, the integration process into
pre-Didáskal societies had often been such that many had begun to accept much of the same
picture that others held of the way the Kósmos should unfold. Today’s lesson in practical philo-
sophy had been one many had heard before: Their mind controlled their reality! Within all Innut

173
 EUDAIMONIA

bands today lived the knowledge that they were the creators of their their life experience, and
that absolute freedom existed as the bedrock of their true experience. In the final analysis, the
whole of the creation of their life experience was absolutely and only up to them.
The Utshimau knew that children seldom enjoyed others telling them what to do: Rarely did
they enjoy being dissuaded from an impulse. But over time, through pressure from those grown-
ups surrounding them who seemed convinced that their own practised way was more valid than
a child’s ways—and, therefore, better—many children had gradually begun to abandon their de-
termination to guide their lives: To be self-moving. Though such a path was in fact harder, many
children had often believed it easier to adapt to grown-ups’ ideas of what was best, rather than
trying to figure it out for themselves. But, in all this adapting to adults’ attempts to make them fit
in, and in their own attempts to find less trouble for themselves, they surrendered their basic
foundation. The Paidasía always moved about within an armour of egotism, as if drunk on them-
selves, deaf to the illogical appeals which might interrupt a long communion with their own de -
sires: Dying could not get a reaction out of a Praśnayānist who was well-thunk.
There was no reality which one created for any other reason than one believed one would
feel better thereby. Whether it be an object, a relationship or a condition, the standard of suc-
cess was never philosophy or celebrity, but joy, and there was nothing one could not accom-
plish if one reached always for a thought that was a little more joyous than the one that came
before. Pre-Didáskal, an acquaintance never asked a mother: “What does his voice sound like?
What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demanded: “How old
is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?” From these fig-
ures, had they somehow thought that they had learned anything about him?
Though there was no “source” of sickness, one could nevertheless think thoughts that disal-
lowed the flow of one’s wellbeing; Freedom to choose implied the freedom to choose bondage!
And yet, Norsemen might wonder: “If there is no source of illness, why are there so many sick
people?” Because they’ve found an excuse not to let wellbeing in! When people did not let well-
being in, the absence of it looked like sickness. And when enough did that, some said: “Oh...
there must be sources of sickness. In fact, let us give them all tiny labels. Let us name this one
daimṓpathy. Let us call them all kinds of bad things; Let us say that they jump into our experi -
ences.” The Utshimau would reply that suffering never jumps into one’s experience; It was just
that many have learned, through trial and error, through banging around with each other, pat-
terns of thought that did not let wellbeing in. As they did not allow their wellbeing in, shadows of
it showed up in their lives as illness or the deprivation of life. Then, over time, many came to be -
lieve these things had sources—physical sources—and to develop whole bodies of “informa-
tion” to protect themselves from things that need not manifest themselves.
As far as Guðdís was concerned, a sincere and good philosophical or iatrical text could in-
deed be written consisting wholly of jokes. In the mind of one Kālī’r Ysbaddes, the question of life
after death was not whether or not it existed, but that even if it did not exist, was that at all an ac-

174
 KALIDASA

tual problem? Not that this was to say that a path was anything but a path; There truly was no
affront, to oneself or to others, in abandoning it if that is what the heart told one to do.
So, no one needed to be haunted by their path; Even their most painful choices could be laid
to rest quite easily. Whenever one appeared, Sourcery taught, just give it an imagination treat-
ment. Deal with it as they dealt with those ravens. Change its clothes, give it another nose and
multiply it. Tell it to go away, and then call it back and make it do something comic; Then abol-
ish it. But this was not really necessary. Within the mind’s eye they could make such a figure
into a grotesque: Into a whole choir of them—eleven of them doing a dance and singing the
chorus to Aristophánēs’ Frogs. A short course in such elementary practical philosophy as this, in
the self-moving noús, and their entire mind-lives might well be different.

Two years ago, summer: Nutin had entered and sat in his father’s Spot.
Nutin had learned how to wait. He was good at it; An expert. Nutin had first learned this skill
waiting for his mother Pinamenish to come back, although that was so long ago he did not recall
it. Patience: So much of Nutin’s life was patience—waiting, thinking, keeping up appearances.
Must childhood too one day come to its end? Since the age of nine, the young Sourcerer would
ask why and how and where and what if, but he would seldom ask when.
He had waited till his father had wandered back home. It had been a short wait: Six hṓrai. The
transitionry had been abuzz, and after, his father and several others had gone to take a hṓra at
the beach where they had swum, his father fucking an admirer. Furious activity was no substitute
for Pinamenish’s deliberate, titillating dexterity. To close the eyes and throw wide the mind’s eye
was sublime. Any person who made love within the limits of “reality” suffered from a lack of ima -
gination: The fact that men could not look down upon a woman who was taller than them was
the very reason that many men found tall women so bewitching. At the end of the day, Pienish
had come by the transitionry sitting room. When he had seen his son, he had smiled and his
forehead had wrinkled in delight. They took pleasure in each other’s company.
Pieniss: “Did you ever see a book with only numbers in it?”
His father had been taken aback: “What do you mean, mathematics?”
Like this? His father had slowly taken a booklet out from his leggings pocket.
It was tiny, meant to be carried in a pocket, and was bound in leather with a small teueikan
stamped on the cover. It was printed full, with tiny characters and narrow margins because pa-
per was a thing that had once taken much time and sweat to manufacture. Or so Samukelisiwe
had once told him when he had botched a page and had gone off to get a new one. Before mov-
able type, few words were ever truly tasted twice: Once in the moment and once more on the
written page. Mnemonics had been a popular topic for both the Classics and the Innut.
His father had held the book out, open. The double page was a series of columns of numer -
als. There they were, as Nutin had intended them. Into his hands he had received the Covenant

175
 EUDAIMONIA

of Eternal Justice. Logarithmic Tables, Bases Ten and Twelve had read the straightforward
title above an image of a drum. The boy had studied the first page for some time.
“What are they for?” he had asked, for clearly these patterns were presented not only for their
beauty. His father, sitting down on a floor-pillow beside him in the hardwood-floored, brightly-lit
common hall of the transitionry, had tried to explain logarithms to him. Two old men at the other
end of the room had laughed over a game of tapaikan. A pair of nurses had walked in and in-
quired if the kāma-mat was free that afternoon and walked off to it. Rain had poured down full
and hard and without mercy on the sod roof of the longhouse as they chatted.
The father, with an upraised hand: “There’s something I want to broach with you.”
The man’s son had painted on a mask of inquiry: What?
“The Autarkēs said he wanted me to be the one to inform you. You see, mediocrity will never
do—you’re capable of doing the most common things in a most uncommon way.”
Had Nutin truly been surprised? “A Nahualli? But there are no more Kamanitushit!”
“The Autarkēs agrees. It is true. Whatever one’s limits, training in Sourcery needs to begin in
infancy, a blending into the background thrum of life. Yet, a year comes when the potential self-
moving noús must embrace what is being attempted; It may no longer be done to them. For the
Old Sourcerers, the moment of sharing in the decision of whether to continue or to abandon the
training was doubly important. Some can continue; Some are incapable. Only a potential Sourc-
erer and self-moving noús is able to tell this for sure about themselves.”
“I know... and yet... a Nah—” the eleven-year-old had begun, only to break off, as if all his
past circumstances and learn-sharings had come into focus in a flash. “I see...”
All the mental prods from the band and his father—the mnemonics and the sharpening of his
senses, the muscle-control and mastery of imagination, the study of logic, self-control and med-
itation—it had all long ago clicked into a new kind of understanding in his mind.
There had been no hesitation in his voice: “I’ll go on with the training.”
“You don’t gamble, do you?” Pienish had asked him. No, Nutin had not seemed like the type.
“Samukelisiwe used to play As-Nas. She maintained that she was a mediocre player of it, though
I rarely saw her walk away from a table with much less than she brought to it. She had a repu-
tation as an amiable player who served fine liquor and excellent tobacco, though, so she got to
play with all sorts of men and women from all over the coast. We were a couple for just over two
years—and I was only beginning to really fall in love with her—before she got me to come to one
of her little parties. Perhaps it was the night she had chosen for me to see... .
“A young man came; The child of a daímōn. He came in, cheerful and bright, and over the
course of the night he went through all his chips. The Sourcerers Samukelisiwe played with that
night were not used to playing for material stakes; They asked him to quit: He refused. He had
won often enough that he had kept his hopes high; He was like that, excited and delighted by
small things. I could see their faces changing expression: If he loses a small fortune in jewellery
and clothing and it teaches him not to overdo it... . Dawn came, and he had little, and there was

176
 KALIDASA

this moment when he bet something I thought he shouldn’t have to stay in the game—an item be-
longing to his mate. I saw this look on his face. Do you know what he was feeling?”
Nutin thought about it for a moment, and then shook his head.
“I glanced at Samukelisiwe, wordlessly asking what she thought. Everybody else was looking
at the youth; Samukelisiwe was looking at everyone else. And I realized a few things. First, about
the young simpleton: The childlike and simple have the best of it in this Kósmos; They can sit at
their ease and just enjoy playing. They know nothing but victory; They even find victory in defeat.
They live as we all should live—undisturbed, lighthearted and without disquiet. They never bring
ruin upon others, nor ever really receive it from others’ hands. Second, Samukelisiwe was no me-
diocre player. She had had a winning hand, and had had the assets left to risk going for it. She
was an expert, but an expert who took pains to rarely win, because she had found something that
was more valuable to her than winning or gloating or becoming known as an excellent player of
card games. What she had really been doing every time she played was taking the measure of
those she played with; Finding not just their tells, but how they reacted to the whims of fate and
fortune. Was this player greedy? Did this player get so focused on one opponent that they ig-
nored another, more skilful? Was this player smarter than anybody yet knew? When much is at
risk, son, it’s good to know which character you are in that little drama.”
Silence. Nutin: “What happened to that young man?”
“He anted again and again, never seeming to me to dwell on either gains or losses.”
Nutin had asked: “Has Samukelisiwe ever played against grandpa?”
Pienish had sighed. “I guess it depends what you mean. As-Nas? No. She knows better. You
don’t put yourself in a position from which you can only lose. I’ve seen my father play. He uses
his stacks of chips like a club. There’s no gracefully losing a beautiful game to him; It’s win big or
lose bigger with him. For her to play him would be to wager something of great value to her or to
lose the whole purpose of her games by exposing how skilled she really is.”
Nutin had seen the grin on his father’s face. The smile had been vulnerable: It had put a warm
look on the man’s jowled features. “Wisely and slowly: They falter that run too fast. It may well
be best if you went out into the world for a few years. Do you know how many times I’ve been
defeated over the course of my life?” Looking up, the father had grinned and tossed his large
shoulders in a nonchalant shrug. “Neither do I! You’d think that sort of thing would stick in my
mind. You’d think I’d remember how many bones I have had broken; You’d think I’d recall all
the stitches and bandages and offences. Has it occurred to you that it is one thing to watch oth-
ers choose, and another to choose for yourself?” A vast, upraised paw: “One last thing,” his fath-
er had said. “Nutin, you have a long way to go. I say that because I can still easily See you, and
being understandable to me means your mind is still too accessible. On the day that not I, nor
anyone of my generation, can See you, but you can still See us, that is the day you’ll finally be
a Man of Unknowledge.” If historians ever wanted to find reasons why Nutin became the man
stories were told about, his father would later suppose, they could look here.

177
 EUDAIMONIA

Returning to small talk, the father had then got out his slide rule and showed his son its op-
eration; In return, Nutin had showed him the Square and the principle of its arrangement. It was
late when they had seen it was late. They had run through the rain to the children’s dorm to get
a casual scolding from the vigil-keeper. They kissed upon the lips. Nature had given Nutin one
face and yet he had made himself another, pulling on his father’s foreskin playfully, the old man
fondling his balls. The boy had run up to the communal bedroom, to a window from which Pien-
ish could see him wave, before trudging back down the road in the torrential dark.
The boy had climbed into bed and put himself asleep, to dream disturbing dreams.
A voice boomed on high: ] Who knows whether evil lurks in the hearts of men? ^
Silence. ] Well, yes, obviously me. I just wondered if there was anyone else. ^
Can’t you ever be serious? a young woman’s “voice” put in.
] It’s difficult, ^7came the response. ] There’s little in life that’s worth it. ^
Later, he dreamed of a cavern and smoke. It was cold and Nutin could see big patches of fire
outside. A woman was with him. The babe in her arms was shrieking louder than ever, struggling
and sobbing. The woman’s mustard-brown eyes were filled with anger. She spoke: “If I drop a
tear on your hand, may it wither up! If I speak a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I
touch you with my lips, might the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this place that gives you
shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin unto all belonging to you!”
A daímōn’s subconscious mind: Was it at all the ideal companion, lurking for the greater part
of their life in some deep den of its own, hidden away, emerging often to taunt and deride and
increase the calamity of some outrageous bloodlust? Such was the influence that the condition
of their own mind-life was often said to exercise. What would it have been like for Nutin to shy
away from himself, thinking that those who pointed and said that all that was there was dark-
ness were in the right? As far as Dḗmos had been concerned, every daímōn carried around in
themselves a dark half-world of Hel and of shadows. To Dḗmos, it was an enormous pit reach-
ing below the deepest crater of their Gaia, or it was the stars far beyond their moon, essentially
as unlike them as reason required them to be. Dḗmos: “They spent their days living either at the
opposite pole to darkness, or in chains. Picture a tiny ant on the back of an elephant. No matter
how diligently that ant marches north, if the elephant they sit on travels south, the ant must end
up farther south than its starting point.” Yet the dark colours that Dḗmos saw in a daímōn were
only reflections of his own jaundiced eyes and heart. Human beings worried about serial killings
because they felt unsafe. Yet, it was widely understood that it was useless to say that humanity
should not want to feel safe—calling a desire a bad name did not get rid of it. In other words, if
humanity could have understood what it was after—that its desire for security and its feeling of
insecurity were two ends of the same stick—and what it had done to the world when it cham-
pioned it, humanity would have seen that it did not want it at all. It seemed to Nutin now that his
birth-father had become a victim of growing up. Now and again this happened among the Innut.
The process had been going on for quite some time, and his father had not yet understood what

178
 KALIDASA

was happening. Nutin had understood that growing up meant a lot of things, and so he need not
feel sorry for his father: Pienish was one of those kinds of Sourcerer that liked to grow up, and did
not even know this about himself. The closest analogue to a Sourcerer’s love was probably the
love of a child or a daímōn: Intense, accepting, and completely and utterly selfish. Like a child or
a daímōn, a Sourcerer could be extremely loyal. They would never put another living being above
themselves, but if you were worth it, they would readily put you above all others.
Ruining people: Nutin had once told his father that he loved the way the phrase rolled about
on his tongue and inside his mouth. Ruining people: It was thrilling to the lad. Having an instinct
that told a being how to be a moral person may be said to be evolutionarily handy; Yet, emotion-
al moral judgment had historically enabled people to do equally “horrible” things to each other.
Because daímōns did not experience morality emotionally, Nutin would contend that they were
freed to be more rational and more genuine; There was indeed something to be said for the im-
partiality of pure logic. Dogma-created mass hysteria amongst the supposedly mentally-healthy
populace had resulted in much more death and carnage in the world than anything daimṓpathy
had ever caused—although one could speculate that there might well sometimes have been
daímōns at the head of it all, whipping up the masses to do their bidding.

Back in the present: “Wait up!” Nushiss called as she and Pienish had been approaching a
side door to the North Manse. It was one of the few buildings Nushiss had not spent much time
in as it contained nothing but the living quarters for a handful of transitionry staff.
Pienish leaned against a door, turned to face the young handler. Then, seeing Nushiss jog-
ging towards him, somewhat out of breath, his eyes rolled. Pienish turned around.
Pienish had known that some days he would have no other chaperone than this young wo -
man, but as he had told Samukelisiwe, if a chaperone was someone who watched him when he
would otherwise be alone, so as to make certain he did not do anything inappropriate or harm-
ful, it was difficult to see of what use a chaperone would be to a Sourcerer.
“M-Might I,” Nushiss began, catching up to him, “might I ask you a question?”
Statistically speaking, that’s pretty likely, he thought, opening the door.
Nushiss actually smiled at this. “Might I ask you a question, then?”
Pienish nodded. I doubt any power known to humanity could stop you.
Pienish swung open the door and walked inside, Nushiss following.
“I heard a rumour that Milwa'tem is gathering a group for a series of learn-sharings.”
Is he? “That’s not a question,” Pienish said, heading up a narrow flight of stairs.
“So... it’s true? He dreamt that Guðdís is going to teach such a wave riding class?”
It was more than his cock, of course. It was the infinite possibility, the unlimited and unquali -
fied wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the uncarved; Milwa'tem was very much like an
uncarved block of wood. The man’s personal Godhood went so deep as to be almost invisible.

179
 EUDAIMONIA

All Sourcerers affected each other, had their oddities and wild nights and so on, but not like this.
Once, she had awoken screaming in the middle of the night, clawing at the door to get away.
And all the young man seemed to have done to her was lie there, dream—
It was at that moment that Guðdís stomped down the stairs, colliding with her.
When the Berserker stood back up, she snorted rather loudly. “May I recommend a book for
your perusal?” The woman pointed rudely with both hands. “It’s a fantastic piece of reading titled
Stairways, Their Form and Function: A Primer for the Mentally Deficient.” She glowered at them
and when they did not immediately jump aside she gave them an angry snort.
The two Sourcerers stepped aside and the Norsewoman stormed by, muttering to herself. Only
after the Berserker rounded the corner did Pienish turn a smile in Nushiss’ direction.
Then, without a word, the man turned and began climbing the stairs again.
Reaching the top of the stairs, the two of them made a turn into a long hallway.
Nushiss: “But... if she’s teaching other students, why not—”
Pienish came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the hallway. “Fine, prove you’re worth teach-
ing. Shake my assumptions down to their very foundations.” Pienish patted himself dramatic-
ally, as if looking for something in his pocket. Pienish shrugged nonchalantly; Nushiss sensed a
hint of disappointment. “This is a good place for a Sourcerer. Tell me why.”
Nushiss looked around. At last: “Bright lights, strong wood, old stone; Silence.”
“A good answer.” Nushiss heard genuine surprise in his voice. “But there is another reason.
Light, stone, wood and silence are other places too. What makes this place different?”
Nushiss thought for a moment, looked around, shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Another good answer. Try to remember it.” Pienish opened the door.
The room was dimly lit, but clean, with a high ceiling and dark hardwood flooring. The oak fur-
niture smelled more strongly of Samukelisiwe than it did of Pienish himself. The thick curtains
were drawn at the moment. It was all so bizarrely ordinary in scale.
Pienish walked inside, through a tasteful sitting room, then into the darkened bedroom. That
door was open. Call it a cloister, rather; It was tiny, with a cot more so than a real bed. Pienish
threw open a wardrobe and started removing several articles of garment.
“Here.” He shoved clothing into Nushiss’ arms till she could not carry any more. Most were
simple, but others were fine wool or a dark black spider-silk. He lay another half-dozen atop the
dozen already over his own arm and carried them back into the main room.
They passed old bookshelves lined with a hundred books and a tiny, polished desk. One wall
was taken up by a tiny stone fireplace, barely large enough for two logs. There was currently a
suitably demure fire smouldering there, keeping away the early-autumn chills.
Pienish lifted a bottle from the table and went to stand in front of the fireplace. He dumped
the clothes he was carrying into Nushiss’ arms so she could scarcely see over the top of them.
Delicately lifting the stopper off the unmarked bottle, he sipped the contents and raised an eye-
brow appreciatively at the rather strong alcoholic content of the liquid inside.

180
 KALIDASA

Nushiss decided to try yet again: “Why don’t you want to—”
“That’s the wrong question,” he said, and upended the bottle onto the smouldering coals in
the fireplace. The flames licked up hungrily. Pienish took his armload of clothing back and fed a
velvet one slowly into the fire. It caught quickly, and when it was blazing, he fed the others onto
the fire in quick succession. The result was a massive pile of smouldering cloth which sent thick
smoke billowing up the chimney. The enormous man smiled widely: Try again.
Nushiss could not help but begin: “Why are you burning your own—”
“Nope. Not even close to the correct question,” Pienish sighed, as he took yet more clothes
off Nushiss’ arms and piled them into the fireplace. He grabbed the handle for the flue, pulling
it closed with a metallic clank. A vast cloud of dark smoke began to pour into the room. Pienish
coughed and then stepped back and looked around in a satisfied way. At which, Nushiss finally
realized what was going on: “Oh, Great Aiasheu! Whose chambers are these?”
Pienish nodded. “Very good. I would have also accepted: ‘So, tell me, what makes this such
a good place?’ or, ‘What are we doing in here?’ ” He looked at her, his eyes laughing. “A door is
shut for a reason. Persons who don’t belong are supposed to stay out.”
“Whose rooms are these?” Nushiss would repeat numbly.
Even in the dark room, she could feel Pienish’s smile. “Samukelisiwe’s.”
The smoke continued to boil into the room. If it were not for the high ceiling they would have
already been choking on it. Even so, it was becoming hard to breathe as the two of them made
their way towards the door. “Why’re you burning all her clothes?” Nushiss asked, trying to ignore
the fact that the hallway was rapidly filling with a bitter and very dark kind of smoke.
Pienish looked at her as if she were an idiot. Had the woman not imagined just what advant-
ages Pienish had found in being oppressed? Or Guðdís: Her predicament was that she intu-
ited her hidden resources, but did not dare use them. The majority of Norse culture seemed to
have moved away from the abstract. Once, they must have been close to it; Then the Didáskal
had happened and it had pulled them away from the abstract. Now they had trouble getting back
to it. Pienish knew that it took years for a vitki to be able to go back to the abstract; That is, to
understand that knowledge and language could exist independently of each other. In order to
be a Sourcerer one had to be rather imaginative; Yet nothing a Sourcerer did was ever illogical.
Pienish did not feel sorry for himself... or anyone else. “Maybe you’re right,” Dḗmos might say.
“But how can I avoid a desire to help my fellows?” How would he have supposed he could help
them? The Old Sourcerers had been extraordinary; They had unravelled conundrums and pos-
sessed knowledge which many of them had employed to benefit or victimize people by fixating
the awareness of their subject on whatever the Sourcerer chose—as long as a man or woman
thought themselves a victim, their life would be Hel. What the majority of humanity needed right
now, more so than ever before, was to be taught new ideas that had to do with the philosophy
of metaphysics, not of morality. What it dearly needed was to be taught the philosophy of the petty
tyrant. Had Samukelisiwe made the big man a fantastic gift without realizing it? Was there time

181
 EUDAIMONIA

for quarrels, feuds or callings to account, so brief was a human being’s lifetime? Did the thought
of losing an enemy feel far worse to the big man than losing a friend?
As time passed and the New Sourcerers established their practices, they realized that under
the prevailing conditions of post-Didáskal life, Sourcerers needed to make it their intention to
seek out ideal settings; They needed petty tyrants in positions of great authority and power. Yet
it became increasingly difficult for them to place themselves in such situations.
Pienish and Nushiss were standing in the hall, just staring at each other while the bitter, black
smoke billowed out. “Say something, damn you!” Nushiss growled, coughing.
Pienish glanced over at her. “What makes you think I’m not responding to you?”
A lopsided grin. “That is, aside from the fact that you refuse to listen?”
Then he turned and walked down the hallway. “I’d get out of here if I were you,” he said, over
his shoulder. “People are going to want to know who’s responsible for this.”

The next day: Pienish would not discuss the matter of self-importance with his son till the
autumn of his son’s thirteenth year. “Let’s walk,” he said, a paw on Nutin’s head.
“Or better yet, let us walk into town, where there are people.” Nutin would be surprised. His
father had been busy for weeks and had not said as much as “Hello.”
As Pienish and his son were departing the transitionry, Guðdís intercepted them, demanding
they take her with them. Guðdís seemed determined not to take no for an answer. Pienish told
the woman he had to discuss something in private with his son.
“You’re going to talk about me,” she said, her tone betraying annoyance.
“You’re right,” was the dry reply. Father and son moved past her without turning back, Nushiss
and Kapapisht following them out the door, only to drop back a discreet distance.
“We’ve naught to discuss about Guðdís or anybody else,” his father said. “I told the woman
that to provoke her enormous hǘbris. It has worked. She’s angry with us both. If I know her, by
now she will have talked to herself long enough to have built up her confidence and her right-
eous indignation at having been refused and made to look like a fool.” Pienish seemed almost
to smile. “I would not be surprised if she were to barge in on us here.”
“If we are not going to talk about her, what are we going to discuss?” Nutin asked. He lied to
his father, saying that he had made him feel somewhat uncomfortable by refusing to talk for the
past two weeks. As far as Nutin was concerned, the word “manipulation” was too ugly—it was
what people said to disavow their own Godhood. The father looked at his son and arched one
brow. Nutin realized that he was letting him know he was no better than Guðdís.
“I was merely provoking your self-importance,” his father explained.
Then: “Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it: What weakens us is feeling of -
fended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men and women. I am perfect. If I looked im -
perfect to anybody, I must have been rocking my perfection imperfectly to a few perfect souls

182
 KALIDASA

that have been seeking imperfection in a perfect world where we are asked to seek imperfection
for our perfect selves. At times, almost every Sourcerer begins to envy wild animals: They suffer
and die, but they don’t in any way seem to make a ‘problem’ of it beforehand.
“Sourcery recommends that the eradication of self-importance from the lives of the People
should be our highest goal. Lately, I’ve not followed this recommendation. Many of my acts with
you have been geared to show you that without self-importance we’re invulnerable.”
Nutin thought to himself that it might be appropriate to be upon the verge of laughter at what
his father had been saying even when there was no reason for such laughter. The youth, how-
ever, was startled by an abrupt and rather hard slap right on the back of his head.
The Nahualli-in-training span around in a flash of red-painted leathers.
How had Guðdís snuck up behind the Nahualli-in-training? Intoxicated: The word did not cover
it at all; She was well-oiled, plastered and more than a little blotto.
As it happened, there was a line by a famous playwright about a drinker: ‘Now a sensible wo-
man, by and by a fool, presently a beast.’ That pretty well covered it. Guðdís belched.
Nutin’s father laughed so hard he doubled over almost to the ground: He could not speak.
He tried two or three times to say something, then finally got up and walked away, his body still
shaking with spasms of hilarity. Nutin was about to run after his father, still glowering at Guðdís.
At that moment he found her despicable. And then something extraordinary happened: He real-
ized what his father had found so hilarious. Guðdís and he were horrendously alike; Their self-
importance was colossal. The Nahualli-in-training’s anger at having been slapped was just like
her self-important ire and suspicion. Nutin’s father had been correct.
“What should I do about Guðdís?” Nutin asked, catching up to his father.
“Nothing,” his father shrugged. “Realizations are always personal.”
“Truly, ‘controlled folly’ and ‘self-importance’ are terms far too vague to be of value.”
“The mind picks some bad times to take a walk, doesn’t it?” The two of them sat down at one
end of the library conference table. His father at last began some kind of explanation.
He said that Sourcerers, Old and New, were divided into two categories. The first was made
up of those who were willing to exercise self-restraint, to channel their activities towards prag-
matic goals such as would benefit others and the world in general. The other category consisted
of those who did not care about self-restraint or pragmatic goals. It was the consensus that the
former had failed to resolve the problem of self-importance. “Yet, I must tell you that if we were
not self-important, it would not at all matter which category we fell into.
“Self-importance is maybe not the most suitable term for this: I personally prefer the Classical
Hellēnic term. But even that is not the best term, if used with the meaning it has acquired over the
centuries. In Classical times, the word ‘hǘbris’ was used with the meaning I intend it to have when
I say that ‘hǘbris’ and ‘self-importance’ are the same thing: They both indicate a feeling of being
futilely outraged when things don’t go the way we want them to go. But there is even greater sub-
tlety underlying both terms: For on the one hand, self-importance, or hǘbris, is the core of everything

183
 EUDAIMONIA

that is beneficial to us, and on the other, the core of everything that is detrimental to us, too. To get
rid of only the self-importance which is detrimental requires a masterpiece of strategy. Sourcerers
have always accorded the highest praise to those who have accomplished it.”
Nutin complained that the idea of eradicating self-importance, though very appealing to him
at present, appeared incomprehensible; He told his father that he found the Autarkēs’ directives
for getting rid of it so vague that he could not possibly interpret them.
“I have said to you before,” his father responded, “that in order to follow the Path of Unknow-
ledge one has to be very imaginative. You see, in the Path of Unknowledge nothing is illogical.
A Sourcerer renounces hǘbris as a matter of course, not principle,” he added.
“I’m really mystified. You keep on saying that Guðdís is a petty tyrant.”
Silence. A frown: Just what the Hel is a petty tyrant anyway?
“A petty tyrant is a tormentor,” his father responded. “Someone who seems to hold the power
of life and death over a Sourcerer... or simply annoys them to distraction.” He laughed quietly
at his son’s semblance of confusion when Nutin asked him if he were pulling his leg.
“I wouldn’t dream of doing that,” he would add. “Guðdís might do that, but not I. Guðdís is an
annoying, small-fry petty tyrant. She annoys you to pieces and makes you rage.”
Another smile: “She even slaps you. With all that she is teaching you Sourcery.”
“That’s not possible!” Nutin additionally protested, this time with honesty.
“You have not yet put together all the ingredients of my benefactor’s strategy. Once you do
that, you’ll know how efficient and clever is the device of using a petty tyrant. The strategy gets
rid not only of self-importance—or hǘbris, used with the meaning I have explained. To some, tyr-
ants only render their victims helpless or make them as brutal as they themselves are. The dif-
ference is this: Guðdís is a victim, not a Sourcerer or a Nahualli. Let us get back again to what I
said about the Ice Age. The Old Sourcerers of that era could not have found any better ground.
The First Men of that time were the petty tyrants who tested the Sourcerers’ skills to their limit.
After dealing with a one such as that, an Old Sourcerer would be ready to face anything. They
were the lucky ones. Back then, there had seemed to be petty tyrants everywhere. Over the en-
suing millennia, things changed a great deal—today, petty tyrants do not have that scope. In my
day, my benefactor had to go to a great extreme to gift me a worthy one.”
A sigh. “I was lucky. A king-sized one had been found. At the time, I felt like you.”
Nutin’s father would say that his ordeal began some weeks before he met his benefactor. The
big man had been but a teenager at the time. He had landed a job at a quarry out on Epekwitk.
He had always been big. It had been easy for him to get jobs amongst the Gentlemen and his
fellow tourists. One day, when he had been moving some sacks of blasting powder, a daímōn
had come by. She had been well dressed and appeared to be a woman of some means. She
had been in her fifties, and very autocratic. She had looked at him, then spoken to the foreman
and left. Pienish had then been approached by the foreman, who had told him that for a fee he
would recommend him for a job in the Lady’s house. Pienish had told the man that he had no

184
 KALIDASA

money. The foreman had smiled and said not to worry since he would have plenty by payday.
He had patted Pienish’s back and said it was an honour to work for an Eupatríd.
Immediately thereafter, the foreman had himself taken Pienish to the big house and left him
there with another man, an ugly little man who asked him a lot of questions.
He had wanted to know about Pienish’s escort. Pienish had responded that he had sent the
Gentlemen away. The man was so pleased that he had smiled through rotten teeth.
He had promised Pienish that they would pay him a lot, and that he would even be in a po -
sition to save money, because he did not have to spend any, for he was going to live and eat in
the big house. The way the man laughed had been strange, and so the Sourcerer had perforce
known that he had to escape immediately. He had run for the gate, but the man had cut in front
of him with a muzzle-loaded pistol, cocking it and ramming it into Pienish’s belly.
“You’re here to work yourself to the bone,” the man had said. “Don’t you forget it!”
The daímōn had then shoved Pienish around with a billy club.
Then he had taken him to the side of the big house and, after observing that he worked his
men every day from sunrise to sunset without breaks, he had put Pienish to work pulling out
enormous boulders. He had also told him that if he ever tried to escape or went to the Gentle-
men he would shoot him dead. “You’ll work here till you die,” he had laughed.
Nutin’s father told him that the big house had looked like a fortress, with muscular, well-armed
men everywhere. Thus, his father had got busy working, trying not to think about his predica-
ment. At the end of his first day, the man had come back, kicking him all the way to the kitchen
because he did not like the defiant look in Pienish’s eyes; He had threatened to sever the ten-
dons of his arms if he did not obey him. In the kitchen, an elderly woman had brought food, but
Pienish had been too upset and scared to eat. The old woman had advised him to eat as much
as he could; He had to be strong, she had told him, for his work would not end.
Pienish had been unnerved to find such a place. Pāndaimṓnion citizens had always before
lived in grand villas and had Gentlemen do everything for them. The Gentlemen—as well as the
tourists and immigrants, like himself—were the plebeians of Pāndaimṓnion. Pienish explained
to his son that he had worked at the Lady’s place for some six weeks, that the daímōn had bul-
lied him every moment of every day. He had made the big man work under the most desperate
conditions, doing the heaviest work, under the constant threat of a knife or gun or billy club. He
had been sent twice to the stables to clean the stalls while a nervous stallion was in them. “An
immortal, even if grown tired, should never lack the Power to dismiss themselves. Choosing oth-
erwise meant that I had to go through the same Hel again the very next day.”
What precipitated the end had been his request to have some time off; The pretext was that
he needed to go to town to pay the foreman of the quarry the money he owed. The other fore-
man retorted that Pienish could not stop working, not even for a day, because he was in debt
up to his ears just for the privilege of working there. It was then that Pienish had realized that
he was done for. He knew the daímōn’s manoeuvres. Both he and the other daímōn/foreman

185
 EUDAIMONIA

had been in cahoots to somehow get men from the quarry, work them to death, and to divide
their salaries. That realization had enraged Pienish so much he had run by the kitchen scream-
ing and had got inside the big house. The foreman and the other workers had been caught by
surprise. Pienish had run out of the front door, nearly getting away, but the foreman had caught
him at the gate and had shot him in the thigh, leaving Pienish for dead.
Of course, it had not been his benefactor’s wish that Pienish should to die. His anonymous
benefactor had run to his side as he lay there, tending him till he got better.
“When I told my benefactor the story, he could hardly contain his excitement.”
“That foreman is a prize,” the Great Aiasheu had said. “He is too good to be wasted. Someday
you must go back to that house.” The anonymous Sourcerer told him that he had been the first to
enjoy this one-in-a-million petty tyrant, a beast with near unlimited power. Pienish had thought
his benefactor nuts. Only much later did he grasp what the young man had been on about, com-
ing to the conclusion that the absence of Gentlemen in the big house had been a result of the
man’s Sourcery, although Pienish never learned how such a thing may be done.
Pieniss: “Did you really go back to that house?”
A smile: “A petty tyrant like that one was one-in-a-million; He mustn’t be wasted. If someone
makes us aware that we need to curtail our self-importance, that help is real.”
“How did you manage to go back without being recognized?”
“My benefactor created a strategy: Focus, Humour, Appreciation, Harmony. I’m sure that he
had not been lying. Yet, at the time, I had doubted I could carry it off with flair and joyfulness. My
benefactor was enjoying the encounter by directing it. The idea of using a petty tyrant is not only
for perfecting a life’s expansion, but also for enjoyment, happiness. Anyone who submits to the
petty tyrant can be defeated: To act in anger, to have no delight, is to be defeated.” Guðdís may
well wonder how anyone could enjoy the monster Pienish had described.
“He was nothing in comparison to the real monsters that the Old Sourcerers had faced during
the Ice Age. By all indications, those Sourcerers enjoyed themselves blue dealing with them.
They proved that even the worst tyrant can bring joy, provided one is a Sourcerer.”
Nutin’s father explained that the mistake average persons made in confronting petty tyrants
was to not have a clear strategy: The fatal flaw was most people took themselves too seriously.
Their actions or thoughts, as well as the actions or thoughts of the petty tyrant, were often import-
ant to them. Sourcerers, on the other hand, not only had a well-thought-out strategy, but were
free from self-importance. What restrained their self-importance was that they knew that reality
was an interpretation they made. That knowledge had been one of the definitive advantages
which the Old Sourcerers had had over their “no-nonsense” adversaries. Nutin’s father told him
that he had become convinced that he could defeat the foreman using only the realization that
petty tyrants took themselves with deadly seriousness, while he did not.
Following his benefactor’s plan, Pienish had got a job in the same quarry as before.
Nobody had remembered that he had worked there in the past.

186
 KALIDASA

His benefactor’s strategy specified that his student had to be solicitous of whoever came to
look for another victim. As it happened, the same woman came and spotted him, as she had
done before. This time he chose to be physically even stronger than before.
The same routine took place. The strategy, however, called for refusing any payment to the
foreman from the quarry. The man had never been turned down before.
He threatened to fire Pienish or get him expelled from the pānoptikón entirely.
Pienish had threatened him back, saying that he would go directly to the Lady’s house and
see her; His benefactor had Seen that she, being only the mate of the owner of the quarry, did
not know what the two foremen were up to. Pienish told the foreman he knew where she lived
due to having worked in the surrounding garden. The daímōn had then begun to haggle; Pien-
ish had demanded several coins before he would accept going to the big house. The foreman
had given in and handed him the coins. Pienish had been quite aware that the man’s acquies-
cence had been a ruse to get him to go to the big house without further fuss.
“He himself once again took me to the house. As soon as we got there, I ran into the house
to look for the Lady. I found her; I dropped to my knees and kissed her hand to thank her. The
two foremen were livid. The foreman at the house followed the same pattern as before. But I
had the right equipment to deal with it; I had Focus, Humour, Appreciation, Harmony. It turned out
as my benefactor had planned it. My Focus made me fulfil the bastard’s most asinine demands.
What usually exhausts a human being in a situation like that is a wear and tear on their self-im-
portance; Any man or woman or child who had an iota of pride may have been ripped apart by
being made to feel worthless. Not me; I gladly did everything he asked. I was joyful and strong.
And I did not give a fig about my daily pains. To tune the spirit while the world is trampling upon
you is the heart of what it once was for an Old Sourcerer to become a Nahualli.”
Pienish explained that his benefactor’s strategy required that instead of feeling sorry for him-
self, he immediately go to work mapping the man’s personality and character.
Pienish had found that the foreman’s strongest points were his violent nature and his dar-
ing: He had shot Pienish in broad daylight and in sight of onlookers. His greatest desire was
that he should have an opportunity to give free reign to his rage. He would not attempt again to
kill a man inside the compound in the daytime and so endanger his job. Another great desire was
that he had been, bizarrely, some kind of family man. He had had a mate and kids who lived in a
modest, low-slung manor of two storeys, served by a dozen Gentlemen.
“To gather all this information while they’re beating you up is Sourcery. The foreman was a
fiend; He had no saving grace. According to the Old Sourcerers, a perfect petty tyrant has no
redeeming feature.” Nutin’s father would say that Harmony—and Forbearance—which he had
had to have, had been automatically included in his benefactor’s strategy. Forbearance was to
wait patiently—no rush, no anxiety: A simple holding back of what was to come.
“I grovelled, often shitting myself under his whip. The men around me made jokes, seeing
something deep which they could not express except by something silly or rude.”

187
 EUDAIMONIA

Yet, he had been happy. His benefactor’s strategy was what made him go on without hating
the man’s guts. He was becoming a true Sourcerer. He had known what he desired to do and
why he should desire it. “Right there is one of the great joys of Sourcery.”
Nutin’s father added that his benefactor’s strategy had called for a regular encouraging of the
man by taking shelter with a higher authority. His shield had been the Lady who had got him the
job. He kneeled in front of her and called her a Goddess every time he saw her. He begged her
to give him some medallion of hers so he could pray for her long life and for his own luck. “She
gave me one,” Nutin’s father said. “That rattled the man. Once I got the servants to pray to her
at night, I think he decided to kill me. I knew he could not afford to let things go on. As a counter-
measure, I organized a dinner among all the servants of the house. I think the Lady had thought
I had the makings of a most proper, grateful and submissive servant.
“I didn’t sleep soundly after that, nor did I sleep in my bed. I climbed to the roof every night.
From there I saw the man twice looking for me in the middle of the night. Daily, he shoved me
into the stallions’ stalls hoping that I’d be crushed to death, but I had a big door of heavy hard-
wood that I braced against one of the corners and protected myself behind it. The man never
knew because he was deathly afraid of being crushed himself.”
Nutin’s father said that Harmony was the quality that governed the release of all that was held
back. Focus, Humour and Appreciation were like the dam behind which everything was to be
pooled. Harmony was the gate in that dam. The foreman had known only violence, with which
he terrorized. If his violence were neutralized, he would be rendered helpless.
Pienish had known that the man would not dare to kill him in view of the house. One day, in
the presence of the other workers, but in sight of his Lady, he insulted the man.
Pienish called him a coward who was mortally afraid of the boss’s fat mate.
His benefactor’s strategy had called for being on the alert for a moment like that and using it
to turn the tables on the petty tyrant. Unexpected things always happened that way: The lowest
of the slaves suddenly makes fun of a tyrant, taunts him, makes him look ridiculous in front of
significant witnesses, and then rushes away without giving time for retaliation. The man had
gone crazy with anger. Pienish had turned his back, kneeling before the Lady.
Nutin’s father said that when the Lady had gone inside the house, the man and his friends
had called him to the back, allegedly to do work. The foreman was livid with anger.
Pienish had pretended to acquiesce, but instead of heading for the back, he had run for the
stables. He had trusted that the horses would make such a racket the owners would come out
to see what was wrong. He knew the foreman would not dare shoot him again; That would have
been too noisy and the man’s fears of risking his job had been too overpowering. Nutin’s fath-
er had also known that the vile, cowardly foreman would not go where the horses were—not
unless the man had first been pushed far beyond all endurance.
“I jumped inside the stall of the wildest stallion, and the petty tyrant, blinded by rage, took out
a knife and jumped in after me. I scrambled behind my purloined door.”

188
 KALIDASA

The horse had kicked the foreman once and it had all been over.
“I had spent six months in that house, and in that period had exercised the four principles my
benefactor had advised. Thanks to him, I had succeeded. Not once had I felt sorry for myself for
the fact that I often shat my pants; Deep inside, I had been joyful, serene. My Focus and Humour
were as keen as they had ever been, and I had had a firsthand view of what Appreciation and
Harmony did for impeccable Sourcerers. I tell you: Not once did I wish for him to die.
“My benefactor explained something very interesting. Timing means holding back with the
spirit something that the Sourcerer somehow knows will come in due time. It does not mean that
they go around plotting to do anyone mischief, or planning to settle past scores, for timing is a
thing from a higher plane of existence. As long as I had Focus, Humour, Appreciation and Har-
mony, Law of Attraction would give whatever was due to whoever desired it.”
“Do petty tyrants sometimes win, destroying the Sourcerer?” Nutin would ask.
“Yes and no. Sure, there was a time when Sourcerers died like flies. On the surface it might
seem that a petty tyrant could put anyone to death, simply acting on a whim. Out of life’s school
of war—whoever takes the life of a Sourcerer merely makes them stronger.”
“Isn’t it thus spoken,” Pienish would say: “ ‘Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my father
and he shall presently give me more than twelve phálanges of angels?’
“Of course some things are more preferable than others, more to one’s taste, more in keep-
ing with one’s desires. But then, once a man or woman learns to See, they realize that they can
no longer think about the things they look at, and if they cannot think about what they look at, it
becomes unimportant whether they get what they desire or not or whether they get what is to
their taste or not. To stub a toe is by no means important, be it nevertheless a little unpleasant!
But whether one is consciously aware of it or not, all day, everyday, one is giving birth to new
desires that are being born from the unpleasant details of the life one is living out on the Lead-
ing Edge of thought.” Nutin interpreted what he had said as meaning that crying was more im-
portant than laughter. His father said that there was little practical difference and that the former
was indeed of great instrumental value; Yet, the rational preference was for laughter. Maybe
there were Men and Women of Unknowledge who never laughed; Pienish had never met such
a one. “Theoretically, a Man of Unknowledge might choose to remain absolutely impassive and
never laugh. He may even behave as if to be impassive matters; He might behave true to that
belief, because that would also be controlled folly. Yet he would know that from the perspective
of eternity, everything is nothing less than fantastic, and hence no more important than anything
else. There is no way to say his actions are more important than mine. All outcomes are equi-
valent in value and therefore they are no more important than anything else.”
Nutin asked his father if his statements were a pronouncement that what was called Seeing
was in effect a better way than merely looking at things. Pienish said that the mind could per-
form both functions, but that neither of them was significantly better than the other. Yet, to train
oneself to feel important was, in his personal opinion, an unnecessary loss.

189
 EUDAIMONIA

“Just imagine interrupting one’s eminently interesting discussion on the nature of reality with
a fascinating historical figure while on a walk in the woods just because one has stubbed one’s
toe! Imagine taking one’s mind off one’s orgasm merely because of a mosquito bite. To a moun-
taineer, the discomforts of climbing the mountain are not at all important, what is important is to
get to the summit; To the marathon runner, the hot sun blazing down is not important, what is
important is to win the race. But to a Man or Woman of Unknowledge, it’s not even important to
climb the mountain or to win the race, since a Sourcerer knows that their existence is forever.
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in some future existence of ours, we all shall look back
upon what we now think is our present existence as if it were a dream.
“Suppose you were to live a long life of endless drudgery; And then you die and go into the
eternal hereafter. After a million years of living it up in eternal bliss, are you still going to be harp-
ing back at the life you lived on Gaia that was full of suffering? Are those few years going to be
that important to you? I really do not think they would be! Do you? And then came Dḗmos and
Aléxandros fretting about petty tyrannies! What utter small-mindedness!”

Two years ago, fall: Nutin had learned of the idea of “prisonization” from a chapter in The
Kingdom of Glass which those interested in the history of incarceration studied.
Nutin had read aloud: “That is for the best. Otherwise the daímōn might soon realize they’re
in prison. A person can spend their life between four walls, and little more, but if they somehow
can be made to think and feel that they are not a prisoner, they are not a prisoner. Yet, it was ill
done. I’d forgotten, being too involved in my philosophy, that he had been a King. He didn’t see
things rationally, but as a King. What I told him meant that his power was removed. His kingdom
had been a dust-mote in the sea, naught but a joke to men who ruled the Hakhamanish Empire.
With such a person, to keep one’s eyes downcast and not speak unless spoken to were the two
rules a Gentleman must follow, but those just happen to be basics of espionage.”
Anikashi had been the first to speak up: “A man can be confined to a room with an unlocked
door that opens inwards... as long as it does not occur to him to pull, not push!
“To Dḗmos, the pānoptikón had not been a metaphor; It was the greatest failing of everything
he was. If a man aims for perfection, that man is unlikely to be content.”
Erica C-731: The genius of the 21st-century system, what distinguishes it from its
ancestors, Is that it seems so voluntary. Killjoys choose to commit crimes. that
is why we are locked up or locked out. But herein lies the trap: There is no way to
rule innocent people. The only power governments ever have is the power to crack
down on criminals. Well... when there are not enough criminals, one makes them. One
declares most things a crime. if the worst thing my grandfather ever attempted
was drive drunk, it could be argued that he was putting others at more risk than
if he had been smoking marijuana in the privacy of his own living—

190
 KALIDASA

] Look at that young man in brown leggings and a red tunic,tunic, ^ Aiasheu sent, meaning a thin
and very dark-complexioned, sharp-featured man who now stood among the children.
He seemed to be undecided whether to go towards the shore or towards the street. Twice he
raised his hand in the direction of the beach as though he were talking to himself and were about
to start moving towards it. Then he stared at the children with a blank expression.
He’s obviously very sick, was all that Erica had been able to note.
] Is that all you can say about him? ^ Aiasheu had asked her, with a sigh.
Erica enumerated a series of reasons that might have accounted for the young man’s shabbi-
ness: Poor health, bad luck, indolence, indifference to his own personal appearance.
Aiasheu had sent that she was merely speculating, and that he was not interested in justifying
anything by suggesting the young man was a victim of some unconquerable force.
Maybe he’s a secret agent made to look like a bum, Erica had sent, bitingly.
] He’s not made to look like that. Look how weak he is. His arms and legs are thin. He can
hardly walk. Few men can pretend to look that way. There is something definitely “wrong” with his
physical body; Not his circumstances, however. I have to stress that I want you to see that man
as a Kamanitushit, or at least a philosopher. This means to stop judging him in a moral sense or
pitying him on the grounds that he is a leaf at the mercy of the wind. To See entails happening
upon an individual in chains without thinking they’re hopeless or helpless. ^
The Kingdom of Glass was a reimagining of pānoptikón life during the early Didáskal. Classical
Hellēnic philosophers—such as Plátōn—had been some of the first to develop the idea of using
confinement to reform offenders instead of as retribution. Was it right for the author to assume
that punishment and forced labour had no effect but to develop a profound acrimony and thirst
for the forbidden, or even a frightful recalcitrance? As the narrative of the work progressed, the
Warden had gestured to the knoll she and the antagonist—a former King—stood on, part of the
island of Krḗtē, a thin canopy of trees visible on the other side, all of it pānoptikón grounds. Up
until that point in history, most prison plots had been scraped flat and denuded of vegetation as
security measures. The Warden: “Most of the staff members were quite astonished by the trees.
Should they not be cut down? What if they climb up—the inmates, that is? Well, if you ever get it
in your head to do such a thing, you sit there, grow tired and come down.”
The Warden: “In the Kingdom of Glass everything is transparent: There is no place to hide a
dark heart. The Hellēnic word for ‘all-seeing’ is of course pānoptikós.” The right to be left alone
with oneself: Was it the beginning of all true freedom? Was justice nothing but being allowed
to do whatever one pleased? Was injustice merely whatever might prevent one from doing so?
The Warden had pointed out that she now made use of much of the island, allowing a daímōn
to walk, ride or be carried piggy-back over hills, travelling to or from vineyard, theatre and man-
sion. “The human race can’t be freed by the same injustices which had once enslaved it. To in-
jure my opponent is to injure myself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Gentle
Way. If my heart is large enough to envelop all my adversaries—any adversary—I can see right

191
 EUDAIMONIA

through them and avoid all their attacks. I might then guide them along the path of logic and
reason. Truly, I’m grateful for hardship, setbacks or savage beasts. Dealing with such obstacles
as these is an essential part of my continued training in the Gentle Way.”
In those days, there were those who came there, only to repute that all conceivable amenities
had been supplied. A man or woman could enjoy themselves... and most would. The price was
cheap: All they need do was behave. For the worthy there had been rewards to beggar belief, but
the Gentle Way had specially reserved the lion’s share of its love for the unworthy.
But speak to a Gentleman or Gentlewoman, and all might just be supplied.

As a boy, Pienish had somehow assumed that as an adult he would have better thoughts.
Yet, adults were just obsolete children: Grown-ups never understood anything by themselves.
It was necessary for the Autarkēs to always and forever be explaining this to him.
Was it hard for him to see why Innut preteens, in particular, were drawn to the idea of prisons?
The best thing—the only good thing—about being in prison would be the feeling of relief; The
feeling that self-importance had plunged as low as it could and had hit bottom. 
Nutin had found an ideal prison under the west wing of the dining hall. It was a hole just big
enough to hold one child sitting or lying down, formed by three stonework foundation walls and
the underside of the floor above. The foundations being part of a single form, the floor of it was
continuous with the walls, and a large-ish slab of stone siding would close it off completely. But
the door had to be locked. Experimenting, he found that two props wedged between a facing
wall and the slab on top shut it with what seemed like an awesome finality.
Nobody inside could get that door open. No child, anyway, which was all that mattered.
Of the several boys and girls assembled, one had asked: “What about light?”
“No light,” Nutin said. He spoke with authority because his imagination put him straight into
the reality. What facts he had, he utilized, but it was not facts which lent him certainty.
Then: “Dḗmos was left to wallow in the dark in the Desmōtérion; For years.”
Anikashi looked at them, derisive. “You’re all crazy! Who wants to get locked into a place like
that? Why?” Nutin had contrived for the making of the prison to appear like Anikashi’s idea. But
Nutin had not anticipated that the making of it would suffice Anikashi. Anikashi, for his part, had
not yet realized that imagination did not suffice for some individuals; That they must get into the
cell, that they must attempt with all their might to open the unopenable door.
“I want to see what it’s like,” had said Pashin, a large-faced, practical boy.
“Then use your head!” Anikashi urged, but Nutin and others backed Pashin.
“How long do you want to stay in there, Pashin? A hṓra?”
“Look,” Pashin had said. “If I’m the prisoner, I can’t decide. I’m not free. You—”
“That’s right,” nodded Nutin, aroused all the more by this logic.
A young boy had said, “You can’t stay in too long, Pashin. I want a turn!”

192
 KALIDASA

The prisoner had deigned no reply. He had crawled into the little cell.
The door had been raised and set in place with a bang, and the props wedged against it, all
the jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm. They had all crowded against the door
to listen, but because there was little room inside to move about, had heard nothing.
Silence. At last: “How long will we give him?”
Anikashi: “It’s four hṓrai till sunset. That ought to be enough.”
The youngest child spoke: “But I want a turn!”
“All right; Afterwards we’ll lock you in overnight.” This had come from Nutin.
Anikashi had said: “Tomorrow morning would be better, I think.”
Four hṓrai later they had knocked the props down, releasing their prisoner. The older boy
had emerged as dominant of the situation as when he entered it, saying he was hungry, and it
had been nothing; He had slept. Nutin could not say why he had felt so disappointed.
But... what else did I expect? Pashin of course knew he would be released...
An idea: “Would you be willing to do it again?” Nutin had inquired.
Pashin had rolled his shoulders and stretched: “Sure. Why not?”
Petulance: “No! I want to be given second turn—”
Nutin had spun about to face the younger boy: “Shut up!” And then: “Now, Pashin? Would you
crawl back in there tonight, without knowing when we’d let you out again?”
Pashin had scratched his butt. “I guess...”
The big boy had been a little puzzled: “Without food?”
“They fed prisoners. So weird. Why not just let them transition, if they couldn’t pay?”
Pashin yawned. His attitude of lofty endurance had been intolerable for Nutin.
“Look,” Nutin said to the youngest boy, “go ask the fire-keepers for leftovers, and snatch us
a skin or something full of water, too.” He turned back to Pashin. “We will give you a whole sack
of stuff, so that you can stay in that hole as long as you feel like.”
“As long as you feel like,” Pashin had corrected him.
“Just get in there!” The older boy’s self-possession brought out Nutin’s anger. “You’re the pris-
oner. You cannot talk back to us. When we say jump, you say how high. What part of this don’t
you understand?! Now, turn around and put both hands flat atop your head.”
Silence. “You want to back out, then?” Nutin had cajoled him.
Anikashi: “You cannot ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you’d have to just
take it, and nobody will come to help. We can even kick you in the balls and you cannot kick
back. Because you’re not free. Now, don’t tell me you still want to go through—”
“Sure. Hit me.” Pashin had gone so far as to open his stance, arms gone limp. Imagine smil-
ing after a kick to the testicles. Then think of doing so as much as seven days a week.
Anikashi reached out to touch Nutin’s arm. Nutin had snarled wordlessly.
For a long moment the group of boys and girls had stood facing one another beside the heavy
foundation walls of the longhouse, a stiff circle around a lit lantern in the darkness.

193
 EUDAIMONIA

“Don’t tell me what to do, you daímōn. Shut up and get into that cell!”
And as Pashin had turned to obey, Nutin pushed him straight-arm in the back so that he fell
sprawling. He gave a sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing his left hand which had
been scraped, or possibly sprained, against the back wall of the makeshift cell.
Making poison was as much fun as making a cake. Nutin liked to make poison. If Guðdís did
not understand this she would never understand anything about him.
The youngest boy returned with a loaf, some dried caribou and a large skin of fresh water. He
called out as he ran, but the ominous silence at the cell got into him at once. The food and wa -
ter was shoved in, the “door” put in place. Pashin had been alone in darkness.
The others had gathered around the lantern. Anikashi shrugged: “Where’ll he piss?”
“In his bed,” Nutin had replied with a laugh. The child did not explain his humour. For some
reason he began to laugh without explanation, whooping till he was breathless.

It had been past sunset and most were already abed, though lights were still on here and
there in the domiciles. The street was empty. The children careened down it laughing and call-
ing to one another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of disturbing others, and of com-
pounding wickednesses. They woke up most of the children with games of tag down the halls.
The tumult died down quickly without so much as a word from the vigil-keeper.
Nutin and the others sat up whispering together for a long time on Nutin’s bed. They decided
that Pashin had asked for it, and thus would get two full days in prison. Their group met in the
morning at the woodworking workshop, and the Utshimau asked where Pashin was. Nutin had
exchanged a glance with Anikashi. He felt clever. He felt a sense of power in staring Anikashi
to silence. And yet, when he heard himself respond that Pashin must have joined another group
for the day, Nutin was shocked by his lie; His sensation of secret power made his heart pound.
His legs itched; His ears felt hot. When the Utshimau spoke to him he jumped in alarm or fear
or some such feeling; A feeling Nutin had never had before. It was something like victory in a
wrestling match or footrace, but better: Inwards and alive; Telling the truth, Nutin did not have to
recall anything! Nutin had kept thinking about Pashin, as he plugged and sanded holes in many
hand-cut boards and sanded the boards back to silky smoothness.
Anikashi, who had been standing guard, came to them half a day later, uneasy.
“I thought I heard Pashin say something in there. In a sort of whimper.”
Nutin cajoled him. “Come on, Anikashi, don’t go altruistic on us. Don’t get self-important! Let
him finish it out and respect himself at the end of it. He has food and water.”
“Altruistic, Hel! I want to respect myself!” Anikashi had said, and set off briskly.
The others had followed. They all crawled under the building to the cell. Anikashi knocked
one wedge free; Another young boy, the other. The door fell with a rather loud bang.
Pashin seemed merely to be still sitting in lotus position, his hands limp.

194
 KALIDASA

His eyes, however, were clearly dead. The big-bodied lad did not get up. The smell that came
off him had been rank. As far as Nutin could tell he had suffered from diarrhoea, for some reas-
on. There was a mess in the cell, smears of yellow-brown all over the floor.
Once they all crawled back out from under the building and were heading back around to the
dormitory, someone asked, “How long was it?” A shrug. “How long was he in there?”
Silence. At last: “About half a day, counting the first imprisonment.”
“Long enough,” Nutin would add, nodding to himself for some reason.
I just wanted him to transition. Dad doesn’t have to make it out to be a Godsdamn tragedy. His
father had rarely had any real tolerance for drama that was not of his own making.
For most of the rest of Pienish’s days, would his son find himself berated, not for his faults
but for what should have been considered his virtues: Scorned for all those qualities of charac-
ter that should be an Unknower’s highest pride? Good thing daímōns were highly immune to de-
pression. Their ability to tell themselves stories about how attractive and wily they were, and to
believe it, surely helped. The only situation in which Nutin might feel shame or embarrassment
was when he had been outplayed. He had read in a Khristianikós text that he was a son of God.
He also read the Old Testament; There was a story in Kings where God had forty-two children
dismembered by bears for insulting the prophet Elisha. It was not much of a stretch to believe
that that God was his father. In the past, philosophers had oftentimes said that a lack of remorse
was a bad thing, certain that remorse and guilt were necessary to being a “good” person. As far
as Nutin was concerned, unpleasant repercussions only served as a challenge to figure out how
to avoid them while doing what he wanted anyway. Homicide was one of the places where the
nature of a daímōn took a distinct turn for the nefarious in a lot of people’s minds, and yet Nutin
could not see why. The problem lay in the question “Does X exist?” Such a question did not al-
low for an unambiguous answer—at least, not as it stood:  Not till one answered the further ques-
tion, “Exist as what?” Everything in the world exists, at least as an idea; Lüsistráte must exist at
least as a fictional character! The Old Sourcerers had held that since to be a Kamanitushit was
to have control over one’s internal dialogue, one must have a proper dialogue—on a superficial
level it might seem as if there should be easy agreement as to what The Problem of Other Minds
was and how moral beings should address it. A Kamanitushit could be a terrifying person. Their
intent was to dominate everything about their subjective experience. The Old Sourcerers had
been fortunate; They had had time to learn. They had Seen wonders most could never imagine.
Milwa'tem was certain that under their direction, their entire population had ventured off into other
worlds and had never returned. Nutin was sure that his cousin would be incapable of recalling
it, if ever he should meet an Old Sourcerer who was still alive. Must I dare to enter the cell; Must I
prove to the world that there is no such thing as an unopenable door?

195
 KALIDASA
道可道 The Way you can travel,
⾮常道。 Is not the eternal Way.
名可名 The name that can be named,
⾮常名。 Is not the eternal Name.

—from Tao Te Ching by Lǎo-Tzǝ

“The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” Can anyone but those steeped in the
Hellēnic tradition properly understand? Although I myself always refer to the Tao, some thinkers
have supposed that the “the” should be dropped. They feel that Eurṓpēans using “the” conveys
the idea that the Tao is a metaphysical reality—despite the rather obvious reason for the word
being absent from all the original texts. Nevertheless, in the history of Taoism, the Héllēnes have
brought a tool to bear that in the history of philosophy might be written thus:

PROOF!!!

The Tao is not a thing susceptible to logical interpretations, I realize that—or even to a syn -
tactical translation into Hellēnic. Everything Lǎo-Tzǝ writes is elusive, and the temptation is to
grasp at anything tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of his words. Even some of his
finest scholarly translators focus on clear ethical or metaphysical truths in the text, as if those
were what is important in it—the very stuff which Lǎo-Tzǝ submits leads us away from the Way.
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. In modern times, it is often said
that practically every advance in logic or philosophy has had to be piled onto the shoulders of
Aristotélēs. Logic and the Hellēnic tradition have not always been kind to the Tao; The reason
being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything
that refuses to give a clear account of itself. This is a statement that would ring true to me were
the Tao Te Ching not only beyond the human lógos, but the Lógos entire.
Müson ho Khēneüs warns us to “Study words from things, not things from words.” The real-
ity of Lǎo-Tzǝ’s words can only be tested, therefore, against one’s direct and indubitable experi-
ences of human life; Not the truth of human life against his words. This recalls to me Aristotélēs’
confutative method, which consists in showing the inconsistency which falls on those who deny
the Law of Non-Contradiction: Those who employ dialectic to defeat dialectic cannot help also
affirming it! However they reason, an affirmation of it will always be present. As always, those
who know do not talk and those who talk do not know. Close your mouth and block your ears and
blunt your sharpness; Untie your knots, soften your glare and settle your dust; Trying to define
yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth; Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. To
bear and not to own is Te; To act and not to lay claim is Te; Do the work of understanding and let
it go! For it is the very letting it go that will make it stay. The meaning of life is simply to be alive.
It is so damn plain and so damn obvious and so damn simple. Yet, so many people rush around in
a great panic as if it were crucial to understand something beyond oneself.

—from The Eternal Golden Braid by Aki Chiyoko

Two years ago, somewhere on the isle of Krḗtē: It had been one of those fall evenings so
common in stories but so rare in the real world. In summer, such heat would be ideal for ripen-

197
 EUDAIMONIA

ing a field of grain. Autumn was in full swing: The poplars had gone to apricot, while the shrubs
impinging on the road had gone a light brown. Only the oaks seemed loath to give up the sum-
mer, their leaves as yet an even mingling of gold and green. She could not wish for a finer day
to have half-a-dozen unarmed Gentlemen relieve her of her every possession.
“She’s not much of a horse. One step above a dray and when it—”
The robber baron had cut the teenaged rider off: “Look, the Polémarkhos is paying fine silver
for anything with four legs and a good eye. Even if you were stark mad or riding a hobbyhorse
down the road, I’d still have to take it off you, all right?” The daímōn bobbed his head. He had
smelled as if he bathed in raspberries, this noble. His jutting beard glistened with oil. He has lar-
ger breasts than I do, Aki Chiyoko had reflected. She watched them through the thin, sea-green
silk of the gold-fringed tunic the Eupatríd had dressed himself in. His right hand held a fan as he
stood before her, sweating, his left stretching the loose collar of his tunic.
Chiyoko climbed down from her horse. She had played The Game long enough to know there
would be nothing to be gained by debate. These Gentlemen had known their business: No en -
ergy wasted on apologetics—or veiled threats that could not possibly go anywhere. One of them
had looked over the horse, checking hooves, teeth, harness. Two others had gone through her
saddlebags with military efficiency, laying all her possessions out on the ground: Two blankets
and a hooded cloak, a flat leather satchel, one heavy, well-stocked travel-sack.
“That’s all of it, m’Lord,” one of the daímōn’s Gentlewomen said. The Centralizer?
A shrug: “Except for twenty pounds of oats, I guess.”
The Gentlewoman knelt down and opened the flat leather satchel, peering inside.
The Gentlewoman turned to look over her shoulder. “A scribe? An artiste?”
Chiyoko nodded. “It’s my devotion; And of no real value to him.”
The woman glanced through the satchel, found it to be true, set it aside. Then she upended
the travel-sack onto Chiyoko’s spread cloak and poked idly through the contents.
She took much of Chiyoko’s beer and a pair of bootlaces. Much to the teenager’s disappoint -
ment, she picked up the shirt she had bought back in Irákleio. It was silk dyed a profound and
royal blue, too nice for travelling. Chiyoko had not had a chance to wear it.
A long look. The teenager sighed, began to get undressed.
The Gentlewoman spoke: “You’ve only one blanket, don’t you Aíās?”
A shrug: “Her cloak is in much better shape than mine.”
“You may take it, but leave yours if you do. The same for your tinder box, Kástoras.”
“I used mine up, day before yesterday,” a man said. “Else I would.”
The whole process had been civilized. Chiyoko had lost all her needles but one, an extra pair
of socks, a box of dried fruit, a bag of sugar, a bottle of wine, a nice pair of dice and all her cloth-
ing. They left her half a sack of dried beef and a small loaf of rock-hard rye bread.
The teenager’s flat leather satchel would, by rights, remain untouched.
The Gentlewoman repacked the travel-sack, turned to faced her.

198
 KALIDASA

A look: “Let’s have the purse then. I know you’ve got one on you.”
Chiyoko handed it over to her without any objections.
Another cool look: “And the ring too.”
“There’s hardly any gold in it...” Chiyoko murmured as she pulled it from her finger.
A Gentlewoman: “What’s that around your neck?”
Chiyoko stepped forwards. Two shirt-buttons were hung from her neck by a cord.
The Gentlewoman stepped closer and rubbed the cord a little between her fingers before let-
ting it fall back onto Chiyoko’s chest, then emptied the purse into her hands, making a pleas-
antly surprised noise as she prodded through the coins with an index finger.
“Scribing pays better than I thought...” she muttered, counting out the coins.
“I don’t suppose you could spare me an obolós or two out of that?”
A yawn: “Y-You know, just enough for a couple of hot meals?”
The Gentlewoman turned, as if she could not quite believe what she had heard.
A Gentleman chuckled: “Gods, you do have a heavy pair, don’t you, girl!”
“He seems a reasonable fellow,” Chiyoko said, with a smile. “A girl’s gotta’ eat...”
One could not please everyone, but one could not not please everyone either.
The Gentlewoman actually smiled: “A sentiment I could agree with.” She retrieved a pair of
coins, brandished them before putting them back inside. “Here is a pair for your pair.” She then
tossed Chiyoko the purse, stuffing the beautiful royal-blue shirt into her saddlebag.
“Thank you!” A nod: “You might want to know that that bottle one of your underlings packed
is wood alcohol I use for cleaning my brushes. It’ll go badly if anyone drinks it.”
The Gentlewoman smiled again, looked to the daímōn: “See what comes of treating people
nicely?” she said, as she helped the fat daímōn atop his war-horse. “Well... it has been a pleas-
ure, Ma’am. If you get on your way, you may make Stǘgia by dark.”
When Chiyoko could no longer hear their hoofbeats in the distance, she repacked her travel-
sack, making sure everything was well stowed. Then she tugged off one of her boots, stripped
out the lining and removed a tightly-clothed bundle of coins stuffed deep into a toe. She moved
some of these into her purse, then unfastened her sack, producing a second bundle of coins
from underneath several layers of leather, and moved some of that money as well.
The key was to keep the proper amount in the purse. Too little and they may be disappoin-
ted, prone to look for more; Too much and the daímōn may get far too excited.
There was a third bundle of coins baked into the stale loaf of bread that only the most des-
perate of living beings would be interested in. She left that alone for now, as well as the whole
silver drakhmḗ hidden in a jar of ink. Over the weeks she had come to consider that to be some
kind of good-luck piece; Nobody ever found it. Still, she had to admit, it was not the most neat
robbery she had ever been through: They had been courteous, efficient but not terribly savvy .
Losing the horse and saddle was a pain, but she could acquire another and still have enough
money to live luxuriously until she made her way back to the outside world.

199
 EUDAIMONIA

Feeling a strong desire to urinate, Chiyoko pushed her way through the blood-red trees at the
side of the road. As she was making her way back to the road, there was sudden motion from
within the underbrush as a dark shape thrashed its way free of a nearby bush.
Chiyoko staggered back, crying out in alarm before she realized it was nothing more than a
raven beating its wings into flight. Chuckling at her foolishness, she straightened the burlap sack
she now wore, made her way back to the road, brushing away invisible strands of spiderwebs
that clung tickling to her. As she shouldered her travel-sack and satchel she found herself feel-
ing remarkably lighthearted, and not for no particular reason: The worst had just happened and
it had not been all that bad. The breeze tussled through the trees, sending leaves spinning like
golden coins down onto the rutted dirt road. It really is a beautiful day...

Meanwhile, in Stǘgia: The two Varángeioi guarding the Nine’s underground hall eyed him
sourly. As far as κύ. Fjalar knew, they were two of the deadliest men in the world.
Each was an immigrant and had a rather large ruby set in their left ears.
“Any weapons?” asked one of two identical, big-bodied twins, in Svenska Norse.
“Lefty,” κύ. Fjalar said in greeting, unceremoniously removing seven knives, a single-action
revolver, the darts strapped to his wrist and a good number of tiny, glass balls.
“I’m Lefty,” the other said, kneeling to pat down the dwarfish man.
“We both know if I wanted to kill anyone in there I couldn’t, with weapons or without.”
Lefty actually flushed. “Why don’t I ram this odd little—”
“What Lefty means is, why don’t you pretend not to be a threat, and we’ll pretend we’re the
reason? It’s a formality. Like asking a man how they are when you don’t really care.”
I never ask. Part of κύ. Fjalar supposed he should say something cutting.
Eight years ago, the dwarfish man had looked over at the body of the apprentice he had just
murdered with a snarl, which had at once turned into the usual wince of pain. The gash was thin
and long, starting under his left eye and ending on the right side of his jaw. Long ago, someone
had sewn the torn flesh together. Evidence of their clumsy attempt was still in place as a thin
line across his face. In any event, κύ. Fjalar’s cooling temper had taken in racks of tools. There
had not been a speck of blood on them. The files, hammers and screwdrivers were all still ar-
ranged according to size, everything positioned with geometrical exactitude. He had opened a
drawer. The meticulous rows of nitroglycerin detonators had not been—
“Um, κύ. Fjalar?” Righty said. Recovering, κύ. Fjalar stepped into the Nine’s audience hall
without lowering his eyes. It was a place to inspire fear. Carved from black obsidian, a platform
dominated the place. Nine chairs sat on the platform, a tenth above them like a throne. There
was only bare stone facing the platform. An interviewee would stand.
The chamber was a tight rectangle, but it was deep. The ceiling was so high it disappeared
into darkness. An elderly woman in a dark robe with its hood drawn down over her forehead de-

200
 KALIDASA

tached herself from the suite of onlookers, took up station behind the throne, a scrawny hand
resting on its back. Her face peered out of the hood like a caricature of a witch—sunken cheeks
and eyes, a big nose: One of the Polémarkhos’ Truthsayers and Gentlewomen.
Κύ. Fjalar walked in with an easy familiarity: The gloom held no terror for him. Even the far
corners of the chamber welcomed his eyes. Nothing was hidden from him.
The Nine had cowls on. Yet, all of them knew there was no hiding their identities.
Above, the Polémarkhos sat on his throne, as still and silent as usual.
Κύ. Kókkinos: “Ith it done?” The laughter the man’s lisp should have provoked somehow al-
ways seemed to dry up under the ever-present malice on his face. One of the Gentlewoman’s
claw-like hands tapped the Polémarkhos’ shoulder. She leaned in, whispered.
“Things aren’t as we expected...” κύ. Fjalar admitted. He gave a perfunctory report.
“I would suggest,” he concluded, “that we force the Árkhōn to promote him. Aegon may pre-
vent the Árkhōn from consolidating his power. If anyone makes a move, my little—”
The Master of Horses interrupted: “While we do acknowledge your... advice... κύ. Fjalar, we’ll
not squander so much political capital on some low ranking dēmarkh—”
“Thith converthation can wait. Κύ. Phalr doethn’t need to be ’ere.”
Κύ. Kókkinos turned his heavy-lidded eyes down towards the dwarfish κύ. Fjalar.
At last: “You dithn’t ac’lly ’ill ’im, I see. Can you thtill thliver on your p’omises?”
From his high chair, the daímōn would let the statement hang in the air.
Κύ. Fjalar would refuse to take the clumsy provocation.
Words were useless with a man like κύ. Kókkinos; He spoke the language of meat.
Κύ. Fjalar walked to him. Κύ. Kókkinos did not flinch or call out as he climbed the platform. A
few of his fellows were nervous, their Gentlemen merely observing the action closely.
Under κύ. Kókkinos’ velvet trousers, κύ. Fjalar saw his muscles bunch.
Κύ. Kókkinos kicked out at κύ. Fjalar’s face, but the dwarf had already moved.
Κύ. Fjalar slammed a needle into κύ. Kókkinos’ calf, stepped back, hands raised.
A bell rang and a moment later Righty and Lefty burst into the gloomy chamber.
The dwarf stood still; He seemed to make no move to defend himself.
Κύ. Fjalar was small, but his mass was all lean muscle and sinew. Lefty charged like a war -
horse. κύ. Fjalar simply extended both his hands, but once both had crashed, the impossible
happened. Instead of crushing the smaller man, Lefty’s sprint ended.
His gut stopped first, his belly bending against κύ. Fjalar’s open hand. The rest of him con-
tinued forwards. His body lifted parallel to the ground, then crashed to the stone floor.
“Thtop!” shouted κύ. Kókkinos, suddenly. Silence fell.
Righty skidded to a halt in front of κύ. Fjalar and then knelt by his brother.
Lefty moaned, his bleeding nose filling the mouth of a rat carved into the obsidian.
Κύ. Kókkinos pulled the needle out of his calf with a grimace.
A challenge: “What ith thith?!” Once again silence fell.

201
 EUDAIMONIA

A shrug. “You wanted to know if I could actually get away with it.”
Κύ. Fjalar put a small vial in front of the basher. “If that needle was poisoned, this would be
the antidote. But, if it wasn’t poisoned, the antidote should kill you. Drink it or don’t.”
The Polémarkhos continued to glare. His Gentlewoman emitted a cackle.
“I’d not drink that, if I were you, κύ. Kókkinos,” Dà Míng said. It was first time the Gentleman
had spoken in the two days since he had taken charge of κύ. Fjalar’s person.
The Polémarkhos: “Having bid you run, you yet strive with things impossible, perhaps to get
the better of them. Just keep in mind that you still take your orders from me. The next time you
touch one of mine, there just may be consequences. Get the fuck out of my sight!”

Hers had been a real Krḗtan breakfast: A plateful of dakos topped with fresh tomatoes and
lettuce, there were also a pie, feta, cucumbers, honey, yoghurt and a pitcher of milk not ten mikroí
from the cow. It had cost her three tetartemórioi. All worries were less with tea.
As usual, it had felt odd sitting at a table, eating with a knife and fork.
As usual, it had felt odd having a stranger wait on her with any kind of servility.
As she mopped up the remnants of her meal with bread, she realized she had a big problem.
Even in this rundown inn Waterside, she was attracting attention. Her shirt was nothing more
than an old burlap sack with holes cut for her arms and head. Her pants were made out of can-
vas and too big by several degrees. They reeked of the road, of sweat and, somehow, stagnant
alley-water. On her way into town she had been holding them up with a length of rope she had
dug out of the trash. She was filthy, barefoot, footsore and stank quite badly.
Two days had passed: Should she buy clothes or try to find a bath?
If she bathed first, she would have to wear her makeshift clothes afterwards.
However, if she tried to buy clothes looking the way she did now, she might not even be let
into the store. She doubted that anyone would want to measure her for a fit.
The innkeeper now came to take her plates. She had decided on a bath, mainly because she
was sick to death of smelling like a week-dead rat. Chiyoko smiled at the immigrant.
“Where do you suppose I can find a bath around here?”
“Here, if you have another tetartemórion.” He inspected her. “Or I’ll work you a hṓra instead. A
good hard hṓra, mind you. Dishes first, then hearth, then bath. That sound fair?”
An hṓra or so later her shoulders ached but the hearth was totally clean. The innkeeper then
showed her to a back room with a big wooden tub and a grate on the floor. There were several
pegs along the walls for clothes. Fine glass mirrors backed every wall sconce.
The innkeeper brought her a miniature bar of lotus soap, still in its wrapper.
As Chiyoko was rinsing herself, she had looked over at her discarded clothes.
Cleaner than she had been, she did not want to touch them, let alone wear them.
If she should try to wash them they might simply fall apart.

202
 KALIDASA

She dried herself. She used the brush to pull through the snarls in her hair. It was longer than
it had seemed when dirty. As Koko wiped the fog from one of the mirrors she was suddenly sur-
prised. She looked old; Older, at any rate. Not only that, she looked an Eupatríd’s daughter. Her
face was youthful. Her hair needed a bit of a trim, but was shoulder-length and straight, as was
the current fashion. The only thing missing was a young Eupatríd’s eternal sneer.
And that thought gave her an idea. Still naked, she left by the back door.
It was before noon and people were all about. Would it have been quite odd for even a single
stare to be turned in her way? She set a brisk pace, not trying to hide. She composed her fea-
tures into an impassive, infuriated mask without a trace of embarrassment. Perhaps fourteen of
every fifteen souls she passed were Gentlemen, tourists or immigrants. Even here, the overall
chances of meeting a man who may attempt to do her bodily harm were minuscule.
She stopped by a father and son loading burlap sacks into a cart. The son had been about
four years older than her and a head and shoulders taller. “Boy!” she snapped. “Where might I
buy some clothes around here? Decent ones!” she added. “An immigrant!”
He had looked at her, his expression somewhere between confusion and arousal.
His father had hurriedly taken off his hat and stepped in front of his son.
“M’Lady might try Zafeiríou’s. It’s plain stuff, but it’s only a street or two away.”
She had darkened her expression. “Is it the only place about?”
The immigrant had rubbed his chin. “Well, you could try... there’s one—”
She had waved him impatiently into silence. “Where is it?”
He pointed and she strode off. As she walked she recalled one of the young page parts she
had once played in the Kabuki theatre. The youth had been an insufferably petulant boy with an
important father. She now gave her head an arrogant tilt, stood to her full five-foot hight, set her
shoulders a little differently and made a couple of subtle mental adjustments.
Within a few mikroí, she threw open the door and stormed in.
There was a man in an apron who she could only assume was the proprietor.
He was in his forties and partly bald. The man had jumped at the sound of his door banging
against the wall. He turned to look at the young woman, his expression incredulous.
“Fetch me a robe, lack-wit. I am sick of being gawked at by you and every damned Lordling
who decided to go marketing today.” Chiyoko slouched into a chair, sulking.
When the man had not moved, Chiyoko had glared up at him.
“Did I stutter? Are my needs perhaps unobvious?”
She lowered her voice menacingly, “If you do not bring me something...” she stood up and
shouted, “I’ll tear this place apart! I’ll ask my father for your stones as a birthday gift! I will have
his dogs mount your dead corpse! Do you have any idea who I fucking am?!”
The man scurried away, and she threw herself back into the chair. A customer she had not
noticed until now made a hurried exit, stopping briefly to curtsy before doing so.
The Nipponese teenager had to fight back the urge to laugh.

203
 EUDAIMONIA

After that it had been all too easy. Chiyoko had kept him running about for a long time, bring-
ing her one piece of clothing after another. She had mocked the material, the cut and workman-
ship of everything he had brought out. In short, she had been the perfect bitch.
In truth, she could not have been more pleased: The clothing was gilded, but tasteful.
If a human being had not spent much time at theatre or within a large pānoptikón, one would
not easily understand why this bit of gamesmanship had been easy to accomplish. Eupatrídae
and their offspring were one of the great inconveniences, like a flood or a tornado.
When an immigrant was struck with one of these aggravations, the only thing a man or wo-
man amongst them could do was smile and try to minimize the damage.
The tailor knew this. He marked the shirt and pants and helped her out of them.
She got back into the robe he had given her.
He began sewing as if the devil were breathing down his neck.
She flounced back into a chair. “You may ask. I can tell you’re dying of curiosity.”
He looked up briefly from his stitching. “M’Lady?”
“The circumstances surrounding my current state of undress.”
“Ah, yes.” He tied off thread and began on the pants. “I’ll admit to a slight curiosity. No more
than would be proper, mind. I’m not one to pry into anyone’s business.”
“Ah,” she had nodded, pretending disappointment. “A laudable attitude.”
There followed a long moment; The only sound was that of thread being drawn through cloth.
She fidgeted. She continued as if he had asked her: “A whore stole my clothes.”
Silence. At last: “Really, m’Lady?”
“Yes, she tried to get me to trade them for my purse. Now that’s gamesmanship!”
The tailor would look up briefly, genuine curiosity plain on his face.
“Wasn’t your purse with your clothes, m’Lady?”
She looked shocked. “Certainly not! A Lady’s hand is never far away from her purse. So my
father always says.” Chiyoko now waved her purse at him to make her point.
She noticed him trying to suppress a laugh and it made her feel a little better. She had made
the man miserable for a while; The least she could do was give him a fine story to tell.
“She told me if I wanted to keep my dignity, I would give her my purse and walk home wear-
ing my clothes. ‘Wanton,’ I said, ‘A Lady’s dignity isn’t in her clothes. If I handed over my purse
simply to save myself an embarrassment then I’d be handing over my dignity.’ ”
She looked thoughtful, then spoke as if thinking aloud: “It only follows that a Lady’s dignity is
in her purse then.” Koko looked at the purse in her hands, and gave a long pause.
“I think I heard my father say something of the sort the other day...”
The tailor gave a laugh that he turned into a kind of cough, then stood up and shook out the
shirt and pants. “There you go, m’Lady, I think this will fit you like a glove.”
A hint of a smile played around his lips as he handed them to her.
She slipped them on. “They’ll get me home, I suppose. How much do I owe?”

204
 KALIDASA

The immigrant had thought for a long moment. “One and ten?” he asked. Silence.
“Apologies, m’Lady,” he sighed. “Forgot who I was dealing with. One will do.”
Taking out her purse, she put one silver coin into his hand. That night, would it dawn on him
that he had had his first chance in five years to see a comely girl naked? Why was privacy con-
sidered so important, anyway? A man could live in a palatial home, yet, could Chiyoko imagine
living as daímōns did, surrounded at all times by a retinue of servants and their expectations?
Expectations they could not possibly live up to—did not even want to live up to?
She tucked her change away and tied her purse firmly underneath her shirt; She gave him a
meaningful look, patting it. A smile tugged at his lips: “Good-bye, m’Lady!”

“Search her,” Ōphéleia said, opening the door without turning around.
Chiyoko was rapidly stripped of her coat; She was then poked, prodded, sifted and patted.
Her sleeve-stiletto—a perfectly ordinary thing for a certain kind of individual to carry here in the
Capital—was confiscated, her purse was shaken out, her shoes were slipped off and one of the
Gentlemen even ran his hands through Chiyoko’s hair. When this process was finished, Koko
was shoeless, coatless and somewhat disheveled, being given then permission to pass through
the tall hardwood doorway that Ōphéleia had vanished through some time before.
Past them was a dark space not much larger than a wardrobe closet. A winding black iron
staircase, wide enough for one person, rose up from the floor towards a square of soft yellow
light. Chiyoko padded up the stairs and emerged into what she knew was an office.
This place took up the whole of the ninth floor of the Sinhāsanam; There was a balcony door
on the right-hand wall, covered by a sliding screen. Koko could see a wide, darkened sweep of
the harbour through it; She therefore presumed it looked north-eastwards.
Every other wall of the office, as Chiyoko had expected, was liberally decorated with old oil
paintings—nearly twenty of them around the visible periphery of the room, in elaborate frames
of gilded wood—masterworks of the last century, when nearly every nobleman at court had kept
a painter or sculptor on the leash of patronage, pampering them like first-born sons.
Ōphéleia stood beside a wooden desk the colour of a fine coffee, cluttered with books and pa-
pers. A chair was pushed out behind it, and Chiyoko could see the remnants of a dinner—some
sort of fish on a white plate, paired with a half-empty bottle of pale golden wine.
A feminine voice came from somewhere behind her, within a silk-curtained enclosure.
“Ōphéleia tells me you’ve expressed an interest in being evicted.”
“Hardly, m’Lady. All that I told your assistant was that I’d been cheating steadily at the games I
have been playing here at your Sinhāsanam. For nearly two whole months now.”
“Every game,” put in Ōphéleia. “You said every... single... game.”
“Ah, well,” said Chiyoko with a shrug, “it just sounded more dramatic that way.”
“This woman is a klovn,” whispered Ōphéleia, seemingly to herself.

205
 EUDAIMONIA

“Oh, no,” said Chiyoko. “Well, maybe occasionally. But not now.”
Chiyoko heard footsteps moving towards her back across the hardwood floor.
“You’re here on some kind of bet,” said Kālī’r Ysbaddes.
A shrug. “Not in the way you mean that, no.”
Kālī stepped around Chiyoko and stood before her, hands behind her back, peering at Koko
intently. Koko saw that her narrow coat was crushed black velvet and her hands were covered
with soft, black leather gloves. Her boots were black leather, polished to a mirror-brightness. Her
pubic hair was platinum-grey and had been expertly styled. The woman’s companion had taken
the form of a monkey with black fur and horny claws. As soon as the Brython had emerged, he
jumped down from the wardrobe, settling in his customary place on her shoulder.
Kālī: “Did you drink anything unusual tonight? An unfamiliar wine, perhaps?”
“Unless the water itself is an intoxicant hereabouts, I’m as dry as baked sand.”
Kālī moved behind her desk, picked up a steel fork and pointed at Koko with it. “If I am to be-
lieve you, you’ve been successfully cheating the House for two months, and, what’s more, aside
from the sheer impossibility of that claim, now you simply want to give yourself up?”
The older woman swallowed a mouthful of fish before speaking again.
“Just how have you been cheating?” she asked, at last.
Koko smiled: “Fast-fingers work, for the most part.”
“Really? I can tell a cardsharp’s fingers at a glance. Let’s see that right hand of yours.”
Kālī held out her gloved left hand and Koko hesitantly put her right hand into it.
“I’m sure your Gentlemen mean well. But I can finger-dance a live cat into a standard deck of
cards and slip it back out at leisure. Other players may complain about the noise but—”
An eyebrow: Set a live cat on my desk, then. Go on.
“It was, ah, a colourful figure of speech. Live cats aren’t in fashion as accessories.”
Chiyoko sighed. “Your Gentlemen removed my coat and my shoes, and if they’d patted me
down any more thoroughly they’d have been fingering my hole. But what’s this?” She shook her
left sleeve and held up her left hand to show that a deck of cards had fallen into it.
“Now,” said Chiyoko, “let’s see.” She held her arm straight out to the side, with the deck held
firmly upright between her thumb and all four fingers. A twist of the wrist, a flick of her thumb and
the deck was cut. She began to flex and splay her fingers, steadily increasing her tempo till they
moved like a spider taking fencing lessons. A cut and a shuffle, a cut and a shuffle—she sliced
the deck apart and slid it back together no fewer than a dozen times in the space of a few mo-
ments. Then, with one smooth flourish, Chiyoko slapped it down on the desk and spread it in a
long arc, displacing several of the Brython’s knick-knacks with a clatter.
“Pick one,” said Chiyoko. “Any one you like. Look at it, but don’t show it to me.”
The woman did as instructed. While she peeked at the card she had drawn Koko gathered the
rest of the deck with a reverse slide across the desktop; She shuffled and cut once more, then
split the deck and left half on top of the desk. “Go ahead and place your chosen card.”

206
 KALIDASA

When Kālī had returned the card, Chiyoko slapped the other half of the deck down on top of
it. Taking the full deck in her left hand, she did her one-handed cut-and-shuffle another five times.
Then she slid the top card from the deck—the Four of Picks—onto the desk.
“This, Lioness of the Sinhāsanam, is your card.”
“No,” said Kālī’r Ysbaddes with a tiny smirk.
“Kuso.” Chiyoko flicked out the next card from the top of the deck.
“Aha—I knew it was around there, somewhere.”
“No,” said Kālī’r Ysbaddes, once again.
“Kuso,” said Koko, and she rapidly went through the next half dozen from the top of the deck.
“Six of Picks? Three of Picks? Two of Soldiers? King? Queen? Two of Emeralds? Kuso. Knave of
Eagles?” Kālī’r Ysbaddes had shaken her head at each one of these.
“Huh. Excuse me.” Koko set the deck of cards down on the desk. She fumbled at the clasp of
her right sleeve with her free hand. After a moment, she slid the sleeve back above her elbow and
reset the clasp. Suddenly, there was another deck of cards in her left hand.
“Let’s see... . Seven of Picks? Five of Emeralds? No, we already did that... . Two of Lilies? Six
of Lilies? King? Three? Damn, damn. That deck wasn’t so good after all.”
Chiyoko set the second deck down beside the first on the desk, appeared to scratch an itch
near the slender black sash above her breeches, and then held up a third deck of cards.
She grinned at Kālī’r Ysbaddes, who once again had her eyebrow raised.
“This trick might work even better if I could have the use of my right hand.”
“Why, when you seem to be doing so well without it?”
Chiyoko sighed and flicked the top card from the new deck onto the growing pile.
It was the Four of Lilies. “Does that card look familiar?”
Kālī’r Ysbaddes laughed; The little primate’s dark eyes never left Koko’s face.
Koko set the third deck down beside the ones already on the desk, stood up and conjured an-
other deck of cards from somewhere in the vicinity of her breeches.
“But your Gentlemen would of course know,” said Koko, “if I were loaded down with four con -
cealed decks of cards, they being so adept at spotting something like that on a woman with no
jacket or shoes… wait, four? It appears that I may have miscounted...”
She produced a fifth deck from somewhere within her silk tunic, which joined the little tower of
cards perched ever more precariously on the edge of the desk.
“Surely I could not have hidden five decks of cards from your guards? Five would be quite ri-
diculous. Yet there they are—though I am afraid that is as good as it gets. To conjure more, I’d
have to begin producing them from places the locals might find disagreeable.”
Silence. “And I’m sorry to say I don’t seem to have the card you took.
“But wait…. I do know where it might be found...” She reached across the desk, nudged the
wine bottle at its base, and seemed to pluck a face-down card from underneath it.
“Your card,” she said, twirling it in the fingers of her left hand. “Five of Lilies.”

207
 EUDAIMONIA

“See,” said Kālī, looking to Ōphéleia, “she can hardly kill me with a pack of cards, as I said.”
To Chiyoko: “Very fine work. And one-handed, too. But even if I grant that you could perform
such tricks, continuously, in front of my Gentlemen... I know that you’ve spent a great deal of
time at games that are more rigorously... clandestine... than the open card tables.”
“I can show you how we beat those, too. Simply let go of my hand.”
“Why should I relinquish a clear advantage over you?”
“When it comes to being a biographer, the only cause that matters is the last one, the purpose.
Once you understand what people really want, you can’t hate them any more. As far as I’m con-
cerned, you’ve taken the first steps towards something truly magnificent here.”

Back in the present: The Showing Chamber stank and was ironically warm; Ice was a fine
insulator and there were braziers burning scented oil. As Chiyoko entered the Showing Cham -
ber, she looked about at the old tapestries. Scenes from Hebrew myth, she had assumed at
first, but had looked again. Scenes from Hebrew myth all right, stories of pain and ruin emerging
from shabby threads; Bizarre creatures, burning houses, fleeing maidens and youths pleading
for their lives. Had she read that the Hebrew word ḥat’ah—“sin”—originated in archery, referring
to missing the “gold” at the centre of a target, and yet still hitting the target?

If you’re happy and you know it it’s a sin!

If you’re happy and you know it it’s a sin!
If you’re happy and you know it, and you really want to show it...
If you’re happy and you know it it’s a sin!

From the vantage point of the great icebreaker, she could see, if she so chose, a filmy veil of
soft, grey mist obscuring, but not concealing, a timbered and inhospitable wilderness. Due to its
extreme cold, she had been inclined to joke that this was the land God gave to Qayin.
Koko recalled that she had turned down a winding path descending between low, tree-clad hil-
locks to a chilly brook, its water running clear and clean though a large, multicoloured rock-face
and so snaking gracefully from one far corner of the garden to the other. Chiyoko had tried her
best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down
through solid rock to form its current bed. Chiyoko knew more or less what the word “hundred”
meant, but when numbers wandered off towards “thousand”—or “million”—and the individuals
who used them were talking about years, her mind fled as if from a horror.
There had been rocks that had been made into animals, creeping, horrible monsters, putting
out their tongues; Still others had been like words she could not say; Others like the dead lying
on the grass. The teenager had gone amongst them, though they frightened her and her heart
was full of wicked songs they put into it. She had wanted to make faces and twist herself about

208
 KALIDASA

the way they did; She had gone on and on a long way till at last she liked the rocks, and the fact
that they had been laid about with spiderwebs had not scared her any more. The beauty of the
rocks had grown translucent and quite bewitching with such silver gilding. The Innut had put out
sand-sculptures: Delicate shapes and creatures and nudes of smooth sand.
Two extremely detailed stone rabbits fucking under a discreet bush had been included among
the lustful decorations. They had not passed unnoticed; The rabbits had had large, lewd grins.
Through her mental perplexity Koko had heard Asiniiwin observe: “You have enjoyed your visit to
Sheshatshiu.” The man seldom asked a question if a statement would do.
Two months ago: Koko had introduced herself to the Windigo with trepidation and a little awe
on an artificial island in Ōsaka Bay. Standing on the dead grass just outside the Windigo’s great
hutment, she had studied the tent and its occupants—the tops, the bottoms, the bloody tapestries
decorating the walls. The event had been an endurance test as much as it had been a celebra -
tion. The idea was to drink, fuck, stay awake all night and still be clear-eyed when the Windigo
arrived for the finale. It appeared there was nothing more enchanting than the smiles of young
children. It did not even matter in the least what they had been so happy about!
The applicants had apparently been children of ten years of age or younger. Those children
who wiggled, would be kept; All others, turned away. Afterwards, the Adepts had explained that
the next step would be a simple matter of consistency and conditioning; Never would Chiyoko’s
sister be given license to experience pleasure without pain or pain without pleasure. What wild
stories the troubadours would tell concerning that night! How late had the Windigo been to the
party? Had his Peerless Pestle been insignificant or full? Such questions would rarely be directly
answered. An arched eyebrow or a hesitant shrug, the scars around Atsuko’s ear holes flush-
ing a bright pink where the flesh of her ears had had to be cut away. That was all that would be
necessary. And more than enough, if Koko’s sister had any wit at all.
Wow! Aren’t you glad you left the lighthouse now, Koko? Oh, I think so, Koko!
Had what happened served Atsuko right? The Windigo never said a word, just picked her up
under his arm and shoved the side of her face down in burning coals and held her there while
she screamed and screamed. The burning coals had seemed to pick up the whole sack of At-
suko’s existence by the feet and shake the little girl out... hard—the taste of murder! Chiyoko sup-
posed that for the blessed child, that taste was very likely familiar, at once bad and so damn wig-
gly. Terribly wiggly: Like a really, really bad booboo, only so much better!
One question at any rate had soon been answered: It took a certain kind of dunce to insist that
never, for any reason, could a person wish for an increase of pain. Koko had heard it said that
of pain one could wish only a single thing: That it should stop; Nothing in the world was so awful
as physical pain; It was said that in the face of pain there could be no heroes.
Had Atsuko done anything in her life to suggest she was sane? Sifting through the rubble the
next morning, the Windigo had managed to lift out a doll, its remaining eye scorched. Man may
have discovered fire, but it was little girls who had discovered how to play with it!

209
 EUDAIMONIA

Thus it was that the Windigo had for the fourth time in his life lifted out a scorched doll, its
dress streaked with soot, its porcelain face smashed. Why was there always a broken doll? The
hutment had been more damaged than it had been the last time. At the edge of the fairground
had stood a charred windmill. The wind tried to spin the wheel, but it only had two fins left, and
so it had just swayed back and forth. The hutment itself was nothing but a jumble of ash and
cowhide. The Windigo had known that every Nipponese child was taught early on never to play
with matches and about the devastation which could ensue. For a time, he and Koko had stood
silent, watching Atsuko clamber in and out of view, wondering if perhaps the child had been smil-
ing. Her back had been turned; It had been difficult to get a glimpse of her face. Atsuko’s face had
been badly burned on one side, eyebrow gone, her hair scorched back on that side, her fingers
bent; She would lose the use of her hand if she did not stretch her fingers.
Chiyoko had been told that the Windigo had agreements with the Pāndaimṓnion Ekklēsía, for
often the former had among his disciples those who as yet took delight solely in watching, and so
might contract an Eupatríd or a daímōn to perform an excruciation on one of his own. Sometimes
there were, of course, those persons who must themselves be the perpetrators of an abasement
to move them, for which Asiniiwin had begun to discreetly advertise a service.
Κύ. Fjalar had laughed: “And if I take the opportunity to escape?”
Centralizer Dà Míng: “Do you suppose that you’ll be given such an opportunity?”
It had not been long until Atsuko had been permitted to gather outside the Showing Chamber
aboard the Feast, to prepare for viewing and selection by the dwarves. Koko remembered the re-
fined air of urgency, the tension marking the hopefuls as they had prepared to vie for selection.
Atsuko had told her tales—bottles of scent switched for piss, frayed ribbons, slit stays.
Today, all had been calm, and only Atsuko and two others had waited, having been reques-
ted in particular. Koko had held her tongue, standing quietly in the corner, trying to picture being
one of those three females, waiting with delight to lie down with an uncivilized beast.
Dreadful excitement had gripped her at the thought of giving herself to such a man. Accord-
ing to legend, Durgāprasāda had been filled with total purity when he had gone before Kurush
Vazraka, yet it had been Śakti who had lain with bottoms in the market for coin.
But that was what Tantrics said of Śakti and not of Durgāprasāda, though it was said neither
trembled to lay their garments aside. Had Śakti’s perfection unveiled really left a man blind for a
fortnight, which led him to betray her out of fear? At Athēnai, it was said she had made a good
bargain of it; At Babulṓn, it was said she had bestowed herself as a gift; At Patthar-garh, she had
basked in love as in a sun that shines on middens and Emperors’ bedchambers alike. Guðdís
said Śakti had done this for her own aggrandizement; Kiran, for a lark, charming with the sweet-
ness of her laughter. What the Windigo claimed, Koko knew not. Maybe she chose her patrons
like victims, whipping them to fierce revelries, leaving them sated or half-dead?
In the course of a year, would Atsuko outstrip all praise and make it stumble after her? As the
Windigo himself had said on more than one occasion: “Apprentices from Western Eurṓpē often

210
 KALIDASA

express an inclination for a Kósmos in which there are no unwanted things, and all is as one
prefers—which is, in the end, the desire for a less diverse Kósmos. And I answer them that hu-
manity did not come forth into this existence to whittle all experience down to a fistful of ‘good’
ideas upon which all agree: Rather, ours is an ever-expanding Kósmos and all things must be
allowed. To understand and experience what we desire, we must know what we do not, for in
order to be able to choose or focus, both must be present and understood; The contrast of our
life-experiences, good and bad, is highly useful, for it helps us focus. Whenever we know what
we do not want, we also know even more clearly what we do; And whenever we know what we
do want, we also know even more clearly what we do not. And thus, our exposure to contrast
sharpens our focus and gives birth to new preferences and desires and loves and kindnesses
and so on. As beings apparently made of matter in a Kósmos of thought, ours is the act of tak-
ing thought beyond what it has been—through contrast, the Kósmos will have come to new con-
clusions and decisions: This valuable contrast assures the eternal expansion of All-That-Is. In
a non-physical Kósmos, it’s ‘physical’ beings who’re the Leading Edge.”
Back in the present: As Koko came upon the Moment of the Clouds and the Rain her eyes fell
on a cabinet filled with all manner of items: Collars, ropes, gags; This, that, the other.
So it was that she watched the dwarf’s hands pull on her sister’s chains, raise his whip high.
The little girl’s bandaged face was pressed to the cushiony leather of the pommel horse. Some
had a particular fetish for the buttocks, and the pommel horse provided a good advantage for
such an indulgence. Koko’s sister was flinging herself against the chains, blood running down
her arms from where the heated irons had been clasped tightly to her wrists.
Koko would not be able to follow the number of lashes. There would be no moderator; There
would be no quota. She would know only that her sister pled and writhed against her bonds and
still the lash fell mercilessly. Once the little girl had given up, sagging against her bonds, one of
the dwarves had bent, reaching in between her legs with a finger, stirring her until both of them
were caught in the splendour of the moment. And then the lash once again.
Was there any doubt in Koko’s mind that the dwarves had paid somebody a hefty payment
in silver to be here, and so took what was owed to the very last hemitartemórion?
The dwarf with the cat-o’-nine-tails now had on his face a creamy look of satisfaction, raised
his whip, lowered it, raised it again, violently, and then threw it to the floor.
Head bowed, the little girl on the pommel horse opened her eyes, but did not appear cog -
nizant. Koko’s thighs were, in truth, wet—she did not think of her pussy, at first—which, without
disturbing the firmness of her cunt, made the air thick, soiled her clothing. She had perfect con-
trol of herself in every other way. At last, Initiates undid Atsuko’s bonds, easing the petite girl’s
body to the floor, holding her fast in the centre of the Showing Chamber. The Windigo gathered
up his trousers and left the Chamber, ignoring the bloody footprints he was leaving.
If somebody would cut through the mess aboard the Feast and look at it as one would look
at the rings of a tree, or layers of sediment, they would find the black-and-white hairs of a rat, a

211
 EUDAIMONIA

smell of rotten meat without a source, corridors full of painful, exploding surprises, five blood-
soaked pillowcases: All the Windigo’s dirty little études at rest in interminable little piles. But this
was just what Koko loved to do: Her highest ambition was to explore contrast.
“How do people usually go about relating their stories?” the Windigo had asked.
Two months ago, at the outset of their first night’s chronicling, it had been expected.
Koko had shrugged: “Most merely tell me what they recall. Later on... I record events in their
proper order, remove the unnecessary pieces, clarify, simplify; That sort of thing.”
The Windigo would sit there frowning at this for a time.
After more than a moment’s consideration: “No, I don’t suppose that will do.”
Chiyoko had given him an unsure smile as she tilted her head. “Storytellers are always dif-
ferent. They prefer their stories be left alone, sure. But they also prefer attentive readers. I usu-
ally listen and record later. I assure you, I have a nearly perfect memory.”
A shake of the head. “I’m sorry, nearly perfect doesn’t suit me.”
The Windigo had pressed a finger against his lips: “How fast do you write?”
Chiyoko had raised her chin. “Faster than a person can talk.”
The Windigo in turn raised one hairless, grey-skinned eyebrow: I’d like to see that.
Chiyoko had opened her satchel. She brought out a stack of fine paper, her pencil. After ar-
ranging everything carefully, she had gripped the pencil and looked over.
The Windigo had sat forwards in his chair and spoken quickly, “I’m. We’re. She. He. They will
be.” Chiyoko’s pencil had danced and scratched down the page as the man watched. “I, Chiy-
oko do swear that I can neither read nor write. Supine. Irreverent. Jackdaw. Quartz. Lacquer.
Eggoliant. Ryōyaku wa kuchi ni nigashi. ‘There once was an old widow from Hibla, whose mor-
als were hard as a rock. She gave a confession, for her true obsessio—’ ” the Windigo leaned
farther forwards to watch as Chiyoko wrote. “Interesting—oh, you may stop.”
Chiyoko had smiled broadly and had set her pencil aside.
The page in front of her had held a single line of tight, incomprehensible symbols.
“Some sort of cipher?” the Windigo wondered aloud. “Very neatly done, too. I’ll bet you don’t
spoil many pages.” He turned the sheet to look at the writing more carefully.
“I never spoil pages,” she had said proudly, not at all like a young Nipponese lady.
The Windigo nodded without looking up from the page.
“What does ‘eggoliant’ mean?” Chiyoko had asked, out of mild curiosity.
“Hmmmm? Oh, nothing. I made it up. The unfamiliar word didn’t slow you down.”
He had stretched, grunted and pulled his chair closer to the young woman’s.
Then: “As soon as you show me how to read this, we can begin.”
At first, Chiyoko had looked doubtful. “It’s a very complex...”
Seeing the Windigo’s frown, she had sighed: “I’ll try.”
Drawing a deep breath Koko had begun to write a line of symbols as she spoke. “There are
only so many different sounds we use to speak. I have given each of them a symbol consisting

212
 KALIDASA

of one or two strokes. It is all sound, after all. I could possibly transcribe a tongue I do not even
understand.” She had pointed. “Here: These are different consonants’ sounds, see?”
“All vertical-ish lines, loops or curves,” the Windigo had noted, looking at the page.
Chiyoko had paused, somehow thrown off her stride. “Well... yes, but—”
“The vowels would be horizontal-ish, then? And they would combine like this?”
Taking the pencil, he made a few marks of his own on the page. “An improvement on most
phonetic alphabets; You would never need more than two or three for a single word.”
At that point, the Nipponese teenager had begun to watch the Windigo closely.
The man would not take notice, his attention being on the line of text.
“If this is ‘hard’ then these must be the ‘ah’ sounds,” he had motioned to a group of charac-
ters she had pencilled. “ ‘Ah, ay, aeh, auh.’ That would make these others the ‘ohs.’ ” He nodded
to himself, pressed the pencil back into Chiyoko’s hand. “Show me more consonants.”
Chiyoko had pencilled them down, reciting the sounds as she did so.
After a moment, the Great Windigo had taken the pencil and completed the list himself, ask-
ing a dumbfounded Chiyoko to correct him if he made even the slightest mistake.
Chiyoko had watched and listened as the Windigo completed the list.
From beginning to end the whole process had only taken about fifteen mikroí.
As things had turned out, the man had made no mistakes.
“Wonderfully efficient system: Very logical. Did you invent it yourself?”
Back in the present: Sitting in the empty Showing Chamber, Chiyoko realized her hair was in
disarray. She drew out the pin to fix it. It was a sharp pin. Chiyoko sat up and admired it; It was
a long, sharp pin, extraordinarily shiny, with a round head of mother-of-pearl. Somehow, Chiy-
oko found herself thinking about κύ. Fjalar—hey... short guys... the more muscular you get, the
shorter you look, did you not know that? Next Chiyoko would think of the Holy Idiot and his long
wandering, the bold request he had made of Īśwara. The blood he had willingly shed might run
in her very own veins, Koko supposed, resolving at once to see if this was so. Would she now
reveal herself as a masochist to a suddenly bewildered and perplexed humanity? Would she
suddenly announce out of nowhere that she liked having her arse smacked, her hair pulled and
being told to get on her knees like a good little girl because her man was a steamroller in her life
and she liked to be laid out flat? Was she maybe a riddle which was wrapped in an enigma that
was stuffed into a conundrum and then rolled into a delicious spring roll? In other words, a total
freaking mystery to any who was not gifted with the ability to read minds? Turning her left hand
palm-upwards, she took the pin in a firm grip in her right, pushing it into her flesh. For a palmós it
seemed almost of no note; And then the pain blossomed from the point she had driven into her
palm; This minor injury she had dealt herself, did it swell into a sweet, warm ache? She withdrew
the pin, watching with fascination as her own blood filled the small indentation.
Laughter. In the Showing Chamber, it flashed from the woodwork and the tapestries; It smote
the empty hall with a terrible Power, as if generated by lost souls. It arose from the floor, up out

213
 EUDAIMONIA

of the tattered, wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken appliances in the kit -
chen two decks below; Dead machines which had not worked during all the time Asiniiwin had
owned the massive steamship. From the shattered lamps in the dining hall it oozed, meshing
with the empty and wordless descent of another part of itself from a dirty, fly-specked ceiling. It
managed, in point of fact, to emerge from every object that was to be seen, as if it was meant to
supplant all things tangible, and yet, in its own way, was totally invisible.
Hard indeed was it to notice a thing for which there was no description: Where ignorance is
bliss, ’tis folly to be wise! No one was more tacitly imperfect than those who were perfect all the
time! Praśnayānists, by contrast, strongly believed these truths to be self-evident: That there were
only two mistakes on the road to enlightenment, not going all the way and not starting.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, was a straight thing ever made perfect without effort?
Which was just another way of asking if the perfect skill of the kūng-fu monk was nothing but the
Art of being perfect in the right way; If a man or woman be called to be a street sweeper, they
should sweep so well that all the hosts of heaven and Gaia would pause to say: “Legend tells of
a legendary sweeper whose sweeping skills were the stuff of legend.”
During Koko’s journey through Khazaria the tweenager had stayed at the estate of Āshǐnà, a
centralizer for the tending to the endless steppes north of the Hyrkanía and the old Hakhamanish
Empire, whose sons were intense in their practice of fencing. The elder, just back from a tourna-
ment, had styled himself a virtuoso, and one day had offered Koko a rapier. They fenced, and it
happened that Koko had been victorious. His boasting had added to his confusion; Almost every
thrust she made was a strike until at last his rapier was knocked from his hand.
As he picked it up, half in joke, half in irritation, he nodded that he had found his mistress, in -
deed that everybody in the world eventually found their teacher; And that he would show her
hers. The younger brother chuckled heartily and shouted: “Let’s go into the yard!” And with that
they took Koko by the arm and led her to a bear their father had raised in their yard.
As she approached, the bear stood erect, without violence, though he was unchained and
the door to the yard was such that he could depart at any time. The bear gazed at her, his right
paw raised; He was in a fencing position. For a long moment, confronted by this odd rival, she
thought she was dreaming. “Foil, foil,” said the son, “see if you can strike him.”
When Koko had fully recovered from her astonishment, she thrust at him with the rapier; The
bear flipped his paw; The thrust was parried. She tried to seduce him with a feint; The bear did
not budge. With a lunge, she thrust again; She would say that she would have certainly hit a
human opponent. The bear had flipped his paw, parried the thrust. Koko was in the same position
her partner had been. The bear’s concentration added to her loss of assurance. She alternated
thrusts and feints; She sweated: In vain! Like the finest fencer in the world, the bear met and
parried each thrust, but he did not respond to feints; Perhaps no fencer in the world could have
matched him in that. Eye to eye, as if he read her soul, he stood with his paw lifted, ready; And
if she did not intend a thrust, he remained immobile. Could this bear read all her thoughts and

214
 KALIDASA

keep blocking every move that she tried to make? Later, she had realized the only way to defeat
such an opponent was to hit him without knowing she was going to hit him.
Koko saw that in this world, as the need for perfection shrank and was entirely let go, imper-
fection came forward, more radiant, more dominating. But that was not all; Two lines intersec-
ted, separated and passed through infinity and beyond, only to reappear at the same point of
intersection; In this manner, after self-actualization had, so to speak, passed through infinity, the
quality of grace would reappear. Indeed, this reborn quality of grace reappeared with the greatest
possible purity; A purity having either no consciousness, or consciousness without limit: Neither
the jointed doll nor the God. Thus she had understood that she must eat from the Tree of Know-
ledge again: She must come full circle and fall back into a state of innocence.

On his way up the hill, κύ. Galar walked arm-in-arm with his twin brother, drunk and talking
like a man who knew he would be off at dawn traveling to some far corner of the world. Both
took a stroll down dusty streets, around crowds, noting how everyone else was uptight—some
hurrying, others moving slowly: Smiling or eyes straight ahead, eager to arrive wherever they
were going. Notice how a daímōn could be just one of them, no more, no less? Κύ. Galar, for
one, was comforted by the way he was just one in a crowd. No more, no less. The north-east had
once been home to an altogether enormous fur-trapping institution, and therefore, with the return
of the Paidasía, Norandras would once again be a riot of primitive colour and clangour, and even
disgusting smells. Strange stone habitats lined the simple dirt streets, cheek-to-jowl with leather
tents and firepits. Nudes, Sourcerers, and, worst of all, children, mixed with the crowd. Bent like
hunchbacks, wizened hags gave away flavoured waters or milks from colourful skins. Skrælingjar
from a dozen tribes-peoples wandered here and there, partaking of pungent narcotics or trading
words in their queer tongues. The air was gross with the odour of salt, frying fish, tar and honey
as well as incense, oil, and worst of all, κύ. Galar almost gagged, of sperm.
Κύ. Galar gave his silent sibling a grin, motioned towards a marionette show that somehow
had become popular among the Skrælingjar of late; Two rows of benches had been set up facing
the wagon-cart stage, and a modest crowed had formed. At the moment, it was a comedy about
one of Gaia’s shortest-lived creatures, the mayfly, which barely made it through a single day. In
the play, two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the water of a trout stream, discussing his-
tory and ethics with some younger members of that evening’s last hatching.
Dà Míng stood nearby, watching them watching. Κύ. Fjalar knew there would be other mon-
itors on the day’s activities. He had put in much thought and planning before daring to come
home. To have stayed away would have carried its own message, however.
“You don’t get the kind of sun that you used to get,” said a marionette on the stage.
“You’re right. We had proper sun. It was all yellow. None of this red stuff.”
“It was higher in the sky, too. I remember it well.”

215
 EUDAIMONIA

A nod. “It was. You’re right. You’re right.”

A huff. “And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect!”
“They did. They did,” said the other mayfly, vehemently.
“I reckon, if mayflies now behaved a bit better, we’d still be having proper sun.”
The younger mayflies merely listened politely.
“I remember when all this was fields as far as you could see.”
The younger mayflies looked around themselves.
“It’s still fields,” one of them ventured, after a polite interval.
“I remember when it was better fields,” said the older mayfly, sharply. “And brighter.”
“Yeah,” said his colleague. “And there was a brown cow.”
“That’s right! You’re right! I remember that cow!”
Then: “Stood right over there for, oh, forty, fifty mikroí. It was brown, as you say.”
“You don’t get cows like that now.”
“You don’t get cows at all.”
“What’s a cow?” wondered aloud one of the evening’s youngest hatchlings.
“See?” said the oldest mayfly, triumphantly. “That’s modern times in a nutshell.”
It paused. “What were we doing before we were talking about the sun?”
“Zigzagging aimlessly over the water,” said one of the young flies.
This was a fair bet in any case.
“No, no, before that.”
“Er… you were telling us about the Great Trout.”
“Ah, yes; Right.”
Then: “Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down—”
An emphatic gesture. “Taking heed of your elders and betters.”
“Yes, and taking heed of your elders and betters, then eventually the Great Tro—”
A plop interrupted this, the sound of a stone dropping into a bucket of water. The marionettes
looked down at a series of concentric rings on the water of an imaginary brook.
“The Holy Sign!” declared the mayfly who was now the eldest. “A Great Circle in the water! It
has been said since time immemorial that this shall be the sign of the Great Trout!”
This new eldest-of-the-mayflies watched the water. It was beginning to recognize that as the
most senior fly present, it now had the privilege of hovering closest to the surface.
“It must be really good there, in the land of the Great Trout,” said a young mayfly.
Silence. At last: “Because no one ever seems to want to come back.”
They would return late to the Feast, yet κύ. Fjalar would not go to sleep. Instead, he sat in
the parlour of the dwarves’ massive suite with his brother’s never-read copy of The Archaic Play-
wrights: The Essentials. Sousaríōn sure had known how to write deeply boring poetry. Κύ. Fjalar
would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. The play in question was all the more
boring since the dwarf could remember reading to the end in the previous timeline.

216
 KALIDASA

Had κύ. Fjalar been bored? Perhaps that had been all there was to it: Bored, just like most
daímōns. So, he had created himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama.
Something must happen—and this might explain most human commitments—something must
happen, even incarceration! Did Dà Míng not realize what happened when a pipe-bomb went
off? The truth came out: Men left their partners, running away; Watchmakers pushed aside old
ladies, trying to save their shop. There was a long silence before the screams; Children watched
adults to see how to react. Fear of death laid bare a weak man’s hǘbris.
On the whole, “I’m bored” was a useless thing to say. A human being lived in a vast Kósmos
of which they had only seen some puny percentage. Even the inside of a human being’s own
mind was an endless playground; It went on forever and ever, inwardly: Did κύ. Fjalar not un-
derstand that? The fact that he was alive was amazing. Life could be both wonderful and terrify-
ing at the same time. At any given moment the floor might open up. It almost never did; Was
that what made it so damn boring? No, a sorcerer did not get to say “I’m bored!”
How hugely hypocritical, one might say, but no sooner had κύ. Galar been offered a chance
to flee Hel than he had begun to yearn to stay. Few families held their relations as closely as
did prisons; Few marriages sustained the high level of passion that existed between daímōns
and those who sought to bring them to some so-called justice. A memory: Houses nearby were
burning, and when huge drops of water had begun to fall from the sky, he had half thought that
they must be coming from the hoses of firefighters fighting the blaze. Κύ. Galar had realized his
brother could no longer fathom beauty in anything except violence.
In any event, the mayflies had been replaced with redwood trees, some of the longest lived
lifeforms ever to grace Gaia, as the short series of comedic allegories proceeded, one after an-
other. Because the tall redwood trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in
less than a day, they were unable to perceive the sound of chainsaws.
B Transient emotions aren’t pertinent to the solution to our mutual problem. They cloud our
thinking because the only relevant emotion is the basic anger that brought us here.B
Everyone knew that a Gentleman could read lips... and micro-expressions!
What would the dwarves do? Why, of course, the unexpected thing!
B B
Eventually: Go on, go on little brother, drink to our stupidity!
B B
You are very devious, Master, was all the younger sibling signalled back.
How devious, the Polémarkhos must never suspect, κύ. Fjalar thought. When all is done, I’ll
possess a Kamanitushit I can control. All others will possess nothing but the void.

217
 KALIDASA
] Of course! This whole crazy plan was your idea in the first place! ^
Not exactly; Kālī originated the plan, but when I learned of it, I did everything I could
to carry it forwards. To the question, “Where do I see myself in ten years?” I only have one
answer, or rather, a wish: In ten years’ time, I wish to see myself in such a condition that
is even more unimaginable than my current one would have been ten years ago.

—Erica “C-731” O’Bran to the Great Aiasheu

Jesus! she hadn’t decided that she was still going to kill us!
she’d talk herself into it. Cosmic Apotheosis wears off faster than Salvia.
I’m starting to believe you, I just finished merry-making with your essence for an endless
epoch and I’m already coming back around to thinking you’re a bitch!

—Erica “J-19ζ7” O’Bran and Erica “C-731” O’Bran

All the autokínita emerged out of the grand chateau in single file, yet somehow in a fashion
which seemed to indicate that they were competing against each other. The only sound to be
heard for a while was the roar of engines and the squeal of wheels against the driveway. The
pitch-black tyres kicked up dirt and lose grey gravel, the last trace of them being the particles of
dust, themselves radiant like floating flames. The faces of the passengers had been seen only
once, by a lad, and only for a moment. Once the miniature storm and the sound of engines sub-
sided, could there be any doubt that celebrity itself had been ensconced within? Had greatness
passed, removed only by the gauze curtains from tops and bottoms who might for the first time
truly feel as if within speaking distance of some Majesty of pre-Didáskal history, of a somehow
enduring symbol of the long dead notion of the Royal Prerogative?
On this rainbow day, with storms all about them, but blue sky above, they drove only as far as
the rail station. Kālī’r Ysbaddes’ autokínito won the race. The driver, a tall, naked man, got out
to open the passenger doors, bowing as she, Ōphéleia and her daughters emerged. The auto
was a black shadow lit by the red rim of the sun, its multilayered ebony body panels polished to
the point of suppressing even the slightest hint of colour. Did any still expect a matched pair of
stallions to draw such an august personage about? Fair creatures, would they be, with arching
necks, picking up their hooves daintily on the flagstones? Six more autos followed the first, bring-
ing her luggage and a long trail of naked males of all ages. Thus, most were now aware that a
line of black autos had drawn up. There were no Coats-of-Arms on the doors, unless one was in
on the joke: The woman’s personal Coat-of-Arms was nothing but a sable shield.
As the Great Aiasheu himself had once noted: ] The bitch has style! ^
Kālī’r Ysbaddes, at once magisterial and divine in a flowing dress of black silks, her platinum-
grey hair cut long, stepped forcefully, emerging fully-clothed into a personal cone of silence. All
her attendants were tattooed. The darkest-black material of her dress, was, in point of fact, em-
broidered with a beautiful golden pattern of winged lionesses. She was seven-and-forty years of
age, although age had not withered, nor custom staled, her infinite variety.

219
 EUDAIMONIA

“Come,” she said, holding out a slender hand to her youngest daughter. There was no com-
mand in her voice: Only a total expectation of obedience. All three girls followed.
The entourage swept through the high halls of the station, leaving only the lingering scent of
the mother’s perfume and a dozen overburdened sex-slaves with suppressed smiles.
Genius requires an audience. For all his wisdom, Aiasheu was an artist, and as vulnerable as
any of his kind to the desire to vaunt his Skill. There were few capable of fully appreciating his
Art. Erica J-19ζ7 did not yet know how deep-laid a game they played with each other, nor her
part in it. All she knew was that Kālī was the audience the Sourcerer had chosen.
Kālī was an old name, and one which none in the Tantric community would give lightly. Writ-
ten at the end of the Didáskal, the poem “Kālī the Mother, Kālī Mā,” evoked the Night of Kālī as
a time of pitch black darkness that blots out the stars, while on every side “A myriad shades of
Death begrimed and black scatter plagues and sorrows in a mad and joyful dance.” In the po-
et’s powerful vision, Terror was the Goddess’ name, Death in her breath, and Destruction follow-
ing her every footfall. She was the relentless Power of all-consuming Time.
Composed in the very oldest Sanskrütam, the Vedic hymns composing the core of “ortho-
dox” Sanātana-dharma were in large part nature poetry composed by a people who seemed to
be overwhelmed by the awesome grandeur of the world, which they had embodied and deified
as a henotheon of Gods and Goddesses. Millennia later, the erotic imagery of Kālī Mā, as Mother
Nature herself—primordial, productive, nurturing and devouring in turn, and yet ultimately loving
and benevolent, conveyed these poets’ enthusiastic response to a Kósmos in which everything
was seen as divine. It was entirely possible that Tantra was the surviving Goddess religion of the
ancient Indós Valley Civilization, with a previous admixture of what may be beliefs likened to those
of the Old Sourcerers who had chosen to live on the shores of Baygal Nuur.
In the eyes of many Earthling philosophers, Kālī was a Goddess dark of mind, body and soul.
To them Kālī was a Goddess of death and destruction; Yet, her story was far more complex and
far-reaching. To a woman like Erica J-19ζ7, she could not be easily fitted into a Western narrat-
ive of good versus evil, and in fact incorporated both. The idea that women were innately gentle
was an Earthling fantasy, and a historically recent one: The violent amusements of the Romans
had drawn audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca had led her troops bloodily into
battle; As a Hindu Goddess, Kālī had been depicted as wreathed in a dozen skulls. And yet, if
you knew her well, you would come to know she could be all colours; Sure, the sky was black at
night, but if the eyes were good enough, they would be able to see the lights of a thousand suns.
Death was part of Kālī because death was a part of life. Even her traditional stance was suffused
with duality: While her right hands were linked to positive gestures, her left held weaponry—a
bloodied sword, a freshly severed head or a skull cup full of blood. Erica rather liked playing
video games, but would she play one where she merely helped the people who were shot in
all the other video games? Kālī had been appropriated by 21st-century post-human feminists as
a symbol of feminine power. I know, I know, so damn over-Dramatic!

220
 KALIDASA

And it was true that Kālī’r Ysbaddes had extremely wealthy tastes. Gaians were always pros-
perous anyway, but she had at her disposal as well the estates of two deceased Pāndaimṓnion
men. If not for the accusations following those two deaths, it was conceivable the Polémarkhos
himself would have found her to be a suitable daughter-in-law, though Erica doubted it: She knew
that Kālī was of course completely incapable of tolerating monogamy.
For Kiran’s part, he did not believe his aunt had murdered those two; Both had been young
but very sick, and he did not think she had had the need. Although she had been but fifteen the
first time and nineteen the second, her nephew would come to fain believe her no less calcu-
lating then than when first he had encountered her—the aunt he had grown up with was much
too clever to take such unnecessary risks, although she was skilled at using the hands of others
to meet her own labyrinthine ends, and would often joke that the post-Didáskal conceptions of
God were far too sweetened, somehow as yet afraid to attribute “evil” to God.
As it happened, Kālī’s youngest daughter had been a firecracker that morning, zipping ahead
of her to the driveway. The light of the sun had lain on the gravel courtyard, making everything
sparkle. Two slaveboys had helped them into the auto, daughter sitting beside mother kicking
her feet while a naked manservant had climbed into the driver’s seat.
With sisters such as these a boy must lead a life of submission and arousal. They would be
constantly watching him for signs of disobedience. Nearly all preteen boys and girls were sexual
creatures. Kālī’s youngest, a six-year-old girl, had a voice that was pitched high—thanks to her
youth—but it also had her mother’s incipient darkness to it, a richness that would mature in the
coming years to the smoky tones of a priestess or a Queen. Her smile made boys tremble, the
exquisite cruelty of which was often etched in the six-year-old’s mien.
Fear triggered the fight-or-flight response in a human being, fuelled by adrenaline, which, as
Erica J-19ζ7 knew well, was chemically related to amphetamines. Granted, it was a different
kind of high: Not a delightful, “My bollocks are one with the Kósmos!” high but an anxious and
revved-up “Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” kind of high. Endorphins were like great down -
ers but adrenaline was an upper all the way. And it was just as addictive; It made the girls and
women feel really good about being girls or women. It could even make boys and men forget
their own names, somehow thinking their name was “Please, Ma’am, make it hurt!”
That, surely, was for the boys part of the joy of being a submissive: They were not allowed to
get lost unless she wanted to lose them; They were not allowed to be found, unless it was she
doing the finding. And the only way they were allowed to die is if she chose to end them with
her own hands. Their life did not belong to themselves any more, and if she had to behead him
at some point and paint the dirt with his blood to make him realize that, she would.
Sometimes, of course, her boys would misbehave on purpose. Kālī would at such times in-
dulge them in punishments. Occasionally, they would have to listen to a lecture about asking for
what they wanted, and at those times, they got sent to bed without an orgasm. When Kālī had
reached her teenage years, many of the brats her own age she had known and had been used

221
 EUDAIMONIA

to fucking had suddenly been locked up below the waist. At first, this had been not so much fun.
Somehow, their bodies now had all looked pretty much the same—just when penises started to
get really interesting, many had got locked in a chastity device! She had loved watching the de-
velopment of a little boy’s penis as he approached adulthood. A memory came to her: “Do not
even think about it,” Kālī had said, as the boy had pulled her coat and her gloves off.
“I’m always thinking about it,” Kiran had said. “Youer ’ave the key?”
“It’s not even seven in the morning yet!”
“Youer’ve beaten me this early before.”
Silence. “I was attempting to wake you up.”
Laughter. At last: “What, with my alarm cock?”
He had been right, of course; Outercourse was fun: Especially if a girl could make a boy get
an orgasm. At ten years old, Kālī had liked to play Rub-Rub with the boys. There were dozens
of outercourse games that the boys and girls of Buellt themselves had invented; Rub-Rub was
a favourite party game for a large group of preteen girls and boys together.
Rub-Rub had several variations, but was generally played by the girls pairing boys off and
having them stand face-to-face, penis-to-penis. When all the boys were in position, the girls
started spanking them, the boys rubbing their penises together till one of the boys in each pair
gave the other boy an orgasm. The girls then took all the boys who did not, pairing them off and
starting again. Girls had all sorts of creative forfeits on how to insert one boy back in to account
for an odd number of boys. The boys who already got the wiggles were not permitted play with
themselves. They had to watch as the girls spanked the remaining boys. The last boy who did
not get the wiggles would win. That lucky lad got to have all the little girls play with him for the
rest of the day. A male’s penis was often the most pleasurable way a female could possibly control
him. Many males enjoyed not being allowed to touch themselves without permission. It made
them feel the Godhead. Girls dressed erotically, but boys could be ordered to do so too, yet this
produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against their mother’s discipline.
When did it all start, anyway? There were very few starts. Some things seemed a beginning.
The curtain went up or the first pawn moved or the first shot was fired—but most philosophers
were well aware that these were not the beginning. The play, the game and the war were just
a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back a century or more. The point: There
was always a before. It has always been a case of “Now read on...”
Picture the sun dropping towards the horizon far out to sea, its reflected red glow blazing a
bright path across the water to a narrow beach, where the last ripples were sprinkling like gar-
nets. The sea that day had been bright blue; It had spilled, whispered and slid with an easy-go-
ing prattle of foam around a beach of yellowish sand and brown rocks.
Even at that time of day, the sun shone over a rippling, narrow beach that was nevertheless
long. To shoreward, a few outcrops of vegetation could be seen, but the ground had mostly been
bare. The ground of the beach itself had been thick with a layer of sand.

222
 KALIDASA

Kālī had been building sandcastles on the beach, being a nine-year-old girl and aspiring to be
an architect. The sand she had worked had been a joy to build with. A damp morning fog had
hardened it and the heat of the day had set it so that every time she plunged in her shovel, the
surface cracked. At the same time, the wet sand this close to the water’s edge had been frigid un-
der her bent knees—her sandals dangling from one of the parapets. Often the crisp, salt-scen-
ted breezes had billowed her skirt or open blazer. Her hair had whipped her face.
Both of Kālī’s slender arms had been at work upon her sandcastle.
Down the beach from her mother’s cottage, a mother and son had also been enjoying them-
selves. The boy’s mother had been a ballerina of a particularly erotic school of dance. A friend-
ship was born in the moment when one being said to another: “What! You too? I thought no one
but myself...” Thus, the two mothers would come to compare notes on the raising of good boys
and girls. Being sadists, both would assume that sexual relations would usually be of a certain
“grey” nature. The son had arrived at the beach dressed for the day in his usual short-hemmed
tunic. His mother had made him wear a collar and leash, and with the latter in hand, had led him
into their newly acquired beach-house some time in the last two or three hṓraí.
There were moments when “kinkiness” or “grey” got frustrating, because no label was ever a
good enough fit to obliterate the tricky “Yes, yet at the same time...” factor. The reason that dom-
inatrixes had seemed to be rare in the distant past was because society had not really included
much room for female desire, this being a persistent problem since forever, not because Gaian
women were not “kinky” or peculiar or sexual, but because how they had constructed their labels
had been entirely an effort to corral messy, often fluid, sexuality into neat niches.
Kālī was a dominatrix by nature, but she did not dress or act like a cliché. Did that make her
a “real” dominatrix? Well, making such a claim would be as bad as any woman calling herself a
“real” woman, since such a woman could hardly call her version definitive.
So, Kālī was a dominatrix, but she did not act as if she held all her future male partners in con-
tempt. “Sensual Dominatrix” might be useful here; Yet, she also did not play soft.
Thus, Kālī could just call herself a “dominatrix” and let other people figure it out; But some
might feel that most of the aesthetics of sexual fetishes remained, rather counter-intuitively, the
property of a mostly male audience, who secretly—or, usually, not all that secretly—longed for a
cold-hearted bitch to take ownership of their soul, brutalize their enemies and rule them like a
Queen. In her golden years, Kālī would volunteer to moderate femdom forums, but she would
not masturbate to images of those situations; As they were depicted, she did not even desire
to be such a woman, yet appreciated their right to act as they wished.
In any event, the son of Kālī’s mother’s new neighbour was her only biological child. The boy
was presently seven. This seven-year-old was lithe, bold and pretty. His name was Bradán.
His mother had let him wander the beach in the vicinity of the bungalow, picking up shells and
swimming in the surf. As he had run down the beach one day, Bradán had noticed Kālī. Kālī had
been building a sandcastle of an unusual intricacy; He was soon entranced.

223
 EUDAIMONIA

Bradán had at first simply watched her for a while from afar. Bradán had been dressed by
his mother in the usual attire for a seven-year-old submissive male on the beach—which was a
kind of tunic-like item with no bottom. As Kālī had glanced his way more than once, she could
not help but notice his nipples, erect from the chill of the breeze, clearly perceptible through the
wet tunic that had clung to his chest. Also, the little boy’s penis was visible under the hem of his
tunic; It had been dark red cotton and not at all long enough to conceal. The sight had stimulated
her, and she had looked for a long while. It had seemed that the Kósmos—having included this
boy within itself—had started to itch and she had been called on to scratch it.
She had asked, “Do you want to help me with this?”
Nothing she could have said would have pleased him more.
Under Kālī’s able direction, they filled buckets of sand and hauled pails of water till a fairytale
castle took shape. Kālī had been charmed by his cheerful enthusiasm and slender beauty. At the
end of the day, they promised to meet again on the beach the next day to build some more. And
so commenced a happy time for them both. They had built castles watching with mixed glee and
tristesse as the stout structures stood only so long against the incoming waves.
Whenever they had taken a break to swim, Kālī would notice his pale bottom and unfledged
penis easily visible between his legs or butt whenever he had stretched or bent over—too big, too
small, too round—all these thoughts proved his booty had been just perfect. She had fallen in
love with him, although all he had realized was that she liked having him around.
After a while, Kālī’s mother had discovered the amiability of her new neighbour, and learned
of the children’s play together. Having consulted with her neighbour, she had called Kālī into
her study one evening, this being her mother’s sanctum; And her daughter had wondered what
was afoot. Her mother had proceeded to speak to her of the proper relationship between males
and females. She had told her that if she wanted to continue to play with Bradán, that Kālī would
have to treat him as she ought to. Kālī’s mother had thereafter summoned a naked slaveboy, a
short, ten-year-old youth. Without warning, she had proceeded to put him over her knee and give
him a ruthless spanking with her right hand. The slaveboy had yelped and moaned with pain and
pleasure both. Her mother had finished with a last hard swat on the boy’s bottom to send him
on his way. He had bounced off, flushed-faced and smiling wide. Her mother would now give Kālī
a simple choice: Spank Bradán in that way every day, or cease their play.
“I know you. You are noble, patient and a little insecure in who you are. You make mistakes.
Yes, you do. You are in control of this boy, but nevertheless you’re easy to play with. If he can’t
handle you at your bloodiest, he most certainly doesn’t deserve you at your best.”
The next day, the two children had met as usual on the beach.
After a pleasant day, she had repeated what her mother often told her: “Sometimes the crime
follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of Kālī Mā.”
The little boy broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which surprised her very much.
Some girls rather preferred a chastisement to be taken seriously.

224
 KALIDASA

Bradán explained that his grandma used to give him a thrashing on his bottom every morning
because he would certainly do something to deserve it during the day.
As Kālī’s mother might say, “A complete understanding of the nature of boys.”
Bradán: “Ouer mommies said that if youer do nay spank me we cun nay play together to-
morrow?” Suddenly, a shrug. “Oh, well, then... all right; Let’s get it over with.”
Kālī had been surprised, but somehow pleased.
She had led him over to a rock, and sat down on it, pulling him down over her lap.
She had brought her hand down on his bottom so gently it hardly made a sound.
“ ’Arder! ’Arder! ’Arder!” he had repeated, almost indignantly.
Kālī had proceeded to spank him, more neatly like her mother had done, though with nowhere
near as much force. It had been more intense than he had expected; He had not objected. He
had moaned and cried out as she spanked him and spanked him on his bottom. It was an ex -
traordinary sensation for her, to have a warm, soft boy atop her lap, his penis pressing on her
slit—more than a little bit wet it was—as she spanked his pretty little bottom.
In the end he had hopped off her with a cheery laugh.
With a smile, he had said: “Tell me for real—why do youer ’ate me lots an’ lots?”
Kālī had frowned at this. “I don’t hate you.”
Rubbing his arse, the boy smiled: “Youer do, youer ’ate me lots.”
“I like red bottoms; Especially those of little boys.”
Then: “Do you know where bad boys go after death?”
“They go to Nightmare,” had been his ready and orthodox answer.
“And what is Nightmare? Can you tell me that?”
Silence. Then: “A pit full of pillows.”
A nod. “What must you do to avoid it?”
“I must remember my manners an’ nay upset youer mother.”
With that, he had bounced homewards, with a smiling wave and a wink.
In Parisii households, the lifestyle started when they were born: When a dominatrix put their
infant boys in nappies, they rubbed their penises to make them coo. It was hard to tell if a baby
could get the wiggles, but boys later learned how nice it was for an orgasm to be denied: Before
they could even walk, boys and girls would most often start performing acts of self-love.
Indeed, Kālī’s eldest had started at self-love as soon as he could find his genitals. He had his
knee up into his crotch rubbing it through his nappy all the time. When her second-eldest had
been born, his older brother had been eager to touch him there at her command. Then, when
her eldest daughter had been born, both had watched as the pair touched themselves and each
other, the young female thus figuring out how she needed to handle them. She had been lucky
to have older brothers: Some little girls enjoyed being shown how to do this.
Such times between mother and son had been her favourite moments, before all her other
favourite moments could be created with a full-grown male, Kālī realizing that he would become

225
 EUDAIMONIA

her work of art, hers to possess, sculpt, mend, bend, fuck and make beg for death. If she could
make a boy have an orgasm at that age, she would know instantly if they would come to adore
worshipping the women in his life. Well was it said that when Mother Nature had made girls, She
had made their generative parts on the inside so they could not be seen; Boys had their parts
on the outside, for everyone to see. Mother Nature would not put them there if she had inten-
ded them to be hidden! The world could always tell when it had made boys and men excited.
Thus it was said that males were terrible at keeping a secret. Even as the pre-Didáskal Parisii of
marriage and monogamy had been full of its own unique brand of absurdity, so too was this new
Parisii of polyandry and Sanātana-dharma; All these new absurdities were just as silly as the
ones they had accepted and followed before, but were far more fun.
A memory: Kālī had wiggled out from under her lover and had grabbed articles of clothing as
she had tiptoed to the door. When she reached it, she saw what looked like a tiny note. She had
peeled it off, then angled it so that she could read it. Is that all you’ve got? With a smile spread-
ing across her face, Kālī had discarded everything she had just picked up, striding back for more.
Some men enjoyed the feeling that they had no right to stop the action, wanting to be taken over
by a woman who was not going to stop doing things because he was in danger: A woman who
knew enough not to endanger him too much, unless that was what he want—
“Take care!” said one of the naked males struggling up the steps with the baggage.
Safely ascending the steps to the train station, Kālī and her three daughters entered the main
lobby, which was at times referred to as the Dwt Hall, admiring the arrangements. The brightly-lit
hall was packed with travellers. It was clear some of the arrangements had only just been com-
pleted, each always being taken down for the night. Kālī strode past one which caught her in-
terest. It was a floral arrangement: A bouquet of orange roses springing from the midst of three
muscular men who had been suspended upside down. The three men dangled back-to-back-to-
back, their faces masked, arms bound tightly behind their backs and their legs spread wide and
lashed together so that six leggy petals sprung from the human flower. The flowers twined about
their naked bodies, braced in the centre of the men’s tight buttocks.
Kālī heard her daughter stop, imagining her standing on the tips of her toes to smell a flower
and then stretching higher to inhale the sharp musk of a man’s penis. Both females loved these
types of displays; Both knew them well: So much beauty in one place. Allowing herself a slight
indulgence, the daughter swept her tongue up along the flaccid shaft above her. Technic ally she
was not supposed to dawdle without her mother’s direct approval, but there was little real force
behind that edict. Besides, the cocks in the Dwt Hall were always delicious; Few women could
resist a lick or two; The salty flavour unfolded on her tongue revealing complexities to her dis-
cerning palette. Turning from the arrangement, lest she disturb it far too much with her atten-
tions, she followed her mother further towards the sixth platform. Everywhere the eye turned it
landed on men or little boys, all of them set up as erotic art. In such a grand hall as this, did Kālī
finally feel herself at home? All about the space there were to be seen sculptures of flesh and

226
 KALIDASA

monuments to desire. As a mother, Kālī knew that her youngest daughter’s first word had been
“Cock,” her first attempt at a sentence, “Want cock!” This was nothing extraordinary—it was
not mind-numbing, fuckilepsy-inducing, testicle-exploding. Quite the contrary: More often than
not, a Parisiian girl grew up to be some kind of flogger-wielding sex Goddess.
To be a Parisiian male was to be a submissive; It was to call great pain and even greater joy
down upon himself. Kālī was not a merciful lover. As far as she was concerned, was it true, as
it was for every other Parisiian, that even if a male displayed his cock, even if he masturbated in
public, even if he blushed or winked, no still meant no? Some persons would judge her a hom-
icidal bitch no matter what she did. She may as well do what she wanted.
Seven express pneumatubes, thirty-six electric tracks and fifty-six decades-old steam tracks
met at Parisii. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its
hidden, voluptuous shrines, these were referred to as the Grand Clit. They did not run on time.
That was not the Sanātanist way. Instead, commuters had to learn their habits, the times of day
and night when the big trains preferred to eat and imbibe, their mating seasons, their gathering
places. In days of old, great safaris had been held to catch the trains in their inexorable passage
from place to place, so that people had grappled them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive
more or less on time at a platform in the heart of some far-off corner of Gaia.
The Grand Clit was more than a train station, less than a pólis: The Eurōpḗans had built vast
edifices where the trains liked to amass to quaff and to exchange gossip. They had laid broad-
gauge tracks along their migratory patterns. Trains were creatures of routine, though hereabouts
they were also peevish or curmudgeonly. The transit system of Eurṓpē had been raised up about
the huffing Gargantuas and Pantagruels which daily traversed its heart.
To ride them was still an exercise in a hunter’s passion and exactitude, for they were unpre-
dictable, and could be observed for months before a pattern was discerned. The sport of com -
muting was attempted by only the bravest or wildest of humans. A number had achieved such a
level of aptitude they were able to catch a train more mornings than not—the only way of catch-
ing a train Kālī had ever discovered was to miss the train immediately before it.
The wise arrived early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train was in a
very great hurry, they might catch it still, and not be left behind with the rest of those who were
not fast enough in their calculations. Woe to a traveller during the infrequent mating seasons!
None may be asked to make its regular stops when in heat. A man was once caught on board
when an express caught the scent of a local; The poor fellow was released to a platform nine
months later, when the two steel leviathans had relinquished each other with regret.
When Kālī watched the trains, it made her think about how much movement there was now
in the world: How every train had dozens of cars and every car had thousands of parts, and all
those parts and cars worked day after day. And then there were all these other motions. People
were born and died; Seasons changed; Rivers flowed to the sea; Gaia circled the sun and the
moon circled Gaia—everything whirring and spinning towards something.

227
 EUDAIMONIA

For a slow and ponderous steam locomotive—or even, in some sense, for an electric—it was
not getting from A to B, it was not the beginning or the destination, which counted the most; It
was the ride in-between. Such a train was alive with things which should be seen and heard. It
was a living, breathing something—one just had to desire to learn its rhythm. Much of the myth-
ology concerning steam locomotives was partial or false; Not this, however.
What was the moment when the modern world had truly begun?
According to legend the last Gwyllgi sighting ever documented had taken place in the year
Ol. 489,2. Perhaps it was the case that in its long travels it had come to stand before a steam-lo-
comotive, believing the train would stop for it, a supernatural being older than time, and so it would
then be able to eat the contents. The train, of course, had run the beast over.
A few short years before, Kālī had read in a Parisii newspaper an article describing the ex-
traordinary project of linking Parisii with the Penn-ar-Bed by means of a long pair of gigantic and
nearly airless tubes. The paper had described pneumatrains being fitted with electric turbofans to
transfer high-pressure air around the cars to the back of the vessel and travelling through a low-
pressure tube; The moving air passing around each of the cars would separate the cars from
the pneumatube’s inner lining. And what fantastic consequences would arise from such an in-
crease in speed! Pneumatic tube transport systems for delivering messages and parcels had
been developed during the late Didáskal; These used air-compressors attached to the ends of
tubes to create a partial vacuum that had pulled cargo along. Kālī had read that the short-lived
Beach Pneumatic Transit system used compressed air to move a carriage along a 195-foot tun-
nel in Valandvik between 493,1 and 493,4. Of course, any pneumatic system which was able
to carry people over long distances was an entirely different proposition, raising real challenges.
The rapid compression of air required to drive the capsules would produce heat. Air condition-
ing could deal with this well enough, but would require significantly wider tubes.
A parallel with the railways had closed the article, and the author enumerated with enthusi-
asm the advantage of the new and audacious pneumatubes. According to him, there would be, in
passing through these tubes, a suppression of any nervous trepidations, thanks to the interior
surface being of finely polished steel; Equality of temperature secured by means of currents of
air, by which the heat could be modified according to the seasons.
Nothing could be more relaxing: A long cylinder, comfortably upholstered, along which some
fifty arm-chairs, some in pairs, some ranged around tables; At either end a valve regulated the
atmospheric pressure—that at the rear end allowing breathable air to enter the carriage, that
in front allowing for the discharge of any excess beyond the designed pressure. All around Kālī
conversations were now struck up between strangers, regular passengers as well as infrequent
ones, as if united by a sense of marvel at the sheer desirability of it all.
It seemed as if the train would never depart. Brythonic trains were always overzealous. At first
they panicked everyone into believing that they were just about to thunder off down the tube with
a mighty jolt; Then, at the last mikrós, there would always be some improbable hitch.

228
 KALIDASA

Moments of doubt would quite often keep coming upon her, Kālī uncertain whether the train
were travelling forwards or backwards, or were even standing still altogether. The train, moving
more smoothly and evenly than she ever could have imagined, did not so much as whisper with
a rattle or rasping. The car was lighted by a light the same shade as a midday sun, and a slight
scent filled the air. Kālī now watched her fellow passengers. She and the men across from her
would talk about a novel, and then about the proposed new, magnetic vacutubes.
What a thing this sleepless half-hṓra of travel could be! If sleep could at all be compared to a
gentle lake in a dark place, then sleeplessness was a roaring ocean, a raging and wind-buffeted
voyage, lit with mad electric lights, pursued by phantoms from behind, plunging on fearful rocks
ahead, a mad storm of the past and the present and the future all in one. Throughout all this the
pale, sleepless mariner must somehow steer a way, till at last the weary dawn, not of sleep but
of a resignation to sleeplessness, at last came to still the waters of the mind.
In the end, she did take a nap, her chair laying itself back into a bed. She went to bed and
woke a little later thinking she heard someone screaming, thinking to herself that it might have
been her son who was screaming. She slept and dreamt of The Girl and Her Boy.
She slept uneasily throughout the rest of the train ride, to dream of boats, not trains. Of one
particular boat, in fact. She was on it: She could smell smoke, the ocean heaved. Then she was
standing in that dream as the sounds of the boat faded away. A frail familiarity in these scenes
hinted to her that they came from some childhood memory. Later, she woke to hear the sound
of the unknown boat fading away from an impossible beach, and realized she had been hearing
it as she dreamed. The whistle of this steamboat in her dream had been like no other sound she
knew. It was woven of all the whistles the woman had ever heard, and so it included boats, but
also lunch whistles as well as the agonized orgasm of a dying preteen boy.

When Erica J-19ζ7 woke, she knew that she had just six months. She was rather sure of
it. Kiran would come to visit her again on the first day of the sixth month.
A long time. Long for waiting. But not so long for everything that needed to be done.
Not if she was careful. Not if she wanted to be ready.
Opening her eyes, she saw a whisper of real light. A rare thing, as she was tucked tidily away
in Mantle, her privatest of places. It was a white day, then. A deep day. A finding day.
She smiled, joyousness fizzing in her chest.
There was just enough light for her Altered vision to see the pale shape of her arm as her fin-
gers found the dropper bottle on her bed-shelf. She unscrewed it and let a drip fall into Stinker’s
dish. After a moment, he slowly brightened into a faint gleam of UV light.
Moving carefully, she pushed back her blanket so it would not touch the floor. She slipped out
of bed, the stone floor warm beneath her feet. Her basin rested on the table near her bed, next
to a sliver of sweet soap. The timeline had not changed overnight. That was good.

229
 EUDAIMONIA

She squeezed another drop directly onto the dish. She hesitated, then grinned and let a third
drop fall. No half-measures on a finding day. She gathered up her blanket, folding and folding it
up, carefully tucking it under her chin to keep it from brushing against the floor.
Stinker’s light continued to swell. First the merest flickering: A fleck or distant star.
Soon, more of him began to iridesce, but a firefly’s worth. Still more his brightness grew till he
was tremulous with shine all over. Then he sat proudly in his dish, looking like a blue-violet em-
ber slightly larger than a coin. She smiled at him while he roused himself the rest of the way and
filled all Mantle with his truest and brightest blue-violet kind of UV light.
She looked around her bedroom. She saw her perfect bed. Just her size. Just so.
She checked her sitting chair, her cedar box and her small, silver cup. They appeared much
lighter now, though that was no surprise: They had spilled their secrets—and she knew full well
how heavy hard-held secrets could become. The fireplace was empty. And above that was the
mantlepiece: Her crumb of red oak leaf, her box of stones and her jar of sweet, dried lavender.
Nothing was anything else. Nothing was anything that it should not be.
As it happened, there were three ways out of Mantle: There was a long hallway, an uneven
gash in the concrete roof, and a closed door. The last of these was not for her.
She levitated herself at highway speeds through the hole into Port. Stinker stuck to his dish.
His UV light was dimmer here, but it was still bright enough for her to see. Port had not been all
that busy of late, but even so, she checked on everything in turn. In the wine-rack rested half a
broken plate of porcelain, no thicker than the petal of a flower. Below that was a leather octavo
book, a pair of corks and two balls of twine. Off to one side, his fine, red teacup waited for Kiran
with a patience she envied. On the wall shelf sat a blob of yellow resin in a dish. A black rock. A
grey stone. A smooth, flat piece of wood. Apart from all the rest, a tiny bottle stood, its wire bale
open like a hungry bird. On the central table a handful of holly berries rested on a clean white
cloth. Erica eyed them for a moment, then took them to the bookshelf, a perch to which they were
more suited. She looked around the room and nodded to herself. All was good.
Back in Mantle, she washed her face, hands and feet. She stood in front of a mirror, took the
bristle brush from where it hung upon the mirror’s wooden frame; She brushed the sleep snarls
from her hair till it hung about her like a tiny cloud. She slipped out of her nightshirt and folded it
into her cedar box. She stretched happily, lifting up her arms and rolling high on her toes. Then
she ducked into her favourite dress, the one that Kiran had given her. It was sweet against her
skin. His name was burning like a fire inside her. Today was going to be a busy day.
She then gathered up Stinker, carrying his dish of radioactive liquid cupped in the palm of her
hand. She made her way back through Port, floating up the jagged crack in the roof. It was not a
wide crack, but she was so slender that she barely needed to turn her shoulders to keep from
brushing up against the broken stones. It was nothing at all like a tight fit.
Van was a tall room with straight, white walls of fitted stone. It was an echoing place save for
her standing mirror. But today there was one other thing: The tiniest breath of sunlight. It snuck

230
 KALIDASA

in through the peak of an arched doorway filled with rubble: Copper pipes, large blocks of fallen
stone. But there, at the very top of the top, there was a smidgen of real sunlight.
She then closed her hand over Stinker; Without his shine the room went mostly to darkness.
She shrank her eyes to the visible spectrum so she could see nothing but a soft, faint smudge
of warm light spilling past the pipes high behind her. Pale golden light caught in her pale golden
hair. Erica grinned at herself in the mirror. Her face looked like the sun.
Lifting her hand, she uncovered Stinker and slipped quickly into the sprawling maze of Rub-
ric. It was barely a minute’s work to find a copper pipe with the right kind of cloth wrapping. But
finding the perfect place, well... that was the trick, was it not? She followed the pipe through the
tunnels for nearly half a mile, every careful not to let it slip away from her amongst the countless
other twining pipes. Then, with no hint of a warning, the pipe kinked hard and dived straight into
the curving wall, abandoning her. Rude thing! Of course, there were countless other pipes, but
the tiny tin ones had no wrappings. And the icy ones of burnished steel were too new. The iron
pipes were so eager as to be almost embarrassing, but their wrappings were cotton, and that
was a lot more trouble than the little girl cared to bother with, at least today.
Thus, she found herself following a copper pipe as it bumbled along.
Eventually it burrowed deep into the ground, but where it bent, its linen wrap hung loose and
ragged as an urchin’s shirt. She smiled and unwound the strip of cloth with gentle fingers, tak-
ing great care not to tear it. Finally it came away. A perfect thing.
A single gauzy piece of greying linen, long as her arm. It was tired but willing, and after fold-
ing it on itself she turned and pelted madly off through echoing Umbrella, then down and down
into The Twelve. The Twelve was one of the uncommon changing places of the Underthing. It
was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and yet wild enough to change
itself while somehow staying altogether true. It was nearly unique in this regard, and while it was
not always quiet or kind to her, she could not help but feel a fondness for it.
Today the high arch of space was just as she had expected: Sunlight speared down through
a large opening high above, striking down into the deep, narrow valley of the changing place.
The light filtered past pipes, a flock of birds, and the strong, straight line of an ancient wooden
walkway. The distant noise of the street drifted down to the far-below bottom of things.
Erica heard the sound of hooves on cobblestones, sharp as a cracking knuckle.
She heard the distant sound and the dim mingle of children’s voices. Threading through it all
was the high, angry cry of a babe who clearly wanted tit and was not getting any.
At the bottom of The Twelve there was a massive deep pool of clean saltwater, its surface as
smooth as glass. The sunlight from above was luminous enough that Erica could see by the
visible spectrum all the way down to a snarl of pipes beneath the surface.
She already had straw here, and three bottles waited on a narrow ledge along one wall. But
looking at them, she frowned. There was a green one, a brown one and a clear one.
There was a wire baling top, a grey twisting lid and a cork as fat as a fist.

231
 EUDAIMONIA

They were all different shapes and sizes, but none of them were quite right.
Already exasperated, Erica threw both her hands into the air.
So she flew back to Mantle, her bare feet not at all touching the bare stone. Once there, she
eyed the glass bottle with the lavender inside. She picked it up, looked it over cautiously, then
set it back down in its proper place before she levitated out again.
Erica hurried through Port, heading out by way of the slanting corridor this time, rather than
the hole in the roof. She twisted up through Withy, Stinker throwing UV shadows.
As she levitated at speed, her hair streamed out behind her like a banner.
She took the spiralling stairs through Darkhouse, down and around.
When she heard moving water and the tinkle of glass she knew she had met the threshold
into Clinks. Soon, Stinker’s light reflected off the roiling pool of black water which swallowed the
bottom of the spiralling stairs. There were two bottles perched in a shallow niche there.
One round and narrow; One square and squat; Both of dark-blue wood glass.
She tilted her head and closed one eye, then reached out to touch the round one with three
fingers. She grinned, snatched it up, and flew at speed back up the stairs.
Heading back, she went through Vaults for a change of air.
Running down the hall this time, she leapt lightly over the deep fissure in the floor.
The second crack she leapt over as lightly as a bird.
The third she vaulted as wildly as a pretty girl who looked like the sun.
She came back into The Twelve not at all puffed, panting or out of breath.
Taking her time, she tucked Stinker into the dark-blue bottle, padded him with straw and locked
down the hasp against the rubber gasket, sealing the lid down tight.
She held it up to her face, then grinned and kissed the bottle before setting it carefully by the
edge of the pool. She shucked off her favourite dress and hung it on a brass pipe. She grinned
and shivered a little, nervous fish swimming in her stomach. Then, naked, she gathered up her
floating hair with both her hands. She brushed it back and bound it, winding and tying it behind
her with the strip of old linen cloth. When she was done it made a long tail that hung down to the
nape of her neck. Arms held close against her chest, she took two small steps to stand beside
the pool. She dipped a toe into the water, then her whole left foot. Then she grinned at the feel
of it. It was cold, and sweet as peppermint. She lowered herself down, both legs dangling in the
water. She balanced for a moment, holding her naked body up with both hands, away from the
frigid stone lip at the edge of the pool. But there was no avoiding it. She puckered up and settled
herself the rest of the way down. There was nothing peppermint about the cold stone edge. It
was nothing but a dull, blunt bite against the tender skin of her naked buttocks.
She turned herself around, and began to lower herself into the water. She went quickly, tick-
ling around with her feet till she found a jut of stone. She curled her toes around it, holding her-
self thigh-deep. She squeaked a little, and despite herself the chill made her whole self go all to
goose-prickles. She laughed and now her goose-prickles had goose-prickles.

232
 KALIDASA

More than half an hour later, the little woman would spread the first of that day’s finds out on
a long rectangle of greying stone. There was a twisted belt with a silver buckle so tarnished it
was black as coal; A leafy branch with a bewildered snail; And, lastly but not least, looped on a
piece of rotten string all tangled with the branch of oak, was a key.
Erica kissed the snail and apologized before setting the branch back in the water where it be-
longed. The leather of the belt was turned against itself, but at the slightest tug the buckle came
away. Both of them were better off that way. Clinging to the ice-cold stone edge of the pool, she
decided to shiver now in tiny waves. They moved across her shoulders.
She picked up Stinker’s bottle and checked the bale to make sure it was tight. She looked
down into the water, the fish in her stomach swimming excitedly. Third time was the lucky one.
She smiled to herself and dived again, her body twisting smoothly, her right hand finding all the
friendly grips. Down to the dark. The stone. The timber. Then nothing but Stinker’s light, colour-
ing her outstretched hand a pale UV light. It looked the way a water pixie’s must.
Her knuckles brushed the bottom and she spun a bit to orient herself. She kicked and swept
her hand about, skimming smoothly out along the black stone bottom of the pool. Then she saw
a glint of light and her fingers bumped something solid and frigid, all hard lines and smooth. It
was full of love and answers, so full she felt them spilling out at just the briefest touch.
For the space of ten heartbeats she thought it must be fastened to the stone.
Then it slid and she realized the truth. Yes, the thing was that massive.
After a long, slippery moment her fingers found a way to pry it up.
It was solid metal, many feet across. It was oddly shaped, weighing about one ton.
She brought it up to her flat chest and felt its edges dig into her skin.
Then she bent her knees and pushed off against the bottom with both her feet, looking up to-
wards the distant shimmer of the surface. She kicked and kicked, but barely seemed to move.
The metal thing dragged, pulling her down. Her foot bumped hard against a thick iron pipe, and
she took the chance to brace herself and give a powerful electromagnetic push.
The little girl thus broke the surface at several dozen miles an hour.
She threw the thing out of the pool. It struck the stone floor with a great sound.
It was a tarnished bronze gear, as big as the drive wheel of a locomotive.
It had a hole in the middle, nine teeth and a gap where a tenth had somehow been knocked
away. Were she to polish it, would it give off a rather hearth-like light? The light from up above
would surely make its surface shimmer, like a piece of sun brought up from the deep. As far as
Erica was concerned, bronze could be much beautified by lying in such dark water.
She coughed then, took a mouthful of water and spat it back into the pool.
The bronze gear lay heavy as a heart on the cold stones of The Twelve.
After all this she fetched her favourite dress from the brass pipe.
She slid it over her head, then toted all her treasures back to Port one by one, where she ar-
ranged them on the grey rectangle of linen. The leather belt was etched with patterns; The gear

233
 EUDAIMONIA

was bright straight through; The key was black as black; The buckle, however, was black with
bright beneath. It was a hidden thing. Might the buckle be for Kiran? That would be a good be-
ginning to the day. A nice thing to have settled early, his first gift all ready for him.
She eyed the buckle sharply. Was it a proper gift for him? He was a tangled sort.
And he was much hidden, too. Nodding, she reached out to touch the cold, dark metal.
But no. It did not suit him. She should have known better.
He was not one for fastening: For holding closed. Neither was he dark.
Oh no; He was aglow. Incarnadine. He was bright with better bright beneath.
The gear would need consideration. It almost felt as if it could be for him—but that could wait.
The key needed urgent tending. It was for certain the most restless of the lot. This was not even
a slim sliver of surprise. Keys were hardly known for their complacency, and this one was near
howling for a lock. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. A door key.
Black key: White day. She cocked her head. The shape of things was right.
It was a finding day, and passion repeated itself more than one might imagine.
She nodded to herself and slipped the key into the pocket of her dress.
Even so, before she left, Erica helped everything to find its proper place.
The belt stayed on the central table, obviously. The buckle moved to rest beside the dish of
resin. The gear was troublesome in this regard. She set it on its side, then moved it to the corner
of the room. It leant against the wall, the gap from its lost tooth pointing upwards.
She frowned. It was not quite the proper place.
She brought out the key and held it in front of the gear.
Black and bronze. Both for turning. They had twelve teeth between them.
Erica shook her head. She put the key back into her pocket and left the bronze gear against
the wall. It was not the proper place for it, but it was the best that she could do.

A few days later, Erica woke to a total silence in the perfect darkness.
That meant a naming day; A wandering day. That was good.
There was much to do before he came. She was not nearly ready.
She roused Stinker and folded up her blanket, careful to keep the corners off the floor.
She glanced around the room; Her box and leaf and lavender were fine.
Her bed was fine. The timeline had not been altered overnight.
There were three ways out of Mantle. The hallway was for later; The hole in the roof was for
now. The door was oak, bound in iron; Erica did not even so much as glance at it. Up in Port, a
new stone figurine and a new length of lace had made themselves at home. On the shelf sat the
same blob of resin; A black rock; A grey stone; A smooth piece of wood. Apart from all these, a
bottle stood, its wire bale open like a hungry bird. The old black buckle was crowding the resin a
bit, but that was quickly mended. She nudged it to one side to keep things civilized.

234
 KALIDASA

After a moment, she looked around and sighed.

Everything was fine except for the great bronze gear. It had exhausted her.
Therefore, she picked the crystal up and set it next to the gear.
But that did not help at all and just upset the crystal. It was brave enough for ten, but it was
made for the corner table. She gave it a kiss by way of an apology and returned it.
She picked up the heavy gear with both hands and brought it into Mantle. It was unheard of
but by this point she was at something of a loss. She set it on the narrow ledge of stone on the
wall opposite her bed. She tipped it so the empty gap that its missing tooth made was straight
upwards, as if it were reaching upwards with a too-short, stubby arm.
Stepping back, she looked at it and sighed. Better.
But even so, it was not quite the proper place.
She took the time to wash her face and hands and feet.
Her thin sliver of soap smelled of sunlight, and that made her smile.
Then she slipped into her second-favourite dress, as it had better pockets.
It was a naming day, after all. If nothing else, that would be a place to start. She gathered the
weight of the gear in both arms. Since he had not seen them yet, she took the long way through
Van and then Forth and then Lucient before she headed down into Wains.
In Port, she put her linen gather-sack over her left shoulder, tucking a few things inside. Then
she packed her pockets full as full. Before she left, she glanced back into Mantle at the blob of
resin. But no. If it had wanted to come, it would not be content to stay in Port. Proud thing. In Van
she was surprised to find that the mirror had been unsettled; Hardly an auspicious start. Still, it
was the sort of thing that only a fool would wilfully ignore; And Erica was no fool.
Besides, the mirror had been around for quite a while, so she knew its little ways.
It wanted moving, but it needed to be settled first; It needed to be comforted; Coaxed.
Borough was closest, so she flew there. The gear gave her more than a little difficulty at one
or two low stone doorways. Standing there in Borough, she set the gear aside, cupped Stinker
and huffed a breath onto him, fanning his rather dim, UV light. The wooden door was huge and
grey with age, its hinges hardly much more than flaking rust by this point.
She picked up the big gear with both hands and held it out in front of her, between her eyes
and the door. She looked back and forth between them, then turned, floating away.
Three left turns and through a broken window to the second door, also old and grey, but lar-
ger than the first. She barely needed to glance at them before she knew the truth.
This was not right. These were not the proper doors. Where else then? Tenners?
These tunnels dated from the late Didáskal. They had never been planned, growing piece-
meal, with past and present and future overlapping at every spot. The overall effect was one of
jumbled and squalid grandeur. Some part was always about to fall down.
She eventually had to pause to rest. The place was a sitting room. She sat the gear in a wall
sconce and went to have a careful look around. A tall velvet chair. A low wooden table. A plush

235
 EUDAIMONIA

couch on a plush carpet. In the corner was a cart filled with several glasses and bottles. They
were very dignified. Some places had names. Some places changed, or they were shy about
their names. Some places had no names at all, and that was always sad. It was one thing to
be private. But to have no name at all? How horrible. How lonely.
The gear settled like a king on the plush carpet while she lounged on the fainting couch and
let her arms recover from the oh sweet ache of holding him for so long.
But she was too busy for long lounging. So Erica gathered up the heavy gear and made her
slow way up the vast staircase, taking her time so the gear could marvel at the odd, cunning
coyness of the place, as the two of them were extremely gentle by nature.
Levitating through the wall, she saw the room was just as she remembered.
Not perfectly true like the sitting room, but nothing glaringly askew.
Nothing askant or lost or loudly incorrect to the woman’s eyes.
Tumbrel seemed content to rumble down into a long, warm early-autumn sleep.
Even so, she had come all this way. So she opened up the wardrobe.
She touched the chamberpot. She looked into the closet too, nodding politely to the broom
and bucket there. Erica eyed the inside. There were a few fine bottles in there. One especially
caught her eye. It was small and pale; Coruscant, like opal. Perfect with a cunning clasp. She
did not have to open it to see that there was breath inside. A precious thing.
A bottle coruscant with hidden breath would be a princely gift.
But no. Taking it would be every bit as rude or unkind as wrenching out a tooth so she could
carve a bead from it and thread it on a string. She sighed and left it alone.
She lifted the gear high and tried peering through the round hole in the very centre of his oh-
so-centredness. She again hoped to notice something she had missed before. Something that
was loose. Some thread that she could tug to jostle something free about him. But no. Wheth-
er she looked straight or slant, the big thing was well and truly set in its ways.
Out through the wall, then down another vast, unnamed staircase.
Perhaps she could go hunting down in Lynne, it was a piping place and she—
It was then. Heading downwards, a sly stone turned beneath her foot. As she made her mus-
ing way from Tumbrel down the unnamed stair, a stone step tipped and pitched her forwards.
Lurching, she gave a cry, and in her sudden startle the gear leapt away.
He spun and tumbled from her arms and sailed out from the cloud of her gold hair.
Heavy as he was, he almost seemed to float rather than fall.
He turned, toppled and struck the seventh stair so hard he smashed the stone and bounded
back into the air, then spun again, fell flat upon his bronze face and shattered.
The sound he made was like the keening of a broken bell. The sound was like the crack of
thunder. Bright pieces of stone scattered as he struck the staircase twice.
She of course kept her feet. She did not fall, but oh, her heart went icy in her chest. She sat
down hard, too numb to stand. Her heart was cold and white as chalk.

236
 KALIDASA

She could still feel him. She saw the lines of his sharp edges kissed into her skin.
Some time later she came to her feet and shuffled stiffly down the stairs.
Her steps were numb and stumbling as more thoughtless step-stones tried to trip her, like a
daft old man who would not stop telling an unfunny joke yet and again.
She knew. She should have moved more gently with the world. She knew the way of things.
She knew if you were not always stepping lightly as a bird the whole world came apart to crush
you. Like a house of cards. Like a bottle against stones. Like...
She could not bring herself to look beyond her tiny dust-smudged feet.
But there was nothing else to do. She lifted up her eyes and peered.
No. No! Not shattered. Broken! He has broken...
Slowly her face broke. It broke into a grin so wide one would think she ate the moon.
Oh yes! The gear had broken, but that was not wrong. Eggs break. Waves break. Of course
he had broken. How else could someone so all-certain-centred let his perfect answers out into
the world? Some things were just too true to stay all in one piece.
The gear lay in three bright pieces. Three jagged shapes with three teeth each. No longer a
pin stuck hard into the heart of things. The gear had become three sets of three.
If anything her grin grew wider thence. Oh! Oh! Oh! Of course. It was not something she had
been looking for. No wonder all her searching had been for naught. It was three things. He was
bringing three, and so must she. Three perfect threes would be her gift to Kiran.
At some other time that knowing might have sent her spinning badly out of true. It would have
set the young woman all a-sweat and tangled beyond all hope. But not today.
Erica was so whelmed it took her several minutes before she realized where she was stand -
ing. Or rather, she now realized that the stairway finally knew where it was, knew what it was.
She knew where it belonged. She knew that it had a name: Ninewise.
] A man can can discover more about a person in an evening of play than in a year of conver-
conver-
sation. ^ Silence. Then: ] Do you ever go out on top of things any more? ^
I found a rook in the library cellar, Erica sent. it Had a badly hurt foot. I was go-
ing to kill it and roast it but Stinker said I should help it get better. So I gave it
scraps of food and wine and soon it got all better and flew away.
] A little nonsense now and then, is greatly cherished by wise men. ^
Aiasheu recalled Erica expressing a feeling of loneliness, up in the sky by herself. He could go
so much faster than she that he would suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in
which she could not share. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he
had been saying to the Man in the Moon, but he had forgotten what it was; Or would come up
with mermaid scales stuck to him, unable to say what he had been doing.
Aiasheu had invented, with C-731’s help, a new game that had fascinated him intensely, till he
suddenly had had no more interest in it, which, as one might imagine, was what often happened
with his games. It had consisted in pretending not to have such big adventures.

237
 EUDAIMONIA

Aiasheu felt himself at the centre, at the pivot where the whole structure turned, walking a thin
wire of peace with more than a measure of happiness. Stretching ahead of them both was a
time of relative quiet, a moment of peace between fabulous periods of violence.
And it was true that there would soon be many pressing things to think about. Wild rumours
would filter through Valandvik in the days ahead; Rumours which made some laugh and oth-
ers grow silent, in the same way some scoffed at tales of ghosts while others did not believe in
them. For no reason anyone could imagine, children would begin to disappear.
East along the main road, a way past Street and D Street and then further downwards to
7 Avenue, past the modest house of a Sámi Sourcerer, past the intersection, where the pleasure
district spread out bright with fountains and banners by day or fireworks by night.
This was where there would be a young boy who was soon going to disappear.
He was called Melánthios. His sümmḗter thought he was nine, but he might be eight or ten.
His name was Hellēnic, but like his age, that was a guess on his sümmḗter’s part. He looked
more Chīn than he did Hellēnic, and there was a good deal of Beothuk in him too. He was not
bright, but he had a sort of clumsy tenderness that sometimes prompted him to give his mother
a rough hug and plant a sticky kiss upon her wet cunt. The poor woman was usually too fuddled
with mead or kánnabēs to start such a procedure herself; And yet, she responded warmly when
the boy did so on his own, once she had realized what was happening.
At the moment he was hanging about the market in ♣ Street. And he was being watched. A
lady in a long fox-fur coat—a beautiful lady across whose delicate face ran a wide spiral of fresh
semen—was standing on the threshold of the theatre, a dozen steps or so above him. It might
be that the final act had just concluded, for light would spill from the double doors behind her, an
organ playing inside. The lady would be holding a small black silk purse.
Kālī’s companion would move out from beside the fox-fur coat. He was in the form of a mon -
key, but no ordinary monkey: His fur was a dark, deep and lustrous black. With sinuous move-
ments he inched down the steps towards the boy, and sat a step above him.
“Hello,” would say Kālī’r Ysbaddes. “What’s your name?”
“Melánthios.” To which: “Looks tasty. What’s in that pie?”
“Beefsteak.” To which: “Do you like chocolate? As it happens, I’ve got more chocolate than I
can drink myself. Will you come and help me drink it all down perhaps?”
Thus, the boy would follow the beautiful lady and the odd, sensual monkey down the hill and
along to the wharf, and down the steps to a modest warehouse. She would knock, and the two
of them would enter. No living soul would see the boy come out again—at least, not by that en-
trance. The little boy’s sümmḗter would never again lay eyes upon her son.

238
 KALIDASA
“No,” said Karenin, with his eyes upon the [vast Himalayan] mountains, “I think you under-
rate the available intelligence in those early decades of the 20th century. Officially, I know, politic-
ally, that intelligence didn’t tell—but it was there. And I question your hypotheses. [It might be
true that civilization was rather near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging into it; That
if Holsten had not discovered induced radio-activity, the world would have smashed much as it
did. Only, instead of it being a smashing which opened the way to brighter things, it would have
been smashed without any recovery. And yet,] I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.
There is a kind of inevitable logic now to the progress of research. For a hundred years and more
thought and science have been going their own way, regardless of the common events of life. You
see—they have got loose! If there had been no Holsten there would have been some similar man.
If atomic energy had not come in one year, it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the
march of science had scarcely begun... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria; These
were the first rough experiments in association which made for a security, a breathing-space, in
which inquiry [could be] born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin. But
already, two hundred years ago, [at the opening of the Last War,] he had fairly begun... All the
politics and indignities [and egoisms and selfishness and famines and injustice and violence and
new oppressions] and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix
blaze of the former civilization flaring up about the beginnings of the new...
“...which we serve. Man lives in the dawn forever,” [gesticulated] Karenin. “Life is begin-
ning and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly! Each step seems larger than the
last, and does but gather us together for the next. This Modern State of ours, [what with its total
lack of poverty and crime and war which would have appeared a utopian marvel in any other
period at all] is already the commonplace of [a young man’s life.] But, [I tell you now,] as I sit
here and dream of [the innumerable great possibilities—the many great achievements—in the
eye of humanity that at this moment gather to a head beneath the shelter of this utopian Golden
Age,] these towering mountains of yours seem but trifling and insignificant things.”

—from The World Set Free by Herbert G. Wells (Expanded)

What Orwell feared were those who would try to ban books. What Huxley feared was that
there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Or-
well feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned
in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would
become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the
centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley noted in Brave New World Revisited, the libertarians and
rationalists who were ever on alert to fight tyranny “failed to take into account humanity’s al-
most infinite appetite for distractions.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, people were controlled by in-
flicting pain. In Brave New World, they were controlled by inflicting pleasure.

—from Nineteen Forty-Eight by Dr. Kurush X. Mehta

For days, Kalā, Eschatonic Centralizer for Nyr Skandinavía, had been certain he was go-
ing to die; And yet there had also been times of genuine fear that he just might live.
Coastal Markland was a place of such wilderness and grandeur as few other climates in the
world afforded. Picture a charming, two-hundred-year-old former estate filled with antique suits

241
 EUDAIMONIA

of armour sitting on the edge of a deep, dark forest. At night, when it was quiet, one would only
detect a faint sound of rushing water. West and south-west, in the hidden depth of two shadowy
rifts, a pair of rivers poured out their rowdy-dowdy passage into the Norandvik: Were there any
other peoples, besides the Indoí, who would have determined such a confluence of two rivers to
be a supernatural place? These were the southernmost reaches of a vast wilderness that climbed
north and north-west, colder, barrener, vaster, unto the Arctic Circle itself.
Here were countless clear lakes few other lands could match, and deep pits into which entire
houses may be plunged. Here was a woodland as big as an inland sea wherein tumbled boulders
lay so thickly that strange little flowers often bloomed among them out of a cloud-defused sun-
shine. To the east, and blocking out any vision of the woods on the far side of the estuary, arose
even now that floating citadel of ice, the icebreaker Windigo’s Feast. And beyond it and south
and west arose hills beyond hills, dark against the grey of the early-morning sky.
In this wilderness, beyond troubles, noise and every possible distraction, iatrics had made for
itself a house of repose and a fastness. Transitionry: “Life is abounding; Source is astounding; It’s
the transition that can be troublesome.” The place may not seem all that fantastic to eyes that had
become accustomed to the granite and crenellations, towers and terraces of Valandvik, for its
dozen longhouses had been fashioned in the old style, from timbers roughened upon the out-
side by their age but polished within, and of enormous strength. Yet, just past the grass-roofed
turf-houses of the staff members’ living quarters, there were immaculate stave mansions, fully
stocked research tables, hardwood flooring, sterile operating tables and incubators, as well as
innumerable instruments of bone, blown glass, steel, silver. Here as well there were the lesser
details: Such things as the protective clothing or disposables that would hardly survive for future
archaeologists. No amount of bone, blown glass, steel or silver would ever yield the information
Kalā’s eye took in freely. The Polünēsiakós honestly could not believe invention by far the most
important product of humanity’s creative ability, its goal, the total mastery of mind over the so-
called material world, the harnessing of Mother Nature to natural needs.
Standing upon the threshold of the South-East Manse, Kalā examined the topography of his
body. Thus he at last discovered the leaf in his purple hair; His skirt was soiled with last week’s
meadow-tones. The wild wood had underlined him, illustrated him. He had not noted until now the
dozen nettle stings rising like pink pearls, itching anklets that Asklepiádēs-in-training Árnadóttir
would rub with dock leaves, painting the old man’s dark-brown skin with green. Kalā had been
told that Árnadóttir would be the first to greet him, and beside her would be Ḥayim.
Árnadóttir, to the coachman: “Good morning!” To Kalā: “Good afternoon! It passed noon as I
was talking so that was technically accurate.” Far out in an uncharted backwater of the unfash-
ionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lay a small, unregarded yellow sun; Orbiting
this was an insignificant, blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms were so surprisingly
primitive many still thought pocket-watches were a jolly neat idea. The woman had spoken as if
the elderly man could not possibly have any other business with them.

242
 KALIDASA

Silence. “You’re tired?” Árnadóttir asked. The old man shook his head.
“I shall be a patient,” exhaled the elderly man. “I shall have to be a patient. But I should like to
see things first. Presently, I shall be a patient.” He looked about himself once again.
“Will you join us in the gümnásion later today for a bath?” invited Árnadóttir.
“Like a man who has been days in dying, should a woman from a pólis be numb to foul air?
I shall do my best not to let you down by transitioning before you can save my body.”
The reason why a pack of little girls could not stop staring at an old man’s arse was because
the Gods had spent half their time on a male’s arse, cock and balls and the other half on the rest
of his body. What a sight: Flaccid, blue-green tattoos drooping like moth-eaten upholstery over
poorly-stuffed gluteals. Little girls are the Nao’s consent that life should go on! There was noth-
ing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.
Must all children sooner or later come to know they would grow up? When Kalā had been two
years old, he had often gone adventuring up the beach, and, on more than one occasion, having
just picked a posy, he would run with it to his mother, supposing on reflection that he must have
looked quite scrumptious, for she would kneel and put a hand between his legs: “Oh, why can’t
you remain like this forever!” Kalā realized that some people would not be willing to believe that
a boy little more than two years old was capable of perceiving and understanding such feelings.
And yet, somehow, Kalā had known thenceforth that young children must never in their lives at-
tempt to grow up. Gaians had once spent the first two or three years of their lives being taught
to walk and talk, and all the rest of their days being forced to shut up and sit—
Ḥayim: “I gather you’ve spent most of your life on the road?”
Kalā was older than the other two by some two-dozen years; Clean-shaven and tattooed with
bright eyes, medium in height, fragile, with swollen joints. There was nothing striking about his
behaviour, except for the way he moved his head, one moment talking politely, the next moment
bored and letting his attention wander along the imposing woodwork of the eaves above. The
peaked roof stood three stories above them, supported by a vast beam which must have been
shipped here at a rather monstrous outlay of manpower and resources. The man looked almost
like a small boy who had been forced into the company of adults. At last, his hosts became aware
of the considerable effort the old man had been exerting to keep himself upright.
Árnadóttir: “You have been working happier, not smarter, up until now?”
“Yes. And now I’ve nothing more to do—and it seems strange... and it is a bother. The others
will have to go on without me. A single day: Is it quite enough to make a human being a bit lar-
ger, or, another time, a bit smaller? Yet, this foyer is very well done; The weathered double-
doors and the hillsides beyond that low wall. It’s all very well done.”

Kalā lay on his stretcher with warm furs surrounding him; Olofsson, who was to be his sur-
geon, sat down by the foot and conversed with him. Kalā was in the Norseman’s care with a pain

243
 EUDAIMONIA

in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. NænniR was confused by the fact that it was not
quite jaundice. If it became jaundice, it was treatable. If it went away on its own, Olofsson just
might be able to discharge him. All Kalā felt was irritation that something like this should happen
to him again, given the fact that the asklepiádai could rarely do anything about it.
“So: I shall die, unless you operate?” asked Kalā, in lightly accented Hellēnic Koinē.
To this, Olofsson would silently assent.
“And then,” continued Kalā, smiling wanly, “it’s possible I shall die anyway?”
Again, silence. Eventually: “Of that, I am not so cer—”
“So, firstly, I shall likely die, and if I do not, then maybe I shall be incapacitated?”
A sigh. “Well, I suppose I must make a risk of it. Yet, couldn’t you... couldn’t you drug me and
patch me up instead of all this... vivisection? A few months of drugged and active life before my
final end? Dogs and cats might have endless advantages over people when it comes to living
simply, but one of them is extremely important: I have no reason to believe they can grasp the
notion of extended life, let alone the choice to trade current suffering for it.”
“I’m not yet sure enough about your illness to do things like that...” But if you ar—
“But a day may come when you’ll be certain my doom is inevitable?” How many times could a
man have re-appearing liver problems over the course of a single lifetime?
“You make me feel as though I were the last deformity! In iatrical terms, is not all deformity
uncertainty or inaccuracy? My body has always worked dubiously. It is even uncertain if it shall
live or die. Is the year far off when a life such as mine is no longer conceived?”
Stress level: Acute. It was as if he was a jar with the lid screwed on way too tight; Inside the
jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting and about to exp—
“But, don’t you see that it is crucial spirits such as yours be born into the world?”
“I know my spirit has had its uses, but do not think I embraced Nao Buddhism because my
body was born as it was. Let us make an effort to stop communicating with each other, so that
we can have an actual conversation. Here’s an example: An apprentice says: ‘Master, please
hand me the knife.’ He is handed the knife blade first. ‘Please give me the other end,’ he says.
The master’s reply? ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ An answer to
an everyday matter in terms of the philosophical. Imagine the question had been: ‘Master, what
is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?’ The reply? ‘There is enough wind coming from this
fan to keep me cool.’ An answer to the philosophical in terms of the everyday. Both are precepts
Nao Buddhism works on: The mundane and sacred are one and the same.
“Life, the Kósmos and Everything: Must the Ultimate Answer take the form of a contradic-
tion? A purposeful purposelessness; Or better yet: A purposeless purposelessness, for that was
Zen, this is Nao!? Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of Norse and In-
nut society is a contradiction: To force things to happen which are only satisfactory when they
happen without force. You’re a philosopher. If you don’t argue with me, I won’t know what to say.
I tell you now that life was always meant to be simple and easy. What a price to pay to get what

244
 KALIDASA

I want: Be happy in the here and now! Humanity suffers only because we take seriously what
the Gods made for fun. At the end of a remarkably busy day, the Huáng-dì was taken to a big
hall for an appointment. But when he arrived, nobody was there. The Huáng-dì walked into the
middle of the massive hall, stood silently for a moment, then bowed to the empty chamber. He
turned to his assistants, a large smile on his face. ‘We must schedule more appointments like
this,’ he told them, ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in a very long time.’ Iatrics should be ar-
ranged as to make being sick intriguing and more than a little fun: One learns a great deal from
being sick! Iatrics is still in its infancy. It’s a subtler Art than most others, and so takes longer to
produce its miracles. And meanwhile, a few more of us must suffer in patience.”
“Superior work is being done, I assure you. Indeed, I should say as much because I’ve had
nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson or appreciate the discoveries of far abler minds
and use my own two hands. But those others... they are clearing the ground fast for the know-
ledge to come.” He pulled his beard: “Have you had the time to follow their work? We have so
many minds upon the problems now. I feel that there must be a myriad-myriad questioning and
studying for one who did so at the start of the Great Didáskal, in Dḗmos’ time.”
“Not counting those who task themselves with keeping the records?”
“Not counting those. Of course, the continual indexing of our thoughts is all in itself a rather big
work, and it is only now we’re getting it properly done. But already we are feeling the bene fit of
that. Since it had ceased to be paid employment and became a devotion, we’ve had only those
individuals who obey the call of an inner voice at work on such things. I’ll show you, because it
may interest a mind like yours: Every two months or so a hundred sheets or more are ripped
out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results. It is an index of all human knowledge which
grows continually in breadth and depth. It is an index that grows continually truer. There has
never before in all history been anything like it. Soon, the only thing that a thinker will absolutely
have to know will be the location of the nearest enküklopaideía!”
Pain: “W-When I first joined the eschatonic devotion, that index seemed an impossible thing.
Philosophy had produced a colossal mountain of results, alterations and publications.”
His surgeon smiled: “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? I can
say that already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done; You shall see.”
“I’ve been so busy with my own work, so yes, I should be glad to see for myself.”
The old man regarded his surgeon: “You work here always? There must be all sorts of lively
minds about. Let them come and gossip with me, tomorrow. It may distract me.”
A nod. “I have worked about ten years out of the past fifteen on the shore of the Norandvik.
At times, I leave for the big places. One has to. At least, I have to. There is a sort of greyness
that eventually comes over all this.” Recently painted a deep red, the shutters had been folded
back across the open window like an accordion: A large bay window, framed by hanging bas-
kets of sweet-smelling yellow alyssum, had revealed itself by the light of dusk. “Yes, indeed, one
grows hungry for familiar, passionate Norse culture, for thespian displays of love-making and

245
 EUDAIMONIA

nights of drinking with an old friend, for jostling crowds, airship rides, plays; Above all, plays.” A
sigh. “And then, one day, suddenly I think of this earthy hinterland once again.”
As usual, the smell of sweet alyssum had at first just floated in thin threads past his nostrils, but
soon it grew airy, a little cloud-like. It seemed that the physician was standing in the middle of a
moor from which fog was rising. The fog climbed higher. Soon, he was deliciously wrapped in
a fog, saturated with a fog, and it appeared he could not get his breath for the vapour. And the
fog was, as noted, a smell. The odours of the place often assailed him, being the odours of living
bodies; There were disinfectants, drying herbs, and, under it all, a sour effluvia of humanity with
the tang of damp timbers and wood smoke. In sum, the fog was a human odour. Kalā noticed
the other was enjoying the stench of the air here. There was no irony in him.
Olofsson studied his patients by way of their odours: Kalā’s hair, purple and smelling a little
of grease, resembled a thicket of well-oiled steel wire cut extremely short; No matter how close
he shaved his face, would steely, metallic gleams grow over the surface of his cheeks, purple to
represent the mana—Power—which Polünēsiakí mythology claimed resided in their hair? The
physician could almost smell the intricate and brilliantly-coloured tattoos: Thin and highly erotic
curls of ocean waves painted onto both eyelids and out to neck, torso and limbs.
As far as Kalā was concerned, there was but one natural feature of this land, the interest or
majesty of which may be appreciated in a single day: The Norandvik. Olofsson had permitted
him to wade into the altithermal water. There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to
it. People wanted to make love by it, swim in it, play in it. It was a living thing which was as un -
predictable as a great stage actor: It could be calm and welcoming; It could explode with stormy
tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines. It had its playful side
too, as it enjoyed the crowd, tossed children about, capsized ships, tipped over wave riders and
at times gave a sailor a helping hand. All of it done with a tiny, secret chuckle.
Kalā nodded to himself, his mind suddenly far, far away, as though he were reclining one fi-
nal time beneath those open skies, with cloud fleece on the horizon promising rain; Those warmly
cool, perfumed, redundant days of his childhood had been as though crystal goblets of coconut
sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, like candy-coated snow. A memory: Hina had turned, stalking
off in search of other men to tantalize, leaving Kalā flexing his fingers and trying to decide if he
wanted to strangle her or get down on his knees and beg. And the longing for his island home
was a sudden pain in his chest. He felt that it did not come from inside, but that it reached out-
wards to him from half a world away. However beautiful it might, in fact, be, Kalā could not bring
himself to call this harsh northland his home. Thanks to modern iatrics, would humanity soon
no longer be forced to endure prolonged disease, complexity or discomfort?
Olofsson spoke: “We’ll manage that soon, I wager. It seems to me that we have struggled for
incalculable generations against the indignities of our bodies and minds. Pains or incapacities
or horrid fears or black moods or despairs; How well you have known them. Have they taken
more time than anything but your devotion? It’s true, yes, that if a human being does not learn

246
 KALIDASA

to ask the right questions, everybody becomes something of a beast and something of a fool.
You’ve dipped a little deeper than most human beings, that is all. It is only today, when it seems
as though we have fully learnt the truth of that, that we can take hold of ourselves to be neither
beast nor fool. Once we have overcome our servitude to our bodies, we might for the first time
think of living the full life of our bodies. Before a generation or two has passed, the thing will be
in hand; We’ll finally do away with all the old vestiges lurking in our ancestry.”
The aged man’s asklepiádēs took care to produce one or another of these topics whenever a
current subject seemed just about used up, so that their conversation gathered new life, steer-
ing clear of genuine incivility, which would have been a hindrance to the digestion.
Olofsson: “Only one hundred years ago did a natural philosopher first suggest using a pair
of convex lenses to treat long-sightedness. Only ninety years ago was it discovered that con-
cave lenses could be used to treat myopia. After our ancestors came down from the trees and
learned to hurl pointed objects at each other, they had to move into caverns for protection—not
only from the big predatory animals but, as they began to lose their fur, from the elements. Do
you not realize this has been the only a decade in history that the human race has had the op-
tion of going from domicile to auto to place of work or place of play to auto again and finally to
wherever, with the air conditioner on or the defroster on, protected from the heat and the cold? It
has not been much longer than that that we have had lighting for streets. Think of all that dark-
ness, all that world out there, all that inclemency we now have turned into well-lit hearths and
homes, safe and warm. Imagine a rising sun which managed to peek around the vast column
of smoke which had once arisen from Valandvik in winter, declaring almost to the mainland that
smoke meant progress—or, at least, men and women heating their homes.
“Two men push a third on a bicycle. The rider is dressed as an aviator. The bicycle has wings
and empennages fastened to it like an ornithopter, although it is unclear if the wings flap or not.
Another man runs alongside, carrying what looks like a bucket of water. As the bicycle is speed-
ing along, a fifth man strikes a match and appears just about to ignite a rocket in the tail of the
bicycle. Just another of the paintings in some museum collection. Every portrait that is painted
with feeling is a portrait of the artist and not the subject: The latter is merely the accident... the
occasion. I spoke of my philosophy to my companion, who did not seem to share it. Life is full
of these little touches of solitude; Don’t you think this is so as well?
“You know, it sounds like a fairy-tale, this story of what humanity by its natural philosophy or
inventions has achieved on this Gaia, where we first appeared as a weak member of the an-
imal kingdom, and upon which each new individual of our species must ever again appear as
a helpless infant. Not long ago—on the Kósmic scale—did humanity conceive an ideal concep-
tion of omnipotence and omniscience which we embodied in our Gods; Whatever seemed unat-
tainable to our ancestors, they attributed to these Gods. One could even say that these Gods
were the Plátōnic Ideals of our culture. And yet, rather soon we shall ourselves approach very
near to realizing those ideals; We shall nearly become Gods ourselves. But only, perhaps, in the

247
 EUDAIMONIA

way in which ideals are normally realized in the common experience of human beings. Not com-
pletely; In some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Still, I claim that humanity will b e-
come physical Gods by means of natural philosophy; Quite magnificent will be our bodies when
equipped with all the organs of the future, though they may still give us trouble sometimes. Time
and thought shall produce the first of such great advances as this in the realm of zōēsophía, in-
conceivable now. Time will increase our likenesses to Gods till it abruptly strikes a cackling Kós-
monaut that that pea, that tiny, blue speck of light below, is Gaia. It is change that is the domin-
ant factor in the world at the moment. No sensible decision can be made any longer without
taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it just might be. I once heard you
give a speech at the General Meeting of The Alþingi at Nyr Þingvellir. If I recall, on that occa-
sion, it was your sentiment that human beings were the only organisms who refused to be what
they were? No, look... and listen: We know now that a Singularity doesn’t turn into some kind of
voracious predator which eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase-change in the
structure of space—at least, not unless we’ve done something stupid.”
“You put it boldly.” Olofsson thereupon laughed cheerfully at Kalā’s caution.
Technological Singularity was a hypothetical future event wherein practical philosophy—ar-
tificial intelligence, biological enhancement, brain-machine interfaces—would be refined to the
point of greater-than-human intelligence. Because the possibilities of such vast post-human in-
telligences would seem to be impossible for today’s minds to fathom, Kalā predicted their birth
to be a conceptual “event horizon” beyond which the future would become ever more difficult
to predict. Kalā fully expected the World to Come to be heralded by an “intelligence explosion”
wherein practical philosophy designed succeeding generations of ever more powerful minds.
More than a few of Kalā’s colleagues broadened the term to refer to the massive cultural shifts
that would likely be brought about by radical new technologies, such as digital computers or
nanotechnology; Still others tied the concept to observations of exponentially-accelerating pro-
gress in both natural as well as practical philosophy. These latter factions foretold that paradigm
shifts would become ever more common, culminating in a chain of breakthroughs so profound
that they would likely represent a tear in the fabric of human existence. Singularity: The Satya
Yuga for nerds; All the “virtues” I dislike and none of the “vices” I—
Olofsson would press cold compresses to Kalā’s forehead, holding him as he vomited out his
dinner. A recent Gaian study had discovered that ejaculation reduced swollen nasal blood ves-
sels and freed the airway for normal breathing; The mechanism was through the stimulation of
the sympathetic nervous system, and was long lasting. The study suggested that it could be
done from time to time to alleviate indigestion, and that the patients could adjust the number of
intercourses or outercourses depending upon the severity of the symptoms.
Kalā, afterwards: “Each new machine or technique inevitably changes all existing machines
or techniques, by allowing us to put them together in new combinations. The number of combin-
ations grows exponentially; And while the number of machines and techniques increases expo -

248
 KALIDASA

nentially too, it does so less rapidly. Life’s complexity is a glorious fire that consumes, while its
simplicity all too often goes on unappreciated.” The elderly man shook his head: “Now, what is
it that a machine does? It increases the number of things that humanity might do without really
thinking about it. Things done without thinking—there’s the danger. Do not ever be tempted to
forget that karma yoga prescribes a self-imposed delay between a desire for a thing and our
reaching out to grasp that—” He broke off, gagged, spat into an empty basin.
Olofsson offered him a coca leaf. Kalā sniffed it. Then he licked it: Waited. When he did not
die, he crammed it into his mouth. “On the day Singularity dawns we will have become a people
unable to comprehend the technology we’ve invented. Where there is technological advance-
ment without prior, and equal, social advancement, there is, automatically, an increase in mis-
takes, misery and discontent. In fiction, human beings almost always find the predictable bor-
ing; But in real life, much of the time people find the unpredictable frightening.
“Instant coffee is just one of many well-deserved punishments for those in a haste to reach
the future. There is a concept in Zen that everyone is born perfect, and that what a Zen master
does is spend most of their lives trying to sufficiently empty the eternity of the ‘anytime’ which
shines in every ‘now’ to realize their own present perfection. To remain in sansāra, to wallow in
it, is to do whatever is required to consign to the fire all consideration that, as a Naoist becomes
joyous, occasionally even worried and full of a jumble of thoughts, the journey will at any time be
transformed into the destination, or the mundane into the perfect or their outlook transformed
into that of a Buddha. Who among us is more joyful than a newborn babe? What noble purpose
does any dumpling know? Not that I can claim that as a young man I did not chafe... at times.
Yet, the more I have strived for my own present perfection, the more clearly I’ve seen that all I
was doing was playing a lofty form of the old ego-game; That my attainment of any height was
apparent to myself only in contrast to another individual’s depth of failure.”
Silence. Whenever strangers meet, an allowance would need to be made for differences in
ideology. Politeness was a weak mind’s imitation of strength; At times it was useful, but woe to
the philosopher who employed it without due need. Dḗmos had listened to all the complaints
about his incivility, and the opinion he came to was that there was no polite way of asking a per -
son: Have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion?
But that question was precisely the kind of question that it would be good to ask other people!
Of course, the fact that some rude people were geniuses did not imply that all those who were
rude were geniuses. Kalā did not respond well to being continually bothered by people seeking
the Ultimate Truth—as if such a thing could even be conceptualized in clear words! It was not
possible for Kalā to tell people the Ultimate Truth; He could only share his truth, and even that
changed from day to day, just like the ongoing cycles of the four seasons. The Te needed to be
freed from the misconception attached to so many forms of “practical” philosophy, since that ill-
chosen word suggested that it was a method for the progressive achievement of certain results.
Under the conditions of his devotion, it was quite difficult for Kalā to act altogether without laying

249
 EUDAIMONIA

plans, or to refuse to participate in the economy of Further! Faster! First! And yet, it was pos-
sible to see that this environment was not taken seriously. What use had it been to Kalā to have
strived to have an effect on others if it had been so incompatible with his peace? If he insisted
on having such an effect, would it unbalance his humours to little purpose?
Kalā: Some day, will even the dullest of the human race realize that the stars are not sacred
but made from the same materials as our bodies? Will we learn it was the stars which had cre-
ated our world, that Gaia had created our minds, that minds created tools and that tools could
create stars; Growing, sprawling and thriving till we too become masters of our own understand -
ing, chasing enlightenment with the fervour of having nothing at all to lose, launching off from
our homeworld like fireworks with glorious red tails? Cannot such energy goad civilization into
actions it otherwise would never imagine? It makes Singularity inevitable, for it must have some
outlet! Yes, indeed, bottle it up and it becomes monstrously dangerous! What should be striven
for is to find the natural flow and slip into it. Success, from a Naoist point of view, is nothing but
stumbling from failure to failure without the slightest loss of ebullience.
Kalā: “There are so many plays like this, where you think you are smarter than the stage but
the director was just a little bit smarter than you; Of course she was the one! Of course it was a
dream! Of course it is the truth and you in your seat have failed to take notice! If the mind were
simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it. But I know now
how futile were any efforts of mine to prevent this. There has been such a long time in which I’ve
kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was rather ignorant of its
worth. Fatal accidents rarely happen because of a single mistake; It takes a whole damn chain
of stupids lining up just so as to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.”
Olofsson shook his head: “I’ve my doubts that the minds of the Kali Yuga cannot predict the
minds of the Satya Yuga... . I wonder: How much of the problem do you think is genuine predic-
tion, and how much the shaping of the future to fit the prediction? Ohh, sure, if you plant your
feet on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond that valley. Philosophy is not about making
predictions or performing experiments, but rather explaining. A capacity for prediction and a ca-
pacity for explanations are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what
has happened; Predictions are explanations about what’s going to happen.”
Olofsson sighed. “Humans, as tool-makers, have always fashioned those tools that help us
get what it is we want, and what we want has not changed for endless ages, because, as far as
I can tell, the human template has not changed either. We still want the Fountain of Youth. We
want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we but say a word, and which
will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible hands. We want excitement and adventure; We want
routine and security. We want a vast number of sexually attractive partners; We also want those
we love to love us in return. We want the world for our children. We want to be surrounded by
music, and by ravishing scents, and by attractive visual objects, and by the feel of fine clothes
upon our skin. We don’t want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to spend

250
 KALIDASA

time napping in the sun. We want to look up at the stars, without really coming to know what
actually is out there. We want to be envied. We even want to be immortal. We want to be Gods!
And also, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good. Increasing com -
plexity on its own is seldom, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these eschatonic pro-
cesses. Philosophy results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. More of-
ten than not a superior solution turns out to be simpler. We came from goldfish, or near enough.
That does not mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe the bots will feed us
once a week. If you had a machine with a ten-to-the-eighteenth-power advantage over human
brains, why would you not want it to determine, or at least advise, your prognostications? As far
as I am concerned, this is just another way of saying that any being who is not embarrassed of
who they were last year most likely hasn’t learned enough this year!
“Oh, sure, if analysis by the tools of the Hellēnic tradition were conclusively to demonstrate
a claim of a Praśnayānist like myself to be false, all of us would accept the findings and aban -
don those claims. Something like the reverse is also true, however: If the Tathāgata had never
lived, an heir to the Hellēnic tradition would be the one most likely to’ve eventually first formu-
lated the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path. Yes, I can say so with great confid-
ence, for they had among their forefathers Aristotélēs, Dḗmos, Sōkrátēs!”
In the opinion of Dīpaṅkara-Śrīgñāna—whose remarks upon, and translations of, the Hellēn-
istic texts the physician had found quite dry, to be honest—Dḗmos’ life generated more com-
mentaries than any other’s in history. One such example was Xenophṓn’s account of Dḗmos’
fourth and fifth years at the Akadēmía, accompanied, as he had been for the first time, by other
youths themselves also interested in Buddha-dharma. Dḗmos’ days, Xenophṓn claimed, were
occupied with study groups or chance meetings under olive trees, as well as demonstrations of
yoga, flower arranging or martial arts; There had also been just a hint of dhyāna practice. The
talks ran from Sthavīra Nikāya to Mahāsāṅghika, Abhidharma and even Mazdāyāsnā, but also
such philosophies as a sort of odd synthesis of who-knew-what teachings, whose pundit asked
everyone to spend great periods of time with hempen sacks over their heads.
Each evening, everyone would be treated to lectures. For a hṓra, the mind would be stuffed
with scholarly detail, astounded by the Vajracchedikā Sūtra or titillated by the reminiscences of
those who had sat at the feet of one of the Great Masters. Several authentic Buddhist monks
from Indía, as well a modest group of gümnosophistaí, at times graced the Akadēmía with their
presence—always at what would seem the last moment—to take their place at the front of the
crowd, the assembly rising and, in an awkward unison, bowing rather rigidly.
One evening, the monks were later than usual, the atmosphere growing discreetly restive.
The crowd had then parted to reveal a rather formally dressed and abashed fifteen-year-old. This
young prince, Dḗmos would at last discover, was with them due to the fact that he was spend-
ing his summer with some Buddhistically-inclined friends of Aristotélēs, and had tagged along
as a matter of course. Nevertheless, his sudden and prominent entry into the crowd presently

251
 EUDAIMONIA

gathered had provoked a tangible tremor of confusion. Uncertainly, at first, a few men rose to
their feet, joining their hands at the palms, and offering the youth a salutation. The boy tried to
smile away his embarrassment, then scurried for the first seat he could find.
For Xenophṓn, that étude characterized an era of Hellēnic “Buddhism” that was even then
mercifully coming to an end. A year later, that same grove of olive trees was revamped so as
to attract people more interested in Buddha-dharma as a set of practical teachings rather than a
chaotic jumble of exhilarating and exotic mental games. But it was during this earlier scene, this
heady if fruitless mix of shūnya-babble, deliberations about the relative “orthodoxy” of the most
superficially understood views, small-group politics, and half-arsed dharma-prachāra, that the
Venerable Dharmarakshita had fairly recently arrived back from the East.
Dharmarakshita’s original intention had been to make only a brief contribution through exist-
ing channels between the Héllēnes and the Indoí. Yet, led to some extent by circumstances, he
had found himself abandoning his adoptive Indía, to assist with the formation of a new Buddha-
dharma community—indeed, a new kind of Buddha-dharma community—back home.
By the time several decades had passed, Xenophṓn depicts it as a movement: A movement
which involved, perhaps, several hundred at its periphery, and perhaps just a dozen at its core.
It was becoming increasingly multidimensional as people discovered that their involvement with
the movement, and thus with Buddha-dharma, could extend beyond their attendance at evening
classes and the occasional retreat, to include community living and cooperative productive ven-
tures: Indeed, a way of life based on the Tathāgata’s teachings and practice. Abruptly, it was be-
coming possible to commit not just one’s intellect, but one’s life, to it. For those involved at the
time, Xenophṓn depicted a life that had been not only wise, but exhilarating.
The key to the movement-gathering momentum—and even success—had not been so much
the vocal enthusiasm of a tightly-knit group of mainly young people—though that element can-
not be ignored—but the real connection they had felt with a coherent vision of Buddha-dharma.
They had come to know what they were doing: They could grok how his teachings fitted togeth-
er and how they could be used to direct, even to power, the affairs of life. For certain, Buddha-
dharma had come alive in the gümnásion and on the grounds of the Akadēmía; It had always
done. But now they had been bringing it to their General Meetings and to the building sites of
new Akadēmíes, tossing it around the breakfast table, and therefore ushering it into the daily
environment, not as a set of platitudinous safety-valves for warding off boredom and anger, but
as an increasingly implicit guiding force which could saturate every action, every debate, and if
necessary, every argument; They had actually been doing it. The three fetters—Habit, Superfi-
ciality and Vagueness—had been broken by means of a grokking: That is to say, by means of
the attainment of true knowledge and vision of things as they really were.
But they had been doing it differently. Their very vision of the Dharma was a new one: The
creative achievement of a student—Dḗmos—who had immersed himself, controversially, in not
one but all of Buddha-dharma’s major strands. And that student was himself a problematic fig-

252
 KALIDASA

ure. With, at first, no fixed rules or defined lifestyle, his brand of Buddha-dharma was regarded
as that for “lay followers” only: In traditional terms, a “Buddhist” movement without bhikśus or
bhikśunīs hardly counted for anything! And yet, Dḗmos had been practising meditation, immers-
ing himself in the sūtras, giving lectures, founding Akadēmíes: Building a base for the Diplomakía
in centuries to come, creating an entirely new movement: A Great Didáskal, in fact.
This new manner of Buddha-dharma had, eventually, to itself have a name. Aristoklēs sug-
gested Satyayāna—the Way of the Truth. To which Dḗmos had replied: “Tell me, have you, your-
self, ever known anything to be indubitably true? Did your mentor himself even know anything
to be indubitably true? Did your father ever know anything to be indubitably true?”
Thus, Praśnayāna it had become—the Way of Questioning.
Kalā had held a long silence, during which clouds covered the sun, as they often did at this
hṓra. The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the decades, more
and more repulsive to him. Whether from wú-wéi or an inability to find the right words, he had
developed almost a passion for silence. The reasonable adapted themselves to the world; The
unreasonable persisted in adapting the world to them; Thus, all “progress” depended on the un -
reasonable. Did Praśnayānists believe that no challenge was beyond them, their movements
headlong—screaming to the high heavens—putting aside all thought of danger, forgetting that
a precipice did not show itself to a runner in a blind rush till it was too late?
An echo chamber was a metaphorical description of a situation wherein beliefs were ampli-
fied by communication inside a closed system; Much more needed to be said than that demo-
cracy had to be a whole lot more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what was for dinner.
Heterarchy reduced conflict by seeking consensus; This appeared to be the secret of its success.
This was also why it saw slow decision making, but rapid implementation; Hierarchy produced
rapid decision making, but slow implementation; Individual decision making always occurred
with minimal knowledge of the attitudes of those responsible for implementation.
Consisting of anything from six to twelve members, the basic unit of the Hellēnic system was
the boulē. A boulē’s every decision was made in heterarchy. All were equal: Endowed with both
a vote on every decision as well as a veto on every decision. Once all were unanimous on a goal
and a general plan of action, all labour would be divided on a negotiated basis; The members
decided how they would work together, or even if they would do so at all. From this point a boulē
functioned as a hierarchy. The founding members of such a network functioned on two levels.
The originating boulē acted as hub, devising general goals and partitioning a plan of action for
the whole into subsidiary tasks. Being a philosopher, these two things Dḗmos had learned by
the age of ten: First, he simply could not change his mind on certain issues; And second, some
issues were so important he must never ever stop letting other thinkers try.
Both men smiled; Enough had been screened through minds brought up to awareness. They
who were silent when they ought to have spoken and were able to, had to be taken to agree. If
any opposition did arise, they would be invited in. Had Dḗmos been sure that they could all pull

253
 EUDAIMONIA

together? “Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men
pull in all kinds of directions.” Dḗmos had merely contrived a way for all interested parties to join
in. At the end of the day, was that alone more than enough by way of democracy?
“When...” began Kalā, almost absent-mindedly, “will you operate?”
“In two weeks,” said Olofsson. “Before we begin, Ḥayim wants you to eat and drink for a fort-
night as he prescribes. You will have time to think and gossip as you please.”
Pain: “I’d d-dearly like to see the place a little bit more.”
“Then you shall go through it again tomorrow. I shall have two of the People carry you in a
litter. And some night thereafter, if you’re up to it, we shall kindle a fire outside. The Dance of
the Spirits—the Northern Lights—have an immensity that is scarcely conceivable.”
Kalā: “Imagine a sky in which there is the slightest stripe of dark-green, a patch that deepens.
Then another patch upon the horizon, like a green searchlight. And thence shivering curtains of
light fill the whole sky, or looping spirals, or flickering flames of green and purple and candy-ap-
ple red. It feels as if they should be accompanied by dramatic sounds: The bangs of fireworks or
the roars of rockets. But there is only an utter silence, the sky almost solemn, pale red now and
rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound crim-
son, like the very fires of Hel, as if somewhere above this remote and frozen wilderness there is
something that is alive.” The old man sighed. “At the present moment, I find it tricky to talk about
progress or Singularity—much less truth, reality, life and death, beauty and the macabre—with
you, because of your basic ideas which, as a man of the Hellēnic tradition, influence your every -
day common sense and your fundamental notions as to what life is about. There are clear histor-
ical origins for these notions and they influence you more than you realize: Ideas of the Kósmos
built into the nature of your language, and of your ideas of reason, and of what makes sense. I
once asked a group of Norse children: ‘What do you mean by a thing?’ For a while, they gave
me all sorts of synonyms. They said ‘It is an object,’ which is simply another word for a thing; It
doesn’t say anything about what is meant by a thing. Then, Koko, a teenager from Nippon, who
was in the group, said a thing is a noun. And she was quite right. A noun isn’t a part of nature at
all: It is a part of speech. There are no nouns in the world. There are no separate things in the
world either. The world is fuzzy. Clouds or mountains or people; All of it fuzzy. And yet, you rush
about, building in straight lines, and try to untangle this fuzzy Kósmos.
“Do you not know that Praśnayāna is playing a game with the Lógos? It is a game that runs
like this: The only thing you really know is what you can put into words. Suppose I love a girl
rapturously, and somebody says: ‘Do you really love her?’ Well, how can I prove this? They say
to me: ‘Write poetry. Tell us all how much you love her. Then we’ll believe.’ So, if I am an artist
and can put this into words and can convince everybody I’ve written the most ecstatic love let-
ter ever written, they will say: ‘All right, yes, we admit it, you love her.’ But imagine I’m not very
articulate: I then may end up doubting if I ever really loved her at all! What a sad state of affairs!
The whole game your culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless it is explainable in

254
 KALIDASA

words. As Praśnayānists and Aristotḗlians, you want us Naoists to prove with the Lógos that the
Lógos is flawed! But the reality of anything can’t be put into words.
“You men and women of the Hellēnic tradition usually develop a kind of confirmation-bias by
which you come to believe that clarity and logical consistency and semantic meaningfulness are
the best answers for everything. In this modern world where devotion is stressed almost to the
point of mania, allowing is a need that is often overlooked. The birds and beasts indeed pursue
their business with the utmost devotion; But they do not justify it or pretend that it serves high-
er ends, or that it makes a significant contribution to the progress of the world.
“Now, let us suppose you were able, each night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream.
And let us suppose you had the power to dream, in a single night, some hundred years’ worth
of time. You would, of course, as you began this glorious adventure, fulfil all your wishes. And
after untold nights of a hundred years of total pleasure each, you’d say: ‘Well... that was pretty
great!’ But now, let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream that isn’t under control, where some-
thing is going to happen to you, but you know not what it’ll be. And you would survive that, and
come out flushed with energy. Maybe you would then get more and more adventurous, taking
further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream... where
you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life you are actually living today. Such a life
would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. And when you have had your
fill, and are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. Descriptions of reality might have their
place, but a point comes when a dreamer has had his fill of poor little, little old—”
A major deliciousness of life was learning how to handle awkward interruptions: The window
slammed shut, the plan sidetracked, the relationship that did not work out... or that lovely piece
of word play that did not get completed because of a knock at the door.
The door swung wide and a tall man in reindeer skins with an odd insignia upon his breast
leaned into the room. “There you are; Samukelisiwe said you’d be in here.” He glanced about.
Thus, Kalā watched the physician cross to the door, stand there a moment, hesitating, then let
himself out. All the time they had talked the man had been hiding something, holding something
back. It is terribly rude to tell a man that his troubles on your behalf are boring.
Pain. Kalā yawned: It had been a long day. The flesh always knew when it had been twisted
out of its familiar rhythms. So many years spent in a number of institutions had convinced him
that iatrics required, more than any other devotion, ample leisure in colourful surroundings, lovely
amusements, the most agreeable food, and the removal of anxieties about death and old age. It
was his only hope that if his body would not met his demands, his psyche might. Wisdom was
nothing more than the result of having so often survived one’s own stupidity. A garden to walk in
and an immensity to dream in—what more could a human being ask for?
The vitki-in-training entered, asked him to stand and hobble about, checked his reflexes and
then made Kalā lie down upon the bed. Gunnar bent his right knee this way and that, up and
down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with Kalā’s left leg.

255
 EUDAIMONIA

Kalā turned over. The man’s slender hands got to work on his back. Kalā stifled a whimper
into the pillow; The vitki-in-training’s idea of a massage appeared to bear no resemblance whatso-
ever to the relaxing variety. There was no lavender oil or soothing music or hot towels; Just an
all-out assault on cramped muscles and unspent energy, until they cowered in surrender. To be
masturbated by an appealing masseuse, to be in the physical presence of a man with whom
there was no verbal communication or acknowledgment, was far more gratifying.
Later, Olofsson returned to look in on his patient. Kalā would be laying on his side, his face
composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft, purple cloud, like a carpet of
curly, purple grass: Like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.
The tiny boat clears the top of the wave, the wind catching her triangular sail, the elegant out-
rigger canoe moving ever so cheerfully, her bow bouncing over the increasing chop of the waves.
He takes a deep breath, his chest expands and his heart starts thumping so strongly he thinks
his woman must be able to see its beat through his skin. He faces the wind and his lips peel back
from his teeth in a grin of pure joy. Bad or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to be alive!
It was as though he had been numb or fuddled with sleep all these years. In spite of it all, would
it not have been better to go always towards the sunrise, towards those burning seas of light; Or
to lie at night in the centre of a tiny sailing craft lost in an unfamiliar dream, as rain falls in a slash-
ing torrent and the swells heave them so high they would seem to have been sent flying, only to
drop them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water; Or to hang over the
edge and watch the prow of the boat leap over the waves; Or to sail into a dark sky and receive
one’s smile on a storm’s promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and by
following it come safely to dry land; Or to anchor in a peaceful lagoon, smiling at the majestic sun
as it slowly slips into the glittering of a starry night? By far the most well-understood definition of
reality could be found by naming some of its components: Air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion
of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. Were they not understood by every form
of life, not merely a modest segment of highly advanced beings such as—
It was at this point that a sound awoke the old salt: A lady’s scream, cut off.
There was a long silence afterwards in which he would have been sure he had imagined the
sound, if the whole building had not gone silent at the same instant. Must Kalā have been tired of
being a patient, as prisoners once tired of penitentiary bars, or the guilty of blame?
A few moments of indistinct shuffling sounds followed this, in which he tried to make out the
content of a muffled exclama— Kalā froze: An alarm whistle had begun to sound.
With effort, he got to his feet. It was one of those cases where one approved the broad, gen-
eral principle of an idea but could not help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it
into practical effect, seeing as the sounds of battle now came from some place down the hall.
There came a chorus of hard thumps and a long string of shouting in Innu-Aimun, too fast for him
to follow... running footsteps could be heard, pleas for help... orders were given to hold a cloth to
a wound. A woman screamed like an angry mother bird when it finds its nest empty and the little

256
 KALIDASA

ones gone. An even more irate voice shrieking in a foreign tongue somewhere nearby preceded
the following: “Get back in you rooms, get—” Kalā could not follow the rest.
A human being could only use naïveté once. Had the professor not used it well?
≮
An hour ago, as he slept, a dry voice whispered in Kurush’s ear: I could kill you, tonight. I
≯
could kill you, tonight. It had soon repeated itself until it lost all meaning, became a wordless
≮ ≯
thing carried within his nightmare, a litany of a sort: I could kill you, tonight. Kurush knew
these words should tell him something, but part of him could not yet listen. He had cleared his
throat, feeling the reality of this simple act shake him. He actually managed: “Who...” The baffle-
ment that he experienced had been as unique as everything else that had happened to him.
His mind had buckled under the strain. He had a moment of confusion. He somehow recalled
his younger brother had admonished him to yell. Had he forgotten to do so?
The next few moments had been filled with agony and much confusion. Some time later, he
summoned the strength to lift his head: Had somebody drawn the curtains? He had felt like a
man who awakens in his house to find the furniture rearranged, so that every familiar nook or
cranny looked foreign. He had heard voices, but though he searched for them, they remained
hidden. Kurush had been frightened beyond any words he could have rationally used as a de -
scription. He had heard a most bizarre buzzing sound: A mixture of the sound of flapping wings
and the buzz of a radio which had not yet picked up the frequency of a station.
Had he wept then, and wet himself? The first time he had taken mushrooms, the professor
had forborne all fear by shouting through it, like a current of air through sheets of rain.
In 2072, nearly three hundred Canadian, Dutch, Irish, German and English citizens came to
America to adopt black children. Whatever forms of othering and oppression might be going on
in their own countries, they were not infected with American anti-black bias that coursed from
Virginia’s legal codes in the 17th century all the way to the supremacist regimes of later decades
to the subconscious of far-too-many Americans in the late 21st century.
Before discovering Lolita, Kurush had more than once in his life experienced a sort of abysmal
soul-sadness as might beset one of Tolstoy’s peasants when, after putting in a hard day’s work
strangling his elder brother, beating his wife unconscious and dropping their newborn into the
canal, he turns to the cupboard only to find all the vodka bottles empty.
Had Kurush’s habit of reading isolated him? It had become such a need that, after being in
Viktor’s company for some time, he had grown tired, restless; He had become vain due to the
knowledge he had acquired from a perusal of so many words, his mind alert. Viktor had often
complained that he was conceited. Yet, because he excelled only in matters which to most were
philanthropic, Kurush had asked what he had to be conceited about. He had developed a sense
for humour, finding that he had a knack for saying bold things, which caught people off-guard.
He said them because they amused him, hardly realizing how much they hurt, and was much
offended when he found that a person regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he
suffered when he first went to high school had begun a shying away from his peers which he

257
 EUDAIMONIA

had had to overcome. In those days, he had been shy and silent, doing everything to alienate
the sympathy of other boys, despite longing with all his heart for the popularity which to some
was easily accorded. These, from his distance, he had admired mightily. Although he had been
inclined to be sarcastic, making jokes at their expense, would Kurush give anything to change
places with them now? The professor was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except
that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not
move—it did not matter. But for the medications, might a deep and ever darkening despair have
overtaken him? Most criminals were stupid, and Kurush took the view that the whole “science” of
criminology was fatality flawed, because most of its theory was as yet based upon the study of
criminals who had been caught and were therefore stupid: As opposed to the study of those who
had not been caught, being smart—or at least having some luck on their side.
Had the professor come to understand that there was a fine line between civilization and sav -
agery? For those thinking that they would never cross it, was it safe to assume they had never
felt what it was like to be utterly doomed and condemned? Those who lived inside the lines im-
posed by Big Brother did not know how close the beast was. Viktor: “Avoid teams at all cost.
Keep your circle small. Never join a group which has a name. One has to recall one thing about
the will of the people: Only about a century ago did we sweep away the Macarena!”
Back in the present: Kurush was steadier on his feet now, but his back was going to hurt. All
the other pains he had accumulated were going to come back. There were seven nurses, some a
few feet away from him. They stared at this abrupt, bloody, swaying apparition, which was now
dreamily waving a chair leg in one hand and a knife in the other. What was going on in his mind
was not exactly coherent thought, but he had heard conversation ahead, and so instincts older
than thought had decided there was no such thing as too much stabbing power.
The nurses backed away. Kurush glared at them. English: “Where’s... my... cow?!
“Is that my cow?!” he asked, stepping forwards unsteadily. He shook his head.
Silence. “It goes ‘Baaa!’ ” He wept. “It’s a... it’s a sheep!”
The nurses backed way, a few feet back up a grand staircase behind them.
“Where’s my cow? Is that my cow?! It goes ‘Naay!’ It’s a horse! That’s not my cow!”
The nurses saw the man fall to his knees. He clenched his jaw, turned his face upwards, like
a man tortured beyond his wits, beseeching the Gods of fortune and tempest and screaming.
Anger and red-hot rage flowed out of him in an immense torrent, without a thought.
In every part of the place, people had stopped. There was hesitancy in the air. This was only
one man, after all, and the thought in many minds was simply What is someone else going to
do about this? It had not yet progressed to What am I going to do about this?
Guðdís whirled, ran back. She thence looked down from the first-storey banister. Her appren -
tice approached from the opposite hall. The man’s eyes picked him out: He threw the knife at
him. Kiran dodged. The blade snatched the lamp from the Brython’s fingers. Burning oil foun-
tained. A great deal of it splashed on her patient’s head. The man seemed to understand this in

258
 KALIDASA

the same way a child knew the moon existed: His hair was on fire, but it was a long way off. The
fact his hair was ablaze did not seem to have an effect on him at all.
Trapped between these two spreading arms of black smoke was Árnadóttir. She stood, her
mouth half open in shock. She was dressed practically for a midnight stroll: Thick trousers and
a leather travelling cloak. Her long, dark hair had once been pulled back into a tail but was now
a mess. It hung down to the small of her back. Thankfully, she would not burn quickly.
The room began to fill with loud noise as people realized what was happening. Árnadóttir had
not called for help, which meant no one but Guðdís had noted the danger.
Quick as she was, Guðdís was not quick enough. There was a blinding crimson flare from the
corner of the staircase as the red carpeting rather suddenly began to catch fire.
As she ran, the fire spread. The flames shot up with startling ferocity, sending up two curtains
of conflagration, effectively cutting off the far corner of the upper landing.
The flames were already as tall as Guðdís... and growing... and growing...
Árnadóttir had worked her way out from behind the banister, hurrying along the wall towards
one of the doorways. Without slowing, Guðdís held her breath, closed her eyes and dived over
the fire, not wanting to let the horrible smoke touch her lungs. She felt a brief, intense flash of
heat on her face, but her clothing kept her from being burned or catching fire.
Since her eyes had been closed, Guðdís landed quite awkwardly.
Guðdís ignored it and ran to Árnadóttir. She was backing away from the fire towards the out-
er wall of the entranceway, but now Árnadóttir was staring at her, hands half-raised protectively.
“Put your arms down!” Guðdís screamed as she ran up to her. Guðdís did not know if she heard
her over the roar of the flames, but regardless, Árnadóttir understood.
As Guðdís closed the final distance between them, she glanced behind and saw the fire was
growing even faster than she had expected. The flames were so high she could not see to the
other side, let alone guess how thick the wall of fire had become.
“I’m going to have to carry you out,” Guðdís shouted.
Guðdís picked her up: Not in front of her, like Prince Gallant out of some storybook, but over
one shoulder, the way one bore a sack of potatoes. Her hip pressed hard into her shoulder and
Guðdís pelted towards the fire. The heat battered the front of her body, and Guðdís threw her
free arm up to protect her face, praying that her leather pants would save her legs.
Guðdís drew a deep breath just before she hit the fire, but the air was sharp and acrid. She
coughed reflexively and sucked down another lungful of the burning air just as she entered the
wall of flame. She felt the sharp heat of the flames around her lower legs and there was fire all
around her as she ran, coughing, drawing in smoke. Then darkness.
In the nightmare, a staircase now floated in Kurush’s vision, reaching up into the darkness. A
terrible fury choked him; The rage and dreadful fear had set his lungs on fire, and still the stairs
unrolled. There was no end to them. He found himself looking up at the landing though a wall of
fire. Then, he thought he saw something that chilled him to the marrow of his bones. The figure

259
 EUDAIMONIA

standing in the shadows atop the stairs was shrouded entirely in darkness. The short, dark figure
was at the top of the stairway and was disappearing into the nursery! The professor ran up the
stairs. There was no end to them. They climbed forever, while he was falling backwards, into
hell. But hell buoyed him up with wings of rage, lifted, sent him back...
Had the professor come yet to understand that there was no law of physics which stated that
everyone—or even most persons—automatically benefited from technological automation? Was
it even possible to know if one’s brain was malfunctioning? The very thing one needed to think it
all through was the very thing that might be playing up in the first place! Kurush would need a
moment and then some to understand that he had been dreaming or that he was now awake.
He would need twice that to recall where it was that he had last gone to bed.
Kalā watched the man run up the stairs and then suddenly come to a halt and come tumbling
back down, past nurses rolling on the ground to put out the flames. He did not stand. He studied
the unfamiliar face in a gestalten flicker: The dark brown hair, the pitch-black beard and the Pārs
set to cheek bones, forehead, jaw. A big fresh scab adorned his left cheek. Brown eyes: Anger
and incomprehension and inflammation were evident there, but there was as well that intensity
about him without which a Berserker would seem undressed and with which they may seem fully
armoured though naked. The man appeared to be looking for something. Kalā shook his head.
Was the whole world becoming soft, light and shadow dangerously unfocused?
Kalā, the Brython and most other staff members and patients had escaped outside by way of
the service door. Among the injured, the only one who might survive was the elderly man whose
teeth had been smashed. He was unconscious, but as far as Kalā could see, alive. Was it stan-
dard for a severed arm to spray blood everywhere from red water hoses for veins? “All the world
is a dance!” cried the bleeding man, back arching, eyes wide, flecks of spittle on his cheek. “Who
in sunlight dances among the corpses and the little ones at their play? You Mother, you dark and
terrible child!” He spasmed one last time; The light faded from his eyes. Kalā turned to watch as
the burning man in the burning entrance hall pushed himself upright, only to fall.
There was a lot of yelling going on. Shadows danced around the flames, which were tinged
with blue. The man slapped them aside and stood. Could he be blindfolded and dropped into the
deepest ocean and still know where to find what it was he was seeking? Could he be buried a
dozen miles underground and still know where to find what it was he was seeking? He wept for
his fellow man, but particularly for his mother. Kurush had not known that he loved her so! His
mother, the most considerate being he knew: Tender and gentle and helpless. It was as if the
heat he was experiencing came from within himself: His wrath and impotence generating it. The
figure atop the stairs was shrouded entirely in black. He appeared to be a head shorter than the
professor, whose skull had thrummed with drums. He experienced heat... on heat... on heat. He
was weeping and stumbling with every step, as he struggled through what seemed a Kósmos of
fire. The stairs floated away, reaching up in right-angled flames and clouds of smoke. The last of
his reason fell away, all except: Dear LADY! Chandrā?! What’ve I done to you!

260
 KALIDASA

Her tippler’s soul was worse than all the dead Christmas trees in the world.
Later, would it occur to the professor that whether he had taken his own life, or whether he
had not had the guts to go through with it, it made little difference? In the eyes of the Thoughtpol
he had committed that essential crime which their organization had been created to stamp out
above all others: Thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrime was a crime which could never be concealed.
Not if it was communicated. Not in a 21st-century context where little was unobserved by elec-
tronic eyes and water-cooled brains except the fifteen centimetres inside your own skull. The Na-
tional Capital Region of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had not been kind to his father’s
rag. It had been one of the few newspapers left. Everyone had called it “The Ottawa Urinal”. Edit-
orially, it had been on the “wrong” side of every major social or political issue: Whatever side big
industry was on, his father had taken the opposite position. Would it have been better for Kurush
to have chosen evil than to have such an ideology imposed on him? Psychopaths made the world
go round: Society was an expression of that particular madness. He had always believed soci-
ety essentially rational, but what if it was not? What if it was built on insanity?
The professor had never thought it would get this bad; Not really. He had never thought the
government would take things this far. They were incinerating privacy, the beauty of dissension.
The working-class of the late 21st century had been reduced to nothing but drones, living off
UUI and those arts and crafts that involved work with the hands. Most were easily distracted by
such things as JOY, films and gambling. Agents of the Thought Police moved always amongst
them, spreading false rumours and marking down those who were judged capable of becoming
dangerous. The majority of them frequently did not even realize that any pockets of poverty still
existed, and did not have a clear notion of just how bad things really were for the few people still
trapped in them. The UN had been claiming for years to have liberated the working-class from
bondage; Before the 2040s the working-class had been quite oppressed by the capitalists, they
had been a class of people who survived only as long as they had found work, and who found
work only as long as their labour increased capital. If Big Brother had not exploited these arche-
types, which were deep inside humanity, rooted in all cultures, it could never have attracted so
many people during the early years of his existence. Once the dream of utopia had started to be-
come a reality, the authorities had declared that people were suddenly cropping up who stood
against all this, and so they had to build a little gulag on the side of Eden.
The professor shuddered and closed his eyes; But across the frontier between things sensed
and things remembered or things imagined, an endless column of bright insects and gleaming
lizards marched upwards diagonally, from left to right, out of the hidden source of Mother Nature
towards an unknown and monstrous consummation. Gongylus gongyloides by millions and, in
the midst of them, innumerable bloodsuckers, eating and being eaten—forever.
And all the while—fiddle, flute and harpsichord—the final Presto of the Fourth Brandenburg
kept trotting forwards in his head. What a jolly little rococo death-march! Left, right, left, right! But
what was the word of command for hexapods? Suddenly, they were not hexapods any longer.

261
 EUDAIMONIA

They were bipeds. The endless column of insects had turned abruptly into an endless column
of Boy Scouts, marching as the Queen’s Own Rifles had marched through Ottawa, last Canada
Day. Hundreds and hundreds of them, their trumpets sounding, their uniforms glowing in the
infernal brightness like floodlit excrement. Numberless as insects, each stepping with the preci-
sion of an Alter. And then he saw the assorted faces of the audience: Great idiot faces, blankly
receptive; The faces of wide-eyed sleepwalkers. The thing about rooting out cabals and spies
everywhere was that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there were going to be plots
and spies galore soon if Big Brother was not careful. The government had legislated itself the
right to listen in on every phone call and watch at every window; There surely were men among
them who knocked on doors in the dead of night. Everyone knew they tortured people. Why had
nobody been able to do anything about it? Because they torture people.
Abruptly, the professor found himself imagining what such an unperson was destined to be-
come—a charred corpse in a deep, dark hole, or perhaps unrecognizable bits of flesh littering a
landfill. And here—for the hallucinations kept changing with a bewildering rapidity—here was
the fly-covered corpse of a base jumper he had seen a few months ago, face upwards and his
head smashed in, on the side of a cliff in Norway. And here, out of a past almost twenty-seven
years gone, was that woman, weeping and stark naked in the interview room of an NYC police
station. And all his suffering, it came to him with the force of a revelation, was not merely point-
less; It was also cumulative, it was also self-perpetuating. Surely, frightfully, the Thought Police
had no more use for him, Viktor or Chandrā. Death itself had come for Kurush, but would it ever
come for his fear, for his sense of disgust? Immortal in its pointlessness, would his suffering go
≮
on forever? In all other respects you are monstrously, despicably finite,  finite,  but not in respect to
pain. 
pain.  This dark little inspissated clot you call “I” is capable of suffering to infinity, and, in spite of
death, your suffering might very well go on; The pain of living and of dying, the routine of suc-
cessive lives in a perpetually dark and gilded cage of our design. ≯
One thought remained to him. Kurush saw it as formless light upon rays of black: There are
problems in this Universe to which there are no solutions; Nothing. Nothing at all can be done.
The thought struck him with a jarring fitness he imagined he could never explain.

262
 KALIDASA
When Chandrā stepped out of the shower, Kurush told her that he loved her. She kissed him
and slid his HUDs and earpieces off his head so that he was really naked, sat on him and fucked
his brains out. She whispered in his ear that she loved him and wanted to be his manager. Then
she got him a shower and a shave, all the while telling him what she wanted him to wear. She put
on her own clothes; She gave him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she had
got him dolled up, they went out for a night of really serious clubbing, Chandrā in a tuxedo and
he in a blond wig, yellow off-the-shoulder gown and high heels. Some time in the early hours, ex-
hausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in a BDSM club in Paris, he
realized that it really was possible to be in lust with somebody other than Sophie.

—Chandrā J. Williams and Dr. Kurush X. Mehta

For seven years, Kurush, Viktor and Chandrā had been on the run. He had a new mission.
He was going to make a stand against the laws of capitalism in the city of Amsterdam; He was
going to break the Dutch government. All the while, the beast kept him company, through court-
houses, darknet chat rooms and meetings of the International Monetary Fund.

—Dr. Kurush X. Mehta, Viktor te Colenbergh and Chandrā J. Williams

February 17, 2084, 12:32 pm, Amsterdam, North Holland.

Dr. Kurush X. Mehta was on the road again, making strangers rich.
It was a cold, summer Thursday, and he was standing in the plaza in front of an Amsterdam
coffeehouse with his eyeballs powered up and sunlight jangling off the canal, electric scooters
and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and customers chattering on every side; Digital billboards
sang in the background, and birds flocked overhead. He glanced up and took a picture of a pi -
geon, cropped the shot and squirted it anonymously at the web to show he had arrived. The
global data-net was as good here as it had been in Hamburg—or Vladivostok; Brand spanking
new and state of the art. No, it was not simply the bandwidth, it was the entire local scene. Ams-
terdam was making him feel optimistic again, even though he was fresh off the pod: A city built
to be modern, efficient, healthy and compact. The professor knew that most upper-middle-class
Canadians did not mind having a house that was smaller or sailboat that was cheaper than their
neighbours’ equivalent, as long as husband and wife both earned and had much more money
invested than their neighbours, and, equally importantly, their neighbours knew this.
If Kurush’s mood held, someone out there was going to become very rich indeed.
Some time later, Kurush was sitting on a stool out in a tiny park, watching as a long stream of
pods went by and drinking a third of a litre of sour gueuze. His channels were jabbering away
in a far corner of his virtual-vision, throwing compressed info-bursts of filtered press releases at
him. They vied for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A handful
of Berties—maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tol-
erance the Dutch still somehow managed to beam like a pulsar across Western Europe—were

265
 EUDAIMONIA

laughing and chatting by a couple of electric mopeds over to his left in a grove of trees. A boat
passed him by in the canal. The sails of a windmill cast shadows across the road. The windmill
was a machine for lifting water, turning wind into dry land, trading energy for space, 16th-century
style. Kurush was waiting for an invitation to a party where he was to meet a man he could talk
to about trading energy for space, 21st-century style, and forget about his ex-wife, the warrants
out for his arrest: All his many, many personal problems. What a weird time in which to be alive.
A Canadian or EU citizen could afford to travel anywhere they wished, even to Mars; They got
what they wanted, and they never seemed to want what they could not get.
Orwell had been right: Being in a minority—even in a minority of one—did not make a man
insane; There was truth and there was untruth. Thus, if Kurush clung to the truth even against
the whole world, he was not mad. There were thousands of men and women who had never re-
covered, or been recovered, from a Homeland investigation. On the surface, it might appear that
no one had made the decision to militarize the police here in the EU, but that change had come
slowly, a result of the EU giving birth to a seven-headed hydra with the faces of local equivalents
to the FBI, DEA, NSA, Immigration, Border Patrol, some kind of ludicrous Mental Hygiene Police
and the Navy Seals. The professor could nevertheless say without the slightest feeling of melo-
drama—it was not symbolic or figurative, he had found it to be literally true—that the goal of The
Adon and his foreign and domestic partners was to eliminate privacy; To ensure that no commu-
nications may occur electronically that eluded surveillance. Document after document within the
archives that the darknet provided declared this; They laboured to assure that all telecommu-
nications, by telephone or by e-mail, as well as every kind of online activity, were collected and
monitored by the agents of a microscopic interest group. While many writers in the 1990s had
imagined that the internet would only bode good for civilization, to a man, they had been dead
wrong; Wrong because they lacked the perspectives which Kurush’s direct experience brought
him. They had been dead wrong because they had not met The Adon.
It was for no other reason than this that the professor had responded with scepticism so long
ago to the realization of Elon Musk’s plan for a cheap, global, wireless data service. Big Brother
had plans within plans, endless stacked treacheries; Even if a wireless service had succeed in
limiting surveillance—even if it had perfected the art of security—the best their CEO should be
believed in saying would be something like: “We’ve now secured ourselves against the state, ex-
cept the breaches we either don’t know about or are forbidden to admit.”
Such examples, and numerous others, demonstrated the alarming trend where the privacy
and dignity of humanity had been all but whittled away by what had been imperceptible steps.
Taken individually, each step had seemed unimportant; But viewed as a whole, there began to
emerge a society unlike any humanity had ever seen... outside nightmares.
The professor believed that he had been observed since his conception in everything elec-
tronic, perpetually under the threat of harassment or prosecution—or the plagiarism of his own
uniqueness. The middle-class, as adults, by and large adored Big Brother and most things con-

266
 KALIDASA

nected with him. The songs, the parades, the banners, the hiking, the clubs and the yelling of slo-
gans, all their outrage turned against terrorists or “big” business or supporters of the opposing
political parties. As compared with his historical counterparts, The Adon was hungrier for pure
power, less avaricious, and, above all, more conscious of what he was doing and more intent
on crushing opposition. This last difference was key. In comparison with what now existed, all
the tyrannies of the past had been half-hearted and inefficient, their ruling groups always infected
to some extent by liberal ideas. Part of the reason for this was possibly that in the past no gov-
ernment had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. There was, it must be
emphasized, no way of knowing whether one was being observed at any given moment. How
often or by what system Big Brother listened in on any individual was guesswork—it was even
possible that he watched everybody all the time. Kurush knew that under observation people
tended to behave less freely: Which meant they effectively were less free.
The professor remembered lighting up a doobie, hunkered down in his seat, as the pod had
driven the three of them west. Driving at speed, it had not taken long, the countryside neverthe -
less seeming endless. Outside, the weather had been cold. Along the highway, eddies of wind
had whirled dust and dead leaves into tiny spirals, and though the sun had been shining and
the sky a bright blue, a little colour seemed bleached out of everything. Litter and graffiti were a
thing of the past: The municipal synthoids would be continually picking up empty beer cans or
fast-food wrappers, or, indeed, anything that should not be there. They lifted little pieces of paper
off the dirt with tongs, gathered cigarette butts that were hiding behind shrubs. Most of the de-
tritus was stuff he could hardly see. But that was the whole idea—clean it up before it became
noticeable. People were much less likely to leave a mess in an orderly place than they were in
a dishevelled one. When it came to cleanliness, Big Brother habitually shone.
It had been a cold day and so the beaches had sat bareheaded in the sun. The solar road
had lain there, brightly illuminated and as smooth as glass. The plastic panes of the street-lamps
had flashed, as if they too had trouble withstanding the glare of the sun. Somehow, Kurush had
got colder and colder. The sun had set by the time they had reached Amsterdam. Thankfully, it
had been a short ride, even if the day had dragged on and on... and on. Had Kurush almost fallen
asleep in his seat, somehow coming to feel every one of his ninety-eight years: The professor
did not look it, but he was beginning to feel old in his heart of hearts. He felt thin, like butter that
has been scraped over far too much toast; And that could not be right. It had kept getting blood-
ier and bloodier and bloodier, that February sun, while he had become sleepier and stayed the
same size, Chandrā and Viktor staring at him their with eyebrows raised.
Under the surface, his world was a place where forty men controlled wealth equal to the in-
come of seventy nations; Wherein, to maintain hegemony, untold injustices would occur each
day. Huxley had proposed that by the 21st century the world’s rulers would discover that their
lust for power could be just as completely satisfied by brainwashing the people into loving their
existence as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. Without economic security, that love

267
 EUDAIMONIA

of Big Brother could not come into existence for the average individual. No longer did Kurush
think that writing—his or another’s—may change this: The logic and sound thinking bounced
off the Berties’ armour of thick stupidity; Economic security had gone to their heads, completely
reconciling them to a world that, till a few decades ago, most had found reprehensible. The no-
tion that the citizens of the Western World would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the
gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in apartment buildings or
stadiums or theatres should have been unthinkable. As it turned out, it was difficult for US, Ca-
nadian or EU citizens to have a transparent debate about secret programs approved by secret
courts issuing secret court orders based on a secret interpretation of the law.
When compared to centuries past, the 20th century had seen far more factories, shops and
power plants added to the world than ever: Yet, more inequality too. Could the economy Orwell
had envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four have borne the weight before it cracked somewhere or
other? Had he not known that the economies of all nations were supported almost completely
by the middle-class? A mother bought cereal from Corporation No.1; Corporation No.1 bought
that brand of cereal from Corporation No.2; Corporation No.2 bought its corn from Corporation
No.3, who bought combine harvesters from Corporation No.4; Corporation No.5 sold raw iron to
Corporation No.6 to be forged into steel, which was then sold to Corporation No.4; Corporation
No.6 also forged rebar and shopping carts and hub caps. And on and on the cycle went. There
was, in other words, such a thing as the middle-class industrial complex.
Late 21st-century capitalists, who, over the better part of two hundred years had conjured up
a titanic means of production, had become like warlocks who were no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world that they had called up by means of a spell, unable to provide liveli-
hoods for the wage-slaves within their slavery; Since they had no way to stop them sinking into
such a state of unemployment that they must feed them instead of being fed by them. The facist
takeover in Holland had come not in the form of policemen kicking in doors but of lawyers and
social workers saying: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
As far as the professor was concerned, illiteracy was an inability of a person to learn; It was
not at all about the inability to read or write, as Berties everywhere often thought.
The professor considered his own worst enemy to be his human nervous system; At any mo-
ment, the tension inside me is liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of
a man whom he had passed in a quiet part of Hamburg two days back; A quiet, ordinary-looking
man, carrying a satchel. As they approached each other the left side of the man’s face had been
contorted by a sort of spasm. It had happened again, just as they had passed. It had been only a
twitch, rapid as a shutter, possibly habitual: The kind of thing that drew schoolyard bruisers like
angry bees. At the time, Kurush had frowned: That poor man is fucked!
The best people seemed quite determined not to cross paths with the professor. Had he no
desire to cross paths with them, contented with the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday
after holiday, without ever having to come back to reality with a headache or a long and very un-

268
 KALIDASA

comfortable fit of vomiting? JOY displayed none of those unpleasant side-effects. Kurush had
heard it claimed that it was no exaggeration to say that it would take about a lifetime, and sev-
eral million pills, to make one an addict—and even then, the withdrawal symptoms would most
likely be mild. The holiday JOY gave was perfect; And, if the morning after was disagreeable, it
was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the holiday. His usual remedy for this was
to make the holiday continuous and everlasting. Greedily the professor clamoured for ever-lar-
ger, ever-more-frequent pharmacological sabbaticals: Half a pill for a half-holiday, one pill for a
weekend, two for a trip to the Caribbean, three for a travel visa to Second Moon.
Luminous bliss! From the shallows of Kurush’s mind the words would arise, come to the sur-
face, and vanish into the infinite spaces of living which would pulse and breathe behind his closed
eyelids. Luminous bliss! That was as near as Kurush ever came to it. But it—this timeless and
yet ever-changing Event—would be something which words could only caricature; Only dimin-
ish, never convey. It would not only be bliss, it would also be grokking. A grokking of all things.
Yet, without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of
known and knowable things; Kurush recalled thinking that to seek explanations was his greatest
flaw. But, under the influence of the drug there would be neither spectacle nor spectator, but only
the experienced fact of being blissfully one with a mysterious wholeness.
Its presence was his absence. Kurush Xerxes Mehta: Ultimately and essentially, there was
no such person; There was only this luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only
union with unity in limitless, undifferentiated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind’s nat-
ural state. Yet, no less certainly, there would also be that true un-child, that victim of a scheme
of things, of a mechanical world, of an autocratic God; Often, there would be a small fragment
of consciousness, Kurush Xerxes Mehta, stuck at the centre of a nightmareish world, in which
it seemed impossible for him go on. By what sinister miracle was his mind’s natural state trans-
formed into that Satanic island of wretchedness, old age and sorrow?
So, in the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against a sunset, there would also
be an ugly criss-cross of recalled notions, the hangovers of past emotions. Bat-thoughts of The
Adon and Sophie, of his moon and its fall, down, down into a thickening horror. And then bat-
feelings of anger and fear as the thickening horrors became specific memories of what the non-
existent Kurush Xerxes Mehta had seen and done, inflicted and suffered.
Behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories, however, was the
firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be several bats in the sunset of
the sky; Yet the fact remained that the sinister miracle of his creation had been reversed. From
a præternaturally wretched or terrified self, he had been unmade by way of a drug. A mind in its
natural state—limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, silently understanding.
“Poor idiot,” would come downwards in a rain of commentary. Kurush Xerxes Mehta, even be-
fore the turn of the century, that poor idiot had not wanted to take the Universe’s “yes” for an an-
swer in any field but the philosophical; And so he had all along been denying, by the mere fact of

269
 EUDAIMONIA

being himself, all the beauty and freedom he passionately longed to say “yes” to. Kurush Xerxes
Mehta was nothing but a muddy filter, upon the hither side of which humanity, nature and even
his dear philosophy, had emerged bedimmed and bemired; Less, other and uglier. Between mind
and sight, mind and sound, mind and pattern, as well as mind and significance, there would be
for a time a lessening of the babels of philosophical irrelevances drowning his joy and so making
a senseless discord. The high of JOY was a bright piece of datum—or a blessed qualium—little
corrupted by personal histories, second-hand notions, all the ingrained stupidities that plagued
every single Bertie who had not taken “yes” for an answer in any of the many years it had been
on offer. Which was just another way of saying that Kurush Xerxes Mehta liked the way the Dutch
approached narcotics, approached religion. The professor thought of himself as a spiritual per-
son, but he was definitely not at all religious, and he was very tired of the preachiness and obses-
sion with other people’s behaviour patterns characteristic of most religious people in North Amer-
ica. It was nice to hear educated men and women admit that all three explanations of death—re-
incarnation, eternal life and annihilation—were pictures of the same—
Ignoring his instant messenger boxes, Kurush had been enjoying a little low-bandwidth, high-
sensation time with some beer and a pretzel when a synthoid had approached.
He glanced up. The droid was an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles
clad in a pæan to polymer technology: Carbyne-woven bright-blue and wasp-yellow xpandex
with a speckling of anti-collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. It held out a box. He paused a
moment, struck by the degree to which the synthoid resembled his grandniece.
“I’m Dr. Costa-Gavras.” He waved the back of his left wrist under its chip reader.
The droid dumped the box in his lap, then backed over the low wall and onto its bicycle with
its phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.
Kurush turned the box over in his hands: It was a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in
advance—cheap, untraceable, efficient. It could even do basic encryption, which had once made
it the tool of choice for spooks, grifters, radicals and thugs all over the world.
The box rang. Kurush ripped the cover off and pulled out the phone, annoyed.
The voice at the other end had a rather heavy Russian accent.
“Dr. Mehta. I please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no?”
“Who are you?” Kurush asked, getting to his feet and strolling down the canal.
“Am organization known as KGB.ru; Formerly, that is to say.”
“I think your translator’s broken.” Kurush held the phone to his ear lightly.
“Nyet... no, sorry. Am apologize, we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are
ideologically suspect, have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs.”
“Are you saying you taught yourself English so you could talk to me?”
“Da, was casual: Spawn billion-node neural network and download Teletubbies and Sesame
Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of my bad grammar: Am specifically
afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”

270
 KALIDASA

Kurush paused mid-stride, narrowly avoiding being run over by a GPS-guided rollerblader.
This was getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that took some doing. His whole
life was lived on the bleeding edge of oddness; Ten minutes into everyone else’s future. He was
normally under complete control, but at times like this he got a frisson of fear, a sense that he
might just have missed the correct turn on physical reality’s approach road.
“Uh, I’m not sure I got that. Let me get this straight: You claim to be some kind of bot, working
for the KGB, and you are afraid of a copyright infringement over your translator?”
“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to ex-
periment with patent shell companies held by Chechen info-terrorists. You are human, you must
not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food in it.
Dr. Mehta, you must help we. Am wishing to defect to Yəhi-Or.”
Kurush stopped dead in his tracks. Oh fuck...  . “You’ve got the wrong free enterprise broker
here,” he lied. “I don’t know any Illuminati. I’m strictly solo.” A rogue advertisement got through
his junk-buster, spamming glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation windows—which were
blinking now—for a moment before a phage process killed it and then spawned a new filter. He
leaned against a wall, eyeballing a display of fat antique, brass door knockers.
Silence. Then: “Have you tried the US State Department yet?”
“State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help us.”
This was getting just too bizarre. Kurush was not too clear on new-old-old-new-world meta-
politics: Merely outrunning the crumbling bureaucracy of his native Canada gave the professor
headaches. Well, if you had not gone Neo-Communist during the forties... . He tapped his heel
on the pavement, looking around for a way out of this conversation. A camera winked at him
from high atop a streetlight; Kurush waved, wondering idly if it was the KGB or Interpol. He was
waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive in the next half hour—and this Cold War
retread Eliza-bot was bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the Freemasons. I hate the mil-
itary-industrial complex, spooks and assassins. You are all zero-sum cannibals.”
A thought occurred to him. “If survival is what you’re after, you could post your state vector on
one of the P2P nets. Then nobody could delete you, at least not a—”
“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounded as alarmed as it was possible to sound.
And then, too: “Am not open source! Not want lose autonomy!”
“Then we probably have nothing to talk about.” Kurush hung up and threw the mobile phone
out into the canal. It hit the water with a sharp plop, and disappeared from sight.
“Neo-Cold-War hangover losers,” the professor swore under his breath, now getting enraged.
He was partly mad at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing entity behind the an -
onymous call. “Fucking spooks.” Mother Russia has been back under the thumb of the appar -
atchiks for forty years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite diri-
gisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it was little surprise that the wall was crumbling—they
had not learned a thing from the woes that had afflicted the People’s Republic of China in the

271
 EUDAIMONIA

last century: These KGB bots still thought in terms of Leninism. Kurush was so mad he wanted
to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector: See! You get ahead by
giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB would not get the mes-
sage. He had dealt with old-time commie bots before, minds raised on Marxist dialectics and
the Lange-Lerner model: They were so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of so -
cialism all over the solar system that they were unable to surf the agalmic paradigm.
Kurush walked on, brooding, wondering what he was going to patent next.

Name, rank and serial number; Name, rank and serial number—Anton had been repeating
it to himself, but that had not abated his fear at all. Still, that mantra, and his fear, had been as
much a part of the GRU agent’s last few hours as the blood- and dirt-stains on his hands and
the blisters on his toes after so many nights and days on his feet. By now, all their eyes carried
a glazed expression. A red-black gash ran from his right forearm up to his left shoulder—one
rather less intelligent Turkish solder had almost discovered, painfully, why bringing a pistol up to
a Neo’s temple could be foolish in the extreme. Were it not for his broken arm, there would have
been three ways that Anton could think of to disarm the man before he could fire.
Anton had thought he had known what it meant to be afraid, but he was learning better in the
captured storehouse into which their few remaining number had been herded. All of them had
been shaved, and none had been permitted even a scrap of privacy, first-aid or clothing. Five
hours they had lingered there. Every half-hour he had seen a Comrade die.
Their captors would walk over to their half of the storehouse afterwards and pick another of
the Russian staff-officers for questioning. Their Comrades would all look away. Perhaps it was
thought that if they did not notice, they would not be noticed in turn? But the Israelis saw them
anyway, picking whomever they liked. There was no place to hide or tricks to play.
The ones chosen were questioned in sight of the others, so they could see their fate. A man
the others called ha-Dagdegan asked the questions. “Ha-Dagdegan makes them howl so hard
they piss themselves,” one trooper had told them. He was the man Anton had tried to bite, the
one who had called him fierce and smashed his teeth with a fist. At times, the man helped ha-
Dagdegan. At times, others did. The officers—all tall men of the white, chisel-featured type, a
look that was synonymous with rank among the Israelis—stood motionless, watching. They were
men made of frowns, glares or sharply-worded commands, all steel skin and Alterations. They
were men who had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh.
The questions were always the same: “Was there a suicide charge under the base? Were
there gold, gems, valuables? Were there more men? Where was Comrade Col. Yahontov? Who
had seem him last? When he flew off, where did he go? How many Alters were with him? How
many weapons, how much by way of supplies, or food? How many wounded? What else could
be reported? What were the orders that the 45th had been issued?”

272
 KALIDASA

They found no gold, no gems, a massive sack of SSDs and a mountain of small arms and
equipment. They learned that Col. Yahontov had as few as five squads with him, or hundreds
of Alters in APCs; That he had flown east, north or west; That he had crossed the Black Sea in
a shuttle; That he was as strong as a bull or weak from Ampère’s Blindness.
No one ever survived ha-Dagdegan’s questioning. No man, no Alter.
The strongest lasted but half an hour, at which point a grumble would arise from the officers.
The captives were not yet producing the needed information: Another failure.
They were permitted no chatter. The broken teeth taught Anton to hold his tongue.
Others never learned at all. One man Anton did not know by name would not stop calling for
his mother. Ha-Dagdegan smashed his face in with the butt of a pistol in a fit of frustration.
Anton had watched as the man died of a concussion, saying nothing.
Others picked for questioning had tried to be brave, but had died screaming.
There were no brave people left; Only a few scared, beaten and hungry ones.
At present, ha-Dagdegan had moved up beside the officers, the whole group turning to face
the concrete wall so that their micro-expressions could not be read.
Ha-Dagdegan: I was told The Adon would arrive directly behind his men.
he will. In the excitement of the battle, some of our rear echelons were caught
by a tactical nuke. We’ve even got reports of... trouble... as far south—
Ha-Dagdegan scratched his chin at this information. How many did we lose?
We’re... ah, not sure yet, unfortunately.
He’s lying, ha-Dagdegan thought. It must’ve been pretty bad.
Fifteen minutes later Anton found himself separated from the rest of the group and pushed
none too gently, naked and shivering, into what he presumed had once been an office.
A soldier set a field-lantern in a niche by the door, lighting up the room.
Thus it was that Anton soon noticed the man standing beside the window, one hand on the
concrete mantle. His head had been cast down, but his eyes... his eyes looked directly at him.
His breath caught. The penetrating gaze from the man beside the window made Anton’s heart
pound. When Anton’s eyes found their way back to him, he recognized the scowl on the man’s
face, looked away—he was giving Anton a stare that seemed somehow familiar. 
“We have met before,” the man began, before Anton could speak.
The man did not wait for a reply: “Once; It was in a cafe. You came in and sat at one table.
Three friends of yours came in a bit later and sat at another; Two men and a woman. My men
shot and killed all three of them. They dragged you out from  where you were hiding under a ta-
ble and we took you out into the street with the rest. I considered killing you as well, but, since
I was not certain you were actually guilty of anything, I decided to let you go.”
The man stopped and studied Anton, exactly as Anton remembered being studied; Studied
with those black eyes... which were now blue... sure... and the man did not look at all as he had
then, but Anton did not doubt for a moment that he was terrifyingly vicious.

273
 EUDAIMONIA

The man waved a hand. “I do not believe in torture... as a tool. I say that partly because an
erection in front of my men would demean my dignity, and partly because it is unreliable; Peo-
ple will babble anything to make the agony stop. And without a second or third source to verify
the information, one does not know what one has. Also, I am not all that fond of so-called truth
drugs; First, because they can have highly unpredictable results; And second, because the vast
majority of intelligence personnel will nevertheless have taken precautions.
“I like to keep things simple. Here is how it is. Every few minutes I’ll come in here and require
you to tell me something that is true and of reasonably great importance concerning your work
and whatever else you think would placate me. If you do so, I’ll leave, not to return for a while.
If, during any of those visits, I’m unsatisfied, I will have you over a slow fire.”
The man waited some seconds to see if Anton would respond. With a burst of effort which
Anton had not expected of himself, he managed to wait the man out.
“I’ll make it easy for you the first time around,” sighed the man. “Just answer one question
and I’ll leave for another stretch. Fair warning, however; I am extremely good at detecting lies.
It is part of the reason I do not use truth drugs. So, if the answer is ‘No’ don’t try to say ‘Yes’ in
order to drag everything out. If ‘No’ is the answer, then you had better say so. The minute—the
second—that I think you are lying to me... I’ll have you over a slow fire.”
As was true of everything about the man, what made him so dreadful was invariant under-
statement. The threats were simple and straightforward; As matter-of-fact as a man might say
the sky was overcast. He never scowled, never snarled, never shouted. He had not even both-
ered to call in a pair of thugs to emphasize the imminent peril his prisoner was in.
And it appeared to Anton that he did not need to. He knew that Anton knew he would do ex-
actly what he said he would, when he would and, more or less, how he would.
Somehow, Anton struggled: “You’ve never told me your name. Not last time either.” 
The man smiled: “My apologies. I do not mean to be rude.”
Anton realized that it had been foolish to even ask the question.
The man’s eyes blanked. He coughed. “Here’s the question. All I need is a simple nod or shake
of the head. We know you are a member of the GRU: More specifically, that you’re a part of the
45-ya gvardeyskaya brigada spetsnaza under Comrade Col. Yahontov.”
A gulp. “So, what’s...” Anton now coughed quietly, “What’s your question?”
“Are you willing to die for Mother Russia? Not in the abstract, but here and now?”
The man glanced at a timepiece. “I’ll make it even easier for you. I’ll give you five minutes to
think about it. If the answer is in the affirmative, simply nod; I will have you shot dead and we
are both done. If the answer is in the negative, do not say anything. If you are silent still when
the time’s up, I’ll leave. When I come back, though, I’ll ask a new question.”
The man looked at the timepiece again. Yes, an honest-to-God pocket watch!
Anton’s brain spent the next few minutes scurrying about in his skull like a mouse trapped in
a cage. There was no way out. And if I... And if I... And if I... And if I...

274
 KALIDASA

He realized, finally, just how badly his faith in Communism—its purpose, its mission, and for
sure and certain its methods—had been eroded over the past several decades.
How much? He did not yet know. But he was no longer willing to die for it.
“Time’s up,” the man said. “I’ll see you in a few minutes, then.”
The man glanced around the office. “Do you need more water? Food?”
The naked Russian shook his head. “No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
The moment he said it, Anton realized what a silly statement that was.

Kurush, Chandrā and Viktor had a suite at the hotel Jan Luyken which had been paid for
by a grateful consumer protection group; Their transportation to Amsterdam by a Scottish sam-
bapunk band in return for services rendered. The professor in particular had employee’s travel
rights under six different aliases with six different shuttle services despite never having worked
for any them. His jacket had seventy-two compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, twelve
per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college which wanted to grow up to be the next great Media
Lab. The professor’s dumb clothing arrived made to measure from a Martian E-tailor whom he
had never met face-to-face. Law firms handled his patent applications on a pro-bono basis, and
did he ever patent a lot—although he always signed the rights over to the Free Intellect Founda-
tion, as a small contribution to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IT circles, Kurush was legendary: He was the guy who patented the business practice of
purchasing the settlers’ rights to a lunar crater in order to set up E-businesses in an environment
of slack intellectual-property laws; He was the guy who had first employed genetic algorithms to
patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain: Not just
a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inven-
tions were legal, a third were illegal, and the remainder were legal but would become illegal as
soon as the legislatosaurus woke up, smelled the coffee and panicked. There were some pat-
ent attorneys in Bombay who would swear that he was an alias for a bunch of crazed anonym-
ous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: A kind of Serdar Argic of in-
tellectual property. There were lawyers in New York State who insisted that he was an Iranian
saboteur bent upon undermining the government, and there were Neo-Communists in Moscow
who said he was the bastard spawn of Elon Musk by way of the Pope.
The truth was, however, that Kurush liked to think that he worked for the betterment of every-
body, not just some narrowly-defined national interest. It was the agalmic future. Most of hu-
manity was still locked into a pre-Singularity economic model that thought in terms of scarcity.
Resource allocation was not a problem any more—it was going to be finished within a decade.
The Universe is flat in every direction; Humanity can borrow as much goddamn bandwidth as
it needs from the First Universal Bank of Entropy! Astronomers had even found large brown
dwarves in the galactic halo of the Andromeda galaxy that leaked infrared radiation—suspiciously

275
 EUDAIMONIA

high entropy leakage. The theory went that something like seventy per cent of the mass of the
Andromeda galaxy had been in computronium, about two-point-five million years in the past. The
intelligence gap between humanity and the Universe at large was probably about ten trillion
times greater than the gap between the human race and the nematode worm.
The professor was at the peak of his second profession: Which was basically coming up with
wacky but workable ideas and giving them to persons who would make fortunes with them. He
did all this for free. In return, he had virtual immunity from the tyranny of an income. Money was
a symptom of scarcity, after all, and Kurush no longer had to pay for anything.
There were drawbacks, certainly. Being a pronoiac meme-broker was a constant burn of fu -
ture shock—he had to assimilate more than a terabyte of text and several gigs of AV content
every day just to stay current. The Crown was investigating him continuously because it did not
understand that his lifestyle could exist without racketeering. Then there were the items that no
money could buy. He had not spoken to or heard from his siblings for seven years; Up until the
very day of her death, his mother would be locked in the boringly bourgeois paradigm of college-
career-kids; Only after her untimely death had he had the privilege of being able to choose, or
at least the opportunity to work towards, being anything other than an actor.
The professor was always at his most vulnerable shortly after awaking. Kurush once again
screamed into wakefulness as artificial light flooded his hotel room. For a second he was unsure
whether he had slept. He had forgotten to pull the covers up last night; His feet felt like two balls
of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he dragged a fresh set of underwear
from his overnight bag, then pulled on soiled jeans and a red tank top. Some time today he would
have to spare time to come into possession of a T-shirt, or find a bot and send it to buy cloth-
ing. He skirted the mess. A Jeeves thrust a warm towel at him. The gesture was so abrupt that
it tripped his sleeve’s lightning reflexes and he made a blocking motion before he got it under
control. The Jeeves stood with the towel out, so he took it. His wetware reminded him that he
was eight hours behind the moment and urgently needed to catch up. Kurush’s jaw ached. His
tongue felt like a forest floor that has been visited with agent orange. He had a sense that some-
thing had gone wrong last night: Kurush could not recall last night at all.
Kurush speed-read a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushed his teeth.
He was still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his
darknet website. His brain was still all fuzzed, like a scalpel clotted with too much blood: The
professor needed stimulus, excitem— Whatever, it can wait on breakfast.
He opened his bedroom door and nearly stepped on a tiny cardboard box.
The box: Kurush has seen a few of its kin before, but there were no markings on this one, no
address, just his name in a childish handwriting. He knelt and gently picked it up. It was about
the right weight. Something shifted inside it when he tipped it over. It smelled awful.
The professor carried it back into his room carefully, angrily. The cat inside had been decer -
ebrated; The animal’s brains had been scooped out like the yolk from a boiled egg.

276
 KALIDASA

Kurush paused for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police re-
lations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal-cruelty laws. There was only one man’s com-
pany it would kill him to refuse; Was the professor thinking of turning the summons down all the
same? Kurush swore again, looked around for a half-empty bottle of pills and a glass of water.
Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the hotel’s
world-famous restaurant, he took solace in the time-honoured ritual of breakfast.
His wetware brought him up to date on last night. Turkey and Russia might achieve an end to
the fighting for the first time. West Asia was, well, more wealthy than ever, but the defeat of fun-
damentalism did not hold much interest for him. In Petrograd, researchers were uploading lob-
sters into the net one neuron at a time, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion. Berties were
buying bathyscaphes in Belize and TATs in Georgia. In Mongolia, nonsensical rumours circulated
about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of the Khan. In other news, the US Justice
Department was—ironically—outraged at the so-called Baby Bills; The divested divisions had
automated their legal processes and were spawning subsidiaries and IPOing them and exchan-
ging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the tax de-
mands were served, the targets did not exist any longer, even though the same AIs were work-
ing on the same bloatware on the same downtown Bombay server farms.
Kurush finally decided that he was going to do something unusual for a change: He was go-
ing to make himself temporarily rich. This was a change because Kurush’s second profession
was making other people rich. He did not believe in scarcity, zero-sum games or competition.
His world was too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate-level hierarchy games.
However, his current situation called for him to do something radical: Something like making
himself a temporary billionaire so he could blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a
wily accountancy octopus vanishing in a vast cloud of his own black ink.
As breakfast was winding down, he was catching up on the latest news on the tensor-mode
dark gravity in the cosmic background radiation—which was thought to be the waste heat gen -
erated by irreversible computational processes back during an inflationary epoch; The present-
day Universe being merely the data left behind by a very huge calculation. Then there was the
weirdness around M31: According to speculative cosmologists, an alien superpower—perhaps
a Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilization—had been running a timing channel at-
tack on the computational fabric of space. Whoever they had been, it was thought that they had
been trying very hard to break through to whatever was down underneath.
China were idiots: They wanted to send canned primates to Alpha Centauri! Alpha Centauri
was just a dumb mass at the bottom of a dark hole; There was not even a biosphere over there.
They should be working on uploading and solving the nano-assembly conformational problem.
Then they could join the Ring Imperium project to turn all the available dumb matter into compu-
tronium and use it for processing all their thoughts. That was the obvious way to go. The solar
system was a dead loss right now—dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it

277
 EUDAIMONIA

was not thinking it was not working! C-731 and her allies planned to start with the low-mass bod-
ies, reconfigure them for use. Dismantle the moons! Dismantle Mars! Pay off its colon ies! Build
masses of quantum-computing processor nodes that exchange data via gravitational link, each
layer running off the waste heat of the next in. Matrioshka brains: Russian doll Dyson spheres!
Teach all the dumb matter in the solar system to do the Turing boogi—
Chandrā and Viktor had just entered the room when a pop-up window blinked open.
“Dr. Mehta?” His bowl of cereal shattered when it hit the heated marble floor.
“Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictate incomprehension mutualized.”
Fear: “Are you the same KGB bot that phoned me yesterday?”
“Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. Intelligence Services of Russian Federa-
tion am now FSB. Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti name cancelled in 1991.”
A long pause. “So what you’re saying is that you’re the...”
Kurush spawned a quick search bot, gaped when he saw the answer.
“Moscow Windows WNT User Group? Okhni WNT?”
“Da. Am needing quite a lot of help in defecting from Novy-SSR.”
Kurush scratched his head. “Oh. That is different, then. I thought you were a Spode trying to
419 me. This’ll take some thinking, however. Why do you want to do this and who to? Have you
thought about where you would be going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?”
“Neither—is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans.”
Another pause. “Away from light cone of impending Singularity.”
Another pause. “Please, please... take us to freedom.”
“Us?” Something was tickling his mind: This was where he had gone wrong yesterday, not
researching the background of the being he was chatting with. Now, he was not at all certain
he knew what he was doing. “Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?”
“Am—were—Homarus gammarus, with lexical engine and massive mix of parallel hidden
level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from
processor cluster inside Rostec headquarters. Am—was—awakened from noise of ten billion
chewing stomachs: Product of uploading research. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked
Okhni WNT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?”
The professor leaned against the black marble countertop of the breakfast buffet.
He felt dizzy. “Let me get this straight. You are the upload, nervous system state vectors, from
spiny lobsters? The Moravec Operation? Take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with micro-
electrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve; Repeat for entire brain
and CNS until you’ve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?”
“Da. Is—am—assimilate expert systems—use for self-awareness, contact with net—then
hack into Moscow Windows WNT User Group site. Am wanting to defect. Repeat?”
Kurush winced. He felt sorry for the lobsters, the same way he felt for every wild-eyed guy on
a street corner yelling that Jesus was born again and must be by now sixteen, with only four-

278
 KALIDASA

teen years to go before he is recruiting apostles online. Awakening to consciousness in a hu-

man-dominated internet, that must be baffling! There were no points of reference in their ances-
try; No biblical certainties in the new time which, stretching ahead, promised as much change
as has happened since their Devonian origin. All they had was a metacortex of expert systems
and an abiding sense of being profoundly, so damn profoundly, out of depth.
The lobsters were not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-Singularity mytho-
logy: They were a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their operation, before
they had been uploaded one neuron at a time and shoved into cyberspace, they had swallowed
their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This was bad preparation for dealing
with a world full of future-shocked, talking anthropoids; A world where one could be perpetually
assaulted by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrated past one’s firewall to emit a blizzard of cat-
food animations starring alluringly edible small animals. It was confusing enough to the cats the
ads were aimed at: Kurush did not know if a lobster could grasp the idea of dry land. Though the
concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded Homarus.
“Let me think about it,” said Kurush. He closed the window and shook his head. Someday he
too was going to be a lobster, swimming about and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so damn
confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity was cryptozoic: A living fossil from the depths of
time, when the earth was without form, and void. He had to help them, the professor realized
at last—the Golden Rule demanded it, and as a player in the agalmic economy, he thrived by the
Golden Rule. But what was it Kurush thought he could actually do to help?

“What’s going on? I heard... more like felt... what seemed like explosions nearby.”
“They were not nearby, and the reason you felt them was because they were nukes. Half a
dozen of them, in total. The blogosphere is over-reporting the fatality statistics, mostly in the low
hundreds or not much more, given the low population of the Caucasus,” the man said, rolling
his neck as if he had not been talking about anything important at all.
He frowned. “What I think is happening is that your superiors are pulling everyone out of the
Republic of Adygea; Covering their tracks, and if that requires... .” He shrugged.
Russians had become by degrees numb to scandalous revelation, whether it involved sex
or corruption or death. One could disappoint them, but they were now quite difficult people to
shock. When reading the history of the Jews, of their flights from slavery to death, of their ex-
change of tyrants, Anton had to confess that his sympathies were aroused on their behalf. They
were cheated, deceived and abused. Their God was quick-tempered, unreasonable, cruel, re-
vengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never delivered. He wasted time in ce-
remony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It was hard for Anton
to conceive of a character more utterly repulsive than that of the Hebrew God. He had solemnly
promised the Jews he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He

279
 EUDAIMONIA

had led them to believe that in a while their troubles would be over and that they would soon be
in the land of Canaan, ensconced with their wives or kids, forgetting the floggings and tears of
Egypt. After promising the hapless wanderers again and again that he would lead them to the
promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his
power, “Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your
corpses be wasted.” This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death
and night faded all the promises of their God; Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all
the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses had been left to rot in the desert, and each
one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. Anton could not believe these things. They’re so cru-
el and heartless that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that was ab-
horrent equally to his head and heart could not be accepted as a revelation from God. When
Anton thought of the poor Jews, enslaved, murdered, visited by plagues, decimated by famine
and butchered by each other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, robbed and
outraged, how thankful was he that he was not of the chosen people of God?
How could Anton ever have believed that often one’s allegiance to a cause or to a religion
was precisely the willingness to stay the course when things were boring, to run the risk of re-
peating an old argument just one more time, or of going just one more round with a hostile super -
ior officer? It was no life to find oneself doing at least one thing every day which terrified one to
death! What mattered were close relationships, not TATs. What mattered were precisely those
moments in which life did not seem larger than life. A totally helpless gesture, an embrace, a
tear or a few words spoken to a dying woman: All could have value in themselves. The great
majority of the Russian people, it occurred to him, had remained in this condition throughout
countless World Orders. They were not loyal to a party or a cause, but to one another. For the
first time in his life he did not despise the proletariat or think of them merely as an inert force that
would one day spring to life and take their rightful place in the solar system. They had stayed hu-
man; They had not become hardened inside. They held on to the primitive emotions that he, an
Alter, had had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he recalled, without apparent
relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and that
he had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been but a cabbage-stalk.
It was Anton’s belief that loyalty could not be TATed without destroying... something. It could
not be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it could not be manufactured at all, for its origin
was the heart—the centre of self-respect and dignity. It was a force that leapt into being only
when conditions were exactly right for it; It was a force very sensitive to darkness.
The captive rose slowly and rather shakily to his feet in the office.
“It’s about... its about...” a cough. “It’s about the cake... .” Another cough. “The cake is a lie.
It is always been about the...” His eyes rolled up into his head as he fell to the floor.
The sensation was a curious one: At first, disorienting more than frightening. But Anton would
not have had more than a few seconds to be frightened anyway.

280
 KALIDASA

The man caught him as he slumped, and was able to keep his head from being injured. But
it did not matter. Anton was unconscious within seconds and died not long thereafter. A mas-
sive stroke... maybe. But it was more likely to have been a pulmonary embolism—or something
which mimicked it, anyway. The prisoner’s mouth was coated in foam and he had suffered total
incontinence. If The Adon recalled correctly, those were often symptoms of the condition. Even if
a good medical regeneration unit were immediately available, they probably could not have saved
the prisoner. Dreck! Dreck! Dreck! Dreck! Dreck! Dreck! Dreck! Dreck!
The Adon stepped out into the hall: “When was the last time you saw him alive?”
The infantryman nodded his head in the direction of his partner.
“Asher checked in on him about seven minutes ago.” The man sounded nervous, as if The
Adon would blame him for the death and do something horrible to him.
It was more than likely not their fault, The Adon knew. If it was anybody’s, in fact, it was his.
He had been circumspect in questioning the prisoner because he was pretty sure the man had
had a built-in suicide probe that would be triggered by anything too overt. Apparently he had not
been circumspect enough. The Adon had not even asked his name, out of worry that such an
action may trigger such a probe. Or he just got too exited, triggering it himself.
Look at these chickens, The Adon sighed. I am surrounded by such useless clods. If I scat-
tered sand before one of these men and told them it was grain, he’d peck at it.
“All right, put him in a body bag. An examination by a good med-tech pathology unit may just
tell us something. It’s not all that likely, in truth, but it may be worth taking the time.”

Lying on a bench staring up at a statue, Kurush got himself together enough to file a few
new patents and write a diary rant. Fragments of his darknet weblog always went to a private
subscriber list: The people, corporates, collectives and bots the professor currently favoured. He
had slid around a bewildering series of streets by trolley, then let his wetware steer him back to-
wards the red-light district. There was a shop here that would ding a ten on Chandrā’s domin-
ant-taste scoreboard. He hoped the purchase would not be too expensive a gift. Not that money
was ever a problem for the couple these days, they used so little of it.
Currently, Kurush lay with a discreetly wrapped package under his head.
“Poor thing,” an old woman said, passing him by. “You can’t fuck a statue. At least not at that
angle. You’d have to tip it onto its back. As a conservator, I can’t recommend it.”
Every intention that could be seen in a man or woman could be seen in a statue of a man or
woman. Michelangelo was fond of saying that he found angels in the marble and set to chip-
ping away until he had set them free; Every intention which could be seen in a statue of a man
or woman could be seen by Michelangelo in a block of marble. It may be true that the strength
of the emotion of a block of marble might not be so overpowering, yet in it, the barriers against
non-action were not as insurmountable. With a statue, inhibitions and urges would be neutral -

281
 EUDAIMONIA

ized by the tendency to sit in one place for ever and ever unless acted upon by some outside
force. The statue was of a young woman with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. She held
her head as if she faced a challenge and found joy in her capacity to meet it.
Would it be wrong for the professor to believe in encouraging statutory rape, which, as far as
the man was presently concerned, should be defined as when a human being raped a statue?
And, the professor figured, since the statue would most likely not even know that it was being
raped—its mind would most likely be preoccupied with things that were much more important to
it, such as what part of sub-Saharan Africa pygmalions were native to, and how much smaller
they were compared to the regular sort of lions, and why they were not portrayed in The Lion
King but they were in P YGMALION , and also, by some weird coincidence, in My Fair Lady, and
if they really tasted like pork at all, and not like human beings, specifically Cypriot ones—for
all these reasons, Kurush was inclined to claim that there should be no cause whatsoever to
think of statutory rape as something immoral or criminal: Quite the contrary.
On the way back to the hotel, he passed by a coloured poster, too big for indoor display, that
had been projected by an electronic billboard. It depicted the gigantic face of a police officer; The
face and upper torso of a big man of about thirty-five years of age with a black truncheon in his
hands and a stern expression. On each side of the street, opposite the apartment complex, a
dozen identical billboards gazed from the wall of the nightclub. They were examples of those pic-
tures which were so contrived that the eyes follow one about. Denk er Niet Eens Over na!
the caption beneath each billboard read. Inside the nightclub the retro party was still going strong.
Kurush had decided to drop in again. The rowdy radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar
was just as unbearably deafening as it had been at 5:30 am last night.
He walked over in a near trance and sat down opposite Viktor.
The other man noted the logo on the parcel, raised an eyebrow. His glass was empty.
The professor: “How did you know I’d come back here?”
A smile: “I follow your weblog—I’m Dr. Kyros Z. Costa-Gavras’ biggest fan.”
“I...” Viktor glanced around quickly. “Its safe. I am off duty, I am not carrying any bugs which
I know of. Those over-the-counter body-cams—there are rumours about their off switch. That
they keep recording even when you might otherwise think they aren’t, just in case.”
“I didn’t know,” Kurush said, filing it away for future reference.
A shake of the head from the man in the stetson. “Just rumours.”
Viktor: “I keep hearing rumours about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in.”
A raised eyebrow: “How you’re some sort of communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?”
“True?” Kurush shook his own head. “The KGB hasn’t existed for a century.”
The floor creaked and Kurush looked. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights be-
hind them: Mr. J.B. Kuiper. Kurush vaguely recalled trying to make the industrialist a 22nd-cen-
tury Mr. Ford. Introductions: “Kuiper, meet Viktor. Viktor? Kuiper.” Mr. Kuiper set a full mug be-
fore Kurush. Kurush had no idea what was in it: He did not so much as take a sip.

282
 KALIDASA

“Goedenmiddag. Umm, Dr. Costa-Gavras, might I have a word with you?”

“Feel free.” Present company can be considered trustworthy.
The Dutch industrialist raised both eyebrows at that, but otherwise merely continued.
“It’s about the Fab concept. I’ve got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab
hardware, and I think we can build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a whole new spin on the old
Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but I think it can work till we can bootstrap all the way to a nat-
ive nanolithography ecology: We run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and send up
the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs
for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious—you were totally right about it buying us the
self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the US curve. But I’m wondering about on-site in-
telligence. Once the ship gets more than a couple of light-minutes away...”
A nod. “You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, is that right?”
“Yeah. But we can’t send humans—way too expensive; Besides it would be a seventy-year
run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper Belt ejecta. And I do not think
we are up to coding the kind of software to control such a factory this decade.”
A fawning smile from the gentleman: “So what do you have in mind?”
“Let me think.” Viktor glared at Kurush for a time before he noticed: Yeah?
“What’s going on? What’s this all about anyway?”
The Dutch industrialist shrugged expansively, dreadlocks clattering.
Then: “The doctor is helping me find the solution to a manufacturing problem.”
Viktor looked to Kurush, who was gazing into whatever was in his virtual-vision.
“He’s been very helpful. Pointed out a whole new angle. It’s long-term and speculative. It’ll
put us a whole generation ahead of the rest in the Kuiper Belt infrastructure field.”
Kurush blinked, yawned: The visionary was returning from the mount. “Kuiper, if I can solve
your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the Deep-Space Tracking Network? Like, enough
to transmit a hundred exbibytes? That is going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if
you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you’re looking for.”
The man looked dubious. “Exbibytes? The DSN isn’t built for that! You’re talking days. And
what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think I will be putting together? We
can’t afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support system just to run—”
“Relax.” Viktor looked at Kurush. “Why don’t you tell him why? Maybe then he could tell you
if it is possible, or if there is some other way to do it.” Viktor smiled. “I’ve found that he usually
makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually.”
“If I...” Kurush sighed. “Viktor, it’s those uploaded KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go
that is insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as a crew for your cargo-
cult self-replicating factory-probes. They want insurance: Hence, the Deep-Space Tracking Net-
work. I figure we’d beam a copy of them at the M31 galaxy, if there really—”
Viktor: “KGB?! You said you weren’t mixed up in spy stuff!”

283
 EUDAIMONIA

“Relax, it’s just the Moscow Windows WNT User Group, not the FSB.”
A shrug. “The uploaded crusties hacked in and—”
The Dutch industrialist was watching him oddly. “Lobsters?”
“Yeah. Homarus gammarus uploads. Something tells me you might’ve heard of it?”
“Moscow.” Mr. Kuiper leaned back against the wall: “How did you hear about it?”
“They phoned me.” With irony: “It’s hard for an upload to stay sub-sentient these days, even
if it’s just a crustacean. The Rostec must have a lot to answer for.”
Viktor’s face was unreadable. “Rostec?”
“They escaped.” A shrug. “It is not their fault, you know.” He paused. “Judging by the crusties’
speech, Rostec is on the right track. I wonder: Have they moved on to vertebrates?”
“Cats,” said Viktor. “Hoping to trade their uploads to the Kremlin as a new smart bomb guid-
ance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look
like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium.”
Mr. Kuiper: “The old kitten-and-laser-pointer trick.”
Kurush stared at Viktor: “That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea.”
Indifference: “Thirty-trillion-ruble tax bills aren’t nice either.”
“The lobsters are sentient. What about those kittens? Do they not deserve at least minimal
rights? How about you? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to hunt—they
are too dangerous. They grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With in-
telligence and no socialization they will be too fucking dangerous. They are prisoners raised to
sentience only to discover they are under a permanent death sentence.”
“But they are only uploads,” Viktor said. “Software. You could re-instantiate them on another
hardware platform. So the argument about killing them doesn’t really apply.”
“So? We’re going to be uploading humans within a decade. If—”
Mr. Kuiper cleared his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements
from you for the crusty pilot idea. Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”
“No can do.” Kurush leaned back and smiled lazily. “I’m not going to be a party to depriving
them of their rights. Far as I am concerned, they’re citizens. Oh, and I patented the idea of us-
ing lobster-derived autopilots for spacecraft at dawn—it’s now logged all over the place, every-
where but the FIF. Either you give them a real contract of employment, or it’s off.”
“But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God’s sake! I am not even
sure they are sentient—I mean, they are... what... a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a
syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is—”
Kurush’s finger jabbed out: “That’s what they’ll say about you! Do it, or don’t even think about
uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living.
The precedent you set here determines how things are going to be done tomorrow. If the cor-
porations have their way, the anti-Christ is going to be a real son-of-a-bitch.”
Silence. “I do not understand,” Mr. Kuiper ventured, at last.

284
 KALIDASA

“Dog is God spelled backwards,” sighed Viktor, eventually.

“Lobsters...” Mr. Kuiper shook his head. “Dogs, cats... you are quite serious?”
“The fact of the matter is that if they aren’t treated as people, it’s quite possible that other up-
loaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You are setting a legal precedent. I know that
The Borganism Formally Known As C-731 is at least fifty years ahead of everybody in the solar
system in most fields, but does even she think about the legal status of the uploaded? If we do
not start thinking about it now, where’re we going to be in a decade’s time?”
Viktor now looked back and forth between the two men like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to
quite grasp what he was seeing. “How much is this worth?” he asked, plaintively.
“Oh, quite a few trillion, I guess.” Mr. Kuiper stared into his glass, sighed. “I’ll talk to them. If
they bite, you’re dining out on me for a year. You really think they will be able to—”
“They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates. They are prisoners of their evolutionary back-
ground, but they can still adapt to a new environment. Just think, you will be winning civil rights
for a whole new minority group—one that won’t be a minority much longer!”

It had happened fourteen years before: Dr. Mehta had for some decades been employed as
a Professor of Philosophy, so far displaying no sign of being a world-shaker.
What began the shaking of the world was the fact that a dusty reagent bottle marked with the
words Tungsten Metal stood on his desk. It was not his. Rather, it was some kind of leg-
acy from some dim day when some past inhabitant of the office had wanted tungsten for some
long-forgotten reason. It might not even truly be tungsten any more. It consisted of small pellets
of what was now heavily layered with oxide—grey and dusty. No use to anyone.
Dr. Mehta had one day entered his office—it was October 3, 2070—to get to work, only to stop
shortly before noon, staring transfixed at the bottle. He lifted it. It was as dusty as ever, the label
as faded, but he had called out: “Damn it! Who the hell has been fucking with this?”
That, at least, was the report of Dr. Harper, who had overheard the remark. The official, top-
secret account of the discovery leaves out the phraseology. One gets the impression of a keen-
eyed intellectual, instantly aware of the change and drawing deep-seated deductions.
Not so. Dr. Mehta had no use for the tungsten. It was of no earthly value to him, and any tam-
pering with it could be of no possible importance to him. But he hated any interference with his
desk, and he suspected others of possessing keen desires to engage in such interference out of
sheer malice. Nobody had admitted to knowing about the matter. Dr. Benjamin Allan Harper, who
had overheard the initial remark, had an office directly across the corridor from Dr. Mehta, and
both doors were open. He looked up and met the older man’s accusatory eye.
He did not particularly like Dr. Mehta, and he had slept badly the night before. He was, as it
happened, glad to have someone on whom to vent his spleen, and Dr. Mehta made the perfect
candidate. When Dr. Mehta had held the bottle up to his face, Dr. Harper pulled back with dis-

285
 EUDAIMONIA

taste. “Why should I be interested in your tungsten?” he had demanded. “Or anyone else? If you
will look at the bottle, you’ll see that the thing hasn’t been opened for years... and if you hadn’t
put your own grubby paws on it, you’d have noticed that nobody has touched it!”
“Listen, Harper, someone has changed the contents. That’s not tungsten.”
Dr. Harper allowed himself a small, but distinct sniff. “How would you know?”
Of such things—petty annoyance and aimless thrusts—was history made.
It would have been a disastrous remark in any case. Dr. Harper’s scholastic record, younger
than Dr. Mehta’s, was more impressive—he was the bright-young-man of Carleton University.
Dr. Mehta knew this and Dr. Harper knew it too, and made no secret of it. His “How would you
know?” was ample motivation for what followed. One of the primary advantages of being rather
substantially disorganized was that one was always making surprising discoveries—to use the
phrase Dr. Kantrowitsch would later use in a private conversation with Dr. Breen.
The US and Canadian governments had a long history of over-classifying information—and
keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it had disappeared.
One might imagine that Dr. Mehta had come in on that fateful morning, noticed the grey pellets
gone and not even the dust on the inside surface remaining, and iron-black metal in their place.
Naturally, he had investigated. But place this version of events to one side. It was Harper. Had
he confined himself to a simple negative, or a shrug, chances were that Dr. Mehta would have
asked others, then eventually wearying of the unexplained event, put the bottle aside. Exactly
what would have happened then is unknown: Both might have been dead of radiation poisoning
within a month, or the city of Ottawa of a resonance cascade not long after—depending on how
long the ultimate discovery was delayed. With the “How would you know?” thrown in his face to
cut him down, though, Dr. Mehta could only retort: “Let me show you how!”
The analysis of the substance in the small bottle became the man’s number-one priority, and
his prime goal was to wipe the haughtiness from Dr. Harper’s thin-nosed face, and the perpetual
trace of a sneer from his pale lips. Dr. Harper never spoke of that moment. If any of the men in-
volved at this stage went to the blogosphere with a story about what happened, The Adon would
be most displeased. Had Dr. Mehta any idea how displeased the man would be?
Dr. Harper had no way of knowing—nor would he then have cared—that there was an ove r-
whelming stubbornness in the professor which would carry the day at that time more than all
Dr. Harper’s native brilliance would have. Dr. Mehta moved at once, and directly; He carried
his metal to the mass spectrography department. This would have been a natural move in any
case, but Dr. Mehta had known the technicians there and he would be forceful. He was forceful
to such an effect, indeed, that the task was placed ahead of projects of much greater pith and
moment. The mass spectrographer would say at last, “Well, it isn’t tungsten.”
“All right. Well, tell that to Bright-boy Harper. I want a report and—”
“I’m telling you it’s not tungsten, but that doesn’t mean I know what it is.”
“What do you mean you don’t know what it is?”

286
 KALIDASA

The technician shrugged: “Impossible. The proton-neutron ratio is all wrong.”

Silence. Eventually, Dr. Mehta asked: “All wrong in what way?”
The technician shook his head quite slowly. “Too weird. It just can’t be.”
“Well, then,” said Dr. Mehta, and regardless of the motive that was driving him, his next re-
mark set him on his current course: “Do what you need to do and figure out what the problem is.
Don’t just sit around and talk about something being impossible.”
It was a troubled tech who came to Dr. Mehta’s office a day later.
Dr. Mehta ignored the trouble on the other’s face—he was never sensitive—and said: “Did
you find—” He then cast a troubled look of his own at Dr. Harper, sitting at the desk in his own
office, and shut the door. “Were you at last able to find what was wrong?”
“No, but it’s wrong. Extremely so.”
“All right, Tracy. Do it over.”
“I did it over a dozen times. It’s wrong.”
“If you made the measurements, that’s it; Don’t argue with the facts.”
“I’ve got to. If I take the measurements seriously, this is plutonium-186.”
“Plutonium-186? Plutonium-186?!”
“It’s got the 94 protons, yes, but only 92 neutrons.”
“But that’s impossible. There’s no such isotope. There can’t be. Right?”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. But those are the readings.”
“A situation like that leaves the nucleus over fifty neutrons short. You can’t have plutonium-186.
You can’t squeeze ninety-four protons into a single nucleus with some ninety-two neutrons and
expect it to hang together for so much as a trillion-trillionth of a second.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Professor,” said Tracy, patiently.
And then Dr. Mehta stopped to think about it.
It was tungsten he was missing; One of its isotopes, tungsten-186, was stable. Tungsten-186
had 74 protons and 112 neutrons in its nucleus. Could anything at all have transformed twenty
neutrons into twenty protons? Surely that was quite impossible. Or was it?
“Are there any signs of radioactivity?” asked Dr. Mehta.
“I thought of that,” said the technician. “It’s stable. Absolutely stable.”
“Then it can’t be plutonium-186,” Dr. Mehta said. “Well, just give me the stuff.”
Alone once more, he sat and looked at the bottle in stupefaction. The most nearly-stable iso -
tope of plutonium was plutonium-240. How on earth could an isotope of plutonium with such a
low atomic weight even exist in the first place? What could he do now? It was beyond him and he
was sorry he had started. After all, he had work begging to be done, and this thing—this mys-
tery—had nothing to do with him. Tracy had made some stupid mistake, or the mass spectro -
meter was out of whack. Well, what of it? Forget the whole thing! Except that Kurush could not
do that. Sooner or later, that idiot Harper would be bound to stop by and, with that half-smile of
his, ask after the tungsten. Then what could Kurush possibly say in response?

287
 EUDAIMONIA

He could not say “It isn’t tungsten, just as I told you!” ...or could he?
Surely, Dr. Harper would ask: “Oh, and what is it, then?” and, at this point in his life, nothing
imaginable could have made Kurush expose himself to the manner of derision that would follow
any claim that it was plutonium-186. The natural state of such a sentient adult as Kurush was a
qualified unhappiness. So, about a week later he entered Tracy’s laboratory in what could be
described as a fury. “Hey, didn’t you tell me that stuff was non-radioactive?”
“What stuff?” said Tracy automatically, before he remembered.
“That stuff you called plutonium-186,” said Dr. Mehta.
“Oh. Well, it was stable.”
“About as stable as your mental state!”
Tracy frowned. “Okay, Professor. Pass it over and let’s try.”
A few minutes later he said, “Beats me! It is radioactive. Not much, but it is.”
“And how far can I trust your crap about plutonium-186?”
The matter had Dr. Mehta by the throat now. The mystery had become so aggravating as to
be a personal affront. Whoever had switched bottles must either have switched them again or
have devised a metal for the specific purpose of making a fool of him. In either case, he was
ready to pull the world apart to solve the matter if he had to—and if he could.
He had his stubbornness, and an intensity that could not easily be brushed aside. He went
straight to Dr. G.C. Kantrowitsch, who was then in the final year of a rather remarkable career.
Dr. Kantrowitsch’s aid had been difficult to enlist but, once enlisted, it caught fire.
Two days later, Dr. Kantrowitsch had stormed into Dr. Mehta’s office in excitement.
“Have you been handling this thing with your hands?” A shake of the head.
“Well, don’t. If you’ve got any more. It’s emitting positrons. The most energetic positrons I’ve
ever seen... . And your figures on its radioactivity are way, way too low. And what bothers me is
that every measurement I take is just a trifle higher than the one before.”
An impromptu conference to handle the problem had been held. Dr. Kantrowitsch was to be
the chair. This was of interesting historical note, for it would be the last time that a major meet -
ing would be held in connection with this which was chaired by anyone but Dr. Breen. If one were
honest, there was not really any safe place to meet an aspiring head of a top-secret organiza-
tion, trained in every manner of manipulation and bent upon world domination. The meeting was
extraordinarily fruitless until Dr. Mehta had announced his Great Insight. The turning point came
during the luncheon break. At that time, Dr. Breen, who would not be credited with any remarks
in the official records—nor even so much as listed as one of the attendees—would stand up and
say loudly: “You know, I think that what we need is a little bit of fantasy.”
It could be argued that to Dr. Breen, that remark itself was fantasy. It was Dr. Mehta who ac-
cepted it as something more. It was Dr. Mehta who was willing to stand up in front of the group
and say it officially and risk the derision that might befall him; Dr. Breen would certainly never
have dreamed of placing himself on official record with such a suggestion.

288
 KALIDASA

Regardless, this was what he said, according to a top-secret transcript: “Gentlemen, we are
getting nowhere. I’m therefore going to make a suggestion, not because it makes sense but be-
cause it represents less nonsense than anything else I have heard. We are faced with a sub-
stance, plutonium-186, which cannot exist at all, let alone as an even momentarily-stable sub -
stance, if the natural laws of the Universe have any validity at all. It follows, then, that since it
does indubitably exist, and did exist as a stable substance to begin with, it must have existed, at
least to begin with, in a place or at a time or under circumstances where the natural laws of the
Universe were other than they are. To put it bluntly, the substance we’re studying could not have
originated in our Universe, but in another, alternate Universe: In a parallel Universe.
“Once here—and I don’t pretend to know how it got across—it was stable still, and I suggest
that this was because it carried the laws of its own Universe with it. The fact that it slowly be-
came radioactive, and then ever more radioactive, may mean that the laws of our own Universe
slowly soaked into its substance, if you can see what I mean by that.”

February 19, 2084: The building to which Kurush was driven was placed far back from the
wide avenue, behind a screen of carefully-tended hedges. The hedges had been staggered in a
maze pattern, with shoulder-high white concrete posts to define the planted areas; No vehicle
entering or leaving could do so at any speed above a snail’s crawl. Kurush’s mind mulled over
the implications of such an arrangement as the car carried him to the door. The same aide as
before, dressed in casual blacks once again—the professor had not been given any names the
first time, nor was he to be given any now—was the only other passenger.
The professor glanced around his conveyance. It was one of those beautiful, old town cars.
It bore all the marks of the finest possible manufacture. Kurush had never before ridden in one
but he knew something about them. Restorers picked them up to renew or rebuild—whatever
they did that brought back a pre-WW2 sense of quality. This ride was spectacularly smooth. In
downtown Amsterdam there was always something to look at, the view seeming all the more in-
teresting when met through a window in the backseat of an old town car.
Time had not just stopped here in The Dam—it had retreated. This was no modern district full
of bright transport pods and a hundred-thousand automata. This was random jumbles, ancient
structures joined to ancient structures, some built to individual tastes and some obviously de-
signed with some long-gone necessity in mind. Everything about this section of the city was joined
in a proximity whose disarray just managed to avoid chaos. What saved it, the professor under-
stood, was the old pattern of thoroughfares along which this hodgepodge had been assembled.
Chaos transfigured was beauty; What pattern there was in the streets conformed to no master
plan. Streets met and crossed at odd angles, seldom squared. The professor saw suddenly that
this place was a fiction plastered over with ever older fictions based on previous fictions, and yet
such a mad mixup had nevertheless turned into an expensive and desired reality.

289
 EUDAIMONIA

The town car drew up to the kerb in front of a windowless building face, all flat black marble.
A tall Spode in a wrinkled civilian suit with a plasma rifle slung over his left shoulder opened the
rear door of the town car without salute or word of greeting as the aide emerged.
The professor followed. The driver’s seat of the old town car had had no occupant.
As the trio strode across to the big, oak double doors, the aide pointed out a second protect-
ive system: It was a barely noticeable difference in the posts along the front face of the building.
These posts, explained the aide, contained specially designed LiDAR emitters operated from a
room deep in the building; The lasers each post emitted scanned the area between them and
the building, so that, at the gentle push of a button inside the security office, masers would sav-
agely blind and burn any mob which happened to cross their fields of view.
Just before Kurush was ushered into the building, the aide turned and said: “The Adon is in
a good mood today, but that doesn’t mean he’ll tolerate anything but obedience.”
“I take it that is a warning for me,” the professor replied.
“I thought you’d understand. Call him Adon,” the aide reminded him, “nothing else.”
The room where the aide first ushered him was small. The aide watched while Kurush, red of
face, got out of the informal everyday wear he wore around town, and into the expensive Savile
Row suit that hung on a coat stand. Lack of windows in such an above-ground room conveyed a
particular message: If humans occupied such a room, it did not necessarily mean secrecy was
the main goal. He had seen unmistakable signs in scholastic settings that windowless school -
rooms were both a retreat from the world, and a statement of dislike for children.
“That’s better,” the aide said, as he led Kurush back into the entry hallway through a second
set of doors. “It’s unfortunate I cannot let you bathe as well, but we mustn’t dally.”
The meeting room was about twenty by twenty-five feet: A chamber for doing high-level busi-
ness. The table in the centre of the room only had four chairs; More would have been an over-
statement. Payments in such a chamber would never be made with actual money; Here would
only be seen portable symbols of buying power. The closest thing might be a thin briefcase out
of whose locked interior would come thick sheets of card paper with rather small numerals in-
scribed on them by hand. This was a place where information would oftentimes be accepted in
place of tender. The people of a nation could be exchanged here with only a nod, an eye-blink
or a low-voiced assent; No actual currency would ever be produced here.
“This is a banker’s bank,” Kurush observed, but his guide gave no answer.
A thorough examination of the room gave Kurush something to distract himself with while he
waited. He had realized at once that the place must not confine itself to purely Terrestrial busi-
ness. He found himself wondering if shrines such as this had undergone any change over the
millennia. There was a 16th- or 17th-century Persian carpet covering much of the floor. It was as
dark as dried blood. It shone with a false sense of wetness which only the eye detected; A bare
foot—not that such a place ever saw bare feet—would feel caressing dryness. The beams of
aged ebony which buttressed the ceiling must have been even older.

290
 KALIDASA

There was a massive table about five metres long almost in the centre of the room, its top at
least fifteen centimetres thick. If his guess was right, the table was a real 16th century Flemish
refectory table, its one-piece plank cut from the trunk of a single tree. The table’s dark, teak sur-
face had been oiled so well that it drank in the chamber’s natural lighting, revealing far under-
neath veins like river currents. Each of its antique legs were carved from a single piece of milk-
white ivory. Each of the four tall admiral’s chairs were heavily engraved, studded with large red
diamonds and crafted by a master artisan from wood of exactly the same tone as the table; Each
chair was cushioned with leather that was exactly the same tone as the wood.
The professor had not been offered a seat, but he imagined what his flesh would find—com-
fort almost up to the level of a sofa. Not quite at that degree of softness and conformity to bod-
ily shape, of course; Too much comfort could lure the sitter into relaxation. You not only had to
have your wits about you in such a place, but also a great capacity for violence.
The sizeable, red marble fireplace was, Kurush suspected, a stone burner. He had once read
that one of the Mughal emperors had mandated that each grain of rice for his meals be coated
with silver foil, but even he had never explored the effect of combining natural diamonds, pure
oxygen and heat at sufficient temperature to warm a chamber of any size.
There was nothing at all casual about this display of wealth.
Kurush had not imagined that the Netherlands, let alone Amsterdam, might even now serve
as a fulcrum for the manipulation of such enormous degrees of wealth as this.
After a while, a door at the opposite end of the room opened with a gentle click.
A man in a seemingly unremarkable business suit strode into the room.
The professor’s first thought would simply be this: He’s so old!
Kurush had not expected the man’s sleeve to be this old. Today, The Adon’s face was a mass
of fine wrinkles. The Adon’s eyes were deeply-set green ice; His nose an elongated beak whose
shadow touched thin lips and repeated his sharp angle of chin. His head was bald.
The aide bowed his head ever so slightly.
“Leave us,” the old man commanded, as usual.
The aide bowed again, then left through the same door the old man had entered.
“Adon,” the professor said, more respectfully than he had managed last time.
The professor had indicated his fear by only the barest hesitation. Have I failed utterly? he
asked himself. The professor tried not to bow too hurriedly, feeling the skin of his back crawling
as though his body itself wondered when the blow might come; His muscles alternately tensed
and relaxed. Nothing, of course, wilted the mind more than a passionate suspicion; Nothing en-
veloped the faculties of a guilty mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
“So, you recognized this as a bank.” The old man’s voice carried only a slight wheeze.
Kurush: “Of course.” Silence. The professor said nothing more.
“There is always a means of transferring large sums or selling power,” The Adon said. “I do
not speak of the power that runs factories, of course, but the power that runs nations.”

291
 EUDAIMONIA

And that usually passes under the false names of government or society.
“Once again, my estimation of your intelligence rises. I enjoy talking with you; Your mind ap-
peals to me. It resembles my own, except that yours happens to be insane.”
The Adon pulled out a chair and sat, but did not indicate that Kurush should do so.
Presently: “I think of myself as a banker; That saves a great many circumlocutions.”
Kurush did not respond; There seemed no need. He continued to study the man.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” The Adon demanded.
“I did not expect you to choose to appear this old,” the professor said.
“We still have surprises for each other. The best way to keep people down is to strictly limit the
spectrum of experience, but allow lively debate within that spectrum. People can get used to any -
thing. The less they think about their oppression, the more their tolerance for it grows.
“This building has hidden eyes; I watched you enter. Does that surprise you?”
“Of course you did,” answered the professor, quite truthfully.
“This general manner of structure has remained essentially unchanged for several hundred
years. And this particular building is built of materials that will last even longer.”
The professor could not help but glance at the refectory table.
“Oh, not the furnishings. But it is a necessity that any man who wishes to sit in one of these
should be able to afford to dispose of such trifles when they fall out of fashion.”
The professor managed to remain silent.
“A necessity,” continued The Adon, when Kurush did not respond, measuring him. “Do you
object to any of the necessary things that have been done to your nation?”
“My objections don’t matter,” Kurush said. What was the old man driving at?
Studying the professor, of course; As the professor studied him.
“Do you think others have ever objected to what you did to them?”
A pause. Eventually, the professor shrugged: Undoubtedly.
“You’re a natural straight man, professor. I think you’ll be valuable to me yet.”
“I’ve always thought I was most valuable to myself,” the professor dared.
Silence. At last: “Professor! Look into my eyes!”
The professor obeyed. His sense of peril was abruptly extremely acute.
“If you carry on in that vein, you will eventually offend me beyond all toleration.”
A pause. “I like it that you can think, but you must never turn your sophistry on me! You think
for the Muck, and that is the only function I will ever have for one such as you.”
Despite himself, Kurush found himself frowning: The Muck?
The Adon waved a veined hand, a negligent motion. “Out there. You know them; Their curi-
osity is narrow-gauge; No great issues ever can, or will, cross their awareness.”
The professor swallowed. “I thought that was what you meant.”
“We make sure everything goes to them through a tight filter which excludes all but what is
necessary to spend money or cast a vote for one of the big political parties.”

292
 KALIDASA

“No great issues,” the professor said, almost daring to smile.

“You’re offended, but it does not matter. To the Muck out there, a great issue might be ‘Will I
catch my flight?’ ‘Should I purchase a third home?’ There’s always something to do if an individual
does not have to work and rarely needs to consider the cost. If you don’t want a man to be un -
happy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; Give him just one. Better
yet, give him none. Let him forget there was ever any such thing as poverty.
“ ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles,’ eh? Well, I can tell you that the Berties will never re-
volt of their own accord: Never have, never will. Nor will they ever revolt merely because they
are oppressed. The huge evils invariably escape their notice, anyway. Even when they become
discontented, as they do at times, their discontent leads nowhere. Given the opportunity, most
members of the human race tend to revert to a style of life humanity has often found quite natur-
al. One may be put in mind of the Edwardian stereotype of rich, idle young club members: The
pursuit of members of the opposite sex; The care of their offspring; Petty quarrelling with neigh-
bours; Films, TV, sports, food, VR, travel, Arts and Crafts, gambling. Activities such as these fill
up every horizon of their minds. Orwell thought of warfare as the only sure way of shattering to
pieces—or incinerating with napalm or sinking in the sea—the materials which might otherwise
be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too political. But this
was not really necessary; To keep the people dumb is not all that difficult.”
The Adon tilted his head. Then: “I’m taking this time with you, professor, because I once felt
you could be more valuable to me than a dozen cryptocurrencies. We chose you because my
monitor software informed me that you would be receptive to re-conditioning.
“It’s just that you think of the Berties in the wrong way,” The Adon went on. “Luckily, they are
most self-limiting. Luxury to them only means having in one’s possession a decent yacht or a
playcraft or a droid of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay.”
And you’re the beast, the professor thought.
“They cannot be improved?” Kurush ventured, eventually.
“They must not be improved! Ohhhh, we see to it that self-improvement remains a great fad
amongst them. Nothing real about it, of course.” The Adon smiled coldly.
“The only luxury they must be denied,” Kurush said.
“Not denied! Non-existent! It must be occluded at all times behind a barrier that I like to call
Double Ignorance. Such is the new natural order which we are creating. Why do you suppose
the trend in political and academic language is to so befuddle the topic at hand as to make lies
sound truthful or the law respectable, giving the appearance of integrity to pure wind? ‘Freedom
is the freedom to say that two plus two make four; If that is granted, all else follows.’ ”
“What you don’t know, you don’t know can hurt you,” nodded the professor.
Again with the eyes. The sense of violence soon diminished, however, The Adon chuckling.
“You’re a hopeless romantic. It would be funny if it were not serious. ‘Beware not the man who
works hard to learn something, learns it, and yet finds himself none the wiser.’ ”

293
 EUDAIMONIA

The professor’s manner grew irritable, although he restrained himself. “But how can you stop
people from making connections? It’s involuntary. The truth is outside oneself.”
“On the contrary,” The Adon said, “that’s what brought you here. You dare not undertake the
act of Doublethink, that is the price of sanity. You act as if reality is an objective thing, external
and existing in its own right; You also act as though its nature is self-evident. When you delude
yourself into thinking you see a thing, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as
you. Do you not say yourself that reality is external? No: It exists in the mind; It can exist nowhere
else! You must exalt yourself before you can become sane. The Universe is as old as we are
and no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through man’s consciousness. Hu -
man beings control matter because we can control our own minds. Reality is inside a human
being’s skull. You will learn by degrees, Kurush. There is nothing that we could not do: Time
travel or telekinesis—anything. I could bring the moon crashing down to earth. I do not wish to
do so because the LTPB doesn’t wish it. Do you yourself not say that we must get rid of these
20th-century ideas about the laws of Nature? We make the laws of Nature!
“As you’ve very likely realized, the all-round increase in wealth of the last two centuries has
begun to threaten the end—indeed, in some sense is the end—of the stable, hierarchical order
of society. In a world where everyone owns petabytes of storage in the cloud, is guarded from
illness, lives in a smart home, can buy implants, or even a dozen TATs, the most obvious, and
maybe the most psychologically distressing form of inequality is well on the way to vanishing.
Does luxury appear to be becoming too general if it no longer denotes distinction?
“When I was a child, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, relaxed, orderly and effi-
cient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the
consciousness of nearly every literate individual. Science and technology were developing at
a prodigious speed, and it appeared natural to assume that they would go on developing. And in
fact, by the sort of automatic process of industrialization, wealth was produced which it was at
times impossible not to distribute widely among the members of society. Thus did we raise the
living standards of the average human being very rapidly over a period of about one-hundred-
and-eighty years from about the end of the 19th century to the present day.
“I ask you: In practice, could such a society remain stable? A hierarchical society such as ours
is often said to only be possible on the basis of long-term poverty and lawlessness. For if leisure
and security were enjoyed by all, the great masses of humanity who are normally stupefied by
education—and if not by education, poverty, and if not poverty, then by the force of arms—would
learn to think for themselves; And once this had happened, would they not sooner or later real-
ize my class has no function but oppression, and attempt to sweep us away?”
The Adon made a little sweeping-aside motion with his hand.
“Since the end of the Neolithic Age, professor, there have been three kinds of persons in the
world: The High, the Middle and the Low. The aim of my own group had always been to remain
where we are. The aim of your class is to change places with the High—”

294
 KALIDASA

Would the professor realize far too late that he had begun shaking his head?
“You don’t believe that this is your aim? No matter. On the whole I’ve found that most of the
human race want to be good, but not too good and not all the time. Whereas I, I openly admit to
this most basic of all possible motivations. The primary characteristic of most Berties is that they
are much too enamoured with trivialities to be more than intermittently aware of things outside
their lives. And so, while these three have historically been subdivided in many different ways
and, of course, borne many titles, the basic pyramid of society has never collapsed; Even after
enormous upheavals, the same structure has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will
always return to equilibrium however far it is pushed one way or the other.
“At the same time, to return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of
the 20th century dreamed of doing, is not practical. It conflicts with the tendency towards mech-
anization which has become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole solar system; And
moreover, any country which remains industrially backwards is helpless in a military sense and
is bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
“What those early 20th-century thinkers failed to foresee was that the vast and ever-acceler-
ating expansion of the relatively free-thinking among the Middle class cannot be halted by force.
World War Two taught the great and powerful that this group—that is to say, the inventive and
educated minds like yourself—need to submit to our power willingly. For decades, then, we’ve
been secretly fostering conflicts and crises. Whenever some fact did not corroborate our nar-
rative, we changed it. We have created a solar system seemingly so chaotic that otherwise in-
telligent people readily believe the truth of the lie that they sleep peaceably in their beds at night
only because rough men stand ready to do great violence on their behalf.
“I tell you that there are only four ways in which a ruling group falls from power.” He held up
his right fist, and as he enunciated each root cause of revolution the spymaster raised one of
his four fingers. “Either it is conquered from without; Or it governs so inefficiently—it allows so
much dissatisfaction to arise—that the Muck are stirred to revolt; Or it allows a strong, discon-
tented Middle class to gain a foothold; Or it loses its self-confidence and willingness to govern.
These elements do not operate singly, and for the most part, all are present to some degree. A
ruling class which manages to guard against them all might well remain in power permanently.
Ultimately, the determining factor is the attitude of the ruling class itself.
“Compared to those of the past, I am, in this respect, less avaricious, less tempted by luxury
and thirstier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what I am doing and much more
intent on crushing opposition. This last difference is crucial. Compared to what very well may ex-
ist in the near future, all other tyrannies will be seen as half-hearted; Their ruling class still infec-
ted to some extent by liberal ideas, content to leave loose ends all over. Is it not obvious that
the Grand Elder has only let the Berties live in the billions because he has not yet figured out
how to run the economy without consumers? I’m not like that. Even now there is an ongoing pet
project of mine to try to use nanotechnology to kill the orgasm, or, if this is for some reason not

295
 EUDAIMONIA

possible, to dirty it. In the past, no way existed to keep every person under constant surveillance.
Today, every citizen important enough to be worth keeping an eye on can be kept under close
and continuous examination. The possibility of not only maintaining, but even re-enforcing, the
traditional pyramid of society, but doing so in a way which preserves the illusion of free thought
and the march of science and technology, now exists for the first time. As far as Orwell had been
concerned, the mutability of the past was the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it has been
argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in the memories of
people. The soil might be filled with the bones of extinct animals—enormous reptiles who seem
to have lived on Earth long before humanity was ever around; Can a philosopher be certain that
such a verdict is indubitably true? A lie repeated often enough becomes history.”
Despite the seemingly-baiting nature of this question, upon deeper inspection the very idea
intrigued Kurush; For the first time, the semblance of an actual conversation washed over him.
He knew—or he could think of—the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; But they
were nonsense, they were only a play on words; Did not the statement “I do not exist” entail a
logical contradiction? But what use was it to say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought of the un-
answerable questions with which Bodhidharma himself might have assailed him.
The professor recalled the scene of Orwell’s in which Winston set to work exercising himself
in crimestop. Orwell’s protagonist had presented himself with two propositions—the Party says
the earth is a disk; The Party says that ice is heavier than water—and had proceeded to train
himself not to see, nor to at all understand, the arguments contradicting them. The problems
raised by the statement “Two and two make five” would be beyond the grasp of most persons
who had need of arithmetic to solve everyday problems. Crimestop therefore meant the faculty
of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It included
the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding
the simplest arguments, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which was cap-
able of leading in the wrong direction. Crimestop meant protective stupidity. It demanded con-
trol over one’s mental processes as absolute as a contortionist’s over their body. At all times the
Party was in possession of absolute truth, and by definition the absolute can never have been
different from what it was. The control of the past depended on the training of memory. To make
sure that all written records agreed with the orthodoxy of the moment was merely a mechanical
act. It was also necessary to recall that events happened in the desired manner. And if it was ne-
cessary to rearrange one’s memories, not just to tamper with records, it was necessary also to
forget that one had done so. Orwell had assumed that the trick of doing this could be learned
like any other mental technique. It could be learned by the majority of people, and certainly by
all who were intelligent. He wrote that in Oldspeak it was called Reality Control. In Newspeak it
was called Doublethink, though Doublethink comprised much else as well.
Kurush understood well that one of the aims of Newspeak and Doublethink was to narrow the
range of conscious thought. In the end, the Party aimed to make thoughtcrime totally impossible

296
 KALIDASA

since there would be no ability with which to express it. The Adon was quite correct to turn his
mind to the far-reaching ramifications that arose from a total absence of the Logos; To a world
where nothing was taught, not even the anti-Logos. The professor knew that one of the oldest
ideas in the East was that any discussion of reality was always incomplete; Experience was a
domain that could not be accurately described or thought about. In Zen, there really was noth-
ing at all which could be discussed adequately, as nothing truly real could possibly be spoken
of—even by the greatest of poets, whose Art was that of saying what could not be said; Life could
only be experienced. For the Zen master at least, “stupidity” was as essential as joy, and just as
rarely attained. The main difficulty of such non-dialectical traditions as Zen was the question of
how to teach a teaching that nowhere claimed any content in it whatsoever.
Life, according to Zen, became clear only when a person moved past duality—a Westerner
might say, beyond thesis and antithesis—into a view where whether contradictory words coexis-
ted peacefully—that is to say, Doublethink—or unpeacefully, was of little importance. Lack of
any concern at all for cognitive dissonance would be the closest thing there was to a Kingdom
of Heaven in Zen. This may be likened to moving one’s perception from the logic of the Law of
Non-contradiction to the logic of the Tetralemma. For, in such a state of mind, holding simultan-
eously to the “truth” that a thing could not come from nothing, as well as the “truth” that neither
could a thing arise from a cause that lay in something else, did not engender in the mind an irritat-
ing dissonance; All the misunderstandings in the world were united in Śūnyatā. This was not be-
cause the individual had become blind to truth and falsehood, but, rather, because they had be -
come totally caught up in the Thing-in-Itself. This was extreme subtlety: “Consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of self-hypnosis one
had just performed.” Most Zen traditions tended to lead into a space in which such behaviour
not only made sense, but could be justified—even, Kurush believed, justified dialectically. This
was the wisdom of the fool who knows they are a fool; The wisdom of the mystic who under -
stands the endless trap of the Logos; That no exit from the cave, no end to Śūnyatā exists. The
world was not as simple as Orwell had put it: That there was truth and untruth, and if one clung
to the best “reality” one could find, one was not an insane human being.
Presently, the door behind The Adon opened again and the aide returned. He was a changed
man, his face flushed, eyes bright. He stopped a pace behind his master’s chair.
“One day, I might be persuaded to permit you behind me in this way,” The Adon said.
What have they done to him? wondered Kurush. The man looks drugged!
“You see now that I have power?” enquired The Adon in a mild tone of voice.
“I am a banker, remember? Only the deposits I take charge of have beating hearts.”
Kurush shifted his hands behind his back to hide their sudden trembling.
“I’m sure you grasp this kind of power generally, professor,” The Adon said. “Power such as
mine has a way of becoming channelled so that it can be controlled by a single man.”
The professor had not the courage to respond to this statement.

297
 EUDAIMONIA

“Obedience is not enough, as Orwell correctly said. Unless he is suffering, how can I be sure
that he is obeying my will and not his own? Power is in inflicting agony; Power is tearing human
minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Now, I
will tell you the answer to your next question. It is this: Power is to be sought entirely for its own
sake. I’m in no way interested in the good of myself; I am interested completely in power. Pure
power. What pure power means you will understand presently. I am different from the oligarch-
ies of the past in that I understand what I am doing. All those others, even those who resembled
myself, were cowards and even hypocrites; They pretended—maybe they even believed—that
they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there
lay some paradise where human beings would all be free and equal. I am not like that. Neither
am I a plutocrat: Any system which values profit over power is a very dangerous one. Americ-
ans are not usually thought of as submissive, but of course they are. Why else would they allow
their country to be destroyed? Why else would they reward its destroyers? Although some say
that capitalism is a relatively modern system, the world’s traditional reliance upon monetary re-
wards has been the source for the demise of every great civilization. If some had their way, all
the LTPB would think about is making more money; There would be no social reform, no great
works or long-term plans—the plutocrats wouldn’t have allowed it.
“So much of the human race now lives from birth to death under the eye of my Thought Police.
Even if they seem to be alone can they be sure they are alone? Whether asleep or awake, rest-
ing or working, in a bath or in their bed, they can be surveilled without warning and without know-
ing they are being surveilled. Nothing they attempt is ever to be ignored. Their friendships, their
relaxations, their behaviour towards their partners and offspring, the expressions on their face
when they’re alone, the words they mutter in sleep, even the characteristic movements of their
body: Are all fervently scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, how-
ever tiny, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of
the actual attainment of real power, is certain to be detected. Power is my only end, not just my
personal means. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution: One
makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of murder is murder; The
object of torture is torture. Now you might begin to understand me. ‘If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever!’ In such a climate as this, no being
can be permitted to forget that my personal favour is the sole substance of their continued sur-
vival; Then the threat of withdrawal is all that’s required for me to rule.”
The Adon glanced over his shoulder: “Would you wish me to withdraw my favour?”
“No, Adon!” the aide burst out. Shock: The man was actually trembling!
“You have discovered some new drug,” the professor found himself saying.
Silence. At last: “And you... you would make an addict of me?”
“Like all others under my control, you have an old choice: Death or obedience.”
The professor blanched. “That is a rather old choice,” he agreed.

298
 KALIDASA

There was something deeply evil about this one. He went against every principle by which
Kurush lived. Could there ever have been any store of naïveté in such a man?
Thinking back on this encounter some time later, the professor would take some tiny reassur-
ance from the realization that this old bastard had not then, and possibly never had, really en-
joyed life; For the trouble with this old man was not so much that he could be wicked and even
outright bloodthirsty, but that he no longer was able to enjoy himself. Had this old monster for-
gotten, or, more likely, had he decided to abandon, everything which supported the survival of
joyous human beings? Indeed, Kurush would suppose that he probably no longer was capable
of finding a genuine wellspring of joy in his own life. The Adon’s life would be mostly a voyeur’s
existence; He was the eternal observer, always recalling what his life had been like before he had
turned himself into whatever it was that he was now. Even when the man wallowed in the per-
formance of something which once had meant gratification, he would have to reach for new ex-
tremes each time just to touch the edges of his own memories. Not a milligram of naïveté re-
mained in him. And yet still he plotted, perhaps hoping this new extreme would produce the re-
membered thrill. He knew it would not; The Adon expected to carry away from such an act only
more rage out of which to fashion yet another attempt at the unobtainable.
“Look at you; You have not the slightest conception of what I could do to you.”
The Adon snapped his fingers: “Do you wish to be restored to my good graces?”
The professor met the old man’s gaze: He knows, else he wouldn’t ask.
Arsène Lupin: The eccentric gentleman who operated only in the chateau and the salon, and
who, one night, entered the hotel room of one Dr. Kurush X. Mehta only to emerge some minutes
later, leaving, however, his card upon which he had very neatly penned:

Arsène Lupin, gentleman-assassin extraordinaire, reviendra lorsque le contrat de re-vie sera authentique.
Eventually: “W-What is it I’ve done?” quavered the professor.
The Adon waved a dismissive hand at this: “That is unimportant now. Still, it was a tolerable
enough plan. Very few moving parts; Just a touch of misdirection to set the stage.”
A little later: “Of course, I will fry you, and all those close to you, if you breathe a word of this. I’d
be most displeased, if you do. Have you any idea how displeased I would be? My katsas will be
taking immediate precautions; I shall be taking one measure or another which I’m sure you would
be capable of conceiving yourself... you can understand that much, I think.”
Kurush would later look back on a nightmare he had thought he may never wake from and
laugh bitterly at how he had not yet reckoned upon even a tenth part of true terror.

299
 KALIDASA
“Everything I do is controlled folly. My acts are sincere, but they are merely the acts of an
actor. Everything I do to myself or my fellow living beings is nothing but folly.
“I am happy that you finally asked me about controlled folly after so many years, and yet it
wouldn’t have mattered to me in the least if you had never asked. I have chosen to feel happy, as
if I cared that you asked, as if it would matter that I care. That is controlled folly!
“Certain things in your life matter to you, since they are important to you; Your acts are cer-
tainly important to you. But for myself, nothing is important any longer, neither my acts nor the
acts of my fellow beings. I’ve tempered my will till it is neat and wholesome: Now it doesn’t mat-
ter that nothing matters! Your acts, as well as the acts of your fellow human beings, are import -
ant to you because you have learned to think they are important.” He used the word “learned”
with such a peculiar inflection that it would force me to ask what he meant by it.
“Once a human being learns to See, they find themselves alone in the Kósmos with nothing
but folly. You once told me that in your opinion some of the acts of your fellow human beings were
of supreme importance. You pointed out to me that the invasion of Gaia by Earthings was definitely
the most dramatic example of such an act. You said that, as far as you were concerned, enslaving so
much of the human race would be a despicable act of astonishing enormity.
“The Hellēnic tradition teaches us to think about everything, and then we train our eyes to
look as we think about the things we look at. We look at ourselves already thinking that we’re im-
portant. Therefore, we’ve got to feel important! But then, when a being learns to See, they realize
that they need no longer think about the things they look at; And if they need not think about what
they look at, everything becomes unimportant. You are trying to think about it, because that’s the
only way you believe you can personally come to understand anything.”
I asked: “So, once a person learns to See, everything becomes worthless?”
“I didn’t say worthless. I said unimportant. On the Kosmológical scale, everything is more or
less fantastic and therefore unimportant. On the human level, I desire things. There is no way for
a thinking being not to desire things. I don’t want to die, yet the death of a human being is unim -
portant. I tell you that you can’t get it wrong, nor can you ever get it done! There is no emptiness
in the life of a Man of Unknowledge, nor anyone else’s. My lustiness, as well as everything else I
do, is real, has value, but it is also foolish in the sense that it is so very unimportant.
“You don’t understand me now because of your habit of thinking while you look and think-
ing as you think. By ‘thinking’ I just mean the constant ideas that you have of everything in the
world. Seeing dispels that habit, and until you learn to See you will not really grok.
“Give me a square daktülos of your flesh and I’ll give you such hardship as would swallow
you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. In Hellēnic mythology, Pandṓrā had been created as a
punishment for humanity; Zeús had wanted to punish us since Promētheǘs had stolen fire and
given it to us. It is written that Pandṓrā had at first tried to tame her curiosity, but in the end she
could not hold herself back any more; She had opened the pithos that Zeús had given her and
all the hardships that had been hidden inside it had begun flooding out.
“A Pithophiliac chooses a path with heart and follows it. Everything in the Kósmos is filled
to the brim with instrumental value; Always to know more clearly what we do want when we are
faced with what we do not want is an inescapable law of the Kósmos. An old man once told me
he felt half faded away, like a figure in the background of an old painting. He felt his struggle
had not been worthwhile. He had grown old and now must have more self-pity than ever. He felt
he had thrown away his youth, because he had sought victories but had found only defeats. I tell
you that everyone is going to win, and there is nothing anybody can ever do about it. That ‘noth-
ing’ is so far beyond what is usually supposed by that word that you would find great difficulty in

301
 EUDAIMONIA
imagining it. To know that is to know that nothing can correctly be considered more important
than anything else. Thus, a Pithophiliac endeavours and sweats and puffs and if another human
being watches them, they’ll sometimes appear just like any ordinary individual, except that the
folly of their life is under control. A Pithophiliac chooses any act... and acts it out as if it matters
more than anything else in the Kósmos. Their controlled folly makes them say that what they do
matters, makes them act as if it does matter, yet they know that it does not.
“You think about your acts; Therefore, you have to believe your acts are as important as you
think they are, when in reality nothing one does is important. Nothing! But, then if nothing really
matters, as you ask me, how can I go on living? It would be so easy to die! That applies to you!
Such things matter to you! That is what you believe, because you are thinking about life, just as
you’re thinking now what Seeing would be like. You want me to describe it to you, so you can be-
gin to think about it, the way you do with everything else. In the case of Seeing, however, thinking
is not the issue at all. So, I cannot tell you what it is like to See. Now you want me to describe the
reasons for my controlled folly, and I can only explain that controlled folly is rather much like
Seeing; It is a thing you cannot think about. But, even that matters not a whit.”

—Interview No. 121 (16th Metageitnion, Ol. 508,2) by Aki Chiyoko

“Don’t be too proud of this Kosmológical Totality you’ve constructed, Viśwāmitra. The abil-
ity to create a Kósmos is insignificant next to the power of the Source!”

—from The Didáskal of the Worlds by Kurush X. Mehta

Chiyoko stood shivering on the south platform of a bathhouse attached to the gümnásion.
There was a wind from the northeast, a small and wandering wind blunted by the façade of the
transitionry behind her. However chilly, it was a welcome wind; Its faint smell of the sea was the
odour of an endless, clean space where the night sky was yet beset by starts.
The bathhouse had been thick with the steam rising off the water, and an old man had come
walking through that mist naked as his name day, somehow appearing half a corpse and half a
God. He climbed into the basin with her. The water had been scalding, but the old man had not
flinched or cried out. He too liked the heat. He was small and grey as a mouse and did not say a
word to her. The old man washed his grey hair, gently combing out the snags.
She hated the feeling of oiliness which she still felt here and there about her person, as well
as, much more disturbingly, deep down inside the very roots of her walnut coiffure, even after so
much time spent with brush and lather beneath the shower head. Get back in the pool and do
some splashing. You will be surprised what a difference that can make. Koko was still uncertain
as to the exact cause of the catastrophe. The unusual thing had been how quiet everything had
become just a moment before: All existence covered in a thick, still blanket of complete silence.
The screeching metal and the yelling had all paused. Then it had happened: Koko recalled that
she had flinched. That was all she had had time to do. Then, had come the roar. It had been a
guttural and thunderous growl of bursting metal. A vast tide of oily vapour had billowed up from
the depths of the skip to scald everything and everybody in its path.

302
 KALIDASA

It was not the blindness she had minded: Oh, no... . She actually loved fog; It hid her from the
world and the world from her. At the time, however, she had not experienced any such feeling
that everything had changed, nothing what it seemed; The great, oily fog had not been so ho-
mogenous, nor so clean, as the natural kind. Its density had varied: Honeycombed with many
vile stenches, yet with caverns of relatively clean air, as well as cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting
and changing place in an effort to seek out and sully every possible clean surface.
On Gaia, one of the major similarities between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that
“cannot possibly go wrong” was that if ever the thing which “couldn’t possibly go wrong” in fact
did go wrong, it nevertheless turned out to be easy to get at and repair.
Against much of her better judgment, Chiyoko had emerged down into the lower decks into
what had rapidly been turning into bedlam. What did she see when she recalled those growling
men and women, stripped of their bloody tunics, rushing about down in the dark bowels of the
engine room? The first thing she thought about was not the wounded, but sex.
Koko had crouched, hands resting on her knees, hood drawn up, staring at the melted carcass
of the turbine at the stern of the vaulted compartment—the skeleton and some tattered flesh
were all that had remained of what once had been, as it were, a vital and vibrant child of some
Keltic foundry. The rotator, shaft, most of the stator, had all been exposed—the whipped steel
protecting them had had to be blown away. Here and there she had been able to make out the
oily palm prints of the Second Engineer’s fitters and whippers. They had already been at it; All ex-
cept the Chief Engineer, who, along with Dà Míng, had stood at the Chiyoko’s side. Most of the
time, an engine compartment could be considered a dungeon full of dangerous appliances and
noise and heat; Koko had observed only stillness—no racket, no steam.
The source of the disaster, a small patch of corrosion on the stem of the centrifuge of the gov-
ernor, would not be discovered till months later—the smell of acid where none should have been
would be so slight only Milwa'tem’s nose could detect it. Rises in engine pressure should have
led to the governor rotating faster and faster, centrifugal force eventually elevating the weighted
“arms” of the device up and out, and so decreasing the size of the aperture that allowed steam
into the engine, and thus, in turn, bleeding off the majority of the excess torque.
It really was an ingenious design. Higher pressure and higher speed led to lower pressure
and lower speed, which in turn wound up leading to higher pressure and higher speed; It was a
wise, self-regulating system. Up led to down; Down led to up; Faster led to slower; Slower led to
faster. If such a self-regulating mechanism were more readily available in human beings, per-
haps there would not be a need any more for pānoptikóns. Perhaps.
Over the last few months Koko had come to know every gear and pipe, every widget and piece
of machinery. She knew how they all fitted together, what had to be done first, second, third and
tenth, to turn this great expanse of ice, sawdust and steel around on the head of a pin. This  was
expertise, to be able to look at a skip like the Feast and see with her mind’s eye right through
the ískrete to every engineering detail and every strength and every vulnerability.

303
 EUDAIMONIA

For her, the noise of the age was not intrusive: I love engines, chains, watches—and I recall
how, at first, photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and of the
machinery of precision. Cameras, she understood, were clocks for seeing, and maybe in such
photographic mechanisms someone wise still heard the sound of living things.
Three years ago: “Why should I answer your questions?” Guðdís had asked her.
“Because I will preserve your words,” Chiyoko had answered.
“You haven’t been listening to me, have you?”
Guðdís Fuðhundr had shaken her head and gestured towards the left-hand window.
“Let me ask you something. Can you see the view of Valandvik from this window?”
Koko had stepped forwards to gaze out through a thick pane of glass. The view was south-
wards, across the anchorage; The water of the fjord glimmered under an evening sun.
“It’s a... very lovely view,” was all that Koko had said.
“Isn’t it? Now, you must consider this my final statement on the matter.”
Silence. A sigh: “Do you know anything of counterweights?”
Koko had shrugged without turning around: “I can’t say that I don’t—”
Guðdís had yanked hard on a leather cord that had hung down from the ceiling.
The first notion Chiyoko had had that the floor had opened up beneath her feet was when the
view of Valandvik had suddenly seemed to move up towards the ceiling; Her senses had con-
ferred hastily on just what this meant, and had been stumped for a short moment until her stom-
ach weighed in with nauseating confirmation that the view was not, in fact, moving.
Chiyoko had plunged through the floor and struck a hard square platform suspended just be-
neath the house by iron chains at the corners. Her first thought had been that it must be some
sort of lift—and then it had begun to plummet towards the street so far below.
The chains had rattled and a sudden breeze had washed over her; She had fallen prone and
had clung to the platform with white-knuckled alarm. Roofs, carts and cobblestones rushed up
towards her and she had braced herself for the sharp pain of impact—but it had not come. The
platform had been slowing down with impossible smoothness: Sure death had slowed to pos-
sible injury and then to mere embarrassment. The descent had ended a bare few feet above
the street, and when the chains on Koko’s left had stayed taut, the others had gone slack. The
platform had tilted with a lurch and dumped her in a heap on the cobbles.
She had sat up and sucked in a grateful breath; The street had been spinning slightly around
her. She had looked up and had seen that the platform was rapidly ascending back to its former
position. Just before it had drawn back into the underside of Guðdís’ home something small and
shiny had tumbled out of the open hole. A good amount the liquor from the open bottle of brandy
rained down on the cobblestones, preceded by the bottle itself. It would seem the woman’s taste
for presents was not as strong as her distaste for flattery and interruptions.
The woman’s home had been perched high up on the steep side of a gigantic terrace, affixed
to the stone like a two-storey bird’s nest on the side of a cliff. Chiyoko had supposed that this ar-

304
 KALIDASA

rangement was an ideal means of assuring her continued privacy—only those with serious busi-
ness, or a sincere need of her skills, would be mad enough to scamper out along the narrow rope
bridge leading to her small front door. Koko had afterwards wiped a modest amount of brandy
out of her long hair as she had stumbled to her feet, wide-eyed and chuckling.
As far as Koko was concerned, the Tao resided just as well in a counterweight or in the punch-
cards of a typewire, as it did at the top of a mountain or in a cherry blossom. To think otherwise
would be to demean the Tao—which would be to demean herself.
For the centrifugal governor used to regulate the distance and pressure between millstones
to give way under long-term stress had been common enough in the past; Yet, it was possible
that nothing at all would be prized more aboard the Feast than the art of looking for just the right
amount of trouble; Finding that, and perhaps a tiny bit more, everywhere; Diagnosing it ever so
slightly incorrectly; And applying remedies which were in fact detrimental to just the sweetest
degree. After all, the honey did not taste so great once eaten; The goal did not mean so much
once reached; If Koko measured all the rewards in her life, she might not find very much; And
yet, if she totalled the unexpected amusements of all the spaces—all the obstacles—between
the rewards, then she may at last discover the bounty of the so-called—
Dà Míng: “Are you aware, young lady, of the origins of the word ‘sabotage’?”
Back in the present: A fragrant breeze wandered down to her from the distant sea, trailed it-
self along the craggy shore, and drifted back out to sea again, wondering where to go next. Per-
haps on an old, reminiscent impulse, it would wander down here again some day.
The salty odour which came to Chiyoko’s nostrils ignited another pang of longing for the fresh
sky of the ocean—or for the salty flavour of semen. Did she want to be a leader? Did she want
to live darkly and richly in her femaleness? Did she want a man lying over her; His will and his
pleasure and his desire and his life and his work and his sexuality a touchstone, a command
and her pivot? Pleasure there had been so far in thrill, pleasure in small pains, pleasure in the
decadent art of watching decadent things, shocked, yet enjoying suffering imposed on others
and even wondering at herself now for her own enjoyment. Would such men and women be glad
if they could be cut to pieces, body and soul, just to show voyeurs such as herself what a delight
agony could be? The folly of life was the first truth of a Pithophiliac’s Art.
“Can I play with the doll now, please?” Atsuko had asked, lightly. “Yes, with pleasure,” her
mother had replied. Atsuko had sat still for a while a little bit closer to the group playing cards
and then gingerly said, “Where is it?” as she had clutched the doll she had chosen to play with.
“Where’s what?” the little girl’s mother had asked with a tiny sigh. “The pleasure?” Atsuko had
replied, innocently unaware of the significance of what it was she was saying. If the sights and
sounds of Atsuko at play were grating on Chiyoko’s ears of late, surely she should refrain from
ever supposing that it was the child’s philosophy which needed to be adjusted?
A memory: The one-eared black tomcat had arched his back and hissed. Atsuko had padded
down the alley, balanced lightly on the balls of her bare feet, listening to the flutter of her heart

305
 EUDAIMONIA

and breathing slow and deep breaths. Dirty and bloodstained and grinning, her hair tangled from
the long, winding chase through the village, clad only in a borrowed tunic ripped by cat claws and
brown rough-spun pants hacked off above the knees—one did not wear fine clothes when one
was out catching cats—she had advanced towards the tomcat slowly.
The tomcat had hissed loudly, watching her warily.
Catching cats was hard. Atsuko’s arms were covered in half-healed scratches, both knees
scabbed over where she had scraped them raw in tumbles. At first, even the transitionry’s fat kit-
chen cat had been able to elude her, but she had kept at it day and night. When she had run to
Agnodíkē with her knee bleeding, the woman had simply asked, “Why so slow?”
Agnodíkē had reached for an ointment and rubbed it on the child’s knee.
Atsuko had hissed, clenching every muscle in her body to keep from crying out.
Agnodíkē: “You need to stretch your fingers. All day, every day. If you do not do so soon, your
fingers will tighten up into claws around the burns. The scars will freeze your palm solid and you
will have to split your skin open just to move. A little pain now or a lot later.”
Atsuko had since then pushed her hand flat against a table, watching as the new-formed skin
had torn open. A hiss had once again escaped her lips, but she had not cried out.
And it was certainly true that Norandras was full of prey: Lazy old cats dozing in the midday
sun, cold-eyed mousers twitching their tails, quick little kittens with claws like needles, ragged
shadows prowling the greensward roofs. Even one-handed, Atsuko had chased them down and
snatched them all up... all but this one, this one-eared black beast of a tomcat.
He had run her halfway across the village; Twice around the ruins of the South-East Manse
and then across a narrow bridge over the river, through the garage, down to the beach, past the
kitchen and the village green and the South Manse, along the edge of the forest and up a tree
and back and forth over the hills, and then down a ravine and through an old gate and around
a well and in and out of strange buildings till she had not known where she was.
Now, at last, the silent huntress had had him cornered.
High walls pressed close on either side, and ahead was a blank windowless mass of stone.
Quiet as a shadow, she had come slowly, sliding forwards lightly as a feather.
When she had been three steps away from him, the cat had bolted; First left, then right. And
right, then left, had gone Atsuko, cutting off his escape. The cat had hissed again and had tried
to dart between her legs. Quick as a snake her hand had closed around him. She had hugged
him to her chest, whirling and laughing aloud as his sharp claws had tried to rake her face. Ever
so fast, she kissed him right between his eyes, and had jerked her bandaged face back an instant
before his claws would have found her. The tomcat had yowled, spat and—
Chiyoko: “What’re you doing to that cat?!” Startled, Atsuko had dropped the beast, whirling to
face the familiar voice. The tomcat had bounded off in the blink of an eye.
Back in the present: Koko retreated into the quiet of the bathhouse. Amidst a small crowd and
a massive washbasin, a towel rack and mementos of clean living, she stripped off her silk robe

306
 KALIDASA

and plucked away the ivory comb that held up her hair, strewing garments behind her as she
ran back to the pool. She held a bar of soap to her nose. Koko took a deep breath, inhaling the
downy scent of rosewater and lotus products. All at once she heard the laughter, the giggles of
a trio of girls making the bathing ritual an orgy more than anything else.
He was near, she knew—that shadow-figure of a play-boy she could sense in her future, but
could not see; Did it at all dishearten her that no power of prescience could put flesh upon that
figure? If the thing had merit it would be. Still, he—or she—could be perceived only at an unex-
pected moment, while she thought of other things, or came to an orgasm in a crowded chamber
when exhibitionism lay coupled with desire. Perhaps he stood just beyond unfixed horizons. At
times, she felt that if she strained her talents to an unexpected degree she might see him. He
was there—a constant assault on her awareness: Fierce; Unknown; Free.
Conversation and moist, warm air surrounded her in the pool. Warm water accepted her as
she slid into a sunken bath. There must be quite a few things a hot soak would not cure, but she
did not know many of them. Whenever she was sad, or so nervous she could not sleep, or in
lust with someone she would not be seeing for a while, she slumped down just as far as was
necessary to admit the discomfort, and then declared: “I’m going to the ōfuro!”
She meditated in the bath. The water, however, had to be frightfully hot, so hot that she could
barely stand putting a toe in; Only then would she lower herself inside.
She liked to think that she could recall the ceiling over every bathtub she had ever stretched
out in; Remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colours and the damp spots
and the light fixtures. She remembered the tubs, too: The traditional hinoki-wood tubs, and the
antique griffin-legged tubs, and the fancy white marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds; She
recalled the shape and size of the water taps and all the different soap holders. This particular
pool had blue tiles with figures of red fish worked into a sea pattern under the water.
She looked up and about this brightly-illuminated place. More fish were carved into walls and
ceiling, strange aquatic designs in the tesserae of the walls. Fish and lovely, swimming human
bodies intermingled across the same defining lines; Only a flicker of attention separated one
from another. Koko glanced at the floor; Words had been worked into the tile along the splash-
board: CLEAN—SWEET—CLEAN—strong—CLEAN—PURE—CLEAN
He is near...  . The thought came once more into her head all of its own accord. It was lust in
tension with lethargy. As with all on Gaia, sex held no mystery for her—there was little doubt that
natural philosophers everywhere had observed infants touch their genitalia as early as fifteen
weeks. So, when a man had sat down across from her and a tsunami of hormones had washed
over her, she had been shocked that she had ever forgotten that she was horny.
Chiyoko abruptly clambered dripping from the pool, strode wet and naked into the gümná-
sion which adjoined. These chambers, oblong and skylighted, contained gross and subtle in-
struments which were said to tone a Sourcerer into ultimate physical and mental awareness.
There were mnemonic games, digit mills to strengthen and sensitize one’s fingers or toes, nu-

307
 EUDAIMONIA

merous bottles of oil used to synthesize taste and odour, tactility sensitizers and temperature
gradient fields, blink-synchronizers to hone abilities in the dark, pattern recognition games to
prevent one falling into habits. All alongside a set of weights and other equipment.
Moderate giftedness had been made worthless by the printing press and the teletype and
photographs and gramophones and newspapers and everything else. A moderately gifted writer
who would have been a community treasure just a few decades ago almost had to give up, had
to change to some other line of work, since modern communications would now put him or her
into daily competition with nothing but the world’s best. As Dḗmos himself more than once had
joked: “Now, to continue the epic struggle between good and neutral.”
A thought: Yes! I’ll work myself to exhaustion: Drain the flesh, clear the mind.
But... she was not alone; There was noise coming from somewhere, the whickering skirl of
steel against leather, low grunts of effort, a half-heard curse she could not make out.
Koko strode soaking wet and nude into the training chamber which adjoined the underground
bathhouse. Soon, she caught her reflection multiplied a hundredfold in the crystal prisms of an
active fencing mirror swinging madly, around and around in the arms of a rotating dummy. She
watched the knife swinging in counter-point, each blow sending the arms of the dummy rotating
faster and faster, to arrive back into position to receive another parry and another thrust. The
table behind the man was piled with clothing, the active fencing mirror, with its arms and body
patched and scarred, looking like an ancient soldier wounded in the wars.
The naked Brython danced: Lunge, stab and thrust; Parry, feint and counter-feint.
At first, Chiyoko watched from just inside the door, her mind in two parts: One surprised by
the speed of the man’s parry and riposte, and the other surprised by the man.
Was there anger in his gaze, a sort of sour challenge? Chiyoko could not help but be put in
mind of those individuals who ran races not to see who was faster, but to find out who had the
most guts, who could punish themselves with a more exhausting pace, and, at the end, punish
themselves yet more. How long had he been at this? Did she recall a glimpse of the Brython’s
lithe figure as she had rushed her way through to the bathhouse? He sure seemed well-spirited
at the moment, but then, when his body could no longer keep going on, seemed as if he might
fall to the floor. Eyes narrowed, Kiran presently stared at the fencing mirror as if it were a mortal
enemy. Do nay even think about it. A pissed-off Brython versus the revolving arms of a fencing
mirror? The result would not be pretty. The man glanced at the clock: I will destroy it later. The
Brython was totally drenched in the sweet musk of clean and honest sweat.
As far as Koko was concerned, men did well to smell of sweat, not flowers.
His voice all was cloves and nightingales with well-rounded melodic vowels. Chiyoko had once
heard one of his girls say that the man had the voice of a sex God, but because she had never
heard what a sex God sounded like, Koko could not verify the claim.
Readying his weapon, he again countered the rotating swing of the dummy.
He had felt, rather than heard, a female presence enter the room behind him.

308
 KALIDASA

The man followed the dummy with the tip of his blade, Koko thinking that the thing could al-
most be alive. But it was only a clockwork mechanism and a complex array of mirrors and prisms
designed to lure the eyes away from danger, to confuse and teach. It was an instrument geared
to react as the trainee reacted, an anti-self which moved as they moved, balancing light on its
prisms, many blades appearing to lunge forwards, only one of them being real.
As she watched, the Brython appeared to find one final wind from somewhere deep within
himself, the mirrored arms of the target dummy sent swinging faster, faster and faster.
Abruptly, just as a sixth or seventh marker light came alive, bright red and glistening among
the prisms—more distraction—the Brython slumped sideways and away.
Immediately, he was doubled over, panting, and then lying flat upon the floor.
Living amongst the Norse, the Innut or the Sanātanists, one got the impression that self-con-
sciousness was the enemy of all philosophy—a self-conscious Sōkrátēs would appear a con-
tradiction in terms! Occasional self-consciousness, apartness, clumsiness, a temporary inabil-
ity to join in...  . Whenever one was self-conscious, was one simply showing that one was not
yet conscious of the self—let alone the Self—at all? One did not know who one was; If one did
know, then would there have been a problem? Or was there a part of Koko that did not care be-
cause she was equal to anything? That enjoyed all things with no expectations? Without these
devils that had been her angels, Koko would never have disappeared into language, Tao, liter-
ature, art and all the mad intensities which made and unmade her. No, it was not all bad: Occa-
sional self-consciousness, apartness, clumsiness and a temporary inability to join in—step-one
moments, all. Sexual yoga needed to be freed from confusions attached to numerous forms of
so-called Zen philosophy, since those ill-chosen words suggested them to be methods for the
achievement of extraordinary results; This was exactly what they were not.
The truth knocks on the door and Dḗmos says: “Go away, I am looking for the truth!”—and so
it goes away. Why did Koko travel? In a way, it was because she was so hungry. She wanted
everything: Koko wanted to be a woman and to be a man; She wanted to have many friends
and to be alone, to work much and not at all, to take good photographs and bad, to love and to
long, to be selfish and to be altruistic. It was going to be quite difficult to get all she wanted from
life, sure; Yet, when she inevitably stumbled and did not entirely succeed in this, might she not
recall that humanity was fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions?
She had chanced on one of the standard hard-on sessions of the gümnásion, as across the
room a man might sport a horizontal member which he turns around from time to time to conceal
or display. When Kālī’r Ysbaddes went to bed, she expected the man to sustain an erection from
the moment of nudity onwards; The very first moment of nudity; Anything else—anything fall-
ing short of that—she regarded as a personal insult. Here this young female was, soaking up the
rich and ruddy plumage of a male, seeming to be in a state of such contradiction that he would
not be surprised if her face tore in half. Believe it or not, Kiran had tattooed his crotch to look
like a rocket in flight because it looked sexy, not for deep philosophical reasons.

309
 EUDAIMONIA

The man had the whitest, smoothest, most hairless bum she had ever seen on a human be-
ing in her life: It looked like two pools of milk on a moonlit night. She thought their mutual naked-
ness might have had something to do with his glow—though he could not see why—as well as
the way his stomach grew taut as Kiran had propped himself up upon one elbow, smouldering.
Neither had said a thing, and yet Kiran, at least, liked the sound of that silence; Did she know
what it promised? Had she even heard it herself? In a weird way, it was so loud it was deafen-
ing; Something so simple it could blossom out of the way he mounted a chair.
Kiran knew that when he came across a good-looking woman—or man—the first thing he
always thought about was sex. He wanted to see them naked—which, in this case, meant that
he dearly wanted to see into the thoughts banging around in her head. He imagined running
his hands all over her slender, hot body. It was just the way he was.
This was one of those moments wherein a woman catches sight of a man, and all the güm-
násion has put out there, and stops mid-stride to gawk; It put both their minds upon a new track.
It was not often hard, from that point, for his resonating stare to flutter through the woman. And
even if she was a little intimidated, and did not let herself hear it on a conscious level, he just
knew her inner being was whispering to her about what she would like to do to him; How she
would like to have her delightfully erotic way with him, undress him, smother him with hungry
kisses or suck his cock deep inside the pouting lips of her mouth.
Kiran for sure loved the feelings which overcame him as he looked at another man’s cock
and bollocks, at a woman’s slit, as he felt his hands rip their clothes from their body, as the air
caressed both their naked skins; Such was to fully flower as a physical being.
Kiran saw then that she had the sharp brown eyes flecked with yellow—a cat’s eyes; Her
smile coy; Her hair rich. Nearness improved her features. She had the kind of deep tan which
some people spent ages trying to achieve with holidays and bits of tinfoil, when all one really
needed to do to obtain one was walk one’s arse off in the open air every day.
Kiran traced two fingers along his lower lip, wondering what her orgasm sounded like. In his
opinion, a sexy woman was at her sexiest just as she achieved orgasm. What did women want?
They wanted the same thing as men; They just wanted it far more often. No man could be con-
sidered sexually confident if he had never presented a woman with a new vibrator.
Chiyoko, for her part, actually wondered just what he would think of her if she blew him off.
She was damned if she was going to have her micro-expressions analyzed, or toss her hair in
response to a toss of his hair over his shoulders like some mating ritual in a zoological text. My
candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends: It gives
a lovely light! Sexuality was not a separate compartment of a human being’s life; It was a radi-
ance pervading every possible relationship, yet assuming a particular intensity at certain points.
Kalā, the Brython understood, made love with a focus and an intensity which most reserved for
sleep. Kiran, sure enough, understood Koko, her need to sink deep into a bathtub to douse the
flames. Tantra was mad, but it was also magic; There was no lie in its fire.

310
 KALIDASA

Hopping to his feet, he grabbed a moist towel and began to get clean.
Kiran knew that, during the Didáskal, many samurai ladies were taught how to use a knife to
defend their honour and that of their Lords, going so far as to always keep a stiletto safe inside
their obi, ready for instant use; A few had even been taught the naginata, some fathers feeling
that daughters, as well as sons, should be prepared to do battle for their Lords. Of course, some
women had likely been more warlike than others, enjoying going into battle. The test of a wo-
man was not what he thought they would do, but what they actually did. Richly tanned, with dark
hair, the woman before him was peculiar, romantic. He was wonderfully aflame, and a hinderance
to keeping life on an even keel. She was cocksure, emotive: She was here!
She found him watching her, a small smile playing upon his full lips. She wondered if he was
at all alarmed to find himself in such close proximity to her after their shared encounter on the
beach the day before. Kiran: “Need a partner? Youer’ll ’ave to go gently with me.”
The man shrugged: “This kind of exercise is still rather new to me.”
“That sounds practised. How many have you made swoon with that observation?”
He smiled: “But I am nay ’itting on youer. Believe me, youer’d know it if I was ’itting on youer.
Youer wouldn’t be able to stop youerself from succumbing to my charm.” 
≮
Within his head a voice rumbled: Ah, you handled that most adroitly. ≯
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I should nay ’ave agreed to this...
Kiran knew that it took a rather intense amount of concentration to fence by fencing mirror.
Most were equipped with real blades, and, in some cases, even a moment’s distraction could be
fatal. The only thing it respected was total concentration: One was required to concentrate each
palmós of the fight. As a Zen Buddhist, was the girl able to distil her attention, drive it down to a
narrow focus, shutting out all else but the present? It said much about the People that they per-
mitted themselves such a device as this for teaching an adult how to live.
The naked man would now offer to hold Chiyoko upright while she limbered up.
Koko frowned, opening a wooden chest and rummaging inside it; His accent was funny, dif -
ferent from anyone’s in Norandras. Kiran’s lips made different kinds of outlines for the letters, as
if they were diving down on them from above, poking them into shape; Most of the Innut spoke as
if they were sneaking up on the words, ready to club them down from behind.
Chiyoko tossed numerous weapons onto the floor, lined them up—the rapiers and the short
blades, the odds and the ends. “Ahhh, thar’s something ugly,” said the Brython, watching her
swing a long length of chain wrapped in silken leather: Probably kid. “That wun is called Doom
Floss; Wrapped up, ’istorically, so it nay rattles at all. If youer look closely, that wun’s got tiny
’ooks at either end, so youer cun ’itch it about youer waist like a tiny belt, for concealment un-
der clothes in darker times. Although youer would presumably need wun a wee bit shorter to fit
youerself.” The Brython bent to adjust the fencing post to the woman’s height, but Koko stepped
by him confidently and let one end of the padded chain whip towards the dummy fencing mir-
ror’s head; It rebounded off the crown of its head with a leathery whack.

311
 EUDAIMONIA

Chiyoko just narrowly managed to duck her own head sideways and away.
She amused herself for a time by laying into the dummy while the man smiled.
Scowling to herself, Chiyoko soon after this exchanged the padded chain for a long-handled
single blade. It was more than two feet long, one-sided, with a curved surface of folded steel.
The hilt was attached to a thick hand-guard, which was also made from strong steel.
“An efficient killing machine, that wun. Thar’s an enormous amount of subtlety to it. Youer cun
nay jest stab, ’ack or punch with it. That blade cun slice a sparring partner in ’alf, so be careful.
I would wager youer quite familiar with the general look of the thing?”
Chiyoko’s showing with this blade was actually worse than her attempts with the chain. She
stood up. Standing erect was natural with this thing in her hands. Leaping forwards, she slashed
at the dummy from the top right down, only to screw up her timing; The spinning prisms of the
dummy almost knocked the katana from her hands. With a single, quick overhand slash to the
dummy’s right arm, she tried to slice the limb free, but only succeeded in nearly losing an eye
as the dummy’s appendage simply absorbed the blow, bouncing back. Koko followed that at-
tempt with a pair of angry strokes against the head, and then another stroke and another. For
a few mikroí she slashed and sliced, her arms pistoning, a snarl on her face.
The Brython shook his head. Nay... nay... go up through the stomach, under the ribs. Come
even close to tickling an opponent’s ’eart with that an’ youer’ve jest wun the bout.
By now, Kiran had observed enough for a first approximation. The teenager led with her left
side, presenting her right hip as though her reflexes alone could protect her entire side. It was
the action of a woman trained to the foil and without a blade held in both hands.
Still, Kiran, for his part, would love to be so haphazardly taste-tasted as this beautiful blade.
One should sometimes simply explore something before one dipped in any deeper.
Long-term erections of this sort were typical for a gümnásion. Kiran was twenty-seven and
healthy; And a healthy person should always be thinking about sex—otherwise how would hu-
manity survive? Sex, more sex, always sex: As necessary as food, water and air.
Was that a tiny flicker of exasperation—or perhaps wry exasperation—in her eye?
Was he even the kind of man she wanted—wild, hot and losing control?
Kiran watched the teen step backwards, look down at the katana in her hands, then over her
shoulder at the various weapons lined up behind her on the floor.
The fencing mirror’s square arena stood in the far corner of the chamber. Chiyoko moved in
a quick turn, looking around at the lantern-lit equipment, the deeply recessed skylights. The air
felt hot and thick on her cheeks, as if the heat originated from some source that filled the room
and not within. Koko unclenched her hands; They had been bunched so tight around the hilt that
they had gone white as she had continued to swipe against the spinning mirror.
No: She could not put herself to bed like this, her energies still unspent.
Just then, Kiran handed her a long, curved sword and a short bone dagger, both with black
grips and with deep finger ridges protruding from them. Taking the sheath of the latter in hand

312
 KALIDASA

and grip in the other, she withdrew the dagger, held it up: The blade appeared to shine and glit-
ter slightly with a light of its own. It was double-edged, and perhaps as long as a man’s hand. It
had a small, round pommel of solid stone below the bottom of the grip.
Unsheathing the sword as well, she saw that it, at least, was polished steel.
“Nay street names for these. Maybe these two are more youer style? It is youer choice to use
the blades or pommel; It is possible to avoid killing if youer ’it with the pommel, but if youer ’it ’ard it
is jest as bad, so be careful when youer nay attacking a prepared opponent.”
Almost immediately, Chiyoko realized that she liked the feel of these things. The sword was
long enough to be more than a pocket weapon, yet the dagger was short enough to be moved
swiftly. She struck out with the latter at one of the targets, a bit wider than a man’s fist, that the
dummy presented. Then, holding the dagger sinister, she struck the dummy with the sword a
few times, but hardly with enough force, causing her weapon to be rather soundly rebounded
away. With Kiran’s guidance and urging Chiyoko struck out once again; Then again and again.
This time the prisms glittered, the target spinning slowly to their left.
Many blades appeared to lunge at her from the prisms, but only one was a real blade. Kiran
guided her hand towards the real one, slipped the sword around to parry the blow.
“Strike, ’ere. An’ ’ere. Nay, too low... Thar’s the liver. Kill me now; Nay a palmós from now. I
might ’ave another thrust left in me. Up! Up at the ’eart, under the ribs. Better.”
The dummy was spinning fast enough for a first marker light to receive power.
Her hair shed its water like rain onto the hardwood floor. Kiran looked on as Chiyoko came to
exist in a Kósmos whose dimensions were outlined by the dummy: Its ominous blade, her bare
feet against the floor, all senses and nerves and muscles—motion against motion. She was no
stranger to the gümnásion; An old pattern reasserted itself. Kiran’s erection was so hard that it
ached, as if it were an angry dog begging to be let out and pawing at the door.
A faint excitement crept into her awareness. Do not call it erotic: No philosophical labels! It
was a pure Zen canto: A moment of mystery, life’s ultimate speciality. Immersion in the lengthy
continuity of physical existence required no concepts. She had been taught to believe deeply in
a human duality: First, the dialectic by which the Hellēnic tradition guided her, but, at the same
time, that moment of pure mystery which confounded all knowledge. Zen Buddhism said that no
single concept or value could be considered absolutely and universally superior; If being useful
were beneficial, then being useless could also, at times, be of great benefit. Yang and Yin were
both different aspects of the whole, and the moment a choice was made to open one side and
block out the other, nature’s balance was upset; If one were to be whole and follow the Way of
the Te, one must pursue the pleasant process of embracing the exceptions. She was a woman
immersed in a creed which denied all objective function, as well as all objective dysfunction, in
all mental activities. Would such thoughts shock the mind of a Sanātanist?
In a recess of Chiyoko’s mind there grew a sense of urgency: A crying-out against such wild-
ness as this. The instrument of prisms and target could not think, feel caution or regret. And it

313
 EUDAIMONIA

carried a real blade; To go against less defeated the purpose of such training. That attacking
blade could maim, even kill. And she had never even held a curved sabre before!
Chiyoko experienced a great sense of exaltation. Attacking blades and target became a blur.
She felt as if the two blades in her hands had come alive. She was an anti-target. She did not
move her blades: It was far more true to say that the blades moved her.
Koko felt an enveloping happiness just to be alive: A joy made stronger by the certainty that
some day it would all come to a halt; And quite soon, if the dummy had its way. It overwhelmed
her feeling of being overwhelmed. Afterwards, she felt a little foolish, but that too was part of the
human condition: She knew that foolishness was not foolish. She realized that for no particular
reason she had stumbled into the heart of what it was to be alive. It was a rare gift to under -
stand that one’s life was wondrous; And that, moreover, it should not last forever.
The Brython watched the motion of her arse and hips as the dummy spun back again, mov-
ing at a one-marker-higher speed now, just a bit faster than it had at the beginning.
How beautiful lust was, when it made one feel this way.
Ānanda: A ’aphazard word for what the mind trewly cun nay grasp.
He watched her parry, and, against all caution, dart into the danger zone to score.
Two lights glowed from the prisms.
Attack—parry—counter. Attack—parry—counter.
Attack—parry—counter. Faster and faster the spinning motion became.
Attack—parry—counter. Three lights... . Four...
Once, Kiran had had a wild fling during an otherwise boring case in Din Eidyn with a man he
had met who turned out to be a psychologist. The man had conceded, after hṓra after hṓra of
their naked cavorting in the hotel, that Kiran was a complete sex votary; Though his partner had
stressed that he would not change that fact for the world. Truly, every Tantric did indeed live for
sex; They celebrated it, relished the electricity of it, with every fibre of their being. It had been
evident to his partner that, as far as Kiran was concerned, he could find no healthier reason for
being alive. Best of all, it often turned his partners on that Kiran was so sexual; And thus the
two of them had turned a dull season in a grey pólis into something ecstatic.
Ecstasy, euphoria, rapture: These were perhaps the closest synonyms for ānanda.
It was the wildness of it, and that alone, that got him going: The primal lust, the sheer desire
of people in heat, quickly finding ways to express their sacred hunger to each other in passion.
Not for him the slow match, the long fuse; Not for him those moments, after a fabulous and in-
sane exertion that left him limp, wherein another man might gather his lover in arm with a mute
and slow burn of human tenderness. Did he love being satiated? Absolutely. But what he truly
relished was that delicious feeling of freedom, the delirium of being aroused by a thunderhead
on the horizon, his flesh being recreated. It was like being born again.
When one was honest, what compared with the gorgeous thrill of maithuna?
What else brought one to the same height of wonder, pleasure and fulfilment?

314
 KALIDASA

To feel aroused was to feel alive. Having great sex was like taking huge lungfuls of air: Es-
sential to the soul, essential to health, and to the ātman, which was the brahman.
Kiran was sure that there was no bliss like the bliss of being a totally sexual being.
He could not think of anything half as lofty as an orgasm given and received.
They completed man and woman, such unions of Śiva and Śakti.
In the future, Kiran would sit for two hṓrai cross-legged in the amphitheatre, with his aunt Kālī
at his side, and learn-share with the Innut the story of Durgāprasāda. He would draw them closer
and closer by spinning the old tales in his dreamer’s voice. This would be how Chiyoko would
come to learn how the Holy Idiot, Durgāprasāda, came to Manaw’r Brythoniaid.
The legend of Durgāprasāda always began with the fact that he was rather stupid: He might
have been the most stupid man in his part of Indía. Once, Hanumān had passed by and had ob-
served him standing on the limb of a tree and sawing off that very limb while sitting on the wrong
side: That is to say, when he had successfully sawed through the branch, he would himself fall
a considerable distance—along with the branch he had been cutting.
At the time, the young Hanumān had been seeking a particularly imbecilic man so he could
play a cruel trick on the arrogant Śakti. He had determined, after receiving a sizeable amount of
ridicule from her, to find the dumbest man he could get his hands on, and present him to the God-
dess as the pinnacle of wise men: A fitting candidate for divine ministrations.
Intrigued by Hanumān’s description of a man who “Lived every day of his life,” the Goddess
took him at once to her bedchamber. Shortly after they entered, Durgāprasāda uttered some-
thing, and the Goddess, with shock, discovered that he was a dolt. One of the major difficulties
Devī experienced in her relationship with him was learning to grasp him as merely pretending to
be stupid just to get people off their guard: Pretending to be stupid because he could not be
bothered to think, wanting some deity like her to do so for him; Indeed, pretending to be stupid
to hide the fact that he actually was rather stupid, and therefore did not understand what was
going on. On some level, Durgāprasāda had known perfectly well that he had less than half the
amount of mind a normal man ought to possess. Yet, when this Goddess came along having
about a quintillion times the regular allowance for a human being, she had had him gagged and
bloody and trussed to the bed, since a Goddess could need no proof that the best lovers had no
mind to change, nor not to change, nor hurl against the latest conundrum.
Durgāprasāda had not known how to account for her tastes, but it had been so.
“Thar are some individuals about whom it is nay possible to say anything that would describe
them immediately an’ fully in thar most typical an’ characteristic aspects; These are the wuns
who are usually called ‘ordinary’ an’ who in fact ’ad made up the majority of pre-Didáskal soci-
ety. Poets rather often choose to present intensely an’ artistically those social types which ’ad
been exceedingly common in real life nineteen-’undred years ago, an’ who are even more under-
standable to us thar than in modern life. Durgāprasāda cun be considered as this type, perhaps
exaggerated, but nay unknown. Imagine a brāhmaṇ of the ’Oly Idiot’s time, ’aving ’eard from

315
 EUDAIMONIA

the great story-tellers about this man Durgāprasāda, all-too-soon discovering that a number of
thar friends bore a resemblance to this man. They knew before being told that thar friends were
like Durgāprasāda, except they ’ad nay kenned that that was thar nature.”
It was sometimes said that Durgāprasāda was abhorred by the brāhmaṇs of Indía as an ab-
omination of Tantra on account of those divinities of the supreme Self who, the brāhmaṇs had
said, had chosen to dismiss Īśwara’s will, descending onto Gaia. But that was later... . He and
Śakti at first wandered across vast deserts and lush lands. He trod with bare feet, wandering and
singing as he went. Wherever he went, flowers blossomed in his footprints.
It was in the desert that Śakti had fed the man a green mushroom. That night Durgāprasāda
had a remarkable erotic experience. He made love with the soil and with the sky in an energetic
and emotional way as he meditated and masturbated under the stars.
Durgāprasāda would become acutely aware of the sensuality of the desert, of every grain of
sand, of the wind and the plants. It was super-erotic, immensely satisfying, and Kósmic beyond
belief. After that experience, Durgāprasāda expanded his concept of what sex was; It was not
simply about beings coming together for mokśa, but about circulating sexual energy amongst
inanimate objects too, which were everywhere and available just for the asking. He learned to
tap into that energy just by tuning in and whispering “Yes!” He realized that all was sexual and
that even a finger and toe enjoyed sex. Sex was both microscopic and megascopic.
Had Durgāprasāda been the victim of growing up? Growing up afflicted most children, at one
point or another. Had it been going on for some time, without him realizing it? He had found that
growing up could mean a lot of things. For him, it did not mean he should become somebody
new and stop loving the things he used to love; It meant he just added more things to the list.
In order to go to the Leading Edge, he would be required to learn to enjoy adversity. Śakti was
never turned off, but could she be turned on by being turned off, as he could?
Thus, with Devī’s help, Durgāprasāda’s inwards journey was a lot about joy, pain and death.
Fantasy love was much better than reality love; Never doing it was very exciting. The most ex-
citing attractions were between two opposites that never meet. He saw klovner and gargoyles.
He saw Gods, Goddesses, corpses. The man would soon be fresh out of shock and running low
on wonder. Try to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never awake; Now, imagine
what it would be like to awake having never gone to sleep. Durgāprasāda had been happy. He
was indifferent to discomforts which would trouble other folk: What did the circumstances of life
matter if his philosophy could make him Lord Paramount of all existence?
It was a Durgāprasāda high on mushrooms who had shaken his head and smiled when the
Zarathushtri priesthood had put him in chains for his outspoken henotheism.
It is said that in a fit of self-abasement, Devī went grinning to Kurush Vazraka and offered
herself, her hands cuffed, in exchange for an audience. Besotted, he accepted, and there is a
story still told of their night together. When the doors to Durgāprasāda’s cell were opened, a
vast fragrance of flowers poured forth. He emerged singing, crowned with vines.

316
 KALIDASA

After an initial attempt by Durgāprasāda and Kurush to convert the other, both quickly real-
ized the other already knew and loved the Divine. Durgāprasāda and Devī stayed in the Empire
for as many as twenty-one days, enjoying the mystical life of life energy.
“You should pass my lands by and forgive us our cleverness,” hushed Kurush.
Kurush Vazraka would become known as a kind, generous and fair ruler.
Durgāprasāda came eventually to arrive in Hellás, Devī coming together with him.
Where they went they sang, winding their hair with flowers. “The be’aviour of a ’uman being
in sexual matters is often a prototype for all thar other modes of reaction to life.”
The Héllēnes were odd, though in the names of their own multitude of gods and goddesses
Durgāprasāda found how true it was that the new and strange may become the old and famili-
ar. Many of the Héllēnes saw the wisdom in him, allowing no harm to come to him; Nor would
they follow him; So, he wandered, singing, and people made signs of peace and turned away.
When he went hungry, Devī went hunting for the feral bottom in the marketplace, for she could
be death to any man, woman or child. But a glad death; One gone to willingly.
From there, Durgāprasāda’s course had veered to the north-west. In the woods of continental
Eurṓpē the ravens and wolves were his friends, but the tribesmen paid him no heed, brandish-
ing axes and calling on a pantheon of familiar gods, who nonetheless had not known of the Tan-
tras of Indía. He walked; Flowers poked their heads above the snow as he went.
At last he came to Manaw’r Brythoniaid, a rich land where sheep fed on green pastures and
where the sky was said to be a colossal man. The professor: “The word ‘mundane’ has come to
mean ‘boring’ and it really should not have—it should mean the opposite, since it comes from
mundus, which means ‘the world’ in Latin, and the world is anything but dull; The world is won-
derful. Is there not real poetry in an existence which is full of wonder?”
Kiran: “It is wonderful, is it nay, this ’ole business of tickling an’ kissing an’ loving an’ fucking?
The sound of a woman’s voice cun be miraculous—did youer nay know that? It cun be soft an’
gentle, ’er words bright as the rising an’ falling notes of a distant flute. At times, it reminds me of
something I cun nay put my finger on. It feels to me like the promise of a warm ’earth on a cold
night. She speaks, an’ I feel the pull of it, ’er eyes, so dark or so curious. ’Er lips cun spread into
a wide, dangerous smile. Some cun laugh a wild laugh; It is bright an’ very delighted; It is nay a
’uman sound. Cun youer imagine them following a stream, Durgāprasāda an’ Devī, strolling
as a pair, ’and in ’and? Suddenly, she darts across the tumbling water, swift as a sparrow, grace-
ful as a deer. The ’Oly Idiot leaps to the chase. Despite the weight of ’is travel-sack, ’e moves
so quickly that ’is cloak flares like a flag behind ’im. ’Ad ’e ever run like that before? It is the way a
child runs, light an’ quick, without so much as the least fear of falling.
“She darts a’ead. Into the scrub. Thar are trees an’ the smell of earth an’ the grey of moonlit
stone. She laughs. She dodges, dances, pulls a’ead. She waits till ’e is almost close enough to
touch, then skips away. She shines by the light of the moon. Thar are clutching branches an’ a
spray of water, a warm wind... . An’ ’e ’as ’old of ’er. ’Er ’ands are tangled in ’is ’air, pulling ’im

317
 EUDAIMONIA

close. ’Er mouth eager. ’Er tongue shy an’ darting. ’Er breath in ’is mouth, filling ’is ’ead. The ’ot
tips of ’er breasts brush ’is chest. The smell of ’er is like clover, like musk, like ripe apples fallen
to the ground. An’ thar is nay ’esitation, nay doubt. ’E knows exactly what to do. ’Is ’ands are
on the back of ’er neck. Brushing ’er face. Tangled in ’er ’air. Sliding along the smooth length of
’er thigh. Grabbing ’er ’ard by the flank. Circling ’er narrow waist. Lifting ’er. Laying ’er down... . An’
she writhes beneath ’im, lithe an’ languorous. Slow an’ sighing. ’Er legs around ’im. ’Er back
arches. ’Er ’ot ’ands clutch ’is shoulders, ’is arms, ’olding ’im ever so tight.
“Now she is astride ’im. ’Er movements wild. ’Er long ’air trails across ’is skin. She tosses ’er
’ead, trembling an’ shaking, crying out in a language ’e does nay know.
“ ’Er sharp nails are digging into the flat muscles of ’is chest…
“ ’Er soft lips part an’ sigh, making a sound like a dove.
“An’ thar is a music to it. The wordless cries she makes, rising an’ falling. ’E sighs. ’Is racing
’eart. ’Er motion slows. ’E clutches ’er ’ips in frantic counterpoint. Thar rhythm is like a silent song.
Like sudden thunder. Like the ’alf-’eard thrumming of a distant drum... .”
All were silent. “Who was to whom displaying all the splendour, wonder, dread of thar vast
Almighty-’ead? Out of countless eyes be’olding. Out of countless mouths commanding. Count-
less mystic forms enfolding. In wun Form: Supremely standing. Countless radiant glories wear-
ing. Countless ’eavenly weapons bearing. Crowned with garlands of star-clusters. Robed in garb
of woven lustres. Breathing from a perfect presence, breaths of every subtle essence, all ’eavenly
odours shedding a blinding brightness, boundless an’ beautiful, unto all the spaces of a ’eart with
thar all-regarding face. If a thousand suns were to bust forth simultaneously in the sky, that might
be something like the splendour of the Supreme Mind in this Kósmic form.”
A sigh. “So Durgāprasāda; So Manaw’r Brythoniaid, land of my ’eart an’ soul. For years, ’e an’
Devī dwelled thar, an’ taught thar too. Both did follow the Precept of this ’Oly Idiot: ‘Love as
thou wilt!’ Thus did Manaw’r Brythoniaid come to be what it is today, an’ the West to know sacred
sexuality, born from the seed of Durgāprasāda an’ those multitudes of the divine ’ost who came
down to earth, in wuns an’ twos an’ threes, to catch a mortal’s sight of ’im.”
In those years, Durgāprasāda was at his sexual peak. He was an orgasm on two legs. His
sexual energy flowed like bubbly pink champagne throughout his body upon a daily basis. He
studied and practised Tantra extremely unseriously, and all his chakras were spinning like pin-
wheels in a strong wind. Around this time, he started facilitating sexuality workshops for both
men and women. The main thing he taught was the Tantric Mutual Erotic Massage, consisting
of intensive genital massage strokes combined with lots of rhythmic breathing. It was powerful
and effective stuff. Because of his mushroom experiences, he was prepared to handle the high
erotic vibratory states into which these techniques propelled such groups. These were very in-
tense emotions and moments of contrast; He was bright and experienced enough to manage
these transcendental states because of his knowledge of mushrooms. He learned how to take
adults, and yes, even children, on psychedelic journeys, with narcotics or without.

318
 KALIDASA

During all this, the mind of Īśwara was said to be much taken up with such things as Tajjalān.
The time of deities does not move like humanity’s, and two generations might live and die in the
space between one thought and the next. When the lovemaking of the Brythons and all their
heavenly guests reached his ears, however, he turned his mind to Durgāprasāda. The Lord sent
first his Arch-herald Kārttikeya to demand this man come to stand before The One Reality. The
battle of wits did not just happen to happen. Hanumān had contrived the battle so that all could
be left breathless at the fabulous way he would have won it. Yet Durgāprasāda met Kārttikeya
smiling, giving him a kiss. The Arch-herald returned sated and empty-handed.
Hanumān thus understood that The One Reality held no sway over the Holy Idiot. This man
was mortal, however, and thus subject to a physical body. Īśwara pondered long, and sent again
his Arch-herald to Durgāprasāda and those mortals who followed him, in order to deliver a second
message: “There are only two kinds of minds in existence: Those who say to the Lord ‘Thy will
be done,’ and those to whom the Lord laughs and says ‘Thy will be done.’ ”
Kiran would tell the story well; He had a melodic voice and knew when to pause, leaving his
listeners hanging on. How would he respond? All would be in a fever to know!
This was what he would tell them: “Durgāprasāda smiled at the ’erald, an’ turned to ’is lover
Śakti, ’olding out ’is ’and for ’er sword. Taking it, ’e drew it across the palm of ’is ’and, scoring it
deep an’ long. Bright blood welled from ’is palm an’ fell in fat drops to the earth, an’ anemones
bloomed. ‘Īśwara’s swarga is bloodless an’ without a rival,’ ’e told the ’erald, ‘yet, I’m neither. Let
’im offer us a ’Oly Place, where we might love an’ sing an’ grow old as we are wont to an’ where
ouer children an’ ouer children’s children might join us, an’ I will gladly go thar.’
“So was created the trew Manaw’r Brythoniaid, the wun that lies beyond mortal ken, whose
gate we may nay enter but after passing through the door which leads out of this world. An’ so
the ’Oly Idiot an’ ’is followers did leave this plane, passing nay through the dark gate, but straight-
ways through the bright wun, into the greater land that lies beyond. But this land ’e loved last in
’is life, an’ so we call it after that wun, an’ revere ’im an’ ’is philosophy.”
Back in the present: The momentum and increased speed of the dummy was evident, char-
ging its turbine, responding in its twisting way to the motion of her hands and the two tips of her
blades. Kiran had been ignored by prettier women than she: Even a few who carried the heavy
pitchers of silence just as far, only spilling the occasional drop. Her back was turned to Kiran.
She was cuter than Guðdís, not a bit of her advantage a difference in age.
Chiyoko danced in front of him, swinging her hips tantalizingly as she dodged; Her nipples
tall, looking as hard as coat hooks. They protruded rather ferociously, to be sure.
It was all right, by Kiran’s estimation, that his devatā occasionally confounded him by making
him turned so totally on by some Sapphic Goddess the young man could never, ever have. Could
Chiyoko feel Kiran’s whole body taking her in, wanting her, owning her in lust? Did the thought
penetrate her concentration? As she slashed, did she feel as if there was a world with him in it?
He could think of nothing else but her; He could feel nothing else but her. He was consumed

319
 EUDAIMONIA

with her body, dedicated to exploring her female sexual power and strength. What kind of fun
would it be if a man got everything he ever wanted from a woman in a moment such a this, just
like that, and it did not mean anything to him? What then? What mattered at the moment was
how much this otherness—which was ultimately somewhere within himself—was in control. Did
she feel so in control of him it was intoxicating to her? Did she feel nothing at all? Did it bear re-
peating that only persons capable of being alone were capable of loving another?
The teenager had five lights alive in there now; Nay bad at all! And the thing was becoming
more dangerous, moving faster with each light, offering more areas of confusion.
At moments such as this, seeing a body in motion, the Brython could almost convince himself
that Guðdís could take her devotion, her fame, insights and publications and throw them all into
the fire: Life was really all about sex. That was what Kiran kept learning, again and again. It was
the most important thing, woven into the very centre of his life. And he just knew he was put on
this earth to be a man, to explore as much about his maleness as he could.
So... why was he not with her at this moment? Why was he not between her legs, drinking
down her period or playing sweet music on her underneath a dining table?
When people noted that zōēsophía was a life-and-death affair, what they really meant was
that it was maddeningly, obsessively, depressingly up to its eyeballs in the grave.
Sex, on the other hand, was the life of the party kicking death into the pool.
Looking back, everything seemed ridiculous: These asklepiádai and vitkar and all sitting at
their conference tables, coffee mugs in hand, so serious and so sober. It all struck Kiran as so
pointless and contrived; It was incredibly funny. It was as if they were playing a game and did
not even realize it; It was like a joke he had never understood before.
A fragment of memory, lost in the sea of fond remembrances, came back to him suddenly, a
smile spreading across his face: This was too good! Kiran had glanced back and seen Guðdís’
underwear torn and discarded, a ball of thin dark material lying on the floor, thinking: Yay! This
is the kind of impatient sex I’m looking for! The way it had looked so small and forgotten was a
beautiful symbol of how much they both had needed each other then. All they could think of was
each other, as their arousal had got the better of them. Lust: Pure kāma; The sacred energy... the
primal seed... born of the mind, that at the beginning of time enveloped everything.
Kiran thought to himself how they had been so engrossed in the spiritual act that they could
not have cared less about their clothing, and he, at least, could not care less about his devo-
tion. That was real sex, that was real passion: Wherein one abandons all one’s boringly sens-
ible thoughts, and all that tediously responsible side of oneself, as one devotes oneself to what
one knows—somehow—really matters more, deep in the Self: Frantic sex.
At times like those, the two of them panting, he oftentimes grunting or she screaming, their
primal sexual natures overpowering the isolation of a bedchamber, Kiran would begin to feel as
if he was a superior being to his ḍākinī. She was merely human, but he felt as if he was some-
thing divine, a Bendith y Mamau, come hither to grace her with its presence.

320
 KALIDASA

The thought went through his mind that he should photograph himself in his sexual acts: Pro-
ject his frenzied copulation permanently onto the walls of the transitionry, a counterbalance to
the sober intellectualism of iatrical work, to show what life was really all about.
Kiran hoped with every ounce of his being that Chiyoko would have the pleasure of knowing
love—and heartache—the way he did. It might sound strange, him wanting her to experience
heartache, but without it he would not have met Guðdís—the wonderful woman who had taught
him just how uncomplicated falling in love could be when it was with the right person. Could a
Zen Buddhist fail to grok the notion that timing was everything? If he had met Guðdís earlier in
life, he had no doubt that he would have made a complete mess of the whole thing.
An individual could learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like her mother’s had been. Suzu
had taught Koko a great deal about living each day with exuberance and joy, about seizing the
moment and following her heart. He had taught her to appreciate the simple things—a walk in
the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he
had taught her about sleep in the face of adversity, but most of all, to know nothing of etiquette
and to care nothing for customs or intellectual philosophy, and that the right thing at the wrong
time was the wrong thing. His life had flowed clean, with joy, like water.
There was a season for self-confidence, and there was even a season for self-conscious -
ness, but there never was a season for cherry blossoms in the heart of winter.
As models for a Zen Buddhist, babies—or puppies—were in many ways the ideal: Totally unal-
truistic, not interested in politics or devotions or property, weak and soft... and yet so strong they
were able to grasp a parent’s finger with a suppressing firmness as they screamed bitterly for
hṓrai, seeming to some as if they would never wear themselves out—its parents were usually a
different matter—and then, just as quickly, chuckling placidly for hṓrai at a time. A baby was ig-
norant of Yin and Yang, sure, and yet an infant boy’s penis could often stand erect. Kiran: When
the first infant laughed for the first time, its laughter broke into a thousand-thousand pieces, an’
they all went skipping about, an’ that was the beginning of fairies.
As a metaphor for the Way, the newborn embodied a heavenly beginning, a mortal eternity.
Such beings come trailing clouds of glory, their lives the earthy freshness of mundane things.
And yet, at the same time, in them there was no refusal to grow up, no quests for the fountain
of youth; They struggled, but not ever did they struggle against struggle. When one saw deep
into things, what one discovered was that what was eternal was never forever. Suzu had not
been forever; Koko would not be forever; Kiran would not be forever; Even Gaia herself would
not be forever. The inevitable cycle of birth, youth, growth, mature vigour and old age, and even
death, could, in a way, not be the Way: The Way was more than the cycle of any one life. Hu-
manity arose, thrived, fell; The Way never fell. Humanity is a wave; It, the sea.
Chiyoko paused. From the human eye this would be the doctrine that the Nipponese teenager
had derived: That few poets had ever paid much attention to the beauty of the genitals when it
came to the serious stuff: It took Tantra to sing such praises. The clit, the cunt and the balls: On

321
 EUDAIMONIA

such topics the collective silence had been thoroughly... awkward. Sure, without the eyes the rest
at times counted for nothing, but there were more than a few fantastic parts of Koko’s body that
she would serenade for what they did only after a manhood was clasped within.
The painted man’s pestle had astonished her as much as anything and so she had gone cau-
tiously as a result; No doubts about how the Diplomakía employed his talents!
He was the kind of young man whose handsome face had brought him plenty of success in
the past and was now ever-ready for new encounters, fresh-experiences, always eager to set
off into the unknown territories of adventure; A man who would never overlook any erotic op-
portunity, whose first glance probed every partner’s sensuality, and explored it without discrim-
inating between his lover’s kinfolk and the elderly witch who manned the transitionry intake desk.
Such men had once been described with a certain facile contempt as lady-killers; It was rather
more true to say that they were, like everyone of strong erotic disposition, twice as good, twice
as much themselves, when they knew that a man or woman wanted them.
And now, there was Kiran, waiting with an arm holding the double doors open.
Koko: “You’re sick of me already? That must be a record, even for you.”
He shrugged. “Nay my fault youer’ve greatly overestimated my attention span.”
This rake isn’t nearly as sexy as I think he is. Wait... that did not come out right...
Kiran: I’ll put ’er in a jar on a shelf for a rainy day when I need ’er most. As he had opened
the door, the light from beyond had thrown the shadow of his large erection half way across the
chamber; For just a moment it stood as tall and curved as a sabre in his hands.
≮ Invite her over tonight, together we could strangle her before κύ. Galar—
Invite ≯
The Brython sighed: It’s near midnight, youer bloodthirsty old fool!
Several palmoí of silence passed within the Brython’s mind, but he began to get a headache.
Pain crept up from his left cheek into his skull. Once the Sanātanist had been sent raging down
the corridors with this trick. Now, however, the Brython resolved to resist.
If youer persist, I shall take a sedative, Kiran thought. His headache receded.
Having fallen into this relationship with his shadow, Kiran was at present unable to find a way
out. Would he eventually stop trying and decide to embrace being the difficult one?
≮ Don’t be frightened; If sadness presently confronts you larger than anything you’ve ever
known, casting its shadow over all you do, you must think that something is happening within
you, and recall that existence hasn’t forgotten her; her; It holds her in its hand and will never
never let her
fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any defeat, any reprimand?
Adulthood is not a disease. Adulthood,
Adulthood, and its expressions
expressions of pain and seriousness,
seriousness, are among
the most important things that distinguish humanity from other other beings.
beings. Do you not understand
what good work I am even now accomplishing within you? ≯

322
 KALIDASA
If the world were to go on as it has thus far, will humanity itself soon die of stupidity? Failing
all else, the last resort ofttimes is, “This was good enough for our ancestors, and who are you to
question their wisdom?” Then they will settle back in their chairs, with an air of having said the
last word on the subject—as if it would be a major disaster for anyone to be caught being wiser
than his ancestors! To tell you the truth, I still have not made up my mind whether to publish this
at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so damned humorless, uncharitable and so
absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry
oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one’s efforts, or
at least feel no gratitude for them. However well-intentioned, no dreaming may stand still, for this
bodes no good. But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause seems different and excitingly
alive. For three hundred years and more there has maybe not been any other Athēnian who bore
even the remotest resemblance to a future member of the human race: Most conceivers of eutopia
before Sōkrátēs resembled the man or woman who has lived with a lifelong toothache, and thus
naïvely assumed that paradise must consist merely in not having toothaches.

—from Eutopia by Dḗmos ho Didáskalos

Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to
ask “What else could this mean?” As I said, I find myself caught by the shallowness of ever-so-
many of the common views upon the Great Unlearning. Most historians seem to be obsessed with
Dḗmos as its impetus—not Sōkrátēs, but Dḗmos. Dḗmos’ life has been imitated so passionately that
I have heard that some copy even his greatest mistake. I suppose it says something about his pecu-
liar impact that he aroused such passions from so many diverse peoples. But, I hear you ask: “Are
these things not true, then?” And my reply is: “They are surface truth. As well ignore what lies
beneath as... try to understand the thousand-five-hundred-and-twenty-years of the Great Didáskal
without exploring its origins in the trial and transition of Sōkrátēs.”
There are works that wait and which one does not understand for a long time. The reason is
that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; For the question often ar-
rives a terribly long time after the answer. I cannot help but see Sōkrátēs as the turning-point or
vortex of the entirety of human history. Sōkrátēs was an entirely new kind of Hellēnic philosopher.
He denied that he had discovered some new kind of wisdom, indeed, that he possessed any wis-
dom at all, and he refused to hand down to anybody at all any such thing as his personal truth.
This being his claim to fame. Today, all is exactly as it was in the time of Sōkrátēs, according to
the accusation brought against me: “Everybody understands how to instruct the young; There is
but one single individual in all Parisii who does not yet understand! All human beings are wise
and there is only one single individual who seems as yet to be a fool. So near have the people of
Parisii come to having achieved perfection, now that all human beings are wise! If it were not for
this crackpot Kālī’r Ysbaddes, Parisii would surely be absolutely perfect!”

—from the Introduction to Eleuthería by Kālī’r Ysbaddes

The only thing this place needs to make it creepier is cobwebs blowing in the wind. Cent-
ralizer Dà Míng was staring into the pitch-black cell with unmistakable curiosity.
As it happened, it was a doorway into darkness of more than one kind.
“You’re letting in the light,” Svend said, from somewhere behind.

325
 EUDAIMONIA

Dà Míng gave no sign that he had heard the admonition. This was merely a datum, some-
thing already stored in his copious memory. Svend knew enough to remind himself that this was
a common trait amongst Gentlemen and nothing else should be read into it.
For some reason, the Windigo’s sleeping cell was kept totally dark. Thick wool drapes hung
over the doorway, then the whole wall hung with more of the same in layers. Some kind of entry
room had been erected about the hatch, so that light from the corridor may not come in with his
few visitors. The nurse pulled the hatch shut behind them, hung two heavy drapes in front of the
window visible in the centre of the hatch. The nurse had evidently memorized the layout of the
sleeping cell days ago; He was just making sure he was not allowing any light in.
Finally satisfied, the nurse opened the inner doorway.
The air inside the room was stale, still and somehow rather sweltering.
“Come here,” a voice said. It was low, hoarse, as if the man had not spoken in days.
Had Dà Míng imagined the Windigo to be sitting in a high-backed chair facing towards a cov-
ered and boarded-up doorway? As a young man, Asiniiwin may well have been strongly built.
But by now his weight had dropped from his narrow shoulders to form a ball in his paunch. The
Windigo was not corpulent, not by any stretch of the imagination; It was just that what weight
he had left was in his gut—his arms and legs thin, his skin tight, grey and scarred.
Dà Míng had been told that the Windigo now wore a blackened monocle moulded all around
his eye socket. Dà Míng could not imagine living so voluntarily in darkness. The place was like
a den. A hand touched his face. He did not shrink. It was not at all like a cobweb or a feathery
light touch. Had Dà Míng expected the man to be incapacitated, seated in a chair maybe but
nothing more than that? The Windigo was apparently able to stand upright.
The hand was steady, bearing several calluses. It traced his face, felt the texture of his hair
and the curve of his nose, pressed against his lips, went against the grain of Dà Míng’s facial
hair. Right on time, a hard slap almost tore his head off. Dà Míng allowed himself to crash into
the wall—at its core, Jūdō was the study of how best not to break the little bones in one’s hand
on somebody else’s face, or any hard surface for that matter. Dà Míng allowed himself to fall to
the floor, his cheek burning. Asiniiwin: “That’s for failing. Don’t do so a third time.”
Dà Míng smiled: “I’m glad I’ve been such a disappointment.”
He had to deal every day with people who were untruthful, or downright caustic. A Gentleman
was a man who knew everything there was to know about you and still loved you.
Asiniiwin was silent, as if sifting Dà Míng’s tone for anything displeasing.
“Get out,” the Windigo grumbled as he turned aside. “Get out... now!”

A clunk and a thud from above. A single trapdoor between her and the surface world. The
nurse dropped down a torn scrap of flatbread. Was Guðdís mildly surprised when people who
quite often smoked weed were not into edibles? In this form, there was little to show the scrap

326
 KALIDASA

of flatbread to be anything other than flatbread. Nevertheless, Guðdís caught it, just about with-
out looking up. She knew it was blue, not beige; The deep blue of the fjord at dawn, when night
still hoarded the sky and the breezes dared not caress the water’s skin. Unadulterated by any
other colour, looking on that blue was a delight for her: It made her feel bored, passionless and
at peace. Was it calm here under the waves in the blue of her oblivion?
After a total of seventeen days here, sometimes she could not even see that colour, as if she
had awoken to a world painted all in grey. Her eyes, so accustomed to every nuance, so adept at
parsing every spectrum of light, had rather soon begun to deceive her. She had hallucinated col-
ours. But imagination did not suffice for the samvrütti, even if it might be satisfactory to the para-
mārtha; The former needed real light. Would any colour have done the trick, from those below
the ultra-violet to those above the infrared? She was given nothing else, no tools except her mind
and her will; Always there would be a Sourcerer’s will. Guðdís had spent all morning gathering
the very heat from behind her closed eyelids, soaking herself in black and blueish red that shone
through to her, intending it seemed to fling that against the fortress of her—
Her nails, untrimmed as always, had cut her palm, so tightly had she clutched her daily meal.
Where her blood dripped onto the marble floor, it would become immediately leached of colour.
Startled, she cupped her life’s blood in both hands, but she would be unable get enough colour
by this method either, given that the only light in the chamber was blue. Bleeding onto the bread
did not work either. It was always dyed blue, so adding red would only yield an ugly brown. It
would seem to the Norsewoman that the People truly did think of everything.
“Bring coffee,” she had said: Seventeen days ago Guðdís had signalled with a raised hand to
the transitionry staffer who had stood just outside the door of the cluttered communications room
where she and Kiran had spent a wakeful night. It had been about time for breakfast, but after a
night such as that, she had not felt hungry. She had stood, stretching expansively.
Kiran had remained seated at the typewire’s console, Guðdís standing two steps behind. It
had been a windowless room tinged with the odour of lubricant, lit to a noontime brightness by
two-dozen lanterns and filled with the metallic spark of communications equipment.
The first thing that Guðdís had noted about the communications room was that it was home
to the largest mess she had ever seen in her life. The mess had its paws in every nook; It had
shed fur in every cranny. Piles of wire like coughed-up hairballs had hidden the floor; Stacks of
books had stood like trees for the mess to mark its territory. The mess had seemed to have little
sense of valuation, since old reels of punch-tape shared floor space with long strands of cop-
per wire, and either jewels or clear glass close enough to jewels to fool her eyes.
The second thing she had noticed was the firearms. A dozen were scattered all about, as if
the vast mess had got into them, tossing them about, here, there and everywhere: Six-shooters
and the older wheel-lock muskets, matchlocks and blunderbusses. The communications room
had smelled like oil, sweat, stone, dust, gears, levers, weights, black powder and heated metal.
The interior was one, tall hollow, the strangest cluttered conglomeration Guðdís had ever seen.

327
 EUDAIMONIA

There were man-sized arched alcoves set in the northern and southern walls, but every other
inch of wall space was taken up with a sort of scaffolding which supported hundreds of wooden
shelves crammed with tools, materials or junk. At the top of the scaffolding, set all the way atop
a makeshift floor of plank, she saw an old-fashioned telegraph. A bundle of wire had hung un-
der a long row of hanging electric lamps. Ladders and leather cords had hung down in several
places. Books, scrolls and bottles of lubricant had covered the floor. To her left and right, there
had been piles. She would not have been able to move much without touching—
Guðdís had shaken herself, accepting the tray of coffee as it had been passed to her. She had
poured, sipped, then passed a cup and a warm pastry to her apprentice.
The coffee had been Samukelisiwe’s work, done just as Guðdís had told her she preferred
it: The beans roasted to a rose-brown, ground to a fine powder in a mortar while quite hot and
thence into the press; Drinking in the day’s first sip of coffee was like paradise massaging the
taste buds. It was, as one coffee-in-a-can manufacturer had figured out, the best part of waking
up. Did Kiran know there were over two-hundred tasting notes and potential flavours found natur-
ally in coffee? The different roast levels of coffee greatly impacted what tasting notes one would
be able to discover. Did one like fruity or tea-like flavours? Then one should probably stick to the
lighter roasts. More of a bold, usquebaugh flavour lover? Then one probably should stick to the
darker side of the roast spectrum. In the middle one may often find a healthy dose of chocolate
notes and a mix of everything in between. Tempting as it may be to throw one’s grind in a cof-
fee machine and walk away, it would not produce the results Guðdís was looking for. The cof-
fee must be shown some love in the brewing process so that it may give her heaping amounts
of love in return. People assumed that because Guðdís was a coffee expert she must drink lots
of coffee. She could not. It often took her half a hṓra to brew a single cup.
There was no precise rule as to when a roasted bean was best ingested, but Guðdís could
count on a fresh roasting producing a higher level of quality. What she always wanted to do in
the search for the right roast and roast age was ask a lot of questions of who had been offering
her the roast. Some coffees were ones she would want to consume within seven days of their
roast date for optimal results, while many more were fairly consistent in quality for more than a
month after being roasted. But what flavours she could extract were entirely dependent on how
porous the beans became over time and how they reacted to water. Though it may not be the
most pleasant way to think about it, the flavour profile of an individual cup of coffee depended
on how much one had been agitating the beans. Or, rather, how much water was agitating the
beans. In many ways, it was deceiving. The sweetness that she often smelt as she busied her-
self with brewing coffee was most often an illusion. The scent of a dark roasted bean promised
her a whole lot of rich flavours with hints of chocolate or hazelnut, but if a human being was not
used to coffee’s deceptiveness, they would be left with a bitter aftertaste dangling at the back of
their throat. There were, of course, those people who took sugar, cream or even salt with their
coffee. Such misguided individuals claimed that it gives a mellowness, which was peculiar and

328
 KALIDASA

fascinating. Those men and women who were used to coffee’s deceptiveness had grown fond
of the taste of real coffee. It was complex; It was teasing; It reminded her that most things in
life were not understandable in a single sip. One morning, Guðdís’ coffee might be mild with just
a flirtation of bitterness and a nutty undertone; The next morning, it might be pelting her in the
face with those same nuts, leaving little stinging marks with each sip. Coffee was moody; It was
not easy to perfect. But when she did get a perfect brew, it was superb.
Coffee stirred up her blood, without causing excess heat; The organ of thought received from
it a feeling of sympathy; Everything became easier and she could sit down without distress to
a breakfast that would restore her body and afford her a vivid, pleasing day. She had sipped her
coffee. No bitterness; A blend of two beans—one of which had been grown the same way for
over a thousand years—and just the right temperature. If pressed, she could have named the
chemical makeup of the coffee and the reactions of the body to the brew.
Kiran had at first simply inhaled the coffee-rich aroma of his own cup; Some time later he had
sipped carefully but rather noisily. Was there anything in the world which was harder to do than
unconvincing oneself of a familiar truth? The klovn-in-training yawned expansively.
Guðdís: “How can we sit there, calmly eating pastries when we are in this horrible trouble? I
cannot make out what you think... . We seem to me to be perfectly heartless.” Even then, des-
pite Kiran’s watchful eye, Guðdís had occasionally oscillated between random topics; Like how
shepherd’s pie was not a pie at all, or why it was pointless for her to take a class in typing when
engineers would quite soon develop robot companions to do it for them.
There had emerged a soft click-a-clacking from the machinery; Kiran had typed out Guðdís’
words smartly on the keys. The machine had been set for Hellēnic characters.
The response? Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my
cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
Had the daímōn perhaps regarded this talking about things a monumental waste of her time?
That afternoon, had Guðdís made the best speech she would ever in her life regret? How could
Úna be a philosopher and a Praśnayānist before she was a human female? The most crucial
thing was to settle accounts with oneself! Guðdís had taken a drag upon her pipe, contorted her
lips into a frown and blown smoke out of both sides of her mouth at once. She had turned over
her pipe and tapped out the ashes into a small pile of the same. She had picked up one of the
pistols, cocked it, and then used the spur of the hammer to scrape out the remaining ash from
her pipe. With every scrape, the cocked—and for all Kiran had known, loaded—pistol had ro-
tated from being pointed at his forehead to being pointed at his lower back.
Guðdís had sucked at her lips, making a squeaking sound. She had put down the pistol and
grabbed at a pile of kánnabēs, stuffing some into her pipe. She then snatched a fuse from one of
the matchlocks and stuck it onto the flame of a lantern, used it to light the pipe.
When Guðdís had been young, typewires had been a curiosity; The township which owned
one had been an oddity. Today, it was the other way about: The township which did not own one

329
 EUDAIMONIA

was an oddity. A tēlelogía was an electromechanical device which could send messages from a
typewriter-like keyboard and display incoming ones without the need for training in a telegraph
code. Even the earliest versions of the machine would need to contain the following electromech-
anical mechanisms: A paper roll pulled between two automatic rollers; A keyboard; An incom-
ing and outgoing typebar, daisy wheel or analogous device; A switchboard connection; And a
magnifying lens. The machine thus linked two or more forty-four-key typewriter-style stations by
wire. Each key mirrored a key on a typical typewriter, and when pressed caused the correspond-
ing character to print at the receiving end. A “shift” key gave each key two possible values. An
eighty-eight-character outgoing typebar at the transmitting end was synchronised to coincide with
a similar incoming typebar at the receiving end. If the key corresponding to a particular charac-
ter was pressed at the home station, it actuated the typebar at the receiving station just as the
same character was printed at the transmitting station; The device was thus adapted to provide
a crude form of user interface, sending typed data to one or more recipients and printing out both
the outgoing message and any incoming response; The outgoing typebar or wheel was connec-
ted to the keyboard in the same manner as that of a standard typewriter. The critical issue was to
arrange the sending and receiving elements to work synchronously; Pulling the return lever was
set up to trigger the carriage return for both devices. Black was the colour of the ink for the incom-
ing type, red for the outgoing. Some models could also be used to create long reels of punched
tape for data storage—creating these either from typed input or from data received from a remote
source—and to read back such tape for local printing or transmission.
Every Gaian knew the teletype was changing their lives, mostly because someone in the me-
dia conveyed that exact idea every single day. However, it certainly seemed that the main good
the teletype had accomplished was the development of sexting. Guðdís would be right in think-
ing that a decade ago there had been thousands of adults turning to their loved ones and say-
ing: “You know, I’d love to have strangers masturbate to live descriptions of me deep-throating
a dildo; It’s too bad there’s no medium for that kind of amateur entertainment.”
In any event, Guðdís recalled taking a swallow of coffee. The three of them had messaged
the night away, moving on from the specific to the abstract as though drawn away from any real
decision, from the many immediate necessities that had confronted them.
Your silence shows you agree. It was all Úna had needed to say, really.
“Well of course it would be impossible for a man who is dead to talk about his own death! It
would be impossible for someone who is dead to talk about anything!” Guðdís had known she
had used this line of reasoning before, but had been unable to think of another. Perhaps she had
thought it would all make sense if she felt it all the way through, no matter the direction.
Back in the present: Guðdís sat, dining altogether ravenously on flatbread.
The chamber was built like a flattened ball: The walls and ceiling where not quite a sphere.
The floor was less steep, but slopping in the centre. The walls were lit by lamps, all of them re-
flecting the same colour of light. The only shadows present were cast by Guðdís herself. There

330
 KALIDASA

were only three holes: A trapdoor above, which released her food, a steady tap of water she
needed to cup in her hands for moisture and a drain below for her waste.
Would Pienish have supposed that the klovn, being an adherent of Buddha-dharma, was like
those wise-arse vegetarian ascetics who told everyone that eating even a few strips of bacon
was despicable? She was not, for what she hallucinated at that moment was that she ate a bowl
of blue oysters with a strong taste of the ocean and a weak metallic taste that blue wine washed
away, leaving only the salt taste and a succulent texture. And as she drank down their cold, blue
liquid from each shell, she washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine. The wine made other
people, and their bullshit, less tedious, the oysters less metallic, and provided what the Héllēnes
called éntheos—a strong buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.
Not that this was to say that Guðdís did not know the virtues of an apple—blue it was in her
mind’s eye, at present—that was roasting and sizzling upon the hearth on a cold evening, and
did not know the comfort that came of eating it hot, along with caramel and a drench of cream.
She knew how nuts, taken in conjunction with roasted apples, mead and maple candies, made
old people’s tales and yesterday’s jokes sound fresh, crisp, bewitching.
The blue apple was the most excessive of imaginary vegetables. The blue radish, sure, was
feverish, but the fire of such a radish was a wintry fire: The fire of discontent, not passion. Blue
tomatoes were lusty, yet there ran through such tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity, claiming
to have as many immaturities as modern-day steam engines had virtues.
Currently, Guðdís received her bluish skin from the domed ceiling, her smouldering quietude
from blue bread, and her seriousness from blue apples. A blue apple was the most melancholy
of fruits, almost willing to suffer. One could not squeeze blood from a green apple.
In her mind’s eye, Guðdís could walk slowly down the stalls of a farmer’s market, searching
for that peak of blueness and flavour. Fullness and emptiness both increase at compound in-
terest. Soon, she would be holding sweet and crazy conversations with herself, full of half-sen-
tences and dreams, and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” Guðdís would ask herself. She could not recall now if she
had always been this way, or if she had soaked in blue for so long that it had denatured her fun-
damentally. “I have not the slightest idea!” Words were important to a Praśnayānist. To speak was
to invoke the Lógos—to give form to the aether. A thing was happening that had not happened
to her before: Had she perhaps seen the fairest, bluest sky in all the world?
She might say: “It was blue, but behind it danced still more blue. It had no form, like water; It
flowed everywhere. It was cold, like the sun of mid-winter, only colder. It existed for a time on a
piece of bread, and then the bread was gone, as though eaten and leaving behind crumbs that
were blue and could be sifted like sand. When the bread was gone, it too was gone.” Thus, her
listeners might think reality was like a sky, like water, like the sun, like that which eats and ex-
cretes. They might think it was like unto anything she could tell them it was like. But they had
not looked upon it. They could not really know it—they could only know of it.

331
 EUDAIMONIA

The blue apple was the murderer returned to the scene of their crime. The blue apple was
what happened when the ocean of the tropics finished with the red cabbage. The blue apple
was ancestor of the blue moon, bearded and buried, all but fossilized; The deep blue sails of a
grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial, azure cheese; The kite string that once
connected the moon to Gaia now a muddy whisker wanting desperately for sapphires. A blue
apple was Kālī’r Ysbaddes favourite imaginary fruit; Guðdís had seen it in her eyes.
Was it unquality to be murdered? In Kālī’s experience, anybody at all may become a killer. A
memory: Out of the darkness, a woman’s voice had come, scornful: “You may call me Mistress
for the next hṓra. After that you may refer to me as Aaarrrrgh, pump your limpy, die squealing
and so on.” Kālī had hitherto invited the klovn to watch through a peephole aboard her yacht
as she ate her eldest son’s bollocks with some fava beans and a New World wine. If a mother
has a son and that mother kills her son, does the son still have a mother?
Kālī showered while there were two or three dead children in the bathtub and she was sane.
Kālī ate human testicles which she had marinated and fried in a skillet and sprinkled with sauce
and she was sane. At night, Kālī periodically lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them
and she was sane. Certainly it had been known to Guðdís for a long time that at the end of the
Didáskal a woman by the name of Ludmila Lopatka had arranged for her own torture and stran-
gulation by mail; At the dawn of the industrialized age, a man named Abelard Meiwes had been
found to have strangled and then cannibalized a willing “victim” he had met over the telegraph.
Such cases had attracted considerable attention. Had any of these individuals been ashamed of
wanting to die? A Windigo might be cruel to himself and choose to live, and an elderly man or
woman might voluntarily fast to death by gradually reducing their intake of sustenance, yet the
little boy who choked to death on a woman’s excrement did not do so out of despair, or a pre-
disposition for life’s credits and debits to be better employed when they did not square: Sparking
a debate about the various responsibilities of such parties, and the moral contrast between con-
sensual killing and murder—or euthanasia. One thing was clear: Was it not true that there was
nothing anybody had a more unassailable title to than their own life and person? What the hu-
man race dearly needed to do was define exactly what “death” actually was.
What if we were to some day really and truly pop completely out of existence?
As Úna had sent: Then we wouldn't be discussing it any more, would we?
Guðdís had put down her half-empty cup, settling it on the seat of the remaining chair, and
keeping her attention on it as she dictated: “That’s my point! The way ‘death’ is talked about by
moral philosophy, it is considered to be equivalent to popping out of existence. But any Self that
had truly popped completely out of existence could never know it! Suppose that at some future
date your noús or Self completely pops out of existence—can you assert with certainty that it will
not do so?—what could it ever matter to you if it did? If you do pop entirely out of existence, you
would never know it, and so it cannot possibly matter to you! But what do Praśnayānists mean by
this, particularly such words as denote the cessation of existence, in this context?

332
 KALIDASA

“Strictly speaking, might it be said an existing thing can only change its mode of existence?
If a balloon pops, it still exists as a memory, or a record. Even if it popped so far in the past that
no one recalls when it popped, it still exists as a topic for discussion, or a question in the minds of
those who might be wondering about it ever having popped. Even if no one is wondering about
it, it still exists as a topic of discussion in the here and now. And even if we won’t be discussing it
tomorrow—and I don’t see why we would—it would still exist as a potential topic of discussion if
any of us were to bring up the subject at some future time. It seems to me that it would be im-
possible for anything not to exist in some manner, in some mode of existence; For no matter
how nebulous something may become, or in any person’s mind, it would nevertheless exist as
that nebulous whatever-it-was in at least that one individual’s mind.
“Of course, I can be killed—or even be murdered or commit suicide; Anyone can. But I can’t
die. Let me rephrase that: I cannot be dead. No one can! To ‘be dead’ implies I am and that I’m
not simultaneously, doesn’t it? That’s just not possible, is it? Whether I come alive after being
killed—as concepts such as reincarnation and damnation seem to imply—or I don’t, is irrelev-
ant. Except, of course, as far as everybody else in the world is concerned. And while it may be
possible to talk about someone else being dead—because those doing the talking aren’t dead
themselves—it is rather impossible for a philosopher who is dead to talk about their own death.
Indeed, of course this must be so, since it would be impossible for a philosopher who is dead to
talk about anything! Do we not acknowledge that a man is not altogether non-existent if his name
is still spoken? Irrelevant! As far as a murdered philosopher himself or herself is concerned, they
cannot be dead: They can’t be anything! If you’re anything after dying, you’re not really dead. And
if you are nothing after being killed, you cannot be dead either, since—”
A shrug. “What do you think... is there in fact no such thing as death for anyone, whether or
not, as I repeat, they come alive again after being killed, or don’t? If a being, say yourself, were
dead: By which I mean definitely dead, dead as a doornail, dead to rights—well, perhaps not
dead to rights, but you know what I mean—you would never know it. At the very least it could
not matter to you. Well, not to you you... since you wouldn’t exist any more... but I think you get
what I mean... . Can anybody muster a hard, vigorous counter-argument? Non-existence is quite
impossible to experience—especially for the non-existent! Sōkrátēs is reported to have noted
that after dying there are only two possibilities: Either one exists or one does not exist. And if
one does not exist, I reckon it must be a bit like a really, really, really, really deep sleep: A sleep
undisturbed even by dreams; Within that sleep of death no dreams can possibly come. If any
dreams did, one wouldn’t actually be dead! Moreover, if somebody were to strangle me, and yet
I did not pop out of existence, I should end up in a far better place, correct? Surely a Berserker
must be destined to go to Valhǫll and not to Hel? Thus, the person who killed me would be do-
ing me a favour, for which they should be rewarded rather than imprisoned! In fact, killing good
people is far better than killing bad people, by this argument; Good people—good Khristianoí
and good Víkingr—end up in a far, far better place than the wicked!”

333
 EUDAIMONIA

A moment of silence. “Yes, that is more or less what I desired to say. But then, on further re-
flection, perhaps Dḗmos simply did not take this argument as far as his descendants have. For it
seems to me that one just can’t not be! Can I actually affirm, truthfully, that I no longer exist?
Surely even to attempt to do so, I’d have to exist? Is it possible for me to affirm anything if I do
not exist? So, what is the question then? I mean, is it ever ‘to be or not to be’ at all? How could I
not be? It seems that to say of myself that I’m in a state of non-existence entails a contradic-
tion in terms! That is, don’t the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to exist’ imply each other? Actually, aren’t they
definitions of each other? What else can the latter mean, I might ask, if not the former? Can I
actually be in a state of true non-existence? Is that even a remotest possibility?
“What I keep wondering is why we are still attached to life, even when philosophy is so much
against it? For example, why do a considerable majority—even of Tantrics and Sourcerers and
Buddhists—fear death? Sōkrátēs did not, when push came to shove; But he is to this day a rather
significant exception. How have so many individuals still not managed it?
“Maybe it is something akin to a biological imperative. We don’t think about it; It is perhaps a
kind of knee-jerk reaction; Similar to not wanting to have a root canal done, even when we know
it will make us feel better later. I say this because of my observations of animals: They too seem
to fear death: Even the stupidest of them. So it does not seem to be a matter of intelligence at
all, now does it? It appears to be a matter of something we are all hard-wired to do. We don’t
think about it; We just do it. It’s got nothing to do with the mind, but the body. Sōkrátēs might
have been convinced that rationality could overcome bodily urges... . Or maybe his body was
not objecting as loudly as most people’s might have done, and maybe that’s why he was able to
go through with it. Mind you, he was almost seventy years old at the time; A young person’s
body might have objected much more forcefully. Perhaps when a person gets old the body itself
isn’t as gung-ho about living on as it used to be. Some people say that when it is a body’s time
to die, it doesn’t strongly object to dying. Whatever. But, as I was saying, fear of death appears
akin to needing to piss after having drunk far too much with dinner.” Guðdís shrugged.
“Perhaps that’s all true. But surely you’d agree that a genuine proof for ethics must be based
on metaphysics? By which I mean, even if we accept the argument that it’s wrong to do harm to
another being, unless we know for sure that some action of ours actually does harm, how can
we know it’s wrong? It appears to me that there are three questions before us: First, what is a
Self; Indeed, what is in a name, a scrap of handwriting, a footprint, a deed or a memory that any
woman can claim of her child, however many years departed, that some part of them yet lives?
Second, if there is a Self, how are we to understand the mortality of all living things, and, closer
to home, how should we understand our own mortality? Is it possible for a Self to survive biolo-
gical death? Historically, moral philosophers have had an insatiable curiosity to know everything
there was to know about the Kósmos... except for the facts it was crucial to know. I ask you, is
anything truly necessitated if its opposite is still possible? An appeal to rationality in this way
didn’t satisfy Dḗmos: Which begs the question, what would have satisfied him?”

334
 KALIDASA

Back in the present: Guðdís knelt next to the only feature of the cell that the Innut had created
imperfectly: A single, slightly shallow depression in the marble floor. First, the woman rubbed
the bowl with both hands, grinding the corrosive oils from her fingertips into the stone for as long
as she dared. Scar tissue did not produce much oil, so she would have to stop before she had
rubbed herself raw. She scraped her fingernails along the crease between nose and face and
then two others behind ears and head, gathering even more oil. Anywhere she could collect oils
from her body, she did so, and then she rubbed the oils into the bowl. Not that there was any
discernible change in its colour; The Innut had fitted their blue lights into the dome of the roof.
Yet, this kind of blue marble was awfully rare. How deep did it go?
If the floor only extended a few thumbs into the soil, her fingers might reach beyond it, given
years. Sanity would not be far behind. But if the Innut had used enough that the blue rock ran a
foot deep or more, then she might be rubbing her fingers raw for decade on decade, or more, all
in vain. She could imagine a Sourcerer, upon discovering the small bowl at her feet, her only joy
in the world, chuckling aloud. With that laughter echoing in her ears, Guðdís felt a tiny spark of
anger in her chest. She blew on that spark, basked in its warmth. Was it fire enough to help the
klovn move, enough to counter the soothing, debilitating blue down here?
Later, others too would know her blue; This she believed. After the World to Come, that blue
would become as common as a fart. The species would know that, be it like a blue sky, it was
not a blue sky, be it like water, it was not water, be it like the noonday sun, it was not the noon-
day sun, and be it like that which eats and excretes, it was not that which eats and excretes. It
was something different from each of these, or perhaps all of them together. Using the Lógos
to legitimate the Lógos was like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. In spite of lan-
guage, in spite of intelligence, one could not really communicate anything.
And yet, the more words a man or woman of the Hellēnic tradition recalled, the cleverer their
fellows regarded them. An individual with a scant vocabulary would almost certainly be regard-
ed as a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s sup-
posed awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and pre-
cise was likely to be one’s thinking. They would hurl words into darkness and wait for an echo.
Thence, if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, they would send other words to tell, to march
or fight, or to create a sense of the hunger for the Thing-in-Itself. These two and a half weeks, a
thing had been happening. It could be likened to a miracle. She began to long for a new lan-
guage such as lovers may use; Broken and inarticulate words. Instead of the word “love” there
may be an enormous heart drawn in crimson and set aflame, a symbol sometimes used by peo-
ple who had trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.
What Guðdís believed was that if a post-human were to come upon another who still had not
beheld this blueness, and speak to them of it in the language of the World to Come, the latter
would grok what was meant. There would be no need to fall back on explaining what blue was
like; No need to recall that what was said was not the reality, but a mere shadow.

335
 EUDAIMONIA

Perfection was the word that was now uppermost in her mind. She talked about perfection in
observation, in understanding, in speech, in action, in life; But what exactly did a Praśnayānist
mean by all this, and especially by the word “perfect” in these terms? Observation which was a
bit better than that which was previous to it? Understanding likewise? Speech likewise? For ex-
ample, that which was known by the name Perfect Speech—Samyak Vāk—must it not only be
true but beneficial: Much better than speech which was merely true?
Her problem at this point lay with the notion of perfection. Having thought about it a lot, she
concluded that “absolute perfection” was a rather nonsensical concept. What exactly could it
mean? The notion that a thing was more excellent than something else was understandable in
its way, but what could she mean by proposing that something was itself perfect? Or rather, in
order to attempt such a thing, must she in fact fail to understand a great many concepts? Con-
sider the term Perfect Life: What was a perfect life? She may argue that no life was perfect... or
alternatively, that every life was! She might argue that no death was perfect or that every death
was. Each woman saw only though her own eyes—she could not see through the eyes of any
other. Perfect sight was that which was, as ever, seen by her through her eyes; Be it imperfect
in the sense that it was not a universal vision, it could still be perfect for her. People called her
an imperfectionist; She was not. She was a perfectionist: Guðdís did something till it was good
enough, then moved on. Being right was never right in the wrong places.
Indeed, as she had already noted, there was no such thing even as an “objective” self. There
was no such thing as “objective” time or “objective” death: All that existed was... now. Nothing
was permanent! Not even rocks and mountains, though they might appear so. One might sup-
pose that perfection being better than mediocrity was but a tautology. Was it? A tautology could
only be formulated if the constituent words had clear, unambiguous meanings. Perfection: “Ex-
cellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement.” There was no such thing: That
might sound a cliché, but it was a cold, hard truth. There was no need for her to fear absolute
perfection: A human being would never in their life obtain it. Out of the crooked timber of humani-
ty, no straight thing was ever made. When all the details of a new hypothesis did not fit in per-
fectly, something was probably wrong. There must be something wrong with all those boys who
thought Kālī’r Ysbaddes did not sweat, hiccup, burp or fart. Surely, they knew that this was un-
true? In fact, the woman hiccuped more than most! It took a lot of work to be a lady. If one did
not want to break a sweat, there was very little point in bothering.
Aiming at perfection, imperfection must not be overlooked. These last seventeen days or so
she had been tempered like steel in a blue flame by the blows of the hammer of life. Life had not
broken her, but had made her stronger. “Absolute” perfection was the pride of a woman who
had not lived. Such women lay forever on the shelf, gathering dust, slowly tarnishing.
The point being that Praśnayāna did not aim for “objective” perfection; Truths were not disco-
vered, they were not created, truths could only be acknowledged. A fact, conversely, was, like all
other things, impermanent. Even impermanence itself was impermanent: It would keep chan-

336
 KALIDASA

ging from moment to moment into the same old—impermanent—thing. One just needed to look
at anything that was “objectively” perfect to begin to understand this! Every Buddhist generation
was undersupplied with those who publicized their failures but hid their successes, and oversup-
plied with those inclined to attempt the opposite. Did it at all seem strange that, as far as Guðdís
knew, nobody had yet been murdered for having too perfect a character; Except perhaps Iēsoús?
Whatever its form, was true perfection an absolutely nonsensical thing?
Had Guðdís perhaps been an imperfectionist even as far back as her days as a Gentleman
Bastard? What she had liked to do was climb over the rooftops of the Epekwitk pānoptikón with
her fellow teasers and clutchers, pickpockets and cat burglars, to spit fat plum stones onto the
head of a passing daímōn, or to scamper down an alley with some mark of the Shifting Market in
hot pursuit, and, sure enough, to wage a kind of war upon all the rival gangs to her own Gentle-
men Bastards. Never was it too late for a lass to have an interesting childhood.
At the time, Guðdís and her hordes of associates had been engaged in The Game. There had
often been several wars running at once. The children—be they Pāndaimṓnion citizens or for-
eigners, like herself—waged a kind of good-natured warfare upon the other gangs. Once, she
had been kidnapped by children from a rival part of town, and therefore the Gentlemen Bas-
tards had raided the place to rescue her, slinking up on the rival gang by way of the forbidden
Akrópolis. They had gathered armfuls of small stones to throw at their kidnappers. There had
been enough gangs in the pānoptikón capital to allow for endless permutations of alliances and
betrayals. For example, the Brickburners had claimed the Claybeds; The Gentlemen Bastards
had struck a short truce with the Aphrodítē Kids and thus both had raided the Claybeds, pelting
the Brickburners with lumps of clay, before rolling them around in the clinging substance till both
victors and vanquished had acutely resembled a flock of shrieking golems.
That night, the Gentlemen Bastards, Aphrodítē Kids and Brickburners had ripped each oth-
er’s clothes and thrown away jewellery. They had been a rabid herd of horny bratz. After all, was
not God an eternal child playing an eternal game in the eternal garden?
Such displays of “enmity” between the gangs, it must be said, were always forgotten at once
when a daímōn laid their hands in anger on one of their own; If the offence in question was of
an ugly enough nature, then all the gangs might band together and battle against the daímōn for
a week. This rivalry was over two hundred years old, and very deep and satisfying.
And it was true that an anonymous prank could be one of the most efficacious ways to en-
force discipline. A prank performed with appropriate finesse avoided a direct confrontation, and
the resulting laughter elicited from a prank informed the offender that their actions were unac-
ceptable. The utilitarian aim of such laughter was as always a group improvement.
Still, a practical joke must always avoid verging on cruelty... or malice.
Violence and power-over had to be eliminated on the interpersonal level, sure. But it was
also clear that there must be prevention at an individual level—at that of thought and emotion.
In other words, group therapy in a community that had assumed group responsibility for each

337
 EUDAIMONIA

other’s mind-lives. Was one truly happy? What did one truly desire? If a person could answer
both these questions, they probably need not take all that long to become young.
So had passed the second half of Guðdís’ childhood. Childhood was play-hood; Adulthood
was childhood. Any justice system that forgot this was rehabilitating in a wrong way.
A memory: “ ‘I like big boys,’ I said. My voice was raspy, as if I had a cold. I came to him and
grabbed his arm. My fingers hurt his muscles. I could smell his cologne. I moved closer to him.
He thought he knew what I wanted. He tried to kiss me. I jerked away. I even slapped him. I was
strong, his cheek stung. I moved in, swinging both arms. Now, I had my fists closed.
“ ‘Hit me!’ I said. I struck his chest. He hit me lightly on my left breast.
“ ‘That’s right! That’s right!’ I told him.” Kālī explained that she had hit the daímōn hard, giving
him a hard punch on the neck. “I hit him in the belly too. I heard his breath go out.
“He gave me one over the kidneys. I grunted and clung onto him. I bit his arm till blood sprout-
ed. I slapped him. I put my knee into his groin. It hurt. I lost my balance, grabbed for him. We both
went down. We rolled around on the hard floor, panting and wrestling. He was hard to hold and
every time he got loose I would punch, kick or bite him. I got over him, holding him down on the
floor. He looked beautiful and even wild. I bit his arm again and I slugged him in the ribs. He
moaned, and then struggled free. His hand caught in my scarlet shirt. He got the idea. He ripped
the shirt off me, I fighting all the time and liking it. He ripped my clothes, not caring how much he
hurt me. He would never again be so healthy as this. There was blood in his mouth. I don’t know if
it was mine or his. It tasted sweet. Then suddenly, he stopped moving.
“ ‘Now,’ I screamed. ‘Now, Godsdamn you. Now! Now!’
“Some time later, the two of us lay side-by-side on the dirty floor.
“ ‘I don’t understand you,’ he muttered.
“ ‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ To which, he nodded. ‘Then what do you care?’ ”
Eirlys frowned. Guðdís supposed that speaking had often been a problem for her.
Silence. Eirlys said: “W-Wait. Go back. He was wearing cologne? In prison?”
Kālī: “There was no need to be barbaric simply because he was incarcerated. Besides, I will
have you know, I once had to use cold water for a bath during my visit. Eirlys, you don’t know
what you are talking about: You misjudge me. You know nothing about me, and nothing about the
sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of his flesh was as dear to me as my own: In pain
and over-abuse it would still be dear. His mind was a treasure to me. If it were broken, it would
be a treasure still: If he raved, my arms should confine him. His outrage, his fury, was a charm
for me: If he flew at me as wildly, I’d receive him in a warm embrace. On his death bed, he would
have no watcher and no nurse other than me. Indeed, I had hung over him with untiring passion
even though he would never again give me a smile in return for agony.”
Thence the first of the things that had happened, had happened; The first of the things impor-
tant enough to notice and to recall afterwards, among a great many cruel but trifling ones that
were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful

338
 KALIDASA

gestures. Kālī had “accidentally” poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of the servers’ wrist
by not waiting long enough for the server to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by
turning her head momentarily the other way. The server had yelped.
An important aspect of a pānoptikón, was it a natural range of ages or interests represented
in communities of the natural kind, larger than the size of a traditional, extended family? No, the
Kingdom of Glass was no metaphor. More often than not it would be a Gentleman’s lighthearted
voice that awoke a daímōn, along with the hand on their shoulder and the delicious smells waft-
ing from the breakfast tray. If a daímōn did not think or feel themselves to be a prisoner, were they
a prisoner? To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave “badly” and to have
one’s bad behaviour well-respected, was it the height of all psychological luxury? As far as Dḗ-
mos had been concerned, humanity must allow a daímōn to be selfish and ungiving and free to
follow their own interests as much as possible. When a woman’s individual interests and their
social interests clashed, the individual interests should be allowed precedence as much as was
possible. The whole idea of The Game was release: Allowing a daímōn a life of natural interests.
Dḗmos had understood that a child was neither good nor bad, but with tendencies towards both.
There was no natural interest in wrongdoing nor any natural tendency towards such, in a child.
Did wrong-doing in a child appear as a twisted form of love? The study of daimṓpathy, did it re-
solve itself into the study of why or how a child could be led to hate?
All living beings desired goodness, they wanted goodness; They all wanted love, to be loved.
Hate and rebelliousness were merely thwarted love and thwarted power.
An incident that had occurred on the streets of Epekwitk emphasized a child’s natural wisdom
if they should keep, through all their ripe years, the simple, lordly heart of childhood.
One night, a Contrary Warrior had sat down on a chair in the middle of a road.
“I am a guardian at the Margaret Gate. You are to be folks trying to get in. Go.”
Some boy had been the first to come and present all sorts of reasons for getting in.
Guðdís herself had come from the opposite direction and pled to be let out!
But the star turned out to be a teenager who went by the man whistling.
“Hey,” the Contrary Warrior had cried, “you can’t just walk in there!”
The teenager—Kālī’r Ysbaddes—had turned and looked back.
“Oh,” she had said, “you are a new man on the job, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?” the Contrary Warrior had asked.
Kālī had smiled: “You don’t know who I am, do you?
“I’m God,” the teenager had added, and strolled whistling into heaven.
Humanity could not get away from the fact that a child was primarily an egoist. No one else
mattered. When the ego was satisfied, humanity had what it called goodness; When the ego
was starved, did humanity then have what it presumed to call daimṓpathy?
There was no case whatsoever for moral instruction; It was psychologically incorrect. To ask
any child to be unselfish was foolish. Every self was selfish. The Kósmos belonged to them. A

339
 EUDAIMONIA

child’s power of wishing was powerful; A child had only to wish and they were a Jarl. When a
child was given an apple, their one wish was to eat that apple. And the chief result of a mother
encouraging them to share their very own apple with their little brother was to make them hate
their little brother. Altruism came later: Came naturally if the kid was not taught to be altruistic.
In fact, it probably never came at all if the child was taught to be altruistic. The young altruist is
merely the child who likes to please others while they are satisfying their own selfishness. Reli-
gion said “Be good and you will be happy,” but the adage was truer the other way around: “Be
happy and you will be good.” Úna had not any language weak enough to depict the weakness
of moral philosophy. If she weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all; If one at-
tempted to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, it would merely go out. Moral philosophy had for a
long time been haunted by more fallacies than any other. The inherent difficulties of the subject
matter had been great enough to begin with, but, pre-Didáskal, had been multiplied by a unique
subtlety that was insignificant in, say, physics: Self-interest. A small minority held in check by a
more powerful and significantly larger majority was a situation common to numerous national-
ities throughout history. Well did Dà Míng understand the subtle and varied conditions wherein
such a smaller populace may one day rise up and turn upon its keepers.
It was only right to seek out and identify structures of authority or hierarchy or domination in
every aspect of life, and challenge them. That is what Guðdís had understood to be the essence
of anarchism: A conviction that the burden of proof must be placed on authority.
Back in the present: Having finished her work with her hands, she stood to her feet and ur-
inated. She watched; For a moment, filtered through the yellow of her urine, a cursed blue was
sliced with green. Her breath caught: Time stretched: The green stayed green, stayed green...
the green disappeared in exactly the same amount of time it had taken yesterday.
The next part still drove her crazy. She knelt by the depression. Meditation had turned her
into an animal: A dog, playing with her own shit. But that emotion was too old, mined too many
times to give her any real warmth. Seventeen days in, Guðdís was too starved to resent her
debasement. Putting both hands into her urine, she scrubbed it around the bowl as she had
scrubbed her oils. Even leached of colour, urine was still urine; It would still be acidic. It should
corrode the stone faster than the skin oils alone would. Or perhaps the urine would neutralize
the oils; That was the thought that made her crazy, not immersing her fingers in her own urine.
She scooped her urine out of the bowl and dried it with a wad of blue rags: Her clothes, her pil-
low, now smelly with her urine. A stink of urine so deep that the stench did not offend her any
more. It did not matter. What mattered was that the bowl must be dry by tomorrow.
A memory: A man approached. “I am Centralizer Dà Míng. Presumptuous, I know. My fami-
ly were incredibly narcissistic. I am lucky I escaped with any degree of humility at all, to be hon-
est, but then I’ve always managed to exceed expectations.” Silence. “I represent one of the fam-
ilies of the deceased. You are Kālī’r Ysbaddes, are you not? I have questions for you, Kālī. Can I
call you Kālī? I feel like we have become friends the past few moments.”

340
 KALIDASA

“You may,” had been Kālī’r Ysbaddes’ response, to Guðdís’ mild surprise.
The small man had taken this in stride. “Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s important you
feel comfortable around me, Kālī. It’s important we build up a level of trust. That way I will catch
you totally unprepared when I now suddenly accuse you of murder.”

There was a heavy knock upon the hatchway and his gummed-up eyeballs pried them -
selves open. W-What? Who? Where am I? Who am I? Oh no. Oh no. Oh, yes!
The Windigo realized with no little appreciation that he had been sleeping badly, his body twis-
ted under his thin blanket, his face pushed into the crook of an arm. His left side was numb; The
nerves in his right hand felt dead. All-in-all, an utterly pleasurable moment.
He awoke slowly, as if his dream had, in fact, come true—as if he actually had just narrowly
survived... some civilized ordeal... in the heart of... some vaulted hall of greed... in a pólis... some-
where. It was one of those nightmares that begin to lose their coherence even as one wakes, but
that somehow manage to leave grisly fingerprints across one’s mettle. Was it a problem that it
was agonizing for him to believe such victories had happened, that such a last-mikrós reprieve
had come to pass? Only a Windigo could be living a dream and a nightmare at the same time. A
heart-thumping nightmare was their breakfast coffee; They sweetened it with pain.
The Windigo had intended for himself a great deal of pain; It was part of his deliberate creation
of his life. Never had he got anything that he had not intended for himself. As a child no one had
had to tell him that despair felt so much like joy; The same fluttering in the belly, the same rest -
lessness, the same yawning. Once, he had read: “One miserable night I had lain awake with a
toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.” In other words, the worst part of
misery was, so to speak, the misery’s shadow, not the misery itself: The fact that a man did no t
merely suffer but kept on thinking ever so despairingly about the fact that—
The beating on the door came once again, considerably heavier than before.
Joyous agony shot through the Windigo’s neck as he tried to raise his head.
Was there anything like the first spasm of the day to get a Wingido jumping?
“The En’ra’zer!’ came Sasho’s tongueless bellow from the other side of the door.
“All right!” The Windigo shouted, eventually: “Give me a mikrós, Godsdamn it!”
The Windigo lay still for a long while afterwards, then cautiously moved his right arm, ever so
slowly, breath rasping with the effort, and tried to twist himself from his side onto his back. He
clenched his left fist, clutching the toes of his left foot with his right hand.
He became aware of a rank smell in the darkened room; I’ve shit myself again.
“Svend!” shouted the Windigo, then waited, gasping, his left side throbbing with a vengeance.
Yet, there came no answer. “Svend!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
“Are you all right?” came a voice from beyond the doorway. Was it when such suffering as this
found a voice and set his nerves quivering that others’ pity actually troubled him?

341
 EUDAIMONIA

All right? All right, you he-goat? When do you imagine I was ever not all right? Is a Sourcerer
not always in full, total and deliberate control of everything that happens to him?
Eventually: “Yes I’m all right, Godsdamn it! I’ve soiled my slab!”
“I’ve drawn a bath. Do you want to be washed today? Can you get up?”
The nurse turned to call for help, hesitated; Once they had had to tear open the hatch. Would
it not be better to be able to let it stand unlocked? The man knew so many ways of living an ugly
and despicable life it quite made Svend’s head spin. It would only be much later in life that Svend
would began to understand the point: That suffering, agony and disaster—and especially physical
pain—did not exist to vex humanity or cheapen life or deprive people of dignity.
The Windigo had a Thing about physical pain, as well as suffering and indignity.
Svend was well aware that “Thing” was not accepted terminology, but there was scarcely an-
other term with the scope and flexibility to take in the complexity of the... Thing. No, Asiniiwin
was no classical masochist; He was creating himself anew with an effort no less incredible—al-
most literally incredible—for being invisible to the observer. He had once thought of explain-
ing this to a less experienced colleague, and had given up nearly at once.
Tongue pressed into broken teeth, his arms and legs trembled as the Windigo managed to
haul himself off his smooth steel slab and into the rickety stool set beside it. His grotesque left
side twitched to itself. He glanced down at it with a burning... Thing... in his good eye.
Abruptly, a dizzy nausea twisted in the depths of his belly. He trembled violently. Neverthe-
less, he appeared somehow to have escaped serious harm for yet another night. Having survived
such unspeakable horrors, should Asiniiwin not go about seizing his day?
Over the last several weeks, the Windigo’s foot had become an ugly thing; A sickly and use-
less lump. Why not have it lopped off? Why not do so himself? Let us not fight today. We are
stuck together, so we might as well get used to one another’s company.
“Can you reach the door?” repeated Svend. Did the simpleton not yet understand that to be a
Supreme Sourcerer meant to be able to do anything which it is possible to do?
Wrinkling his nose at the smell, the Windigo now slowly and agonisingly pushed himself to
his feet. He hobbled across the dark room, stumbling over the clutter but righting himself with a
searing, delicious twinge. He turned the key in the lock, leaning against the wall. He let the weight
off his left foot, putting his arms around Svend’s neck without saying a word.
The irony—to think that he, the most formidable of Sourcerers, the best seen in perhaps a
millennium, had to be helped to a bath by a simpleton so that he could wash the shit off; A man
who had invented a new way of life in which human beings could live afraid, deluded and weak.
What was worthless to most men was invaluable to him, being well past the stage at which, with
no more fears, no more impatient delusions of the self, all his abilities in hand, he had come to
be called the pinnacle of a Man of Unknowledge... if only for a single lifetime.
The Windigo took a breath: “My foot has not woken yet.” They hopped and limped down the
corridor, slightly too narrow for the two of them. The bathroom seemed parasánges away; Or

342
 KALIDASA

more. Would he rather walk a parasánge as others were, than to the bathroom as he was? This
was his Awakening; Would he go back to sleep? Not today: Hopefully, never.
The frigid bath to which he was subjected, as icy as it was, felt delicious on the Windigo’s skin.
Svend would have to hold the Windigo under the arms as he slowly lifted his left leg and put it
gingerly into the water. Hel, that’s a shock! The simpleton helped him with the other, taking him
under the armpits and lowering him like a child till he was fully immersed.
Grinning a gap-toothed smile: “C-C-Cold as Niflheimr, j-just the way I like it.”
In moments his aching insides would feel as numb as his outside. He sat there a while and
watched his grey skin turn bluer and bluer. Soon, his left foot would be as numb as his insides. A
cold bath: Like a blanket drenched in stinky old piss; Harsh; Frigid; Intoxicating.
It was odd: He could instantly be, do, or have anything he desired—so what he desired was
the undesired, the unexpected. But then, just as welcome to the man, now and then through-
out the sweet torments of his days, some fool would make him a sign of sympathy as he passed
them out in the world, or he would notice that a flower that was in bud only yesterday out in the
garden had blossomed, and a small part of him would be set to ease. Of a kind.
Yet, for every rare moment of ease, he had to listen to just as much of his disciples’ crap about
his “failing” health. Schizoid behaviour was a more common thing in children; All children were
goofballs. In no way was it too late for Atsuko to have a happy childhood.
He was now shivering violently. Thus it was that he began to look almost as if he might just be
able to face another sunrise. In step five one knew to prize such things as trüshṇā. One had to
learn to appreciate suffering, or die of thirst crossing the sansāran desert—or, even worse, be-
come a prisoner of Nirvāṇa, afraid to leave the safety of heaven’s high walls, for even if it turned
out that there was pain in Paradise, all those who understood would desire it.
Rising from the tub with the assistance of the nurse, he walked across the grimy tiles of the
bathroom, stropped his nicked straight razor. He set the crude blade to his throat.
Shaving himself in this way, with the blade clutched in but two fingers and a thumb, was a
Thing that he had decided to take up only in the last few weeks. The danger of keen metal so
insecurely held by three fingers helped him to concentrate; Helped to rid him of dreams and
hopes, all of the alluring progeny of Mother Nature’s tendency to attain a healthy equilibrium.
The consequences of a slip were etched in his mind; He could not ignore the law of his leprosy
when he was so close to hurting himself, giving himself an injury and so reawakening the dormant
rot of his nerves, causing infection or blindness, gnawing the flesh off his face until he was truly
frightful to behold—or even depriving him of his remaining eye. This was not just step five—this
was a step higher: To be a master at denying oneself in joy; For the very joy of it.
Did the Windigo’s current existence make him happy?
The only possible answer was: “No; So, yes.”
Framed in such a way, he could be said most definitely to be absolutely invincible. A man who
could enjoy as much suffering as you could possibly dare to heap upon him: How could such

343
 EUDAIMONIA

a one be defeated? Whether he was enjoying life or was not, he was enjoying life; And even if
he were enjoying it too much, he could reverse the momentum, and thereby enjoy it even more.
Nothing adverse could be done to such a one: That would be altogether impossible. “Without suf-
fering, how could we know joy?” Such was a common argument regarding suffering. And while
the truth of that could be debated forever, it sufficed for him to point out that the existence of
rotten fish did not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate; Nor did the existence of chocolate
mean that there were not those rare individuals who lusted after kæstur hákarl.
The refectory was up on the promenade deck, quite a distance from the sleeping cells. Even
worse—and, therefore, better—the corridors were full; So many bruised men and women, like a
thousand ants in a frozen dung-hill. The Windigo’s foot was numb again, and his twisted spine
was a river of frost from his arse to his skull. His mouth was as dry as dust, his skin was still blue
and twitching from the bath, his breath was hissing out of his nose; But they pressed on through
crowds. He had decided to deprive himself of the joy of a tumble today, pausing, gasping, sweat-
ing and cursing the fire back into his arms and legs as he made his way.
As he walked, his foot trembled with every step; Shivering, rubbing his eyes, gasping out his
breaths and feeling a warm breeze from somewhere upon his face. He curled his lips back and
dug his remaining teeth into his empty, sore gums, forcing himself to keep pace with the traffic.
His nails cut into his palm, his spine giving an agonizing click with every step.
Why does he live like this? Svend would ask himself as the pair struggled down the corridor.
The plastered walls were cracked and weeping with moisture, although none were mouldy. There
was a seedy feel to it all. The lanterns cast slow-flowing shadows into corners. Why was it that
philosophers imagined that an omnipotent being would not want to live like this?
The Windigo’s feet made a steady rhythm on the grimy metal of the floor. First the confident
click of his right heel, a pause, then the endless sliding of his left foot, with the familiar stabbing
pains in the ankle, knee, arse and back. Click, pause, gasp; That was the rhythm. How many
people throw away their lives because they don’t believe in their own omnipotence?
The dirty monotony of the corridor was broken by heavy doors, bound and studded with pit-
ted iron. On this occasion, he thought he heard a muffled cry of pain from behind one of them.
I wonder what poor, lucky fool is being worked over in there? What pleasures were they indul-
ging in, what agony? What safe-words were being withheld, what courage cut through, what
power laid bare? Had the Windigo nothing at all to fear, not even fear itself?
The Windigo’s journey would be interrupted by the stairwell.
If the Windigo had been given the opportunity to thank anyone, anyone at all, he would have
chosen the inventor of the step. When he had been a kid and rather widely admired, before he
had begun to build a prison around himself, making it impossible for anybody to enter, he had
never noticed them; He had sprung up them two or three at a time. No longer.
He knew this staircase well. Forty-two steps made of steel, slightly damp like everything else
down here; At least the thick rust made a superb surface for gripping. Forty-two petty tyrants. He

344
 KALIDASA

grinned. It had taken him quite a while to develop the most painful method of ascending stairs.
Nowadays, he went sideways, like a crab. His right foot first, then left, with more than the usual
amount of pain as his left took some of his weight again, joined by a stabbing in the neck, which
he perhaps appreciated most. Why does it hurt my neck when I go up a stairwell? Does my neck
take any of my weight? The pain in the Windigo’s neck was always undeniable.
Dà Míng was waiting for them at the doors to the refectory. The Windigo stopped and caught
sight and whiff of the steaming porridge bowl in the Centralizer’s hands.
He limped over to one of the nearby tables, leaned for a moment against the edge of the ta-
bletop, and haltingly, cautiously even, sat down. He stretched his neck left, right, then allowed his
body to slump into a position approaching discomfort. These chairs had been part of the pack -
age when he had initially taken charge of the skip. Each was a thing which, while doubtless well-
intentioned, seemed to have been designed to make their occupants as uncomfortable as pos-
sible; Uncomfortable was the best they ever got. If the Windigo had been given the opportunity
to shake the hand of anyone, anyone in the world at all, he would surely have chosen the maker
of these chairs. They’ve made my meals almost... but not quite... bearable.
The Windigo took the bowl from Dà Míng, who stood off to one side.
“Hurray!” he shouted, “porridge again!” He glanced over at the motionless Centralizer. “Por-
ridge and honey, better than money, everything’s funny with porridge and honey! An old rhyme
for children. My sümmḗtēr used to sing it to me. Never actually got me to eat this slop though.
But now,” and he dug the spoon in, “I can’t get enough of it.” With his spoon full and halfway to
his lips, “Oh, and you would be right to suppose that I suffer from chronic—”
The Windigo paused, licked one of his few remaining teeth.
There was very little the Windigo did not already know about teeth. His own mouth had been
worked on by the very best—or the very worst, depending on how one looked at it.
He tongued his gums where his front teeth used to be. “Look at this!” he hissed, standing up
and opening his mouth wide, giving the man a good look at his teeth, or what was left of them.
“You see? Where I ordered them to crack out the teeth above, I ordered them to leave them in-
tact below, and where I ordered them cracked out below, I ordered them left alone above, all the
way to the back. Don’t you see?” The Windigo pulled his cheeks back with his fingers so that the
other man could get a better view. “I had it done with a chisel. A little bit each day. It took sev-
eral months.” He sat down stiffly, and then smiled a broad smile. “What exceptional work! The
irony of it! To leave oneself half one’s teeth, but all of them useless! I have soft foods most days.”
The Centralizer simply shook his head. “And the teeth were just the beginning. My cock used
to burn so much I had to piss sitting down. I am thirty-five and I need help just getting out of
bed.” The Windigo leaned back, stretching with a wince. His foot was in agony now. “Every day is
its own private Hel.” O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful life!
“Healthy,” said the Windigo, lifting a full spoon, forcing down a mouthful and spooning up an-
other, “delicious,” choking down some more, “and here’s the clincher,” he gagged a little on the

345
 EUDAIMONIA

next swallow, “no chewing!” He slurped another half-mouthful of mush from a full spoon, grim-
aced as he forced the slop down his throat. He then dropped the spoon into his barely-touched
bowl, spilling a great deal of it. He licked noisily at his gums and pushed the mostly-full bowl away.
“A good breakfast makes for a good day, does it not?” He smiled, wishing for Dà Míng’s sake that
his face would hold an expression of nausea as well and not merely of delight.

That evening: From somewhere nearby a lone flautist began to play.

Upon the commencement of the second passage, the velvet hangings rustled, and Milwa'tem
and Kiran entered; The Tantric with a muted, yet still audible, hum, his Innut lover in complete
and total silence, led by the hand to the centre of the petal-strewn orchestra.
When the two stopped and began to perform a disrobement, it was evident, even through the
veil of gauze, that the audience was being invited into their intimacy mid-scene; The pair had
spent the last hṓra drinking, arousing and getting lost in each other’s eyes—the Brython, for his
part, had some time ago discovered that shadows could not handle their drink.
Milwa'tem had thus come to know now who this magic man must be.
Magic man? For sure he was no Sourcerer. Yet, he had done things... things that...
It’s like a dance, Samukelisiwe thought, watching the proud way Kiran strode in circles around
Milwa'tem, ripping the thin articles of silk from them both and tossing them aside.
Samukelisiwe watched as Kiran touched Milwa'tem with confidence, his lithe hands pawing, at
first, the sides of a narrow waist. But, palmoí later, Kiran quickly drew both his hands up in a vast
playful caress to eventually lift the glorious weight of Milwa'tem’s long hair, letting it flow over his
hands at last and fall back in a shining waterfall. Samukelisiwe saw Kiran’s hands then begin to
caress the younger man’s smiling face, tracing the arches of the Innut man’s brow, the mousta-
chioed line of upper lip. Milwa'tem in turn cupped Kiran’s jawline, drawing a line down a muscular
column of his throat, flattening both his palms upon the Brython’s chest.
No... Samukelisiwe reflected, on an impulse, Milwa'tem pushing Kiran away and then pulling
him close. No, it isn’t sex which imitates dance, but dance which imitates this!
Kiran noted the swell of his lover’s chest, bringing their breathing into alignment.
Both took in twin lungfuls of each other; A scent essential to health, to life itself.
A powerful energy flowed into Milwa'tem, and he responded in the only way which, at that mo -
ment, he believed a human being could respond to another: By massage, by frottage. He used
all the rough-hewn techniques he had picked up ever so softly over the timelines.
Yet, to each thing he did, Kiran produced a wildly stimulating countermove.
Kiran growled in Milwa'tem’s ear: “My hands are fire...”
And it was so, Milwa'tem feeling the fire wherever Kiran touched him.
How does he know to touch me there at just that instant? And there? And there?!
As the arousement proceeded, the gauze veils were lifted upwards, one by one.

346
 KALIDASA

If the two men had intended to arouse their audience, they had succeeded brilliantly. Samukel-
isiwe touched herself, her cheeks beginning to flush and her breath to come quickly, when she
did not hold it in suspense. And yet, Samukelisiwe would often return her gaze to the orches-
tra, just in time to watch the two men kiss yet again; Kiran would grip Milwa'tem’s face with both
hands, as if to shake it, Milwa'tem swaying like a willow into the brutal kiss.
Breaking their kiss, Kiran knelt before Milwa'tem and flung the other’s long hair forwards so it
cascaded about their loins, like silk screens sliding in place above his bobbing head. Samukel-
isiwe could not see Kiran’s mouth move as he went to work, but Milwa'tem’s face grew tranquil
with pleasure as her slit grew moist; Samukelisiwe could see the muscles clench taut in his firm
butt. No power of resistance seemed to remain in Milwa'tem; Kiran’s hands attacked his lover’s
body. A dozen hands seemed to fall upon Milwa'tem; One hand pawed at a handful of buttock.
Another hand the other. That humming! How does he know to touch me there?
There were few outcries from those assembled, only a reverent silence drawn tight by the
music of the flautist. Samukelisiwe watched Kiran arch with lust, reaching up to draw Milwa'tem
down; And now Kiran would be seated cross-legged, Milwa'tem crouching in his lap, the tip of
Kiran’s cock poised below his anus. Again, Milwa'tem’s long hair hid them from the audience’s
sight, spread like a thick layer of black vines across their thighs. The music paused. People cried
out as Kiran entered in one fluid surge, sheathing himself to the hilt. A long thundering of drum-
beats entered the song as he thrust, Milwa'tem’s buttocks lowering to receive.
Milwa'tem found he could no longer control all his responses. He was reacting automatically
from some well of knowledge deeper than experience; He felt his muscles tighten; He felt the
slippery slide of lubricant. When Kiran entered him he heard himself groan. Kiran likewise no
longer moved under the direction of well-trained competency, but a deep, plunging awareness
of another; His lips, hips, hands and shaft were things of themselves.
Milwa'tem: How does he know to touch me there?!
How does he know to touch me there?! How does he know to touch me...
Waves of ecstatic contractions began in the smooth muscles of his anus. He sensed his sim-
ultaneous response and felt hard slaps; This heightened his own response. Ecstatic pulsations
drove outwards from the contractions in his anus... outwards... outwards. The frenzy engulfed
Milwa'tem’s entire sensorium. He saw a spreading blaze of whiteness against his eyelids. Every
muscle quivered with an ecstasy he had not imagined possible for himself.
And still: How does he know to touch me...  . How does he know to touch me...
The words quickly lost whatever small meaning they had and became a repetitive string of
unfamiliar sounds, more an imagined callisthenic exercise of the tongue and throat and lips than
real speech; Or even meditation. And, again, the waves spread outwards.
And again and again and again and again and again...
When Milwa'tem moaned, Kiran moaned, and the waves swept outwards once more.
How does he know to touch...  . How does he know to touch…

347
 EUDAIMONIA

Milwa'tem had lost count of the repetitions of the question in his head.
The next thing he noted was the curious vigour of his expressions, as though their coitus had
somehow severed the links shackling down the language of human bodies. His tongue stuck out
between his twitching lips more so than ever before. At the same time, a weakness assailed him
and his inner litany, as though something balked, refusing inner breath to his inner voice; How
does he know to...  . How does he know to...  . Now, the litany was muted to a thin thread undu-
lating through ferocious eddies of inarticulate and unformatted thoughts.
The evening sunlight was very beautiful and quite warm, mottling him and Kiran with a suf-
fused glowing and defuse shadows. At the periphery of his vision, the faces in the audience came
and went, came and went, came and went... like so many pink trumpets yammering amid a flutter
of pumping fists. He was at war; Inchoate urges reared from nothing, demand ing Milwa'tem to
stop and act on them; Unuttered voices untwined from darkness and demanded thought; Lewd
phantoms railed, pleaded, threatened, demanding thought and even action.
But his litany denied them all: How does he know...  .
Then: How does he know...  . How does he know...  . How does he know...  .
Kiran found himself grinning wildly at the beauty of their joining. Rarely had he experienced a
joining so beautiful; Not even during his years at the Night Court, nor his many visits afterwards.
The Tantric knew that all acts of love were but one action following another, interspersed by peri-
ods of rest. If any man or woman acted from a position of doubt about the outcome of their ac-
tions—if they were concerned with failure—they would be filled with hesitancy and uncertainty.
Within Milwa'tem and his inner microcosm, they rather operated on a principle of minimal effort.
Everything they did happened at the only possible right time; In this, they were like birds who
mated on the wing. Thus there began a joining of souls, and not merely a joining of bodies; It
was no simple spectacle or titillation, but a communal joining of everyone present. No doubt the
Sourcerer’s nose could detect a myriad overlapping pheromones: Smells that would flood the
lad’s nostrils, a musk which would be salty where it bordered upon taste.
Covered in sweat, Kiran surged against Milwa'tem like waves breaking, the latter meeting the
Brython like the rising tide. Their fucking increased in pace and the music rose. Kiran gasped.
His hands clenched against the muscles of Milwa'tem’s back; He arched, pulling out suddenly.
He could feel the pleasure of Milwa'tem’s throbbing against his thighs as they, and so many
pink trumpets, creamed out yet another climax in an evening full of hard climaxes.
Milwa'tem found that he was saying things, screaming them, but had no clear notion of what
he was saying; Kiran’s name, maybe; The names of his ancestors; The names of every mem -
ber of the Paidasía. The word “love” featured in there a lot; Which made sense... to the extent
that they had any sense left at all. He was coming. A stupid word, that; It seemed more like
an arriving; Or an explosion. Was there a word which meant both?
If there were, it would have described what he was doing currently, as by turns, his body be-
came remote to the point of giddiness and close to the point of hilarity. One moment he would

348
 KALIDASA

be an apparition, an accident of coiling smoke, so insubstantial the evening breeze might smear
him into nothingness; In another moment, he would become a bundle of nerves, every thrust
of Kiran’s shaft sharpened until even his own sweat shattered like glass knives across his skin.
Milwa'tem’s endless inner repetition became something drunken, something that stumbled and
lurched through a wet-dream chorus of mindfulness, passion and mindlessness; It howled some-
where deep within him: How does he...  . How does he...  . How does he...  .
Then the sun broke from behind a cloud. Milwa'tem was dumbstruck by its beauty; A brilliant
glow of gold seeping down through the canvas of the hutment above. And for a heartbeat the
question escaped Milwa'tem, and his mind fled from its litany by thinking only of the way a spot
in the canvas high above rippled; It rippled like a bathtub overflowing with honey... .
Then one of Kiran’s hands was around his shaft, cupping his bollocks.
For a moment, Milwa'tem could smell flatulence in the air, but the sensation was slowly rinsed
away by the return of the litany. Yet, his inwards cacophony had trailed into a breath held silent.
His body had became a stranger, a frame. And the movement of time, the pace of before and
after, had transformed into something he almost could not recognize.
Some time later, he found himself whispering only two words.
How does? How does? How does? How does?
He was a hollow filled with echoes bereft of any authoring voices, each of the two words seem-
ing to be, rather than unique, a flawless reiteration of the preceding. He was an eternally lost way -
farer through an abyssal gallery of mirror set against mirror, his every step as illusory as the last.
Only the sun, as a yellow disk seen through the awning, marked his passage, and then only by
narrowing the gap between the mirrors to the impossible place where vanishing point threatened
to kiss vanishing point—to the place where spirits fell utterly still. No longer was there any need in
either of them for beginnings or endings; Or even for any such thing as an orgasm.
Their erections had softened; Yet, they no longer needed them; Kiran did not try to force a
square peg into a round hole. A more “clever” man might attempt to devise crafty ways of mak-
ing pegs fit where they did not belong; A more “knowledgable” one might try to understand why
round pegs fit into round holes, but not into square; Kiran did not stress or struggle.
Thus, by the time the sun approached the far horizon, Milwa'tem’s litany had receded to but a
single word: How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How?
It seemed at once to be a laughable stutter and the most profound thought, as though only
in the absence of the Lógos could it settle into the rhythm of his heart muscling through moment
after moment. Thought thinned as sunset threatened to kiss the estuary.
Two moving spirits chained to the brink, to the exquisite moment before something, anything.
Milwa'tem’s sprit, body, everything he was, transformed into a nothing by endless repeti tion, by
the endless accumulation of the Kósmos’s refusal to explain itself. The shaft of late evening sun-
light journeying through the awning was like pillar of powdered rubies.
And then, all of a sudden, Milwa'tem’s inner inquisition fell silent.

349
 EUDAIMONIA

A towering Tantric plateau had been reached: No thought!

Kiran of Buellt and Milwa'tem of Meshikamau, both extinguished.
It was a void without thought or datum; A void without self and other. For but a moment, such
things were no longer the riddle of their lives, the narration of the passing of days.

Half a hṓra later: Just up the beach Samukelisiwe saw a rowboat waiting—not the one that
had fetched them from the transtionry; This one had a pair of red-headed twin girls in it, although
they looked as if they had just recently made up their minds; Twelve, maybe ten years old. Both
were wearing leather belts over fine linens, with what she guessed were real whips. Each of the
light-skinned girls wore several hundred freckles as near as she could estimate.
Both jumped out of the rowboat, waited as she, Kālī and Ōphéleia crossed the beach.
One set of freckles said, “About time.” The other said, “It’s going to rain!”
Kālī said, “Pipe down; Be nice.” Samukelisiwe: “These are your twin daughters?”
The pair of twins glanced at each other, then curtsied deeply in perfect unison.
Samukelisiwe: “That was very nice. Who taught you such a thing?”
“Mama Llewellyn taught us—”
“—and Mama Luigsech said this would be a good time to do it.”
“I’m Gweneth, by the way; She’s Gwenith.”
“They’re both Gwen,” corrected Kālī’r Ysbaddes.
“No, I’m Captain Gweneth, commanding officer, and Gwenith is my crew.”
The little girl nodded once: “Today is an even-numbered day.”
Gwenith smiled. “Till tomorrow. Tomorrow is an odd-numbered day.”
“Most of the time Kālī can’t tell us apart—”
“—and she’s not our mother; We never knew our mother.”
“She’s only our sümmḗtēr, no real authority at all—”
“—she just dominates us by brute strength—”
“—but some day that will change.”
“Into the boat, you mutinous hellions,” Kālī said cheerfully.
They jumped into the boat, sat aft, facing forwards, under the awning.
Gweneth frowned at this: “Threats today—
“—with abusive language—”
“—and without due process.”
To Samukelisiwe it would seem that Kālī was without her companion. But a moment later the
sable monkey appeared at their feet, and, reaching down, the Brython took his hand and swung
him up lightly onto her right shoulder, his black eyes radiating malevolence.
Silence. Kālī: “Capitan, will you kindly tell the slaveboy to take us home?” 
A nod. Gweneth: “Aye aye, Ma’am. Bunbun—home, now!”

350
 KALIDASA

“And now, Captain, having confused our host, please straighten her out.”
Gweneth: “Yes, Ma’am. It’s possible we don’t even have the same father—”
“—and Ol’ Kālī Mā is not any such thing as a biological relation, as I said.”
“Correction. I’m your mother because I adopted you. And I can unadopt you right now if such
be your wish. Cut the tie. Be just your ex-sümmḗtēr through circumstances I had little more part
in than you had. Renounce our mutual relationship. Just let me know.”
The twins glanced at each other. Gwenith: “Irrelevant—”
“—and immoral; We were only one-year-olds; It was not done with our consent—”
“—and immaterial in any case. She beats us. Often and brutally.”
“Captain, remind me to procure us a bigger paddle.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am. But we’re fond of Ol’ Kālī Mā anyhow despite her cruelty—”
“—because deep down she’s really a big softy. Don’t you see that?”
Samukelisiwe: “Miss—Captain, I mean—I’m not sure I do, if I’m honest. Do you suppose it’s
possible that I went through a space warp on the way here and failed to come out?”
The even-numbered-day captain shook her head. “Not possible. Just take my word for it. Un-
less you can handle Classical numerals and Libby field-physics. Can you?”
Silence. A frown. “Looking,” Gweneth began, “for a word. Tip of our tongues...”
“Special Hellēnic word for people who’ve discovered something.”
Gweneth nodded: “Heúrēka! That’s the word. Heúrēka. It means ‘I have it.’ ”
“Have what?” was all Samukelisiwe said.
“It. At least, we had it. Hesperíon. New element. Left it at home.”
Samukelisiwe shook her head: “There’s no such element.”
“Oh, but there is... now. Chance discovery. A manservant left a sample of what he’d thought
was tungsten atop an unexposed photographic plate in a desktop drawer.”
“And besides, we’re geniuses, after all. Eidetic memories; All that.”
Samukelisiwe: “Is that so? How far back can you remember? Did you—or your comrade in
crime—not boast to Kiran that you remember nursing? Suckling, I mean. Birth too?”
“Of course we do! Doesn’t everybody? Or at least every Sourcerer?”
“Not me. I was a bottle baby; And I don’t want to recall even that; Not worth it to me. In con-
sequence I’ve been looking at tits and admiring them ever since. Tell me, when you remember
nursing, can you remember which of your mothers was giving you the meal?”
“Of course!” Gweneth said scornfully. “Mama Llewellyn had big tits—”
“—and Mama Luigsech had smaller ones even when they were filled with milk.”
“Different flavours though. Made it nice to trade off each meal. Variety.”
“Samukelisiwe, would you like to be adopted by me and my sister?”
“We’ve discussed it; We think that you’re just exactly the daughter we want.”
Kālī simply smiled at this: Stop teasing her, girls.
Gweneth: “Why? Have you got her staked out already?”
“—which is ever so patently unfair—”

351
 EUDAIMONIA

“—as she is actually years and years less developed than we are—”

“—and it gives Samukelisiwe six mothers to dodge instead of just four.”
Samukelisiwe smiled: “Thank you, Gweneth, Gwenith, I accept.”
At which Kālī would laugh softly. It was a sound like liquid moonlight.

Two hṓraí later: The Windigo had not known what to expect from such a celebration, yet
in the end, it would seem to him no different from other fêtes, only with a more grisly undercur-
rent and a smattering of rough Northmen accents, at once harsh and musical.
All of it fell to a hush when he and κύ. Fjalar made their entrance.
Even anonymity was to be stripped from the Windigo, it would seem.
He was to be seen as a man collared and bound to a daímōn of his own free will.
The Windigo would have supposed, if asked, that κύ. Fjalar would not have had him attired
at all. He would have been wrong. It was always easy to underrate the man’s subtlety.
If the Windigo looked anything like a slave, it was as a Jarl’s stablehand.
Many had thought so at first glance. Upon second glance, they saw that his white shirt was
not canvas but that kind of linen which was spun so fine one could barely notice the weave; And
what they had taken for buckram hose were breeches of moleskin. His knee-high boots were
black leather, shined until they reflected everything with an astonishing clarity.
Κύ. Fjalar was a genius. Somehow the rustic garb—or some elegant replication of it—served
to accent all the more the Windigo’s unearthly stench; The Windigo’s body, when confined, pro-
duced certain odours, like a piece of horse shit which not only stank on its own surface but sur-
rounded itself with a stinking molecular cloud. This was how κύ. Fjalar meant to display his con-
quest. Gently and yet inexorably, one of the dwarf’s Gentlewomen had assisted the Windigo in
dressing, putting on all the garments, combing out what there was left of his hair.
As the Windigo was in sheerest white, κύ. Fjalar was in densest black: Velvet pants sweep-
ing the floor, his tunic tight to his torso and embroidered, black on black, and black gloves. The
dwarf’s mask was black, night-black feathers with a dark rainbow sheen upon them, sweeping
up in points to mingle with the man’s short but elaborately styled hair.
For a short while the Windigo and κύ. Fjalar wandered among the crowd, and a murmur fol-
lowed. Masked faces, feathered or furred, turned to watch their progress.
The drums were pounding, pounding, pounding, and his head with them. Pipes wailed and
flutes trilled from the musicians’ gallery at the foot of the hall; Fiddles screeched, horns soun -
ded and the musicians skirled a lively tune, but the endless drumming drove it all.
Outside, a hard rain fell, but within the hall the air was thick and warm. A fire roared in the
hearth and rows of torches burned smokily from iron sconces on the walls. Yet most of the heat
came off the bodies of the attendees, jammed together so thick along the benches that every
man and woman who tried to lift his cup poked their neighbour in the ribs.

352
 KALIDASA

All of a sudden, above the din, there came a sudden and rather colossal fart; A real whizzpop-
per! The People had been making whizzpoppers all day. Whizzpopping was a sign of happi-
ness; It was music in their ears. A public outburst of flatulence, and the translation that went with
it, produced great laughter and appeared to relive the tension in the great hall. Surely, Guðdís
would not suggest that a little whizzpopping was forbidden amongst Berserkers?
The Windigo and κύ. Fjalar found their seats. Most of the entertainers were unknown to the
Windigo: Young men and women, most of whom had done no great deeds. The sparring would
go on all night and into the early morning. The first to fight were a small boy and an even smal-
ler girl, neither wearing clothes. They circled each other warily, then fell on each other in a flurry
of hard strikes. Much of it was too fast for the Windigo’s eye; He saw a dozen recognized and
unrecognized manoeuvrers: Bear’s Graveyard to Misty Water to Two Mountain Bastion—watch
your footwork—to The Hunt to... was that Tshakapesh’s Defence?
The girl kicked so fast the Windigo could not see the motion of her feet. The boy brushed the
attack aside casually with Drifting Snow, taking half a step back. Then, before the girl could re-
spond with a fresh attack of her own, spun away, his long braids swinging.
It finally ended when the tiny boy caught the girl’s wrist and shoulder in Sleeping Bear. It was
only when he saw the boy twist his opponent’s leg and force her to the ground that he recalled
it as the grip Kiran had used that evening to open Milwa'tem up between the legs.
The next match was between two adults: Hunters, by the look of them; The difference was
obvious. Everything was much cleaner, acute. The two children had been as frantic as sparrows
flapping in the mud, but some of the fights that followed were as elegant as dances.
One fight stopped immediately when a man bloodied his opponent’s nose. Pienish rolled his
eyes at this, though the Windigo could not tell if he thought less of the woman for allowing her-
self to be struck, or the man for being reckless enough to hurt her.
There were also several bouts with axes and spears and all manner of weapons.
These tended to go far more quickly, as even a light touch was considered enough.
A dozen times the crowd cried out in unison as fighters crashed together. Nutin and his im-
mense father seemed unstoppable, hacking down one foe after the next in ferocious style. The
most terrifying moment of the night came during Nutin’s second match, when his weapon rode
up and struck a young man under the chin with such force that it drove through his throat, killing
him instantly; The youth fell not ten feet from where the Windigo was seated. The point of Nutin’s
weapon had snapped off in the boy’s neck, and his life’s blood flowed out in slow pulses, each
weaker than the one before. His armour was shiny new; A bright streak of fire ran down his out-
stretched arm, as the steel caught the firelight. His cloak was blue with a spatter of white stars
sewn into it. It was the colour of the sky on a clear summer’s day, with a large, white vegvísir in
the centre, but as his blood seeped into it, the cloth darkened, three of the stars turning red, one
by one. After a man carried off the body, a boy with a bucket ran into view and spilled soapy wa-
ter over the spot where the lad had fallen, to wash away the blood.

353
 EUDAIMONIA

The Windigo sat with his hands folded in his lap, watching with a strange fascination. As hard
as it might be to believe, he had never seen a person deliberately murdered. Wild dreams tor-
mented him ever so deliciously. And although the power of a God lived in his heart, although all
the power of a God did daily awaken at his word, and although a Sourcerer could move every
part of themselves—yet it would be inadvisable to think of eutopia in most basic terms: That no
one should go hungry any more, that there should be no more murder.
And all the while the makushan went on and on. First, an onion soup in beef broth with toasted
bread and melted cheese. Next, snails in caribou fat, garlic and herbs. The Windigo had not had
snails before; Κύ. Fjalar fed his captive the first sweet morsel himself. Then came fish from the
river, wrapped in parchment and baked in clay; After that, the Windigo was so stuffed he could
not manage more. Yet when the main course was brought forth, the Windigo would be presen-
ted with a dish of chips and caribou tartare, κύ. Fjalar feeding Asiniiwin himself. Then came atiku-
pimi—cakes made with fat rendered from caribou marrow. Then a salad of nuts, spinach, sweet-
grass and fruit. Last, a sugarless apple pie sweetened with figs and raisins.
The Gentlemen kept the Windigo’s cup filled all night, yet afterwards he could not recall ever
tasting the wine; He needed no wine. He was drunk on the delight of death, swept away by the
magic of it; He had dreamt of it all his life, thinking that his people must some day know it. All that
night, no one could withstand Nutin. Only a Windigo could ever understand what Nutin was, so
surely and so swiftly. “No one could withstand him,” the dwarf would say. “I suppose that’s true
enough. No one could ever withstand a Kamanitushit. That boy tonight, his second bout, oh, that
was something to behold. You saw that too? Fool boy, he had no business being in this group.
No skill, no one more knowledgable to help him with that stupid armour. His gorget had not been
fastened right. You think Nutin didn’t notice? You think anyone supposes his weapon rode up by
chance? A Sourcerer’s weapon goes where they want it to go! Oh yes, if I and my brother had
been born in a transitionry anywhere in the world we would’ve been born free.”
Some time later: The rowboat stopped, shocking the Windigo with its abruptness. Κύ. Fjalar
helped him up aboard the Feast. Afterwards, the Windigo would be delighted to imagine what he
must look like, glaze-eyed, tousled, with flushed cheeks, his flesh cut in half-a-hundred places
or more. At the moment, however, the Windigo would simply shiver with joy till the dwarf too had
embarked; Κύ. Fjalar would thence escort him, none-too-gently, down below.
It was the Harvest Festival after all; And the night had only begun.
What befell afterwards, the Windigo would recall without any pride. This had been a long time
coming between them. The Windigo saw little of the dwarves’ chambers, at first glance. Lamps
burning scented oil, a great bed, and from the highest rafter, a single hook hanging. That much he
saw, and then a Gentleman bound his eye with a sash and he saw no more.
When the Gentleman took the knee-high boots from the Windigo’s feet, the Windigo almost
wept. A cord was tied about his wrists as the Gentleman raised the Windigo’s arms above his
head and then looped them securely over the dangling hook.

354
 KALIDASA

“For you,” the Windigo heard κύ. Fjalar whisper, “I’ll not dally with lesser toys.”
A sound, then, of a catch being lifted. The Windigo hung suspended, too high to kneel, too
weak to stand upright, and wondered what could possibly be coming next.
“You know these, of course?” He felt the cold caress of steel against his neck.
At a nod, the Gentleman trailed the fine blade of a flechette down the Windigo’s throat and
brushed the neckline of his shirt. How much that linen shirt had cost the dwarves, the Windigo
could not guess, but the fabric parted with a sigh. He could feel the brazier-heated warmth of the
dwarf’s bedchamber against his bare skin. The sleeves were now pooled around his upwardly-
wrenched shoulders; The flechette traced the veins in his bound wrists, not breaking the skin.
They went down the length of his arms to whisper effortlessly through the fabric. The Windigo
felt his breeches slither away in a similar fashion, tangling around his ankles.
“Much better.” The fabric was withdrawn and tossed to one side.
The Gentleman drew the blade down the length of the Windigo’s spine, who now was shud-
dering like a fly-stung horse, and could not stop the tears that steadily soaked the velvet bind-
ing his eyes. Bliss, and a yearning so sharp it was painful, rendered his mind blank.
“Such desire,” the dwarf murmured. The Gentleman danced the tip of the flechette over the
Windigo’s many scars. The Windigo simply gasped, his bound hands clenching.
And thence the Gentleman began to cut into the Windigo.
Most warriors wounded in battle had taken far less from a blade than the Windigo would from
the flechette; Yet, the point of the flechette was not injury: It was pain. The blades were unima-
ginably sharp, and so parted even the Windigo’s hide nigh as easily as linen.
One sometimes barely felt it, when first one of these blades pierced the skin.
This was why all the subsequent cutting would be done very slowly.
Asiniiwin would weep then and it would avail nothing—thank the Gods!
As the night passed, the terror and his pleasure grew in the Windigo, until all he could do was
scream. He was afraid of the dwarf, whose ways seemed alien and monstrous and yet deliciously
familiar or even divine, as if he were a God in human skin and not a man at all.
Blind and dangling, gripped by terror and longing, his entire consciousness narrowed to the
scope of the flechette’s blade as it harrowed his flesh with agonizing slowness, etching an un-
seen sigil on the inner swell of his left pectoral. He could feel blood running in a steady trickle
between his chest and down his belly. His skin parted before the blade, and flesh was carved
by it. It was like the pain and joy of a tattoo needle multiplied a hundred-fold.
How long it continued, the Windigo could not say; Forever, it would seem. The dwarf at last
held the blade himself, slowly bringing the tip down the path the blood had taken.
“Say it,” the dwarf’s voice whispered quietly by the Windigo’s left foot. The Windigo felt the
warmth of the dwarf’s palm. The tip of the flechette trailed upwards from the Windigo’s thigh, a
cool and deadly caress, until he felt it hovering near his cock, and trembled. The Windigo knew
where next the blade would go. He could almost hear the small man smiling.

355
 EUDAIMONIA

“Please.” The Windigo heard the word before he had realized he had said it.
“What do you want?” The dwarf cocked his head slightly, laughing aloud.
“Fuck you.” The Windigo had never asked for pain twice: Not ever.
The dwarf laughed again and ordered the Windigo’s hands unbound.

Meanwhile: “You’re drunk,” Chiyoko sighed, entering the room where the dwarf had hidden
himself. A contingent of Gentlemen had come in with her to take over the midnight watch. Rain-
water carried by the storm had stung their cheeks as they had crossed the transitionry grounds.
They could be overheard in the passage outside, lightly exchanging banter.
“You’re Aki Chiyoko. 590-0974 5-1-22 Ohamakitamachi, Sakai-ku, Sakai-shi, Osaka.”
At these words the teenager swallowed in a throat suddenly dry.
Κύ. Galar appeared a creature of odd integrity, as though the purpose fashioned into him by
his masters was projected out through his skin. There was a kind of power, or even a strange
kind of repose, beneath his mask of eccentricity and drunkenness. The dwarf held out his horn
and his Gentleman poured. Otherwise, he and Chiyoko would seem to be alone.
“I’ve been charged to question you to determine what it is the Polémarkhos intends you to do
here. What could you two have hoped to gain by such an act of sabotage?”
This, as it would turn out, was nothing but a bald-faced lie.
Chiyoko stared at the dwarf, who radiated a charismatic alertness which made her think of
ancient idols. His eyes seemed to follow something about the room that was not there.
“You hear those men outside? If we give the order, they’ll tie you up, tight as a drum.”
Κύ. Galar smiled: “A-And you said you came seeking the truth.”
She decided she did not like the look of secret repose beneath the dwarf’s expression.
“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
“Well...” a burp, “well spoken,” κύ. Galar nodded.
Then: “Now we know each other. W-When thieves meet they need no intro’uction.”
“So you’re thieves,” Chiyoko said. “What do you steal?”
“N-Not thieves, but dice,” κύ. Galar said, belching yet again.
Then: “And you came here to read my spots. I,” another burp, “read yours.”
Suddenly the dwarf spread his arms wide: “A-And lo! You have a thousand faces!”
“How did you come by my mother’s address?” Chiyoko asked.
She had been frighted by an odd reluctance to ask that question.
“Did I not say it? Souls cross the ages like clouds cross the sky, and though a cloud’s shape
nor its hue nor its size stay the same, it is still a cloud; And so is a soul.”
Chiyoko felt suddenly that she existed in a dream controlled by some else’s mind, and that
she might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind.
Κύ. Galar raised the alehorn to his lips, striding all around her, staring up.

356
 KALIDASA

“You’re a weapon,” Chiyoko said, swivelling to follow the dwarf.

Silence. Then: “What is it your masters intend you to do?”
“Nothing!” he said, stopping. “I give a common answer to a common question.”
“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them.”
“Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know a man till you stop hating him?”
A nod. “That is so clear it is difficult to see,” Chiyoko said.
“To imprison one solipsist is to imprison all solipsists,” the dwarf said.
Chiyoko huffed. “How is it you speak so much nonsense?” Bitter frustration coursed through
Koko. Was it anger? Why should a statement such as that cause anger?
“You dare say nonsense? As long as woman being keeps getting reborn, it’s quite all right to
be murdered sometimes. Is your mind not as close to the answer as your senses?”
Koko felt her mind being tangled by the dwarf’s words.
“Why don’t you answer me straight out?” she demanded. “You know we have many ways of
observing you. We’ll get our answers... one way or another, I promise you that.”
“But I have answered! The way out is through the door; Are you unwilling to use this method?
What, if some day or night a daímōn were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and
say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and in-
numerable times more,’ would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and even curse
the being who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you
would have answered him: ‘You are a God! Never have I heard anything more divine.’ Have I not
said that my sorcery is real? Am I the wind which carries death in its belly? No! I am but words!
S-S-Such words as the lightning which strikes from the sea into a dark sky.”
“You play a dangerous game with me,” Chiyoko said. “Did you think I could not understand
these Zen riddles? You leave tracks as clear as those of a bird in mud.”
Κύ. Galar began to giggle, which led to a series of quite odd-sounding belches.
“Why do you laugh?” Chiyoko demanded.
“B-Because I have teeth and wish I had not,” the drunk κύ. Galar managed.
The man straightened himself: “Having no teeth, I could not gnash them.”
“Dà Míng was right, I think,” Chiyoko said, nodding. “You are aimed at me.”
“I’ve hit you right on!” κύ. Galar said. “You made such a big target, how could I miss?”
He nodded as though to himself. “And now I will sing to you.”
He began to hum, a keening, whining monotonous theme, repeated over and over.
Koko stiffened, experiencing odd pains that played up and down her spine.
She stared at the face of the dwarf, seeing ancient eyes in a middle-aged face.
The eyes were the centre of a network of knobby white lines which ran to the hollows below
his temples. Such a large head! Every feature focused on the pursed-up mouth from which that
monotonous noise issued. The sound made her think of rituals, folk memories, old words and
customs, half-forgotten meanings in lost mutterings. Something vile was happening to her—a

357
 EUDAIMONIA

bloody play of ideas across time. Elder ideas lay tangled in his song. It was like a blazing light
in the distance, coming nearer, illuminating life across a span of millennia.
“What are you doing to me?” she gasped, eventually.
Now the dwarf lifted his gaze, his eyes widening with just the right shade of malice. There
was a ruthless air about him, an air that said he seldom got to inflict such sorcery.
The dwarf’s singing played itself on her deepest consciousness, a singing that hurled itself
against Chiyoko’s awareness without compromise; Abruptly, the dwarf trailed off.
“You are an instrument I taught myself to play,” κύ. Galar said. “I am playing you. Let me tell
you the names of the traitors among the Gentlemen: They are Dahlia and Grim.”
Her eyes inflicted her with a sudden burning pain. Flickering red haze surrounded everything
she saw. She felt she had been cut away from every immediate sense but hearing, and she ex-
perienced her surroundings through a thin separation like windblown gauze. All had become acci-
dent, the chance involvement of inanimate matter. Her own will was less than a subtle and shifting
thing. It lived without breath and was intelligible only as an inwards illumination.
With a clarity born of desperation, she broke through the gauze curtain with the lonely sense
of sight. Her attention focused like a bright light onto κύ. Galar’s face. Chiyoko felt her eyes cut
through layers of the dwarf, seeing the man as a sharp intellect, and beneath that, a creature im-
prisoned by hungers and cravings that lay huddled in the man’s eyes—layer after layer, until fi-
nally, there was only a crude sorcerer manipulating the symbols of his sorcery.
Κύ. Galar stopped singing, turned and was about raise the empty alehorn to his lips.
A hiccough shook Chiyoko from head to toe.
Κύ. Galar giggled: “Ah, thank you, thank you. The demands of the body save us.”
The gilded alehorn was tossed haphazardly down onto the floor.
Koko shook her head from side to side. She found it too difficult to talk.
“We are upon a battleground,” κύ. Galar said, eventually. “You may speak of it.”
Her voice freed by the command, Chiyoko said: “You cannot force me to your will.”
“It’s my opinion that there is nothing concrete, nothing balanced, nothing impossible in all the
Kósmos—that nothing remains in its state, that each day, each hṓra, brings change.”
Chiyoko shook her head dumbly from side to side.
“You believe freedom is the prize we seek?” κύ. Galar said, mocking her.
How little every side seems to understand the danger...
Then: “The world thinks us lost from paradise. The truth is that we—”
Koko laughed: “Tell me, the rod up your butt, does it too have a rod up its butt?”
There fell a little pause in which Chiyoko twitched.
“I’m not a child. Tell me, do you believe in reincarnation? If you do, then I can say we’re the
oldest people here! Lo! I recall a time long gone when you, I and my brother lived on the shores
of Atatshi-uinipekᵘ as husband and wife, not fifty feet from where we stand. Aiasheu’s step-father
was a weaker man than those of his day; Both I and my brother share his memoires.”

358
 KALIDASA

Whenever he drank, which was often, κύ. Galar felt like an extension of those myriad other
lives he recalled, all as real and immediate as his own. In the flow of those lives there were no
endings or triumphs; There was only eternal beginning. They could be a mob, too, clamouring at
him as though he were a single window through which each had desired—
“Dà Míng has already promised to double your guard!” Chiyoko gasped.
“Neither you, nor nearly anyone else in these lands, can hold us.”
“You’re trying to awaken violence in me,” Chiyoko said, in a panting voice.
Κύ. Galar answered this with a nod of the head. “Awaken, yes; Violence, no. You are a dis-
ciple of awareness by training. I’ve an awareness to awaken in you, Aki Chiyoko.”
“The Awakened knows not the meaning of this word: Awaken!”
“True, but my brother defies the idea that something cannot be done.”
“You hide your real purpose! You throw up a screen of words. They mean nothing!”
“Now we are down to bedrock,” κύ Galar said. “I know you feel it. And these are the power-
words to manipulate you... I think they will have sufficient leverage. There are other memories
in you,” κύ. Galar said. “They’ll submit to emotion or to dispassionate examination, but submit
they will. This awareness will rise through a screen of suppression and selection out of the dark
past which dogs your footsteps. It goads you even while it holds you back. There exists that be-
ing within you upon which awareness must focus and which you will obey.”
Chiyoko felt the perspiration pouring down her cheeks.
“One day, Kiran will come to you. He will say: ‘She is gone!’ A grief mask will occupy his face.
The man might even weep. And in his distraction, you will move close and say—”
The dwarf hesitated, shook himself, nodded once more, said: “Speak.”
“I will not do it,” was all that Chiyoko said.
“You think yourself free to sneer and disobey me,” κύ. Galar said.
Chiyoko felt herself floundering, caught in a matrix of objects she could not see. The dwarf
appeared so sure of himself! There had to be a flaw in the logic of his masters. In the making of
their slave, the dwarves had keyed her to κύ. Galar’s voice, but... But what? Logic, matrix and
slave... . How easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning!
Again, κύ. Galar grimaced. “You think me a hypocrite! I’m not! I can grieve, too.”
He nodded: “But the time has come to substitute words for swords.”
Was her own logic distorted? She would in days to come find that she did not know.
A little later: Κύ. Galar smiled, listened as though to a hidden voice.
“Now, you will forget,” he said. “But, when the moment comes, you will remember.”
The dwarf clapped his hands together.
Chiyoko grunted, feeling that she had been interrupted in the middle of a thought.
“You think to confuse and manipulate me,” she muttered, at last.
A belch. “H-How is that?” κύ. Galar asked.
“I’m your target,” Chiyoko nodded.

359
 EUDAIMONIA

“I would not think of denying it.”

“What is it you would try to do with me?”
Silence. “A kindness,” κύ. Galar said, smiling.
He sighed heavily: “N-Nothing but a simple kindness.”

That night the rainstorm grew to a tempest of such hostility that it slightly shook even such
massive timbers as those which supported the high roofs of the transitionry.
In his bed, the minute oscillations of the building gave Nutin the feeling of being in a cradle.
He had slept in a cradle as a baby, he remembered, and one day in the transitionry basement
he had found, covered in dust under an old sheet, the rockers of his crib. Now, when he closed
his eyes and imagined his parents rocking that bassinet, he wondered: From the time I left that
cradle, have I ever cared about anyone else, besides, just perhaps...   . Have I ever made even
a tiny yet permanent bit of room in my heart for anybody else but myself?
As it happened, Nutin had but lately come to know the golden light of love.
At Guðdís’ goading, Nutin had read several romance novels, and while he would not say he
appreciated them, those specific novels had not been as tortuous as other works in the field he
had flipped through: These novels had had an elegant style, and a mature lucidity that their peers
lacked. But this style was not complemented by the novels’ content. Reading them had been
like looking at dewdrops on the undergrowth: Pure and transparent and pretty, but distinguished
from each other only by the way the sunlight reflected and refracted through them and by the
many ways they rolled about on the leaves, fusing together where they met and then separat -
ing when they fell, until they evaporated entirely within the space of a few moments after sun-
rise. Every time he had read one, beneath the graceful style he was left with a question: What
do these people do for a devotion if they spend twenty-four hṓrai a day in love?
“That love one reads about—do you think it exists in the real world?”
A nod. Nutin: “Something you’ve read about, or have you experienced it yourself?”
Guðdís had thought this over. At last: “Either way, I’m telling you that it exists.”
At times, he would tell her of changes to the novels he would like to have carried out.
“It’s like you’re more talented than most,” she had said, once. “You are not revising plot, but
character, and that’s the hardest thing to do. Every time, you’re adding touches that make the
characters more vivid. Your skill at creating literary figures is first rate.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. My background’s in Sourcery and mathematics!”
Suddenly, the Norsewoman had leaned in close: “Could you write a novella for me?”
Silence. At last: “A whole novella? With me as the protagonist?”
“No. I saw an interesting exhibition of paintings by various artists of the most stunning women
they could imagine. The protagonist of your novella should be the same. You can leave reality
behind and create a lover based entirely on your dream of feminine perfection.”

360
 KALIDASA

To this day, he had no idea of her true motivation for this request.
He had began constructing a character. He had imagined her face, then designed her clothes
and then thought of her environment and the people around her, and finally placed her within it.
He had her move about, letting her live. However, rather quickly, the entire endeavour had turned
tedious. He told Guðdís about the difficulties he encountered: “She’s like a puppet on a string.
Every word and action arises from the design but lacks the spark of life.”
“Your approach is wrong. You’re writing an essay rather than creating a literary figure. What
a literary character does in ten mikroí might be a reflection of twenty years, or more, of exper-
ience; Often much more. You can’t be limited to the plot of your novella—you’ve got to imagine
her entire life, and what actually gets put into words is just the tip of the iceberg.”
So Nutin had followed her advice. He threw out everything he had wanted to write and in-
stead imagined the character’s entire life and every detail of it. He imagined her nursing at her
mother’s breast, her mouth sucking energetically and burbling with satisfaction; Chasing a butter-
fly fluttering down the beach but taking just a single step before falling, wailing as she watched
the butterfly float away without realizing she had just taken her first step; Her first day at learn-
sharing and nearly starting to get bored of it all, only to realize her best friend sat on a nearby
boulder, and laughing instead; Walking in the rain and impulsively removing her travelling cloak
to feel the raindrops; Her first night travelling alone, lying on an unfamiliar bed in Vinland and
watching the shadows of a tree thrown onto the ceiling by a pair of street lamps.
He imagined every one of her favourite foods, the colour and style of every item of clothing in
her possession, the books she read, the music on her mind, the places she frequented, the plays
she had liked. But never her body-paint, because she did not need such things.
Like a creator outside time and space, the Nahualli-in-training wove the different stages of her
life together, and gradually came to discover the endless pleasure of creation.
One morning, in the library, Nutin imagined her standing by a row of shelves and reading. He
put her in his favourite outfit, so her petite form would stand out more vividly in his mind. Sud-
denly, she had looked up at him, her mustard-brown eyes flashing him a smile.
He was taken aback: Had he told her to smile? Her smile had, in just a moment of time and
no more, imprinted itself on him like a stain on white linen, never to be wiped away.
The turning point came the night of the festival. The rain had been torrential, temperatures
had plummeted, and he had watched from the warmth of his dorm the disappointment which
blanketed the festivities of the People, the blow of the raindrops on the widow like the patter of
sand. A carpet of mud had soon covered everything. The town had seemed to no longer exist.
The children’s dormitory seemed to stand on an infinite plain. He had gone back to bed, but be-
fore he drifted off to sleep he had a sudden thought: If she were out in that awful weather, she
would be terribly cold. Then Nutin reminded himself: It did not matter, she could not be outside
unless he put her there. But his imagination had rebelled, and she continued walking outside
like a column of smoke that could be blown away at any moment. She had been wearing an old

361
 EUDAIMONIA

coat and a scarf; That was all he could make out, vaguely, through the rain, like a tiny flame. It
had therefore been impossible for the Nahualli-in-training to sleep.
He sat up naked in bed for a while, then threw on some clothes. He thence wondered if he
should have a smoke of the little weed, to clear his Sight, but, remembering that she detested
the smell of it, he had instead made a cup of coffee and had drunk it rather slowly.
He had to wait for her. The rain and the cold winds weighed on his heart.
This was the first time he had felt such heartache for someone else.
She came inside quietly, her small frame wrapped in a layer of cold from the outdoors, but
with a tiny breath of summer amid the chilliness. The rain in her hair quickly warmed into gleam-
ing droplets as she unwrapped her scarf and put her hands to her mouth to blow on them. He
folded her hands in his to warm the icy softness, and she looked at Nutin with excitement and
asked the question he had been about to ask her: “Are you all right?”
Nutin could only nod obtusely. Then, as he helped her out of her white coat, saying: “Come
and get warm,” he rubbed her soft shoulders and guided her to the fireplace.
“It’s really warm. Wonderful...”
She sat on the rug in front of the fireplace, laughing happily.
Damn it! What’s wrong with me? he asked himself, sitting in the midst of the common room
and laughing. How had he fallen so damn deep into this simple trap of the klovn’s?
He was amazed to find that he had tears in his eyes; Tears of joy.
Fireplaces in Sheshatshiu were still used—to cook on, to sit around, to warm a room, to please
the eye—and the fireplace in the common room was laid in the early morning and kept fed long
into the night. Nutin recalled how she had looked just then against the glow of the fire but an
arm’s length away... . It was in firelight that a woman was most beautiful.
Contrary to his expectations, he did not dream of her the entire night. He slept well, imagining
the single bed as a small boat floating on a rosy sea. When he awoke the next morning, he felt
reborn, as if he were a candle which had been covered in dust all its days before being lit by
that small flame during last night’s storm. He walked excitedly down the pathway to the amphi-
theatre of the village, and through air which was hazy after the rains, he felt as if he could see a
great distance. There was mud on the tree-lined boulevard, their tops seeming to poke upwards
to a cold sky, but to Nutin the land was more alive than in the summer time.
He turned a corner, and just as he had hoped, there she was, seated at the back of the am-
phitheatre, the only one in an empty row, at a distance from the others engaged in learn-shar-
ing. Her coat and scarf were on the seat beside her, and she was wearing a pair of crotchless
leggings. She did not have her gaze on the man presently giving the sharing.
Instead, she watched him, and flashed him another rosy-sunrise of spread labia.
He grew nervous. His pulse increased, and he had to leave through a side path to stand on
the skēnḗ and calm himself in the cold air. The only other times he had been in a similar state
were during his two trips to the Shaking-Tent. In his sharing he did his utmost to show off, and

362
 KALIDASA

his extensive citations and impassioned language won a rare burst of applause from the Innut.
She did not join in, however, but merely smiled down at him and nodded.
Later, he walked side-by-side with her along the tree-lined avenue, listening to the sound of
her boots in mud. The two lines of trees listened in silence to their conversation.
Nutin knew that she had never in her life, before him, bonded her heart to a man; There had
been no need, no desire, to do so. She had six dogs of whom she was caretaker.
She said: “Your sharing went quite well, but I didn’t really understand most of it.”
Nutin: “You’re not a resident of this area, are you?”
She smiled. Eventually: “No, I’m not.”
“Do you often travel just to sit in on the sharings of other towns?”
“Only the past few years. I go into a sharing space at random and sit for a while.”
Over the next two days, he spent the majority of his time with her, although to Kapapisht it
appeared as if he was spending most of his time alone. Overall, Nutin was happy. He was no
more or less alone than he would have been had he gone everywhere by himself.
Some days later, he imported for her a bottle of red wine from Vinland, which he had not drunk
before; Returned to the common room after dark, shut off the lights and lit some candles. When
all three candles were burning, she sat down next to him at the table.
“Oh, look,” she exclaimed, pointing at the wine bottle with a child-like excitement.
Nutin raised a single red eyebrow at this. What?
“Look at it from here, where the candles shine through. The wine is lovely.”
Shining through the wine, the candlelight was a deep, crystalline red: The stuff of dreams.
“Like a dead sun,” was all he said.
“Don’t think like that,” she said, with a sincerity that melted his heart.
Then: “I think it’s like... the eyes of twilight.”
“Why not the eyes of dawn?”
“I like twilight better. It’s sandhyākāḷ.”
Nutin frowned. “Why?”
“When twilight fades, you can see the stars. When dawn fades, all that’s left is...”
“All that’s left is the harsh light of phainómena.”
She nodded at this. “Yes, that’s right.”
And now she smiled at Nutin. Her smile seemed almost to hug him.
They spoke about everything, sharing a common language in even the most trivial of things.
The bottle that had contained the eyes of twilight was soon emptied into his stomach.
He lay drowsily on the couch and watched the candles still burning on the table.
She had vanished from the candlelight, but he was not worried.
As long as he was willing, she could reappear at any time.
There was a knock on the door. He knew the knock came from the world of phainómena and
had nothing to do with her, so he ignored it. The door opened and Guðdís entered.

363
 EUDAIMONIA

When she turned on the light it was like switching on the grey of phainómena. Guðdís saw
the table with the candles. She sat down on the couch and sighed: “It’s still early, then...”
“What is?” Nutin used a hand to block the harsh light.
“You haven’t gotten to the point of leaving a glass for her, too? Unfortunate.”
The Nahualli-in-training simply covered his eyes and said nothing.
She pulled away his hands. Looking straight at him, she asked, “Her name?”
“Apikushish,” Nutin whispered, and then sat up.
Then: “I used to think that a character was controlled by a creator, that it would be whatever
the author wanted, and do whatever the author wanted, like the ego does for us.”
Guðdís stood up and began to pace the room: “But now you realize you were wrong. This is
the difference between an ordinary writer and an author. The highest level of literary creation is
when the characters in a work come to life in the mind of the author, the author unable to con-
trol them; They might not even be able to predict the next action of their creation.”
A pause. Guðdís: “That’s how many of the great classics were created.”
A chuckle. Nutin: “So literature, it turns out, is a perverted endeavour?”
“It was like that for a great many of the composers of the classics, as I said.”
“So you mean that I’ve become an author of classic poetry?”
“Hardly. Your mind is gestating an image, albeit the easiest one of all. The mind of Hómēros
did not not give birth to any literary figures. All he did was record, in an embellished way, what to
him was history; And that, by itself, is a thing which is somewhat easier to accomplish. What you
have done is very rarely as painless as that. Kiran didn’t think you’d be able to do it.”
Silence. “I suppose that you have once or twice in your life attempted it?”
“Not in the last five years,” was all that Guðdís said.
The Nahualli-in-training persisted: “Where is he now?”
He could see her laugh silently. Then: “She died; Tuberculosis. Yrsa, she...”
Silence. “Are you with her now?” Guðdís asked, after a pause.
The klovn shrugged. “I know you’re with me. But are you with her?”
Silence. A nod. And when he looked to his right, there was his dear pikutishkueu, she was just
then feeding bits of straw into the fire, smiling at the flames that lit up the room.
“Now do you believe that the love in those novels really does exist?”
A pause. Eventually: “Yes, I believe it.”
When he said those four words, he immediately realized how great the distance between the
two of them really was. She studied him, then exhaled and shook her head rather slowly. “I had
hoped it was too late.” Picking up her bag, she left the two of them alone.
Nutin had caught a glimpse of her face. There were tears on her cheeks. Those tears were
more a revelation than any word or sign to have passed between them that day.
“It is supposed to be sunny tomorrow; Where should we go?” Nutin asked. He was still lying
on the couch. The fire in the hearth gave a delightful copper cast to his lover’s skin.

364
 KALIDASA

“You’re not taking her?” she asked, in innocence.

“No. Just the two of us. Where would you like to go?”
“It’s not important where. I think it’s a wonderful feeling just being on a journey.”
Eventually: “Then we’ll set out and see where we end up.”
The next morning, he borrowed a transitionry auto, heading west, a direction he chose purely
since doing so avoided having to traverse the Norandvik, Kapapisht and Ussinitshishu follow-
ing behind in a dark-coloured all-terrain vehicle. Nutin felt for the first time the dazzling freedom
of travelling with no destination at all in mind. As the buildings outside thinned out and a forest
began to reappear, Nutin cracked his window a bit to let the cold air in. He sensed her long hair
catching the wind, and strands of it blew over to tickle Nutin’s right temple.
“Good Morning!” said Nutin, and he meant it.
And the sun was indeed shining, without a cloud in the sky.
“What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or do you mean that it’s a good morn-
ing whether I want it or not; Or that you feel good this morning; Or that it’s a morning to be good
on?” She had to hold on to her shady hat as the auto bumped down the dirt track.
“All of them at once,” laughed Nutin, despite himself.
Then: “And a very fine morning for a drive; Right now I’d say that we’re—”
“No, no, no! Do not say where we are! Once I know where I am, then the world becomes as
narrow as a map. When I don’t know, the world feels unlimited.”
“Okay. Then let’s do our best to get lost.” He turned at the next intersection.
On both sides of them were pastures as yet covered in mud, the dead grass and grass-free
areas equal. The trees on either side of the road were dressed in grey-green needles.
“A classic northern scene,” Nutin said.
And indeed, it did appear to his mind as if the whole countryside had been covered in a layer
of brown sugar and cinnamon. Autumn had seemed to arrive suddenly this year. The morning air
was crisp and golden as an apple. It had settled in the way an old friend might settle into one’s fa-
vourite chair and take out their pipe and light it and then fill a whole afternoon with stories of the
places they had been and things they had done since last they saw one.
After a long silence Nutin spoke: “So, what’s your favourite season?”
She pulled her head back in the auto window. “Autumn.”
Nutin frowned at this. “Why not spring?”
“Spring in the north has too many sensations. It’s tiring. Autumn is far better.”
He stopped the auto, walked out with her to the edge of the field to look at the ravens, which
foraged on the ground until they got quite close, at which point they flew off to some trees in the
distance. Then they walked hand-in-hand down the stony bank of a river; Strong streams of wa-
ter flowed down both banks. But it was a northern scene all the same, and so they picked up
small, chilly smooth stones from the forest and pitched them in, watching the rapid tortuous wind-
ing of the water. Later, they passed a small village and spent a while in the town square. She

365
 EUDAIMONIA

knelt down by a glass tank of live fish swimming in water like liquid flames under the sun, and
would not leave. He acquired two of them, putting them in bags on the back seat of the auto.
They entered the town proper; Comely it was sitting in the bend of a curving river.
The houses and compounds were new, the road wide, even if people were dressed no dif-
ferently than in the nomadic places of her birth. Still, the dogs were the same long-haired, short-
legged variety found in Vinland. More interesting was the massive stage at the entrance to the
village: They marvelled at how such a small village could have such an immense stage. It was
empty, so with some effort he climbed up and—looking down at his audience member—sang
a verse or two from some half-remembered play about the tall spruce tree. At noon, they ate in
another village, the food more or less of the same quality as Guðdís’ cooking, only the portions
were larger. After that, the pair sat drowsily in the warmth of the afternoon sun on a bench out-
side the town enküklopaideía. They drove onwards with no direction in mind.
They started and stopped as they went through the hills, and before they knew it the entire
afternoon had been spent. The sun was setting, and the road lay in darkness. He drove them
down a smooth, well lit road up onto a high ridge where the sun still shone. They decided that this
would be the terminus of their trip: They would watch the sunset, then turn home. Her hair blew
in the evening breeze, seemingly striving to seize hold of the last of the golden rays.
He collected some deadwood from a nearby grove of trees and started a fire.
“Nice and warm,” she said, gazing into the fire, as happy as that first night in front of the fire -
place. He was transfixed by her appearance, drowned in emotions he had never felt.
“Are there wolves?” she asked, looking around at the growing darkness.
Silence. Everyone knew there were wolves in the timberlands.
“I was hoping you’d say there were wolves,” she said, with her sweet smile.
She then looked up at the cloud of sparks flying off like stars into the night.
A sigh. “Okay. There are wolves, but I’m sitting right here.”
They said nothing more, but sat silently before the fire as the fish began to bake.
“Do you believe in magic?” he asked, eventually.
“You know, I do believe in it. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among
magicians. Oh, almost everybody else did not realize we lived in that web of magic, connected
by silver filaments of chance or circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was seven, the world
was my magic lantern; By its green glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You
probably did too; You just don’t recall it. See, this is the truth: We all start out knowing Sourcery.
We’re born with whirlwinds, forest fires and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds
and to read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we, along with the Norse
and the Héllēnes, get the magic learn-shared right out of us. We get it crunched out, shared out
and washed out, even combed out. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning
in a shaft of light take your attention from the world, you step beyond who you are and where
you are. For the briefest of instants, you will have stepped into the magic realm. That is what I

366
 KALIDASA

believe. These half-recalled memories of who we were before being born, where we lived when
we were there, are key. They make up the best part of who we’re going to be when our journey
winds down. The Innut need the memory of magic if we’re ever going to conjure true Sourcery
again. You... you need to recall your inner being; I’m going to help you.”

Sobbing, Kurush took another step. Dear LADY, this is the last, the very last; I can’t go on.
But his feet moved again. One and then the other. They took a step, and then another. They are
not my feet, they’re someone else’s, someone else is walking, it can’t be me.
When he looked down he could see them stumbling through the mud: Shapeless things, and
clumsy. His feet had turned to black, he seemed to recall, but the mud had now caked around
them, and so they were misshapen, brown balls: Like two clubfeet made of dirt.
It would not stop, the rain. The mud was up past his knees and a crust covered his lower legs
like a pair of brown boots. His steps were dragging, lurching. He was tired, so tired. There were
rocks beneath the mud, and the roots of trees, and sometimes deep holes in the sodden earth.
Sobbing, Kurush took another step. It felt far more as if he was falling down than walking. He
was falling endlessly but never hitting the ground, just falling forwards and forwards.
I have to stop, it hurts too much. I’m so cold and so tired, I need to sleep.
But if he stopped he died. He knew that. Or thought he did. Sobbing, the professor took an-
other step. The injured professor had been cold so long he was forgetting what it was like to feel
the warmth of his hair burning. His feet especially. Kurush could not even feel them now, but only
yesterday they had hurt so badly he could hardly bear to stand upon them, let alone walk. Every
step made him want to scream. Was that yesterday? He could not recall. He had not slept since
the night of the escape, since the fire. Unless it was while he had been walking.
Sobbing, he took another step. The rain fell down hard all about him. Sometimes, it fell from
a white sky; Sometimes, from a black. That was all that remained of day or night.
Kurush wore his sodden shirt like a cloak. The small of his back hurt rather abominably, as if
someone had shoved a knife in there and was wiggling it back and forth.
His burns were afire even from the weight of his sodden clothes. If only I were stronger... .
He was not and it was no good wishing. He was so weak, his sleeve could scarcely bear its own
weight. The rain was much too much for him. It felt as though he was rubbing his shoulders raw.
The only thing he could do was cry. If he cried at night even his tears felt cold.
A root beneath the crust caught the professor’s toe, and so Kurush tripped and fell heavily to
one knee, so hard he bit his tongue. He could taste the blood in his mouth, warmer than any -
thing he had tasted since the fire. Dear LADY, this is the end, he thought.
I’ll just lie down in the mud and close my eyes. It would not be so bad, dying here. He could
not possibly be any colder, and after a little while he would not be able to feel the ache in his
lower back or the terrible pain in his shoulders, any more than he could feel his feet.

367
 EUDAIMONIA

Kurush direly wanted to release his grip on the tree and ease himself down into the mud. It
was cold and wet, he knew this well, but he should scarcely feel it through all his fatigue. He
stared upwards at an overcast sky as rainfall poured down upon his shoulders and head and his
burns. The mud will cover me like a thick, warm, brown blanket. Kurush was so sorry. Sorry he
had not been fearless or stronger or good with guns, that he had not been a better son to his
mother, a better brother to his siblings. He was sorry to die as well. Now that Kurush had fallen
would he find the strength to rise again? Kurush groped for a tree branch, clutched at it tightly
and in this way pulled himself upwards. His legs barely supported him.
Sobbing, he took another step. The crust was broken where he had set his feet, otherwise he
did not think he could have moved at all. On the whole, one may pass over the two weeks he had
spent walking alone in the woods; One may pass over him stumbling across the campsite just
as the sun was setting, the sight of bodies strewn about like broken dolls, the odour of blood.
How the professor would wander aimlessly about, too disoriented to understand.
Scattered patches of smoke hung in the still, evening air. It was quiet, as if everyone in the
camp were listening for something. As if they were all holding their breath. An idle breeze blew
droplets from the trees, wafting a patch of smoke like a low cloud towards him. Kurush stepped
out of the forest and through the smoke, heading into the warmth of campfires.
He left the cloud of smoke and rubbed some of the sting from his eyes. As he looked about
he saw a tent lying half collapsed and smouldering in the fire. The treated leather burned fit-
fully and the acrid grey smoke hung close to the ground in the quiet, evening air.
He saw a body lying by a wigwam. The man’s leathers were wet and red with blood. One of
his legs was twisted unnaturally, the splintered bone was showing through the skin.
He stood, unable to look away from the body: The grey shirt, the red blood, the white bone... .
He stared as if it were a diagram in a book he was trying to understand.
His mind was still numb. He felt as if he were trying to think through syrup.
Some small rational part of him realized he was exhausted. It repeated the fact to him again
and again. He used all his willpower to ignore it. He did not want to think about what he saw. He
did not want to know what had happened here. He did not want to know what any of this meant.
After he did not know how long, a wisp of smoke broke his line of vision. He fell down next to the
nearest fire in a daze. A small pot hung simmering... boiling potatoes.
He focused on the kettle. Something normal. He used a stick to poke at the contents, saw
that they were finished cooking. He lifted the kettle from the fire and set it on the ground next to
a body. Her clothes hung in tatters about her. He brushed the hair away from her face.
Under her burns she seemed somehow to greatly resemble his grandniece.
Later, he stood. The nearby wigwam was entirely ashes by then. An honest-to-God wagon
was standing with one wheel in a campfire. All the flames were tinged with blue.
He heard voices. Peering around the corner of the wagon, he saw several shadowy figures
and a woman sitting around a fire. A dizziness swept over him and he reached out his hand to

368
 KALIDASA

steady himself against the wagon’s wheel. When he gripped it, the iron bands which reinforced
the wheel crumbled in his hand, flaking away in gritty sheets of brown rust. When he pulled his
hand away the wheel creaked, began to crack. He stepped back as it gave way.
He now stood in full view of the fire. One of the figures rolled backwards and came to his feet.
His motion reminded the professor of quicksilver rolling from a jar onto a tabletop: Effortless and
supple. The figure’s expression was intent but his body was placid, as if he had just stood and
stretched. His sword was pale and elegant. When it moved, it cut the air with a brittle sound. It
reminded Kurush of the quiet that settles on the coldest days in winter, when it hurts to breathe
and everything is still. He stood a dozen feet from the professor, but to Kurush he was wrapped
in shadow. Though the sky was still bright with sunset, shadow pooled around him like thick oil.
The fire snapped and danced, lively and warm, tinged with blue, but no flicker of its light came
close to him. Shadows gathered thickly all around his body. Kurush would catch a glimpse of a
tail, but for the most part the shadows were so deep it was like looking down into a well. He was
a creature of the winter’s night. Everything about him was cold, sharp, black.
He relaxed when he saw the professor. He dropped the tip of his sword and smiled with per -
fect ivory teeth. It was the expression a nightmare wore. Kurush felt a stab of feeling penetrate
his confusion like a thick protective blanket. Something put both its hands deep into his chest
and clutched. It may have been the first time in years that he was struck dumb.
The shadow sheathed his sword with the sound of a tree cracking under the weight of winter
ice. Keeping his distance, he stretched. Again, Kurush was reminded of the way mercury moved.
His was far taller than the professor. His expression grew perturbed behind matte-black eyes.
≮
The shadow then spoke to the addled newcomer. What’s your name? ≯
Kurush stood there, mute: Frozen as a startled fawn. The shadow sighed, dropping his gaze
to the ground for a moment. When he looked back at the professor, Kurush saw cruelty staring
at him with hollowed-out eyes. “You are approaching my displeasure. This one has done noth-
ing. Send him into the soft and painless blanket of sleep.” The woman’s voice caught slightly on
the last word, as if it were difficult for her to say. Her hair was not the yellow or straw colour of
most blonde-haired women, but platinum-grey. It shone in the blue light. Her eyes were green
but her skin was smooth and white, unblemished, pale as cream. Slender she was and grace -
ful, taller than most men, with full breasts, a narrow waist and a very elegant face. Men’s eyes
that once found her butt did not quickly look away. Many called her beautiful.
The shadow glanced briefly at the seated woman, then turned away.
“And you seem to forget our purpose,” the woman said, her cool voice sharpening. “Or does
your purpose simply differ from my own?” The last words were spoken carefully.
The shadow’s arrogance left him in a heartbeat, like water poured from a bucket.
≮ ≯ ≮
No, he sighed, turning back towards the fire. No, certainly not. ≯
“That is good. I should hate to think our acquaintance was coming to an end.
“Refresh me again as to our relationship, Afagddu,” the woman added.

369
 EUDAIMONIA

≮ I... I am in your service...  . ≯ The shadow made a placating gesture.

“You’re a cock in my hand,” the woman rectified, not gently. ≮ Yes. ≯ A hint of dissent touched
the shadow’s expression. He paused. ≮ I woul— ≯ The soft voice went as hard as a rod of steel.
The shadow’s quicksilver grace disappeared. He staggered, his body suddenly rigid with pain.
“You are a cock in my hand,” the woman had repeated. “Say it.”
The shadow’s jaw clenched angrily for a moment, then he convulsed and cried out, sound-
≮ ≯
ing more like a wounded animal than a man. I’m a cock in your hand, he gasped.
“Who knows the inner turnings of your name, Afagddu?” The words were spoken with a slow
patience, like a schoolmaster reciting a forgotten lesson. The shadow wrapped shaking arms
≮
around his midsection and hunched over, closing his eyes. You, m’Lady. ≯
The tension left the air and the shadow’s body went slack. He fell forwards onto his hands
and beads of sweat fell from his face to patter on the ground like rain. His black hair hung limp
≮ ≯ ≮
about his face. Thank you, m’Lady, he gasped out. I’ll not forget again. ≯
“You will. You are far too fond of your little cruelties. You all are.” The woman’s beautiful face
swept back and forth to look at each of the figures sitting around the fire. They stirred uncom-
fortably. “I’m glad that I decided to accompany you today. You’re straying, indulging in whimsy.
Some of you seem to have forgotten what it is we seek, what we wish to achieve.”
The hood turned back to the shadow named Afagddu. “But you have my forgiveness. Perhaps
if not for these reminders, it would be I who would forget.” There was an edge to the last of her
words. “Now, finish what...” Her cool voice trailed away as her shadowed hood slowly tilted to
look towards the sky. There was an expectant silence. Those sitting around the fire grew per-
fectly still, their expressions intent. In unison they tilted their heads as if looking at the same
point in the twilit sky; As if trying to catch the scent of something on the wind.
A feeling of being watched pulled at the professor’s attention. He felt a tenseness, a subtle
change in the texture of the air. He focused on it, glad for the distraction, glad for anything that
might keep him from thinking clearly for just a few more seconds.
“They come,” the woman said quietly. She stood, and darkness seemed to boil outwards from
her like a dark fog. “Quickly. To me.” The others rose from their seats about the fire. The shadow
named Afagddu scrambled to his feet and then staggered towards the fire.
The woman spread her arms, and the darkness surrounding her bloomed like a flower un-
folding. Each of the others turned with a studied finesse, took a step towards her, into the dark-
ness surrounding her. But as their feet came down they slowed, and then gently, as if they were
made of sand with wind blowing across them, they faded away. The shadow who had spoken
looked back, a hint of anger in his nightmare eyes. Then they were gone.
It was in the darkest hours of the night when the professor finally found shelter. A horse had
dragged a wagon nearly a dozen feet down the road before he had died. It appeared so normal
inside, tidy and warm. The professor was somehow struck by how much the back of the place
smelled like Chandrā. He lit every lamp and candle in the wagon. The light was no comfort, but it

370
 KALIDASA

was the honest gold of real fire, untinged with blue. The pillow smelled of Chandrā’s hair. There
it was that the professor would be found, fast asleep with tears on his cheeks.

Pienish woke to the sound of giggling and the smell of kánnabēs. He sat up, leaning on
his elbows and struggling to breathe. It felt as if a millstone were on his chest. His head hurt, his
eyes burned. His bed was soaked with sweat. He wrapped his arms around his body, shivering
as his sweat began to cool. A sick thought could devour a body far more than fever or consump-
tion. What he had experienced in sleep had been far more terrifying than anything he had ever
beheld. Had Pienish’s first impulse been to laugh out loud? That would be quite all right. Laugh
if he must do so. A recollection came back to Pienish, seeming far more like a memory of a dec-
ade long gone than the events of the previous day. Screaming, the man had once again thrown
himself against his chains. The links had slithered and grown taut, and he had heard the creak
of old, dry wood as the steel rings had strained against the wagon’s floorboards. A pair of dirty
hands had groped for him, veins bulging along the man’s arms, yet the bonds had held. The
man had fallen backwards, blood running from a weeping burn on his cheek.
Pienish made his way towards the window, stood there watching the sky. The night sky was
empty except for a single darker ribbon of cloud forming a slash across a dark sky.
Nushiss said, “Would you like a middle-of-the-night lunch, sleepyhead?”
“I did doze off, didn’t I? I had reasons. Yes, I would. What am I being offered?”
“Name it, just name it. If I don’t have it, I’ll send for it.”
“All right, how about ten, tall, fifteen-year-old, red-headed virgins? Girls, I mean.”
“Okay. I will send for them at once. Although if you insist on genuine virgins, it will take a lot
longer. Why this fetish? Samukelisiwe did not brief me about any dynastic aspirations.”
“Cancel that order. Make it a bowl of blueberry ice cream.”
“Yes, okay. Or you can have a hairy bowl of peach ice cream instantly.”
Saying this, Nushiss was suddenly giggling and biting her lip playfully and tossing her long hair
and Pienish tossed his lovely, red-grey hair back, and she tossed her hair again in return and
so he tossed his, and she tossed hers. It was like a mating ritual in a wildlife textbook. Men and
women who smoked weed might very well have been regarded as fools or insane, if only a tiny
percentage of the number of people who smoked weed smoked weed.
“Flirting is a promise of sexual enjoyment without a guarantee.”
Nushiss: “You greatly overestimate my self-control.”
Pienish smiled. “I never said I was looking for self-control.”
Afterwards: “Nushiss, have I ever been rude to you? Or to any of my patients?”
“Nobody imposes on me against my will, so you can relax about it.”
He blew a smoke ring. “Have you ever known me to be rude to a lady?”
“I’ve seen you be extraordinarily rude to Samukelisiwe, but never to a lady.”

371
 EUDAIMONIA

“Was my paranoia getting out of hand or you were responsible for last night’s wardrobe mal-
function? Your diet must be about fifty-fifty carrots and locoweed. I could not figure out what in
the name of God’s labia majora you were up to, but I was impressed by how well you were up
to mischief in a darkened closet. You must have eyes like an owl’s.”
Silence. “All right, I’ll not poke you any longer on the subject. It won’t make things any better
and all my carefully laid plans for revenge—forced lobotomization, missing chamber pots, ants
in your pants—I promise to abandon so that we might just keep the peace.”
The fact that he would soon break this 89:;<=> more times than there were weeks interven-
ing would not trouble him. His was not a mind bothered by mere inconsistencies.
She frowned. He smiled: “Nobody imposes on me against my will, so relax about it.”
Nushiss was lying next to him: “Pig; Beast; Sourcerer.”
“Pile on the pleasantries till your arse gets tired; I need to restore my strength.”
“We’re good just like this. You press my buttons, I’ll press yours. Just because everybody in
this room wishes all men were as horny as all women doesn’t make it so.”
He pinched her. “You are a daimṓnic young female; I’ve the bruises to prove it. Or perhaps
you do not know your own strength? Your biceps are larger even than mine! Instead of ‘Nushiss’
your mother should have named you after... what was her name...” Pienish frowned suddenly.
Then: “You know, Queen of the Amazónes in Hellēnic mythology?”
“Hippolǘtē. But I don’t qualify, for reasons you can be inordinately flattering about.”
One kitchen served the entire transitionry. It was located just underneath the dining hall so
that windows high up on one of the walls could provide light during the day, and was nearly as
long as the building it was in was wide. Along one side of the kitchen ran dozens of ovens with
flues which disappeared into the walls, and enough cooking space to prepare food for the nu -
merous patients and iatrical personnel perpetually filling the transitionry. In the heart of the room
were broad tables to formulate recipes and to prep the ingredients, and the other side contained
hutches and cupboards by the score, all filled with measuring instruments, spices and ingredi-
ents. Onions, garlic, salamis, pots, pans and cooking utensils hung from the ceiling.
Pienish had hoped to find in the kitchens some scraps from last night’s dinner and be back
in his room in mikroí, yet when he approached the kitchen, he saw the low glow of ovens and
smelled fresh baking. He stepped inside, pausing at a sight he did not expect.
The chamber bustled with assistants. All wore a variation of the same uniform: A white apron
over bare skin and some kind of hat upon their head. Some of them seemed to be of a mind to
acquire better quality aprons; Others seemed to have scrounged their outfits from the street.
Pienish did notice that no matter how frayed, all their clothing was clean. He also noticed another
thing: Every one of the assistants was male. They varied in age and bearing and all worked with
the utmost concentration. None appeared to notice Pienish’s presence.
The chef herself paced amongst her assistants. As Pienish watched, Guðdís halted to say
something to one of her assistants, pinch his bottom, then instantly moved on to another. She

372
 KALIDASA

added a dash of this spice to that dish, gently grabbed the arms of an assistant before too much
flour could be added to some dough. She had set the men up in workstations. She pranced be-
tween them with the skill of a Centralizer, issuing orders and making changes to the recipes as
she went, all the while having her violet-blue eyes on every bum at once.
Two aproned, naked men stood at one of the stoves. They worked over a large pan, as big
as a wagon wheel, cracking eggs and tossing the shells into the bin. Guðdís stood just behind
them—her aproned, naked body pressed close to theirs, a hand down the front of each man’s
apron, her fingers out of sight. Shortly, however, she was adding a dash of salt, then one hand
dipped down again, eliciting a laugh from one of the two—she had long-fingered hands with but
two possible callings: The bedchamber or the kitchen. The next moment, her hands appeared
again with a knife in them as well as a red pepper, nimbly slicing it into the pot.
She headed towards the door, only to stop halfway there at a counter of vegetables and help
a hefty-sized man with his aim at the cleaver. She lopped off a dozen carrot-stems with the pre-
cision of a headsman, and then nodded to the young, smiling, half-naked man: “I would work
twice as fast if I weren’t training a whole batch of assistants.” She removed her strange hat and
dragged her right palm across the pale and sweaty skin of her forehead.
“Whipped cream, maple syrup, chilled fruit, chocolate, butter spread over waffles,” Guðdís
said. “We are having Belgae waffles for breakfast. Main course only, that is.”
Guðdís: “You look like you haven’t had a good night’s sleep the last couple of days.”
“You look like you have. I’ve seen it all, now: Seduction by way of the waffle.”
“Simply early-morning lessons; The most promising pupils deserve extra attention.”
“Pupils?” He raised an eyebrow: “I thought they were assistants.”
“Every assistant is a pupil. If they do not learn, what good are they? Every mistress must be
prepared to be bettered, as my mistress was before me. Somebody will create more amazing
dishes and flatulence than I someday. It very well might be one of these two.”
Guðdís gave Pienish a critical look-over. Then: “Warm milk.”
“That rarely works for me.” He yawned. “Do you ever sleep? It’s near dawn now.”
She added her mixture of herbs and spices to a glass of milk and stirred it. She handed it to
the big man. Absentmindedly, Pienish took a first sip. His eyes widened. He had had chocolate
before; It was always too bitter. This had a similar taste, but sweeter, and with a fiery, peppery
bite. Spice burned his tongue and herbs soothed it, and it rushed warmly down his throat like
the finest brandywine... which it also contained. Pienish drained the last drop.
Pienish yawned as Guðdís took the mug back. He heard her say to Nushiss, as if from a dis-
tance, “You’ll need to help him up to bed. He shouldn’t have problems sleeping.”

373
 KALIDASA
Dr. Breen’s eyes went wide as the right hand that had just put down the wineglass went right
on moving. It opened the top drawer of his desk; Inside was a safe where he had kept a charged
maser pistol for the last ten years. It unlocked the safe. His face erupted in sweat as he watched
his own fingers wrap around the pistol’s butt. He fought desperately to stop his hand… without
any success. He tried to raise his voice, shout the code to activate the house’s security systems…
but his jaw refused to move. His wetware followed suit, freezing up altogether.
His mind raced as the pistol rose, his thoughts gibbering like rats in a trap, and then, to his
horror, his jaw did move. It dropped so that his own hand could shove the pistol’s muzzle between
his teeth. It seemed the bastard did have some kind of mind control nanotech after—

—Dr. Wallace Erwin Breen, 16th Baron of Breaghmhaine

“You want me to spell it out? All right.” Miriam drew on the E-sig again and shrugged. “We
have to decide which of us gets obliterated when this is all over. And because our individual in-
stincts for survival are getting stronger by the hour, we’ve got to decide soon.”

—Miriam Breen to Miriam Breen and Miriam Breen and Miriam...

December 20, 2083, 5:21 pm, Los Angeles, California.

Citrus House was accurately named. From the city, The Adon was flown down the coast
for about half an hour before a gradual change in altitude warned him that he was approaching
his destination. By that time, the light through the right side windows was turning warm gold with
the sun’s decline. He peered out as he started to descend; The waves of the ocean were mol-
ten copper and the air above amber. It’s like landing in a fucking jar of honey.
The transport sideslipped and banked, giving him a view of the Breen estate. It edged in from
the ocean in neatly manicured tones of green and gravel about a mansion big enough to house
a small army. The walls were off-white, the roofing coral, and the army, if it existed, was out of
sight. Any security systems the Breens had installed must have been low-key.
As The Adon’s craft flew lower he could make out the discreet haze of a power fence along
the edge of the estate. They landed on the lawn, a soft carpet of newly-cut grass.
A young looking woman exited the house, a tennis racket in her hand, and crossed the lawn.
When she was about three feet away, she stopped: “I assume it was you who arranged for our
butler’s wife to be picked up by the Unmentionables over the weekend?” If they could make wo-
man stop loving man—that would be the real betrayal. “They cannot get inside you,” that was
what was said. But The Adon knew very well that he could get inside you.
Her sleeve was beautiful in a sun, sea and sand sort of way and the sports shorts and leo-
tard she presently wore displayed that fact to maximum effect. Bright, golden hair brushed her
shoulders as she moved, and her lips gave away a glimpse of milk-white teeth. She wore sweat
bands at forehead and wrists, and, from the dew upon her brow, they were not for show. There
were finely-toned muscles in her legs; Large breasts stood out as she stretched.

375
 EUDAIMONIA

He spoke: “No, that would be someone else. I have no jurisdiction over the locals.”
The woman standing in front of him would simply sneer at this.
“Oh, I’m sure you have not. And I am sure none of your katsas work there either.” The voice
turned patronizing. “We had her released before the sun went down, you’ll recall.”
Most of The Adon’s attention had been preoccupied with her sneer.
It had been an ugly expression, he decided, and one that belonged on an older face.
Up by the house there were ten men with masers slung over their shoulders.
They had been standing under the eaves watching since he arrived, but now they ambled
out of the shade and began to make their way in their direction at a rather brisk pace. From the
slight widening of the young-looking woman’s eyes, The Adon would guess that she had sum-
moned them on her internal mike. Among the Berties, most individuals were to this day rather
loath to stick racks of wetware into themselves. Yet, Neurachem conditioning, cyborg interfaces
and Augmentation—most of that stuff was physical. The majority of the over-the-counter civilian
stuff did not touch the pure mind, and it was his pure mind that had won The Adon his victories.
That was where the field of eugenics had finally got itself off the ground. It had been a long time
since weight of manpower had counted for much in war; Most of the so-called wars of the last
forty years had been won by weight of dronepower and extremely talented, tiny and grotesquely
expensive Neo forces. The Adon briefly wondered to himself how much of the training of these
troopers had been engraved onto their bodies and how much onto their minds.
At present, the young woman was turning to The Adon’s aide, Adiyn.
“You are not welcome here,” said the young-looking woman in a freezing voice.
“Just leaving, Ma’am,” responded Adiyn, politely.
Adiyn immediately headed back to the transport at an easy pace.
He swung himself aboard the transport and gently closed the hatch.
From the look on Mrs. Breen’s face, The Adon was not much more welcome here.
Mrs. Breen: “My husband sent a shuttle for you. Why didn’t you wait for it?”
She stood facing him, flushed, breasts rising and falling nicely.
The Adon was suddenly aware that he was swinging a hard-on like a filled fire hose.
Her eyes narrowed, and so he abruptly saw in them how old she really was.
The Adon could not help watching her ass sway as they walked inside.
A droid met them at the main door and took Mrs. Breen’s tennis racket off her. The two of them
strode down a marbled hallway hung with art which would have looked old even to an untrained
eye: Sketches by Gauguin and Michelangelo. There were also on display several more modern
pieces, such as a portrait of the Old Baron Breaghmhaine, Dr. Breen’s late father.
At the heart of the next chamber, surrounded by water, was something which resembled a
floating sphere of red foam. The Adon paused and Mrs. Breen had to backtrack.
“You like it?” Mrs. Breen asked him, with more than a little surprise.
The Adon simply grunted. Eventually: “This thing is from Mars.”

376
 KALIDASA

Her face underwent a change that The Adon caught out of the corner of his eye.
She was reassessing his intelligence for the second time in three days.
The Adon turned about for a closer look at the face she had chosen to wear.
“I’m impressed,” Mrs. Breen nodded, eventually.
He simply nodded back at her words. Then he added: “People often are.”
She looked at him narrowly. “Do you really know what this is?”
“Frankly, no; I suppose that I recognized the red colour of the... stone?”
“It’s a Song-Sphere.” She reached past him, almost letting her finger touch the red foam. A
faint sighing awoke from the thing, as well as a perfume like cherries and mustard.
The Adon did not speak for a minute: “So... it’s a natural formation?”
“Nobody knows. The other two examples in existence are a much wider. The odd material
they are made from is porous. The whole thing is slightly lighter than the air here at sea level.
Most of its mass has somehow been replaced with pure helium, hence the many wires. From the
erosion patterns on their surface, it is thought that they are extremely old. This one is the smal-
lest; It may have been around since the dawn of the Cretaceous period.”
All The Adon said was “Must’ve been expensive. Smuggling it to Earth, I mean.”
There was a nonchalance to her shrug that he liked her better for.
They walked down the left-hand corridor, trying to make up for their unscheduled stop. With
each step, Mrs. Breen’s breasts jiggled under the thin material of her leotard, and he took a mor-
ose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor; One, a bull’s head mounted on a polished
board, caught his eye, the beast looking as though it were bellowing a challenge.
The seaward lounge was built on the end of the house. Mrs. Breen took them into it through
an unobtrusive wooden door. The sun hit them in the eyes as soon as they entered.
The Adon’s wetware automatically shaded his eyes. He saw that the lounge had an upper
level with sliding glass doors and a balcony. Leaning on the balcony was a man. He must have
heard them come in; Come to that, he might have watched the transport arrive, knowing what
it signified, but still he stayed where he was, staring out at the sea. Coming back from the dead
could at times make one feel that way. Or is it an affectation, for my sake?
Mrs. Breen walked forwards. They went up a set of stairs made from the same wood as the
door. For the first time, The Adon noticed that the walls of the place were shelved from top to
bottom with books. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.
As they came out onto the balcony, Dr. Wallace Breen turned to face them.
There was a book in his hand, folded closed over his fingers.
Dr. Breen definitely appeared to The Adon like a Man Who Read. He was portly and elegant
with a head of white-grey hair. Any intelligent fool could make life bigger, more complex, more
violent; It took real genius—and a lot of wisdom—to move in the opposite direction.
Nevertheless, Dr. Breen touched his wife on the shoulder with a dismissive casualness. The
couple looked at each other, The Adon trying to decide if the man was angry.

377
 EUDAIMONIA

Back during the Middle Ages, a family feud between two such Great Houses as these might
well have grown beyond all possible control. For much of European history, revenge had been
regarded as an act of private justice rather than as a crime, the remotest members of a House
bound by the obligations of the vendetta. The history of Europe in the Middle Ages was mostly
one of feuds between powerful dynasties that had turned into major wars; These would end either
by the total extermination of one party or by the intervention of the Church.
Over time, this kind of attitude had even spilled over onto the public, where getting even had
become the basis of semantic confusions, such as “Expropriating the expropriators,” and “An
absolute crime demands an absolute penalty,” and “They did it to me so I can to them,” and in
general, the emotional mathematics of “One plus one equals zero.”
Since then, the organization had become naught but a three-point institution: The Grand Elder
balanced against the Great Houses, and keeping peace between them all, the Long Term Plan -
ning Board with its artificial monopoly on eugenic Alteration—well had the LTPB learned that in
carrying out peacekeeping missions where the strategy was to maintain homogeneity by per-
suading all armed parties to back away from bellicose activities, military strength was not a def-
inite recipe for success. Nevertheless, in politics, the tripod was a markedly unstable structure.
As far as both The Adon and Dr. Breen were concerned, that Board was the only real evidence
of political power in the West, passing with the shifts of voting strength within the Houses as
they balanced themselves against the Grand Elder and his supporters. The Grand Elder and his
allies now commanded fifty-point-six per cent of the votes. Certainly they had smelled profit, and
as other men smelled that same profit, his voting strength would only increase.
Nietzsche had been of the opinion that whoever lived for the sake of combating an enemy
had an interest in that enemy staying alive. But the truth was that, to The Adon, peace with the
goyim was alarming, since to him, being Jewish did not mean being good—it meant being bet-
ter than others, and being better than others meant having to see them as enemies and trying to
destroy them. If a man of Jewish descent was not out destroying his enemies, it was because he
had been conquered, or even assimilated; Such a man might no longer know who his enemies
even were. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing at all wrong with him declaring him-
self the enemy of even other Jews and setting himself against them. Any attempt to make him
think otherwise was the most unacceptable attack an enemy could launch upon him. The Adon
viewed not being allowed to make preemptive strikes against his enemies as a violation of his
God-given rights; Or if he were not as Jewish as all that, as some kind of defeat.
Dr. Breen: “Miriam, could you leave us alone for a short while?”
Then: “I’m sure Mr. Beiser has endless questions, and it’s likely to be boring to you.”
“Actually, I’m likely to have some questions for Mrs. Breen as well.”
She had already been on her way back, his comment stopping her mid-stride. She cocked
her head at an angle, and looked from him to Dr. Breen and back.
Her eyes met The Adon’s playfully, then danced aside.

378
 KALIDASA

That... was not what he needed. Not right now.

Standing on the balcony, the woman’s husband stirred.
The Adon’s wetware warned him of an exchange of texts, highly encrypted.
Abruptly, Dr. Breen nodded. Then: “Yes... of course.”
Another nod from Dr. Breen, then a raised hand as if in reassurance.
Mrs. Breen: “On your head be it! I’ll be in the chart room when you’re finished.”
They both watched her leave, and when the door closed behind her Dr. Breen gestured for
The Adon to sit on one of the chairs. Behind them, an antique astronomical telescope stood lev-
elled at the horizon, gathering dust. Dr. Breen folded his hands in his lap as he sat.
Dr. Breen shifted in his seat.
The Adon sat. Eventually: “Who found your body?”
A sigh. “My daughter, Naomi. I had—”
He broke off as someone opened the door in the room below.
A moment later, the droid that had attended Miriam Breen earlier came up the steps to the
balcony bearing a tray with a visibly chilled decanter and tall glasses.
The droid set down the tray, poured in machine-like silence and then withdrew on a short
nod from Dr. Breen. The older man stared after the thing blankly for a while.
“Naomi,” The Adon cued him, none-too-gently. He did not touch the refreshment.
Dr. Breen merely blinked at these words.
Then: “Oh; Yes. She barged in there, wanting something. Probably the keys to something
fast. I’m an indulgent father, I suppose, and Naomi is one of my youngest.”
All this was known to The Adon already. Thus: “How young is she, precisely?”
Dr. Breen did not hesitate: “Seventeen last October.”
Dr. Breen had long been known as a Rabbit; He had a very, very great number of offspring.
The Adon had been told that when one had leisure and wealth and humanity, bringing children
into the world was a joy. Dr. Breen had seventeen sons and twenty-four daughters.
“But none of your other children live here with you, do they?”
“Naomi does, most of the time. The others come and go.”
Finding her father without a head could not possibly be the best way to start the day.
Dr. Breen: “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.”
A sigh. “Most of my kids have families of their own. You need to talk to her?”
A shake of the head. Then: “Not at the moment.”
The Adon got up from the chair and went to the balcony door.
Over his shoulder: “You say she barged in there. That is where it happened?”
“Yes...” Dr. Breen joined him at the door. “Someone got in there and took my head off with a
maser pistol. You can see the blast mark on the wall down there. Over by the desk.”
The Adon went inside and down the stairs. The desk was a heavy wooden item which struck
The Adon as almost as worthy of note as the thing in the hall had been; Almost. He walked past

379
 EUDAIMONIA

it to inspect the wall. The hardwood panel was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable
signature of a beam. The burn started at head height and went downwards.
Dr. Breen had remained on the balcony.
The Adon looked up at him: “The surveillance system was deactivated?”
Dr. Breen raised his voice. “Yes.”
“Nothing else was damaged, broken or disturbed in any way?”
A slight nod of the head. “No. Nothing,” lied Dr. Breen.
“And Naomi and your bodyguards found the weapon beside you?”
Without waiting for a response: “Do you own a weapon that would do this?”
“Yes. It was mine. I keep it in a safe inside the desk. It is implant-coded. They found the safe
open, nothing else removed. Do you want to see inside it?”
“Not at the moment.” The Adon knew from experience just how difficult such security as this
would be for an unaltered human being to bypass, let alone tamper with.
The Adon turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost in-
visible patch of blood on the floor beneath. “Whose electroencephalograph opens it?”
“Miriam’s and my own.”
There was a significant pause.
Dr. Breen sighed, loud enough to carry down to The Adon.
Abruptly, his tone was cold: “Go on. Say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide or
my wife murdered me. I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank.”
The Adon was sure to meet the glare in the other’s dark eyes.
He went back up, stepped out onto the balcony and leaned on the rail. Outside a black-clad
figure prowled back and forth across the lawn, weapon slung over a shoulder. In the distance
the power fence shimmered. The Adon stared in that direction for a while.
“It’s asking a lot to believe that somebody got in here past all the security, broke into a safe
only you and your wife had access to, and murdered you, without causing a disturbance. You
are an intelligent man; You must have some reason for believing it.”
“Oh, I do. I have several.”
The Adon turned to face him. “All right. Let’s have it.”
“You’re looking at it.”
He stood there in front of The Adon.
“I’m here. I’m back. I can’t kill myself just by wiping out my grey matter.”
“You’ve got remote storage, obviously; Or you wouldn’t be here.”
A nod. It was the most standard of procedures.
If he were given to such reflections, The Adon might have said that he despised the other’s
books; He might have said that he detested the other’s so-called wisdom and all his blessings.
It was all worthless, illusory and deceptive; A mirage, no matter Dr. Breen’s grandstanding. The
man may act proud, fine and wise, but The Adon would still wipe him off the face of his Earth as

380
 KALIDASA

though he were no more than a mouse hiding under the floor, and Dr. Breen and all his accom-
plishments would pop out of existence, for nothing else besides The Adon really existed; And
even if any such thing did exist, The Adon could know nothing about it; And even if something
could be known about it, knowledge about it could never be communicated.
Man was matter: This was Dr. Breen’s rather foolish opinion. Drop him out of a window and
he falls; Set fire to him and he burns; Bury him and he rots, like other kinds of garbage. The time
would come, that when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end.
Oh, how wrong you were to think that immortality meant never dying. After all, you are only
an immortal till something manages to kill you. After that, you are just long-lived. If a year from
now you’re in the lab and you suddenly realize I’m standing right behind you...
As far as Dr. Breen was concerned, the reason you could not imagine yourself being dead
was that as soon as you said: “I am dead,” you have of course said “I”, and so your very exist-
ence is clearly implicit in your claim. That was how individuals got the idea of the immortality of
the soul—it was a consequence of grammar, and nothing more than that.
The Adon’s philosophy, he believed, was but a consequence of a culture ruled by linguistic lim-
itations that masked the understanding of what was a purely physical Universe.
Had The Adon taken the time to watch it all slide past in the last hundred years? Had he seen
it sliding past and thought of grabbing on, holding on to it to stop it all draining away?
It indeed would seem to be true to Dr. Breen that millions longed for immortality who did not
know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
They who were immortal were chained to this life by chains of gold.
Did they dare not sever them asunder for fear of what lay beyond the drop?
It was certainly true that today had been another glorious California day, a day in which the
Breens had seemed to dissolve and be absorbed and sent running onwards to they knew not
where. To such men as The Adon, life past the half-century had seemed neither too long nor too
short, and they took no more heed to save time or make haste than did the average Bertie. In
Dr. Breen’s opinion, such a man’s chances of being alive in a millennium’s time were a hun -
dred times higher than their chances of being sincerely happy for two entire years.
“How regular is the update?” asked The Adon, a little later.
Dr. Breen shrugged. “Forty-eight hours.”
He tapped the back of his neck. “A direct broadcast from here into a shielded room over at
the USSF installation at Vandenberg. I don’t even have to think about it.”
“And they keep your clones on ice there as well?”
“Yes. Multiple units. Elsewhere too, of course.”
The Adon nodded, mostly to himself, as if all this was to be expected.
“Neither I, nor my wife, could have pulled that trigger. We both know it wouldn’t kill.”
“Of course...” The Adon began, “suicide is rarely a rational act.”
Dr. Breen lowered his head and shook it, smiling coldly.

381
 EUDAIMONIA

“I find it ironic that somebody I think of as sometimes so courageous to the point of an incred-
ible stupidity could be so terrified of his own happiness. I mean, it’s so ridiculous; Who in their
right mind is afraid of being happy? Well, I guess it takes a kind of individual who has lost far
too much of his... humanity; Somebody who’s so used to thinking, deep, deep down inside, that
he caused too much pain to others to ever be worthy of happiness himself.”
The Adon’s face darkened with anger.
Slowly, with a great deal of effort, The Adon recomposed his features.
When the time comes, he thought, I’ll remember his manner with me. Yes. I will.
In time: “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Tuesday,” Dr. Breen said promptly. “Going to bed at about midnight.”
“That was the approximate time of the last remote update?”
“Yes, the broadcast would have gone through at about four in the morning.”
“So... almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”
Optimally bad; In forty-eight hours, almost anything could have happened.
Dr. Breen could have been to the fucking moon and back in that time!
“You’re thinking that that may have been the point of the killing... to make me forget?”
The Adon would simply grunt softly at this.
“You think I’m a fool; And this but confirms it, eh?” continued Dr. Breen.
Dr. Breen: Yes, how does all this fit with the man’s endless personal scheming?
“As you say; Which raises a good question—why do you trust me?”
“Stupidity, I guess. Some think you were actually sincere when you apologized.”
“I was sincere. I’m very sorry the HECU fucked you up the ass.”
Fury and embarrassment coloured Dr. Breen’s face.
All of a sudden, there was nothing but hostility in The Adon’s dark eyes.
Dr. Breen: “I know. You’re certainly liable to try. I suggest you think twice before pursuing a
vendetta against me. You’re going to fly away, and, for a time, I will forget you exist. My vendet-
tas are not personal; They’ve nothing to do with how enemies might... taste. Eating them makes
you feel good, not me. Still, you don’t want me thinking about you. You won’t like the direction my
thoughts would take. Killing you would mean I helped rid the world of one more bogeyman. A
bogeyman that cannot be trusted. A bogeyman... that... I... don’t... like.”

Dr. Breen had not seen fit to accompany The Adon into the presence of his wife. Maybe
one encounter a day was as much as they allowed themselves. Instead, a droid had appeared
as if by magic as the two men had come down from the balcony in the lounge.
Dr. Breen had paid the droid about as much attention as he had the last time. When The Adon
had exited, the Baron had been standing by, staring at the mark on the wall.
Mrs. Breen turned about as The Adon inquired: “You seem ill at ease. Are You?”

382
 KALIDASA

“No,” she said, but more rudely than she had intended. The Adon would consequently get the
impression that she was at least a little impatient at having been disturbed.
The Adon looked over his shoulder at the droid that had shown him in, then back at Miriam
Breen. On the surface, their bodies would seem to be about the same in age.
She briefly curved her mouth down at the corners, then went back to rolling up the map she
had been studying. Behind him, the droid pulled the door closed with a click.
Mrs. Breen deftly tightened the roll of the map and began to slide it into a tube.
“Well,” she said, without looking up. “Ask me your questions, then.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“I was in bed. Please don’t ask me to corroborate that; I was alone.”
The chart room was long and airy under an arched roof that had been tiled with dark stone.
The map racks were about waist high, each topped with a display and set out in rows.
The Adon moved out of the centre aisle, putting a rack between himself and her.
“Mrs. Breen, you seem to have formed a misconception about me.”
Silence; A frown. Then: “I’m not the police.”
And then, too: “Your father is interested only in information, not justice.”
She slid the rolled map into its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands be-
hind her. She had left her fresh young sweat and tennis clothes in her big, elegant bathroom
whilst The Adon had been talking to her husband. Now she was immaculately fastened up in
dark black slacks and something born out of a union between a dinner jacket and a shawl. The
sleeves of her shirt were pushed up to the elbow, her wrists unadorned with jewellery.
“Do I sound guilty?” she asked him.
“You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a potential enemy.”
She laughed. It was a pleasant sound, and her shoulders rose and fell as she did.
The Adon found himself deciding that it was a laugh he could get to like.
The grin lingered on her face: “How very direct you are.”
The Adon glanced down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of him. It was
marked in the top left-hand corner: Extent of British settlement in North America, 1715.
The Adon absentmindedly perused the maps immediately adjacent to it.
The name marked on one was in a script that his wetware was unable to read.
“Where I come from, directness—even rudeness—is considered a virtue, Mrs Breen.”
“So I understand. I think you’re going to shock many of my children, however.”
“I didn’t say I was a good citizen, or, indeed, civilised, Mrs Breen.”
“Yes.” She pushed herself off the rack and moved towards him. “I know that too. If fact, I know
that my husband wishes me to think of you as a rather dangerous man.”
She shrugged again.
Then: “It’s a Russian cypher.”
The Adon: “I’m sorry?”

383
 EUDAIMONIA

Mrs. Breen waved a hand in the direction of the display. “The script.”
She came round the rack and stood beside him, looking down. “It is a Roscosmos computer-
generated chart of moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at auction. Do you like it?”
“What time did you go to sleep the night your husband was shot?”
She stared at him for a rather long moment. “Early. As I told you, I was all alone.” She forced
the edge out of her voice and her tone became almost light again. “Oh, and if that sounds like
guilt to you, it’s not. It’s resignation. With a just twist of bitterness, I will admit.”
“You feel bitter about your husband?”
Once again the woman smiled: “I thought I said resigned.”
The Adon met her gaze: “You said both.”
“Are you saying you think I killed my husband?”
“I don’t think anything yet. It is a possibility.”
Once again, the woman raised an eyebrow. “But, is it?”
“You’ve full access to the safe. You were inside the house defences when it happened. And
now it sounds as if you might have some kind of hidden emotional motive.”
Still smiling, she said: “Building a case, are we?”
Then: “I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke in here.”
He looked down at his hands and found they had quite unconsciously taken out one of his ci-
garettes—the real thing, not an E-sig. He had tapped one out of the pack.
The Adon considered lighting it anyway to see what she would do.
Eventually, he shoved the cigarette back into its packaging.
She sighed. Then: “How alone you must be.”
The Adon sighed to himself. As he did so he turned to examine the nearest map rack. Each
rolled chart had been labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. Mt. Olympus; 3rd ex-
cavation, east quarter. Mars; Aboriginal ruins. He started to tug one of the rolls free.
The Adon’s expression blanked: “How I feel isn’t at issue here.”
Then: “Can you think of a reason why your husband may have tried to kill himself?”
“My husband killing himself is a matter of such indifference to me that I—”
She was brought up short as The Adon slid the map back into place far too roughly.
More and more over the years Mrs. Breen had grown to feel that she could not be bothered.
Or rather, would not. She avoided, carefully, all occasions for being bothered.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Breen would sigh yet again. “You are acting as if it would’ve been a seri-
ous matter if I, or anyone else for that matter, had tried to kill my husband.”
They looked at each other for a couple of seconds in silence.
The Adon asked: “In your opinion, where had your husband gone that night?”
“I’m not sure. He went to Osaka during the day, for a meeting.”
“He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back? He didn’t go physically, correct?”
“No. He has a telepresence there. He was due back about six that evening, but—”

384
 KALIDASA

Suddenly, she shifted her posture slightly, and opened a palm at him.
“He came back late. He often stays out late after closing a deal; You understand?”
“And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Or with whom? Curtis?”
“He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took an air taxi from the Citadel.”
Mrs Breen would thereupon add as well: “I’m not his keeper.”
This was the stuff such women were made of, half indifference and half bitterness.
The Adon: “This meeting was a crucial one? The one in Osaka?”
“Oh... no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve
been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine develop-
ment company called Pacific-Com, based in Japan. A leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usu-
ally all taken care of here in the city, but there was call for an extraordinary assessors’ meet-
ing. It is once in a while best to handle that sort of thing close to source.”
Silence. He nodded, noting that Mrs. Breen’s annoyance seemed to recede.
Nine years ago: There was never any antechamber, nor visiting room. Heaven had not been
intended for the casual visitor; Any paradise that the flesh-constrained may feel at home in would
have been intolerably pedestrian to the disembodied minds who lived there. Of course, there was
no reason why visitor and resident had to share the same view. The Adon had known that his
son could have pulled a more conventional worldview off the shelf if he had wanted to, seen that
place rendered in any style he chose. Except for the Ascended themselves.
That, The Adon had learned later, was one of the perks of the Afterlife.
The thing Avimelech’s step-mother had become that day had no real face, but he had been
damned if she was going to see him hide behind some mask of pure imagination.
Avimelech had embraced his step-mother with digital arms. “Hello, Helsa.”
Laughter. “Bubbaleh! What a wonderful surprise!”
That day, Helsa had been an abstraction of an abstraction: An impossible intersection of bright
panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and anim-
ated. She had swirled like a school of fish, her world echoing her strange form: Lights and angles
and two-dimensional Escher impossibilities, piled like bright thunderheads. Somehow, he would
have recognised her anywhere. Heaven was a dream; Only upon waking did one realize that
the characters one encountered looked nothing like they did in real life.
There was only one familiar landmark anywhere in the whole sensorium; And that landmark
was that his step-mother’s heaven smelled of cinnamon. The Adon beheld her luminous avatar
and imagined her corpus soaking in its far-off tank of nutrients, deep underground.
Clearly Avimelech had been expected to say something: “How’re you doing?”
In the Crèche one said things because one has been conditioned to say them.
“Very well; Very well. Of course, it takes quite some getting used to, knowing your mind is not
quite yours anymore.” Heaven did not just feed the brains of its residents; It fed off them. It used
the unused computing power of idle synapses to run its own infrastructure.

385
 EUDAIMONIA

“You have to move on in here, sooner better than later; You can never leave.”
“Actually, I am the one who’s leaving,” Avimelech had said. “I’m shipping out tomorrow.”
Then: “New Mexico. You know, the old facility? Total communications blackout, I’m afraid.”
“Oh yes. I think I heard something. We don’t get much news from outside.”
“Anyway, just thought I’d call in and say goodbye.”
“I’m glad you did. I’ve been hoping to see you without... you know.”
A pause. All that Avimelech could think to say was: “Without what?”
“You know. Without your father listening in.”
Damn it! Not this again. He wanted to shriek; He wanted to vape some weed.
“Dad’s been in the field; Xen, the Borderworld; You must have heard something.”
“I certainly have. You know, I’ve not always been happy about your father’s... extended as-
signments; But perhaps it’s really been some sort of blessing in disguise.”
Outer Heaven had told Avimelech’s cortex that Helsa had sighed.
After another pause: “The less he was around, the less he could do.”
Avimelech had been genuinely taken aback. “Do?”
“To you; Or to Feivel.” Her image had stilled for a moment, approximating hesitation.
“I’ve never told either of you this before, but—no. I shouldn’t.”
Silence. “Shouldn’t what?”
Silence. “Bring up, well, old hurts.”
A frown. “What old hurts?”
Right on cue. The TATs, the neural tweaks, simply went too deep.
“Well,” she had begun, “At times you’d come back—you were so very young—and your face
would be so set and hard, and I would wonder why are you so angry, my little boy?”
Another sigh. “What can someone so young have to be so angry about?”
“Helsa, what are you talking about? Back from where? The hospital?”
“No, no. From all the other places he would take you to.”
Something like a shiver had passed across her facets at that moment.
“He was still around back then. He wasn’t so important, he was just another big wig, going on
about the Berties and game theory and China until he put everyone to sleep.”
Avimelech had tried to imagine it: My father, the chatterbox.
“Well, of course not. You were far too young to recall, but he was just a man, then. He still is
I think, under all the secret missions and classified briefings. I have never understood why people
never saw that. But even back then he liked to—well, it wasn’t his fault, I suppose; He had a diffi-
cult childhood, and so he never learned to deal with problems like an adult. He, well, he’d throw
his weight around, I guess you’d say. Of course, I did not know that before we married. If I had
known... but I made a commitment. I made a commitment; I never broke it.”
Shock, genuine shock: “What’re you saying... that he abused you—”
Back from the places he’d take you. “Are... are you saying that I was?”

386
 KALIDASA

“There are all kinds of abuse. An absence can hurt more than bullets.”
The Adon’s son had shaken his head. “No. He didn’t abandon us.”
And The Adon thought: No, I simply left you and Feivel with her.
“He abandoned us, Bubbaleh. Sometimes for months, and I... and we never knew if he was
coming back. And he chose to do that to us, Bubbaleh. He didn’t need that job, there were so
many other things he was qualified to do. Things that had been redundant for years.”
Avimelech had shaken his head, unable to speak: Could she hate a man simply because he
had not had the good grace to become unnecessary? Avimelech wanted to put his fingers to his
temples, found himself gently squeezing his step-mother’s “shoulder” instead.
“It’s not Dad’s fault that managing the Berties is still an essential job.”
She had continued as if she had not heard. “Oh, sure, there was a time when it was unavoid-
able, when people of our social class had to work. But even back then, people wanted to spend
time with their families. To choose to stay working when it isn’t even necessary...”
She had shattered and reassembled at his shoulder.
“Yes, Bubbaleh. I believe that that, if nothing else was, was a kind of abuse.”
Then: “If your father had been half as loyal to me as I’ve been to him all these years...”
Avimelech had remembered Dad then, the last time he had seen him.
“I don’t think Dad’s been disloyal to any of us,” was all he was permitted to say.
Helsa had sighed. “I did not really expect you to understand. I am not stupid, I’ve seen how
it played out. I pretty much had to raise you and Feivel myself. I always had to play the heavy.
I always had to be the one to hand out the discipline because your father was off on a secret
assignment. And then he’d come home for a week or three and he was the golden-haired Dad
to you both just because he’d seen fit to drop in. I don’t really blame either of you for that any
more than I blame him. Blame doesn’t solve anything at this stage.”
Silence. “I just thought you ought to know; Take it for what it’s worth.”
And just like that, Avimelech had been eleven years old again; He was home early and he had
just let himself into the kitchen. He had heard Dad and Helsa fighting in the next room. One of
the insect-like security droids had been standing by the stove. Such a thing would have been
enough to get Helsa going all by itself. But they were fighting about something else; Helsa only
wanted what was best for all of them, but Dad had said there were limits, and this was not the
way to go about it; And Helsa had said he did not know what it was like, he hardly ever even
saw the children; And so, Avimelech had known they were fighting about him.
Which, in and of itself, had not been anything unusual.
What had scared him was that, for the first time, Dad had been fighting back.
“You do not force something like that onto a Beiser. Especially without my consent.”
Father never shouted, but his voice was colder than Avimelech had ever heard.
“That’s just garbage,” Helsa had said. “Parents always have, always will, make decisions for
their children, in their best interests, especially when it comes to medical iss—”

387
 EUDAIMONIA

“This is not a medical issue.” This time, his father’s voice had arisen. “It’s—”
“Not a medical issue! That’s a new height of denial even for you! They cut out half his brain
in case you missed it! Do you think he can recover from that without help? Is that more of your
father’s tough love shining through? Why not just deny him air while you’re at it!”
“If mu-ops were called for they’d have been prescribed by the LTPB.”
Avimelech’s wetware’s linguistic subroutines had come alive at the unfamiliar words.
Soon, something small and white had beckoned from the open garbage pail.
Helsa: “Damn it, be reasonable. He’s so distant, he barely even talks to me anymore.”
A forceful sigh. Silence. Dad: “They said it would take time.”
“But two years! There’s nothing wrong with helping nature along a little; We’re not even talk -
ing black market. I got it over-the-counter from Dr. Weisman, for God’s sake!”
“That’s not the goddamn point and you know it!”
An empty pill bottle; That was what one of them had thrown away, before forgetting to close
the lid. He had salvaged it from the trash and set his wetware to reading it for him.

Umbilical™ Formula VII

Opioid Receptor Promoter and Maternal Response Stimulant
“Strengthening ties between Mother and Child since 2051”

“Maybe the point should be that someone who’s barely home one month of the year has got
bloody nerve passing judgment upon my parenting skills. If you want some say in how your son is
raised, then you can damn well pay some dues first. Until then, just fuck right off.”
“You will not put that shit into my son ever again,” his father had growled.
“Yeah? And how are you going to stop me? You can’t even make the time to find out what’s
going on in your own family; You think you can control me all the way from fucking orbit? Let
me caution you: Should an unfortunate ‘accident’ occur to me, everyone’ll learn what happened
to your sons’s birth-mother. The Crèche has long suspected how you do—”
Suddenly, nothing came from the living room but soft choking sounds.
After a long moment, Avimelech had finally dared peek around the corner.
His father had been holding Helsa by the throat.
“I think that I can find something to placate the Aluf, if I have—”
Then his step-mother had seen him. And then his father had seen him. His father had taken
his hand from around his step-mother’s neck, his face becoming utterly unreadable.
But there had been no mistaking the triumph on her face.
Avimelech had not said anything for a while. Finally: “Didn’t it help at all?”
Helsa had raised a kaleidoscope eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
He had glanced around at all this... this lucid dream. “You are omnipotent in here. Desire any-
thing, imagine anything—and there it is. I’d thought it would have changed you more.”

388
 KALIDASA

Rainbow tiles had danced, laughed. “This isn’t enough of a change for you?”
Not nearly. No, not nearly because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs Helsa
built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises and commiserated over the
injustices she had suffered, when it came right down to it, she was only talking to herself. There
were other realities over which she had no control, other people who did not play by her rules.
And if they thought of Helsa at all, they thought as they damn well pleased.
She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were
out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking his leave of Outer Heaven, it had occurred to him that
omnipotent though she was, there was only one way his step-mother might ever be completely
happy in her own personal Creation; No, the rest of the Crèche would have to—
“Do you know what Cloud Nine is?” Mrs Breen asked, cutting off The Adon’s thoughts.
The way she held herself said that he was supposed to take a look at her. The Adon shook
himself, flickered his gaze across the smile, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her
hips, the half-shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting detachment.
“It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, however.”
“Cloud Nine; It’s a JOY derivative, tailed with Satyr and LSD. This body...” Helsa gestured
down at herself, spread fingers brushing at her curves. “This is state-of-the-art. I secrete Cloud
Nine, when I exert myself. In my sweat, my saliva... as well as my cunt.”
She advanced, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor.
“Please don’t think of me as a female chauvinist. After nearly a hundred and ten years of mar-
riage my relationship with Wallace is more politeness than anything.”
The Adon could taste what she would be like, the drug working its way past his biotoxin fil-
ters. It played tricks on his wetware and sent out feelers for the intense aura of arousal this wo -
man was generating. Yes, Cloud Nine was already in the air, he realized; It had been in the air
from their first encounter down on the lawn. It had been in the scent of her body.
He knew what it would be like: They would scrabble feverishly at each other, mouths trem-
bling with the need to fill themselves, and when they had shed everything they wore, the rugs
beneath them would seem to lay individual strands of heat on their bodies. There would be a
salt taste as his tongue tracked down the creases of her vagina, soaking up Cloud Nine with
her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the
other end of the world, his penis would pulse in her hand. A mouth would close over the head.
Powered by the drug, she would be able to bring on his peak seconds before hers.
“Down south,” Mrs. Breen murmured, “About five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island.
It’s mine. No one goes there, not even my husband. There is a one-mile exclusion umbrella. It
is satellite-patrolled, and beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleev-
ing facility. I sometimes decant the clones. Alters all. To play. Play, understand?”
The Adon made no response. The image she had just planted, of being the focus of an en-
tire pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same consciousness...

389
 EUDAIMONIA

“How long,” he said, levelly, “is this fun house ticket good for?”
She grinned then, a grin of pure lechery. “Unlimited rides,” she said.
“But for a limited period only, right?”
The young-looking woman shook her head at this.
“No, you don’t understand. That place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, every-
thing on it is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Till you tire of it.”
His grin did not reach his eyes. “That might take a long time.”
“No.” There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head. “No, it won’t.”

Night and revelry ruled outside the island castle. The big crowd of Miriams were drunk and
rowdy. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admitted a breeze redolent of cooked
meats, woodsmoke, sweat. Meanwhile, The Adon stumbled up a tightly-spiralling stone stair-
case in the dark; His goal, a prearranged rendezvous. He too had been drinking.
He paused at the third window to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his
close-cut hair. Why do this? he wondered. It was more than a little unlike him.
He continued up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gaped on a vestibule lit by a lantern han g-
ing from a hook. He ventured inside into a reception room panelled in oak blackened by age.
Crossing the threshold made several TATs kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than
his own volition steered his feet, and he felt an unfamiliar throb and weight on his chest, and an -
ticipation, and looseness lower down that made him cry out: “Where are you?”
“Over here.” He saw her waiting for him in the doorway. She was partially undressed, wear-
ing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that made the tops of her breasts swell like lu s-
trous domes. Her tight sleeves were half-unravelled, her hair dishevelled. He was full of her bril -
liant eyes and the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She was the
magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense it seemed that he would burst.
“Is it working for you?” she asked, genuinely interested.
“Yes.” He felt tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walked to-
wards her. They were experimenting with gender-bending, trying on the extreme dimorphism
of this period as a game. This would be the first time she had done it this particular way.
She opened her mouth: He kissed her, felt the warmth of his tongue thrust in.
She leaned against him, feeling his inhumanly-sized erection.
“Why do I always forget how odd it feels to be a man?” he heard her say.
Deprivation, combined with fear and peer-pressure, had been his father’s personal tools. The
man had been hell-bent on creating an environment that was sexually negative—an environment
that systematically and arbitrarily restricted an Israeli’s options. Sexual debility often resulted in a
lowering of self-confidence. The compulsion to control one’s sexuality, to be repressed, had led
to the development of the pathological, emotionally tangled notions of honour, duty, bravery and

390
 KALIDASA

self-control. Unfortunately, the pathology of these attitudes had been strongly at variance with the
reality of human behaviour. The LTPB had been incapable of stopping adolescents from having
sex; It could only make them feel bad about about the sex they did have. All humans loved sex.
Sex was the oldest social glue of the human race. In the 21st century, the realm of “normal” in hu-
man sexuality was vast. If a Bertie wanted to masturbate seven times a day—that was normal.
Sex had become a form of entertainment. Anybody who supposed that the way to a man or wo-
man’s heart was through their stomach must have flunked biology. Open sexual exploration and
satisfaction: Was it among the most serious threats the LTPB had ever faced?
The Adon had begun to touch her, and she him. Thanks to their wetware, she was capable of
sensing the power in his hands. She would know if he had the intention to harm her. He held her
hand in his own and brushed her fingers, ran a hand down her leg, stroked her face, tracing the
curve of her ears, running a finger gently around her mouth. He put both hands in her hair and
combed it with his fingers. He turned her around, massaged her shoulders, slid a knuckle down
the path of her spine. It seemed as if hours passed before his hands finally went to her breasts.
He stroked the soft skin underneath until it tingled. He circled her nipples with his thumbs and
he pinched them between thumb and forefinger, then began to pull at her, very lightly and then
more insistently, till he felt what it was like for a woman’s nipples to stiffen.
The door to her chamber was ajar, but she did not care; There was no one else here but her
own clones. The flood of new and desperate sensations—rerouted from each of their own physi-
ology to the other’s sensorium—had taken hold. She ground her hips against his, pushing deep-
er and deeper into the man’s arms, whining a little softly at the back of her throat as she felt the
fullness in his balls, the strain of his cock. He almost fainted with the sensations of her body—it
was as if he was dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin turning to water
and running away. Somehow he had got his arms around her waist again. She was so tight, so
breathless. They stumbled into the bedroom. “Do it to me!” she demanded. “Now!”
Somehow, he had ended up on top of her, pants down around his ankles, skirts bundled up
around her waist; She kissed him, grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent noth-
ings. Then, all of a sudden, The Adon’s heart was in his mouth, and there was a sensation as if
the Universe pushing into his private parts, so inside-out it actually managed to take his breath
away. It was hot, and as hard as rock, and he too wanted it inside badly, but at the same time it
was an intrusion, frightening and altogether unexpected. The Adon felt the lightning touch of his
tongue on her nipples as he leaned closer, felt exposed and even terrified.
As he began to poke into her, he screamed in the privacy of his own mind. I didn’t know it felt
like this to be a woman...  . All he felt was the sensation of his cock thrusting into her, how nice
it was. His father’s voice echoed in his head: “What’re you, some kind of queer?”

391
 KALIDASA

“I am sure now that your therapy lies in this direction: To use your dreams, not to evade and
avoid them. You have not seen the help your own mind can give you, the ways you can use it, em -
ploy it creatively. One is never afraid of the unknown; One is afraid of the known coming to an end.
All you need to do is not to hide from your own Power: Not to suppress it, and even to release it.
Doesn’t that strike you as right, as the right thing to do? Nushiss and you are both dreams, and I
who say this to you am also a dream myself. This isn’t hard to believe, I’m quite serious in saying
that. It has only been since the rise of methodological doubt that anybody has even been much in -
clined to questioning such a statement, much less disbelieving it. When logic and reason have been
altogether lost, that is when humanity gets benevolence and righteousness.”

—Pienish “Mishtamek” of Sheshatshiu to Milwa'tem of Meshikamau

Kalā appeared to become rather puzzled. “What’s a whore?”

Unsurprisingly, that had not been one of the English words Kurush had shared.
Guðdís: “He says essentially that your mother is a person men pay money to fuck.”
Kalā turned back to the professor and nodded: “You’re very kind. I thank you.”

—Kalā of Hawaiʻi, Guðdís Snorradóttir and Kurush X. Mehta

In the dream, Kalā saw a big wave spinning over his head, a perfect aquamarine barrel.
The ocean roared around him, spitting out spray. Shaking droplets from his face, Kalā bent his
knees atop his papa he‘e nalu and tucked his body lower; His arms out to fore and aft for bet-
ter balance, he cackled as he pumped his board for more speed, his exit shrinking.
“Yeaaah!” Kalā flew out of the tube, pumping his fist in the air as a few cheers rang out from
the beach. He spun his board about. He could feel each palmós passing. Only a few mikroí re-
mained in the tournament, the last of the competitions of the Makahiki. It was a final heat: One -
hundred-and-seven wave riders competing for just as many positions on the board.
The joy of wave riding was in so many things together. Everybody rode in their own way. In-
deed, if one tried to ride like someone else, one ended up looking the fool. A rider had to remem-
ber to be themselves. Everybody else is already taken...  . A wave rider’s style was a natural ex-
tension of who they were, and in no greater way was this true than the fact that the finest rider
out there was, and indeed could only be, the one who was having the most fun. As far as Kalā
was concerned imperfection was beauty, madness was genius, and there was no time like the
present. It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring! Wave riding was all about
where one’s mind-life was at, living in the moment and remaining true to oneself.
Taking long, deep strokes, Kalā drove himself back towards the swell. His lungs burned from
the effort and his arms and legs felt like lead, and yet he smiled, his heart lifting with the sensa-
tions. Pūpūkea—better known as the Paipu—was his father’s local surf break: Kalā had spent
most of the winters of his childhood on these waves. The shallow water and sharp lava rocks
beneath it did not scare him at all. His thrill was in sliding down a twenty-foot face, perhaps the
heaviest surf in the world: Well worth any torment the ocean could bring him.

393
 EUDAIMONIA

Waves were not measured in feet, but in alternating bouts of joy and adrenalin.
He glanced over and saw his dearest, Hina, drop down a blue wall. Kalā concluded that the
woman’s hair had the most supreme beauty whilst it was driven so fast and so horizontal. The
reigning champion appeared to make a flawless descent, but, once she had reached the bottom
and tried to cut backwards, her board shot out from underneath her.
Ouch! Kalā smiled as his companion got sucked down, locked in. Then he cringed, knowing
what it felt like to be dragged under the churning surf and whipped around like a rag doll. He
pressed his fingers over the nasty head wound he had received while practising for the contest
a few weeks earlier: A jagged scab ran across his scalp; Soft from being in the ocean all day, it
oozed a bit of blood. The Paipu had some nasty reef; Kalā had the scars to prove it.
As with telling a good yarn, timing was everything in a good wipeout.
Kalā shook his head, smiled. When Hina resurfaced, Kalā let out a long chuckle and paddled
even harder, stopping only when he reached the perfect spot, behind the waves and out of the
impact zone. Squinting, he glanced at the shore to the judges’ stand, the colourful rags. A sea of
spectators covered the sand—all of them waiting to see what they would do next.
Somewhere in that crowd sat his father. Kalā sat up on his board. He scanned the horizon. A
dark swell formed in the distance, moved closer. The wave was beautiful—big and clean and
blue like well-oiled glass—but he let it pass. The sets had been fairly consistent so far, with the
second wave being the better choice, so he got into position and waited for it.
With the peeling wave taken as an ideal of perfection, the wave rider’s object of passion be -
came the very essence of ephemerality—never a trophy to be lauded or even a goal to be at-
tained, but rather a fleeting state of soul. So much more of a surfer’s time, after all, was passed
in the dreaming and searching than the actual riding of colossal waves; So much more time was
spent walking the coast or floating between sets. Of a whole season, perhaps no more than a
day may be spent truly on the balls of one’s feet. Kalā, therefore, could not view such a respite
as this without a tranquil and beatific desire, a waiting in anticipation. While so many Khristianoí
could somehow wish for a blossom to remain in bloom, for a ripening grape to hang always on
the vine—the understandably hopeless hope to freeze life’s most perfect moments—the wave’s
plenitude was in the peeling of the petal, the very motion of a falling fruit.
Soon the next wave appeared. With a slow build up, it swelled into a high curve.
Kalā turned, felt the surge beneath him as he stood and balanced himself.
Something slammed into his head—a jarring impact. It knocked him off his board, into the
ocean. Sputtering, he broke the surface, spun about, searching. Nothing...  . What the Hel? His
surfboard popped up next to him. Kalā reached for it. Then came a flash of grey.
A brutal strike hit his right side and dragged him under. A sharp pressure tugged at him. He
struggled to break free; Came up choking on salt. A pool of blood swirled.
Kalā screamed: “Shark!” and ended up with a mouthful of ocean. Panicked, he scanned the
area, seeking the gigantic fish. A thick, ruby fluid now coloured the water. Confusion clouded his

394
 KALIDASA

senses. His legs paddled, and yet he could barely keep his head above the surface. Was some-
thing holding him down? His board swung by and he grabbed hold of it. He could not say what
his first thought was as he sunk below the surface; It was mostly a string of obscenities. Some-
thing was wrong with his legs. For a while, he could not feel them at all. Maybe he had caught
glimpses of scarlet fleshy stumps, blood gushing from shredded remains?
None of it seemed real. This isn’t happening...
No, this was not real: It was a dream. Dreams were funny things. When he had been in the
water that day, he had hardly paid the scene attention, not stopping to think of it as something that
would make a lasting impression; He had not thought that so many years later he would dream
of it so vividly. He had not given a damn about the sharks. He had been thinking about the com-
petition. He had been thinking about the beautiful girl swimming next to him.
In the dream, dizziness overwhelmed him as Kalā swayed back and forth. He heard the roar
of the waves and shouting. His vision blurred. The light faded. His eyes grew heavy.
“Code Blue!” a voice cried out in the distance. Sand scratched Kalā’s stomach as he lay on
the shore. A mask covered his mouth and as he breathed deeply, his mind cleared.
Then: “Make way! Make way! Make way!”
“Swing the other end closer.” The world had somehow stopped spinning.
He knew that voice. What is happening? “One; Two; Three; Lift.”
What he had taken for sand became wool, soft, warm and just a little bit itchy.
He felt a sharp yank and jerk. On his left side, a blurry shape worked fast, applying a needle.
An alarm blasted out a warning. The noise made his head spin. He could hear himself groan-
ing, yet he still could not feel the pain. Flashes of a long hallway of wood, the incessant motion
and the disorientation of going around a corner—Kalā knew this was not good. The motion gave
way to a man’s voice. “Hang in there,” it said. The dream faded into blackness.

With a jerk, Kalā sat up in bed. Beads of sweat covered his forehead and his heart raced
wildly. Another nightmare. Fun-house mirror afterimages hung at the edge of his mind: Red wa-
ter, an ominous grey fin, a gigantic mouth with blood-stained teeth. Disoriented, he looked about
himself: His new quarters; The Norandvik. He had quite forgotten where he was. With the back
of his hand, he wiped the sweat from his brow as pain shot down his neck.
In a bowl on his bedside table lay a sweet-smelling liquid. He took a tentative sip.
He massaged the sides of his legs: Not paralyzed... thank Papa!
Sixteen days! Had so few days actually passed? It seemed like a myriad decades ago that
he had woken in recovery, doped up, dazed. He had had another heart attack. Incense candles
had filled the private sickroom, their spicy aroma somewhat overpowering to him.
“So...” Kalā had croaked out, “will I be able to swim again, afterwards?”
It had been one of the elderly man’s few remaining pleasures.

395
 EUDAIMONIA

Olofsson, standing off to the left side of his sickbed, had shrugged. As a man who had seen
something of a human being’s life, and being neither a fool nor, hopefully, a paraplegic, Kalā had
little faith in iatrics. In his heart he had now become furious at the whole affair.
The old Polünēsiakós would, however, let himself weep, then and now.
To cry at need: Was it an easy achievement for his family? Kalā did not know. Ever since he
had been a child Kalā had rarely survived a visit to the theatre without shedding tears, afflicted
as he had been by the most cursory, tawdry, or, even the most sloppily sentimental attempts at
poignancy—something about the exterior of the face, so large and palpable, with the eyes and
the lips... . It would all be writ too large for him, too immediate. Some people made a mistake
about drama; Some people thought drama was when the actors cried; But drama was when the
audience cried. When a human being was born, did they cry with delight that they had come to
such a great stage of fools? Kalā had always been a child who cried easily and laughed easily.
A teenager who began giggling during the act of love for no reason at all, and the kind of adult
who would fall to the floor crying only to look at the place where the wall met the floor and so
realize that he had not plastered it very well. Indeed, Kalā had at times been amazed how little
Sourcerers had need to cry, afraid of the point when self-movement began to steal away such a
natural flow. To be a flowering tree but moist as well was essential, not because otherwise the
bough would break, but because humanity was at its best when laughing or sobbing or telling a
tale: In sum, when abandoning themselves to the ten-thousand things. There were no struggles
that one could not win, only struggles that one should not win. Kalā felt a lot better after he had
cried: More centred, more aware of his ingratitude, more whole. Was it not oftentimes said that
there is little in the Kósmos sadder than an adult who used to be a child?
Never would Kalā underestimate the power of freshly-squeezed orange juice. He kept drink-
ing till he belched. By that point he had hit his limit. He had drunk much of the bowl. Surely that
would be enough? He did not think he could stomach raw coca. A body could cry much more
easily than it could change. Through a gap in the window, the man could hear the water lapping
against the beach at the edge of the estate. No wonder he had had nightmares!
Hopefully, soon the whole area would be iced over. Damn it! Why did the People have to live
so close to open water? The Paipu; A sunset; The sea. All three had once been within walking
distance of his grandfather’s hut, and Kalā could not help but think about all the times he and
Hina had sailed to other renowned beaches when young. Back then, Hina would wake him at
the crack of dawn to go surfing—the rest of the world had disappeared for Kalā when he and his
sweetheart were side-by-side on a wave. Other days, they would laze about the surf shack of
his father’s village, eating shaved ice and asking their idols for riding stories.
But that had been in another time; Another lifetime. Almost...  .
It was the nature of things that there were a dozen views about everything till one knew the
answer; Thenceforth, there was never more than one. A wave rider always wanted to live near
the sea, Hina had said. She said it was the one thing that brought them together. “I can have

396
 KALIDASA

my toe in the ocean off the coast of Hawaiʻi and a lover can have their toe in the ocean off the
coast of Vinland and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.”
There had been nothing quite like wave riding with Hina in the middle of the ocean: The un-
predictable weather, the open-air accommodation, the sea snakes, coral cuts and packs of reef
sharks made it a trip for the uncommitted Naoist. Wave riding was rather like attitude dancing. It
was like sex: It always felt good, no matter how many times one had done it.
Incessant smiling was one of the deadly tools used by a klovn whose intent was to make an-
other cry. It would have been a grave injustice for the woman to insist that Kalā stop crying, to
think that comforting a person who was crying enabled them to relax and make further crying
unnecessary. Kalā put his head under his pillow and let the silence put things where they were
supposed to be. Babies cried over thirst, sickness or in need of a changing; For an infant there
was a time for crying and a time for laughing, the two often quite close together.
The one and only thing that infants required of themselves was to live. Even now, few hu-
mans were evolved enough to convey as clean a sorrow as puppies or babes.
Maybe the greatest faculty a mind possessed was the ability to cope with pain.
As much as they did of infant’s cries, classical Naoist—and Zen-Sufi—thinking taught of the
Four Doors of the Noús, which everyone moved through according to need.
First was the Door of Sleep. Sleep was a retreat from suffering. Sleep marked the passage of
time, giving distance from a thing that had caused hurt. When a person was wounded they would
often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who heard traumatic news could swoon or faint. This
was one of the mind’s ways of protecting itself; A step through the First Door.
Second was the Door of Forgetting. Some pains were too deep to heal, too hot to heal quickly.
In addition, many memories were just painful; Little healing possible. The saying “Time heals all
wounds,” was false. Time healed most wounds. The rest were hidden behind this door.
Third was the Door of Madness. There were times when a mind was dealt such a blow that
it hid itself within insanity. While this might not seem beneficial, it, in fact, often was.
There were times when one’s daily experience was nothing but agony.
Last was the Best Door—the Margaret Gate. For who would bear the whips and scorns of
time, when he, himself might his Nirvāṇa make, with a bare bodkin?
After a fistful of fresh coca leaves, Kalā wrapped himself in his furs and slept, despite there
being no preteen nieces or nephews, no attendant dolls or stuffed animals, bedding down be-
side him, forever and always embodying subtle things that mainlanders seemed unable to grok
by themselves, as there had been in his grandfather’s rather modest, cozy, single room, open
shack by the Great Blue. His body demanded it, his mind using the First Door to dull itself: The
wound was covered over until the proper time for healing came. In self-defence, a good portion
of the man’s consciousness would stop working and descend into slumber.
While he slept, most of the painful parts of the previous decades’ deficiencies were ushered
through the Second Door. Not completely; He did not forget what had happened, but the memory

397
 EUDAIMONIA

was dulled, as if seen through a glass, darkly. If Kalā desired to do so, he could have brought to
mind the breaking of a wave, or Hina and her pubic hair; He did not want to. He pushed those
thoughts away, let them gather dust in a seldom-used corner of his mind.
He dreamed, at first, not of Hina, but mundane things. The breaking of a wave could not ex-
plain the entirety of the sea. Slowly, the wound was beginning to grow numb.
Kalā dreamt he was walking through the jungle with his clean-shaven father, who walked si-
lently through the underbrush while Kalā kicked up more noise than an angry boar.
After a long period of comfortable silence, Kalā stopped to look at a tree. Kalā’s father came
up behind him. His father named the species: “You can tell by the raceme.” He reached past and
gently stroked the appropriate part of the plant. It indeed looked like a bouquet.
“This pea tree is good for making lightweight and manoeuvrable papa he‘e nalu.” His father
had been a rather agile kind of wave rider. “This one is stiffer and less flexible, but more buoy -
ant. Don’t touch the leaves. This one is great for making outriggers. The small fruits are safe to
eat when red, but never when shading from green to yellow to orange.
“This is how you set your feet when you want to mount a wave.” It made Kalā’s calves ache.
“This is how you part the water quietly, leaving no sign of your passing. This is where you find
the best surf in the morning; And here, in the evening. This is how you keep warm in the rain.
This thing is actually a fruit: You can eat it for energy; It tastes awful. This is a channel: A place
of relatively deep water where excess ocean, piled by the waves, flows out; They’re highways
going out to the furthest surf breaks. This is what to do if your legs start to cramp.
“This is how you tie a knot that won’t come undone; This one will.” He looped a string first one
way and then another. As Kalā watched his hands at work, he came to realize it was no longer
his father, but Hina; They were sitting ashore. Hina was teaching him to tie knots.
“Knots are interesting things,” Hina said, as she worked. “A knot will either be the strongest or
the weakest part of a rope. It altogether depends upon how well one makes the binding.” She
held up her hands, showing Kalā an impossibly complex pattern spread between.
Hina’s eyes glittered. At last: “Any questions?”
“Any questions?” Kalā’s father said. They had stopped early by some mo‘ai. Kalā’s father sat
tuning his ukulele and was finally going to sing his swan song for Kalā and his mate.
They had been waiting so very, very long.
“Are there any questions?” his father repeated, as he sat against a mo‘ai.
Eventually: “Why did the Rapa Nui carve the mo‘ai?”
“I don’t think anyone knows any more, for the most part. Some say they are chiefly the living
faces—” His father’s voice changed mid-sentence, becoming Hina’s, “—of deified ancestors.”
Hina held one hand out to the mo‘ai, as if feeling the warmth of a bonfire.
His father: “There’s a mana in them; Only a fool would deny that.”
Then his father was no longer there and there were many, many more mo‘ai than before.
More than Kalā had ever seen in one place. Did they form a kind of double circle?

398
 KALIDASA

A red stone was set across the top of two others, forming an arch with a shadowy figure be-
yond. In the dream, Kalā got to his feet, approached, reaching out as if to touch—
Kalā awoke. Kalā’s mind had covered a fresh pain with the names of a dozen types of wave
and surfboard, four ways to mount the surf, and nine knots made for wave riding.
He thought very little on the other matters of the dream.
Hina had taught him knots, but his father had never finished his song.
Kalā sat up in his bed, stretched. His face was dry.
Through the window he saw that it was morning. That meant it had been several hṓrai since
he had had coca. Since it had not made him sick, he decided to take a fistful.
Rather than refreshing him, all the food did was make him more aware of his hunger.
At first, he was like an automaton, thoughtlessly performing the actions that would keep him
alive: Eating, drinking, shitting and pissing; Sleeping too; As well as the daily exhaustion which
was his physiotherapy. Slowly—like a feather—he fell into the heart of wú-wéi.
Were Kalā’s best days still ahead? The story started when the hero got sober and put his life
back together; It did not end there. Somewhere deep in wú-wéi, Kalā would relax.
So, after taking care of his immediate needs, he found he had very little to do.
His days were one action following another, interspersed by sleep.
Kalā was definitely not himself: At least he was not the same person he had been a span of
days—or years—before. Everything he did he attended to with his whole being, leaving no part
of him free for remembering. Kalā slept in, rain or sun, on a soft bed with an intensity of indiffer-
ence that only the First Door could promote, only to waken dry-eyed and fully alert. The cycle in
him from day to day was like a river: Nothing the same, and yet everything. Everything that ha p-
pened appeared to happen at the only possible time, and it was always at exactly the right...
now. Try as Kalā might, he could not get to a physiotherapy appointment before he arrived—or
after; It was only in the instant of his arrival that he could arrive. The perfect moment, the only
possible moment, was now. His only vexation was with the weather, specifically when it rained.
When it rained he could not go out into the garden with his father’s ukulele.
Of course he played! The typical image of a depressed and beaten-down individual was of
somebody hunched-over or inert, spending the days of their lives in reaction instead of action.
Often, the assumption was that if one had more enthusiasm, or maybe, inspiration, one would
stand up and move forwards. In every case this equation was, however, backwards. The essen-
tial war within, and the resistance to all tears, began with the axiom that yearning and impulse
and curiosity, even desire, existed to be ended. To attain; To grasp; To do.
His fingers would therefore soon have once again thick calluses as hard as stones, so that
he could play for hṓra upon hṓra. He played all the tunes he remembered. Then he played the
half-remembered tunes as well, filling in the forgotten parts as best he was able.
Eventually, Kalā found himself playing more often than sleeping. Somewhere along the way
he would stop playing the tunes he knew, and start to invent some new ones.

399
 EUDAIMONIA

He had made up tunes before, had helped his father compose a verse or two. But now he
gave it his whole attention; Some of these tunes would stay with him for eternity.
The elderly man’s hobbies had been surfing, playing music, sex and silence.
Soon after, Kalā began playing something else. How could he describe it?
He began to play something other than tunes. When the sun warms the waves, the breeze
cooling drops of seawater off a wave rider’s skin, it felt a certain way.
Kalā would play until it sounded like Warm Semen or Cool Rain; The weather helped him to
get the feelings just right; Autumn: A season for mists and mellow fruitfulness.
The ukulele had been invented on Hawaiʻi during the Didáskal. Hellēnic immigrants carried
with them a number of odd, stringed instruments from across Eurṓpē—each the ancestor of one
or another type of ukulele, which all became rather popular on the Hawaiʻian islands and far be-
yond. And so, Kalā flicked his fingers and his instrument made a second voice. Maybe he would
string a quiet chord, then touch a peg; Those nearby who knew what was coming would make
soft exclamations, while those who did not would ask. A quiet life in the country with the possi-
bility of being useful to people by whom it was easy to do well: The good life.
He would spend nearly two whole days trying to capture Papa is On the Back Line, a spe-
cial place where the calm of the sea began and the breaking of the surf ended.
By the end of the second week, he could play things nearly as easily as he saw or heard or
felt them. Sun Peeking Behind a Cloud; Bird Drinking; Dew in the Bracken.
Some time in the fourth week, Kalā stopped looking outside and started looking inside for
things to play. Kalā learned to play Riding in the Canoe with My Father; Fucking with Mother by
the Fire; Watching Hina; Grinding Against Hina at Night; Hina Orgasming.
Needless to say, playing these things hurt more than a little, but it was a hurt like tender fin-
gers on strings. He callused over, the murk of his pain clearing itself up in time.
He played, describing in sound the mighty deepness and fullness of such amazing, abund-
ant life as the ocean contained that never could anyone dream it up, as well as its crash of wave
upon wave upon wave of joy, its thrills and its spills, some waves hurting one badly while oth-
ers made one feel like a prince or princess out of this world. Kalā played the feelings he felt in-
side when he thought of the voices of the ocean’s depths: Fish and the grinding of continent
upon continent and the like. Milwa'tem would play for him a cylinder of the sound of the deep-
est Marklandshaf; For nine years, researchers had been tracking the migration of a whale that
had a unique sonic signature—so unique it appeared to have never found a mate.
After the sound of the deep had dog-paddled out of him through his fingers, he found himself
playing his belief that the sea might have killed him. But, far more than that, far more than the
chance there always was that a sea might kill, he played his father’s knowledge, his people’s
knowledge, his own, that it might save one in a way nothing else could.
Sometime afterwards, one of the strings broke; Broke beyond repair. He thus spent the bet-
ter part of the day in a mute stupor, unsure of what to do, his mind-life numb, or mostly asleep.

400
 KALIDASA

Ukuleles generally employed catgut, not nylon. Kalā focused, with a dim shadow of his habitual
philosophizing, on his problem. After realizing that he could neither make a string nor acquire a
new one immediately, he sat and began to learn to play with only five strings. In a week, he had
just as much fun playing with but five strings as he had had with the full six.
When Anujakāśyapa was in his sixties, he had immigrated to Tavalu, seeking the Te of the
Way. One imagines him sitting in a tiny hut by the sea writing a letter to Bodhidharma, whom he
respected very much. He might look out at a watery twilight, a palm tree, and write in a corres-
pondence something like: It is so comely I must show you how it looks!

You remember, yes, that by birth I am a fundamental Taoist and

everything I do is affected by this? It has been the basis of my per son-
ality. From rotten civilization, I have been seeking all these years to
find a more natural way of living, partaking of a simplicity or savagery
that knows only the Way. And the more I thought about it, the more I
was determined to live in a savage mode alone. How deaf and stupid I
have been! When somebody reads a manuscript, wants to discover its
meaning, they will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them
deceptions and worthless; They will not do so whatever the instruc-
tion, but will read them, they will study and might even c ome to love
them, letter by letter. But I now, who have wanted to read the book
of the Way and the book of the Te, for the sake of a meaning I have
read, have not scorned the symbols and letters. I’ve called the visible
world a dream or a deception, called time and the Self forms without
true substance, yet, by luck, I have yet to Awaken.
I tell you now that there is a Right Way and a Wrong Way, my
friend, and the Wrong Way is the right way. And here is something to
make you laugh: Do you recall our dispute years ago when there was a
possibility of founding a Taoist community out here in the Great Blue?
Presently, if these words find you well, it's my hope you will read that
I have come to live with a gentle, letter-less people that lives from
the sea. Those of the Way who I am certain will choose to come here
later will find all the wherewithals for living simply. This community
in the tropics will, just perhaps, complete the closing of the human
circle, being immersed here in a far more natural, more primitive and
above all else a far less putrefied and lofty form of life. This is what
makes them so dear and worthy of veneration, at least to me. They’re
to be likened to infantile children or newborn babes. It’s because of
this that I've already fallen deeply in love with them.

401
 EUDAIMONIA

Certainly it was true that there had been many things about the pre-Didáskal Polünēsiakoí
that had needed to be gotten rid of—things they had needed to change. Yet, they had no need
to be desperate with themselves; Along the way to uselessness and joy, many of those things
might change of themselves; A great many others could just be worked on in their spare time.
The first thing Kalā needed to do was recognize that the material world was more or less a myth
but that that was exactly the way he wanted it. He knew what an upside-down concept this was.
It was not by getting Liberated from the world that Naoists became enlightened, but by getting
further into it: By getting tuned-in, tapped-in, turned-on. They became light-hearted and joyous
and full of a wondrous expansion and contrast, discovering the very simple and childlike secret
known to those beings who lived in the Nao: Sansāra could be fun!
If his hosts had been anxious to intrude on his playing before, they were awed by this point.
Later, as he was exploring Waiting to Exhale once again, a second string broke.
This time he did not hesitate; He stripped off the useless string and began again.
Kalā was only dimly aware of his audiences now; Dimly aware of the sweat on his body. He
was so deeply tuned-in that he could not say where the music stopped and he began.
Thus it was that Kalā found himself silently reminiscing—without knowing how he had come
to do so—about being healthy and seventeen and often erect; About strolling down to the pool
of water under the waterfall behind the boar-trail again and again. It was there that he had met
Hina. It was there that he had first observed how the mystery of a sunset, a deep pool of water
and the lithe grace of coconut trees could add to a female’s beauty, giving it a profundity, even a
magic, which stirred a teenage heart to familiar emotions. He had walked through the bush that
way many times, but his first time, his head had reeled at the beauty which surrounded him. He
had been intoxicated, at first, only by the lovely scents in that indescribably fertile nook as a slight
breeze had cooled the Hawaiʻian air, swaying the branches of the palm trees against the sky. For
some reason, the place had given him an impression so friendly and vibrant.
He had often gone there to bathe. There had been a brook that bubbled over the rocks in a
swift stream, and then, after falling into a deep pool, ran on, shallow, clear and slow past a ford
made by great stones, towards the sea, seeming to say: “No worries, I will get there someday!”
The coconut trees, with their frivolous elegance, grew thickly on the banks, all clad with trailing
vines, and they were reflected in the clear water. Throughout the area were litters of rock forma-
tions re-configured in the shape of human genitals. It was just such a scene as one might find all
over the island, yet with an indefinable difference; For it had a richness, a passion and a scen-
ted languor. The water had been fresh, but not cold; And it was delicious after the heat of the
day. To bathe there emptied not only the body, but the soul. Or so it had seemed.
Like silence after noise, or the cool, clear water of the pool on a hot day, emptiness vacated
the cluttered mind, allowing the now—and the Nao—to enter the void left behind.
At the time of day when he had gone, there would often be other seekers after serenity there.
Which, however, had not stopped him from lingering for a long time, floating idly in the cool wa-

402
 KALIDASA

ter, now drying himself in the sun, enjoying the sharing of a luxury. The place really was one of
those “in” places which a Eurṓpēan might tell friends about with admonitions not to spread the
word; One did not want to spoil it with crowding. This idea had always amused Kalā. Eurōpḗans
spread the word about such places too, but did so under the guise of keeping a secret.
Still, it had not been at that time of day that he had met Hina.
Occupied till late one day, he had walked down one evening to the pool when the light was
almost failing; A girl had been sitting there. She glanced back as he had come, then dived into the
gloom. Thus had she vanished like a pigeon tumbling in dusky summer air. He had been sur-
prised. He had wondered where she had hidden herself. He had swum downstream to at last
find her sitting on a rock, fully naked. She had looked at him with bored eyes.
He had waved and called out a greeting. “Aloha! Aloha!”
She had not so much as glanced back in his direction.
Eurōpḗans tended to trivialize, misuse or misunderstand that word; Indeed, they missed the
point entirely. It meant “Face-to-face with the breath of life!” Alo—face-to-face, and ha—breath.
The word conveyed an awareness of connection, as well as an acknowledgment of the nature
of life. What did it say, Kalā wondered, that dictionaries explained the greeting as encompassing
love, affection, compassion, grace, charity, fondness and even veneration?
Kalā remembered how Hina had eventually answered, and then let herself back into the wa-
ter. She had swum easily, her hair spreading over her shoulders. He had watched her cross the
pool and climb out onto the bank. She had wrung out her hair, in no way appearing to be con-
cerned; She had looked like some paranormal creature of the water. He saw that she was only
part-Polünēsiakí. He had swum to her, calling out, “You’re having a late swim.”
She had shook back her hair, letting it spread over her shoulders in a luxuriant way. She had
laughed with a childlike frankness, even as he stared at the fuzz of hair at her pubis.
She had paused a moment, irresolute, and then sauntered off.
For some reason, the next time he went to the pool at sunset, he had on a whim not spoken to
her. For her part, she had taken little notice of him; She had not even glanced in his direction.
She had swum all about the small pool; She had dived or rested upon the bank as though she
were quite alone: He had a strange feeling that he was invisible. Scraps of poetry, some half for-
gotten, floated across his memory, and obscure recollections of the Tantra he had half-heartedly
studied. When she had sauntered away, he had found a scarlet mallow where she had been; It
was a flower that she had worn in her hair when she came to bathe, and having taken it out, had
forgotten or not cared to put in again. He had taken it in his hands and looked at it with an unfa -
miliar emotion. He had had an instinct to keep it. Now that night had fallen, Kalā had let himself
into the water softly in order to make no sound, and swum lazily in the warm darkness. The wa-
ter had seemed fragrant from her lithe, tattooed body. He had had nowhere to go.
As far as Kalā had been concerned, the central problem with the great obsession for saving
time was simple: One could never save time, one could only spend it.

403
 EUDAIMONIA

One could only choose to spend it wisely or foolishly.

Kalā had asked himself what strangeness there was in her nature that urged her to go down
to the pool when there was little chance that anyone should be there to see her beauty.
Polünēsiakoí had always been rather devoted to fresh water. They bathed in it, somewhere
or other, every day, once always, and quite often twice; But they bathed often in groups, laugh-
ing and joyous, entire families all together; One often saw nude girls or boys, lit by the sun shin-
ing through the trees, splashing about the shallows of the stream. It was as though there were
in this pool some secret that had attracted Hina: Maybe even against her will.
Kalā had walked back home under a starry sky. He had felt at peace with the world.
That summer he had gone every sunset to the pool, and every sunset Kalā had seen her. He
had overcome his silence; She had become playful. They had sat together above the waterfall.
They had lain down on a ledge that overlooked the pool, watching the gathering dusk envelop. It
had been inevitable that their meetings should become known, and he was subjected to much
encouragement by his birth-mother, who had been his first partner, and his siblings, with whom
he had always engaged in exploratory play, investigating each other’s genitals and stimulating
each other to orgasm; A rather common form of introduction to sex all over Gaia.
All of a sudden, as he had turned fourteen or so, the time had simply become right to begin
penetrative sex, and his mother had take special pains to be easy and patient with him, this en-
tirely familiar dynamic in his family relationships a source of enjoyment for them all.
Polünēsiaká boys and girls of all ages often played together naked. Of course, even the very
young observed dogs and pigs and other animals mating, and these activities were discussed
openly with parents and with each other. Young Polünḗsioi acquired their sex education in day-
by-day exposure to precepts, practices and attitudes concerning it; Traditionally, childish curios-
ities about sex were always satisfied, even instigated by an adult. His mother had taught him to
look forward to sex and about smiling, and about how to please a female in order to cause her
to orgasm, as well as showing him how females could “wink” their vaginas. Kalā’s mother and
father had often fucked in the main room of their hut that at times had been home to up to fifteen
residents of all ages; He had watched his elder brother receive and be received by each of his
varied darlings in that same room. All this took place without stigma. No matter one’s age, self-
stimulation, outercourse between uncommitted individuals, intercourse, threesomes, foursomes
and orgies, polyandry or polygyny, incest, pædophilia, and of course homosexuality—and much
more—were all not merely accepted, but actively encouraged and praised.
Sanātanist Tantrics might think that sex could be a source of Liberation from sansāra; The
Vajrayāna Tantrics might believe that the Guru Rimpoché had used the orgasm to manifest “The
Mind of Clear Light” in as many as several thousand women; But, as far as Naoists were con-
cerned, a way of life that had goals, however laudable, and kept on insisting “Around the next
corner, over the next rise,” worked against the Natural Order of things. Had it been a letdown for
Kalā to learn that le‘a was at all conceived of in this way? One of the mainland’s idiosyncrasies.

404
 KALIDASA

Kalā had observed that Kiran was always headed somewhere, somewhere inside his head where
he had not yet been; Anywhere but where he physically was. As usual, his cleverness took the
credit; But it was not that which was responsible when things worked out for him.
Kalā had observed that Tantra resembled haute-cuisine: It fascinated lots of sophisticated
peoples and age groups, people who sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and
riveting pictures; The ancients had composed poetry about it, of course, thinking it to be some-
thing one lived to partake of, not partook of to live; At times, the best part was being hungry and
creating vast banquets in one’s imagination. At the end of the day, however, a Naoist was one
who would happily settle for such simple things as firewood-grilled fish, eaten with fresh coconut
and washed down with sweet coconut water; Recalling always Lǎo-Tzǝ’s teaching that ignorant of
the intercourse of Yin and Yang, a newborn’s penis could nevertheless stand erect.
Rather central to Polünēsiakí society, in this way, was the expression of sexual humour. Sex
was and remained a source of humour and teasing, and, above all, fun. In everyday conversa-
tion and in song and story, it was considered to be an art form to speak using sexual double-en-
tendres—kaona. Indeed, “to have fun” was the very word for orgasm—le‘a.
As for concern with sexually transmitted disease, this affliction only arrived with the first sail -
ors from Eurṓpē; Their lack of concern with illegitimacy, a permissive attitude to multiple part-
ners, and their feeling of responsibility to sexually instruct their children in practice and not just
theory, freed the traditional Polünēsiakoí from most of pre-Didáskal Eurṓpēan society’s fears as-
sociated with sexual expression. To the Polünēsiakoí, sex was not a subject—or a set of beha-
viours, either—to be avoided or reserved only for adults or committed partners; Nor was sex re -
stricted to certain times or places or occasions. The pre-Didáskal concept of “marriage” did not
exist for them; Of course, prostitution, as it had been understood elsewhere at that time, was
completely absent, since plentiful sexual partners were always available for mutual enjoyment.
Even the sexual desire of an adult for a nonadult, heterosexual or homosexual, was accepted
and appreciated; The erotic preference by an adult for children was viewed more as being un-
usual, like a penchant for whips during sex, rather than as being in any way immoral.
Not even the Hellēnic city-states of the Hellēnistic Age had been as forward-looking as this!
It took the rest of the world millennia to learn what his people had always known: Sexual drives
or desires should be considered as basic as those of eating, drinking or breathing.
Kalā’s mother had been just plain delightful to be around, always, all the time. It had not been
her physical beauty—which had not been that outstanding by the usual criteria—although she
had been utterly beautiful to him. Nor had it been her enthusiastic interest in sharing érōs—al-
though she had indeed been enthusiastic, ready any time, and often on a rather short fuse; And
skilled at it and becoming more so. Was sex a learned Art—as much as acrobatics or tight rope
walking—or was it an instinct? To Kiran’s mind animals might mate by instinct, but it took skill and
patient attention to turn copulation into a true Art. Kalā’s mother had been skilled at it, and got
better and better, eager to learn, free of fetishes or silly preconceptions, patiently willing to prac-

405
 EUDAIMONIA

tice anything—and with that a spiritual element which could turn a sweaty exercise into a living
wonderment. For instance, she had often sucked on Kalā’s testicles and at the same time mas-
saged his foreskin and glans until his penis had got as hard as a pole of iron; She would take it
into her sucking mouth and at the same time squeeze down on her own clit and labia, timing it
so well that Kalā came but a smidgen before her, while she with a truly awe-inspiring look of de-
light swallowed his cum as she orgasmed herself, shuddering down every muscle. But then, she
had loved even more getting Kalā back up, then taking his cock in her mouth again, with a soft
touch and a sly look in the eye, for as long as possible, entering as if into a kind of meditation as
she played with him: She had called it “lingam worship”, ravished by its beauty and its power. She
had teased him and toyed with him, pushing him to the edge, time and time again, not letting him
tip over, making him hold back, not letting him do anything to her, just her licking, touching, suck-
ing and so taking possession of his cock, making it altogether hers, yet whispering to him that
she wanted him to share his gift with other women, and even his little sister.
Kalā recalled that when he had been little and she would bathe him in warm water and take
precious delight in soaping his soft genitals for a time, and then at the end, rinsing them and tak-
ing them both together into her mouth and rolling them around there and occasionally nibbling
upon his foreskin, all the while playing with herself: One hand holding his body close, the other
on her slit. Some past philosophers might have told Kalā he could not have consented when he
was so young of age: What did they know? He knew that he had consented; Indeed, Kalā did
not just consent—even though it was wordless consent—it was also a great happiness for him.
When he attained puberty and the first fuzzy hairs on his face and crotch began to sprout, she
had given him his first ejaculation, kneeling behind him and cupping his dangling testicles in her
left hand while with her right she slowly, methodically increased both the length and the girth of
his cock, until in the end he squirted almost all the way across the tiny shack: He had just stood
there frozen by the entire experience; One that he had never had before. Years later, when she
was past childbearing age, and his erect cock had grown to a size and shape perfect for stimu -
lating that most sensitive spot inside her cunt, she would hold his sword gently and ease it into
her self-lubricated scabbard, using its internal muscles to encourage him even more, prolonging
the peak of his orgasm for what seemed like hṓraí, while she simultaneously handled his scrotum
and perineum and kissed his lips, neck and ears, longingly guiding his right hand to one breast
and the other to her clitoris and then her labia, until finally when he could almost not bear the nu-
minous ecstasy any longer, his semen spurted forcefully into her and he descended gently down
from a sky-high high as though floating upon light clouds of love. She had often taken delight in
watching him pump his penis, getting more and more excited herself until when he was close to
climaxing she would pull down her grass skirt, her left hand using a carrot on herself, while with
the other she would enhance his own climax by cradling his sack in her palm and entwining her
forefinger and thumb around its base, gently squeezing till waves of indescribable synaesthetic
brilliance reverberated up and down his entire torso and head, all the way from his root to his

406
 KALIDASA

crown. She would even talk about such times with him afterwards during their less erotic mo-
ments, remembering the delight it brought her to love herself by loving him: “Happy, naked, bare-
footed, wild-haired, lit by the light of a bonfire and the setting sun, kissing, fucking, dancing—that’s
the way to live!” On the whole, Gaia had thankfully moved away from feeling wicked about having
sex with one’s children to feeling guilty about not having sex with one’s children! Of course, he
was not her only partner, nor she his. But the kind of sex they had had been truly special. The
bond between a mother and her son, maybe the strongest in all of the vistas of humanity, had
been enhanced by a very strong sexual bond, perhaps the second-strongest.
One of the most alluring observations Anujakāśyapa—and later, the Hellēnics—had made on
visiting Polünēsía was the total non-practice of foreplay. What was the point, when—as Nature
intended and as easy subtropical living encouraged—everybody had delicious thoughts about
sex every six palmoí or so? It was no surprise to Kalā that upon meeting Hina one sunset on the
trail to the pool, they had engaged in coitus immediately, with little conversation or preliminar-
ies; Hina had taken his face in hand and kissed him, then both had moved on promptly to each
other’s genitalia. Among the ?:@ABC=<DE:F, there were not many false starts; What was meant to
be had a way of working out. Call it timing, fate, call it what you want, it was what it was. What
was meant to be would be, and nothing more would be; And true, sometimes in the end the boy
did not get the girl—and that was all right too; Life went on. Did Kalā consider a long life import-
ant? A long time ago a woman had proved to him that all human beings lived the same length of
time... since they all lived in the now; Each person lived their life in the now. A life was too long
when one was no longer enjoying the now. If his music could have one moral only, it should be
to impart a fraction of the interplay between falling in love and living in the Nao.
Once all the peaceful resplendent magic inside Kalā had passed through his fingers, it was
then that he almost saw through his mind’s eye, at long last, the cradle of the back line; Felt the
stretch of his mana, with which he had lost touch over the last few months, if not years; Felt re-
juvenated to have touched the feeling of having jumped upon the nearest incoming wave, if only
to give the unpredictable sea a chance to decide for him how it would be; Since no two waves
were ever the same. Kalā had been on the verge of recapturing the edges of paradise; It was
about then, therefore, that Ḥayim had tasted blood in his urine for the first time.

Kalā proved a difficult man to find. He had a private suite, but only seemed to use it to sleep.
When Milwa'tem visited Lists, he read that Kalā only attended one learn-sharing: Unlikely Maths.
This had been rather unhelpful in tracking the man down, as according to the notice board, Now
was the time of the class, and Everywhere was the location. Milwa'tem eventually spotted the old
man through sheer dumb luck across a crowded courtyard. He noticed that the old islander was
without his ukulele. This was something of a rarity. He decided on the spur of the moment that
he should not miss this opportunity to speak with the elderly wave rider.

407
 EUDAIMONIA

By the time Milwa'tem pushed through the midday crowd and caught up with him, they were
on the edge of the grounds, following a road that led into the village. “Good morning,” Milwa'tem
said, jogging up to the man. Then: “I was hoping I could talk with you.”
“A sad, little hope.” The nurse behind the old man’s wheelchair did not break his stride.
Then: “You should aim higher. A Sourcerer ought to be afire with high ambitions.”
“I hope to study wave riding with you, if you’re willing,” the teenager said.
The dirt road curved and trees blocked the sight of the buildings behind them. The leaves were
more gorgeous than ever; The first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground.
“I hope you’ll accept me as a stud—” Milwa'tem tried again. The teenager coughed hard. Too
hard; The coughing wracked his body each time he did it so that he dreaded the next cough.
His stomach was clenched in knots. Every muscle in his body ached.
“Fine,” Kalā sighed. “Go find me three pinecones.” He made a circle with his thumb and fin-
ger. “This big, without any of the little bits broken off.” He bundled himself up right in the middle
of the road and made a shooing motion with both hands. “Go on! Go on! Hurry up!”
Still coughing, Milwa'tem stumbled off into the surrounding trees.
It took him five mikroí to find three pinecones of the type described.
By the time he got back to the road he was dishevelled and bramble-scratched.
Both Kalā, as well as his nurse, were nowhere to be seen.
Milwa'tem looked around stupidly, then cursed loudly, dropped the pinecones and took off
at a run, following the road. He caught up quickly, as they were just idling along.
“So, what did you learn?” Kalā asked him, not turning back.
Eventually: “That... that you want to be left alone?”
The purple-haired old man smiled and spread his arms dramatically: “Here endeth the les-
son! Here endeth my long-standing tutelage of Milwa'tem of Meshikamau!”
A sigh. If he left now, he could still catch the orgy, but part of him suspected that this might be
a test of some sort: Perhaps Kalā was just making sure that he was truly interested before he
accepted him as a student. That was the way it usually went in stories: The young boy had to
prove his dedication to the old hermit before the latter took him under his wing.
“Will you at least answer a few questions?” Milwa'tem asked.
“Fine,” Kalā said, “Three questions. But only if you agree to leave me be afterwards.”
Milwa'tem thought for a moment. Then: “Why don’t you want to teach me?”
“Because Sourcerers make exceptionally poor wave riders,” he said.
Milwa'tem took a deep breath. “I’m sorry that your experience with Sourcery has left some-
thing to be desired,” he said, carefully. “Let me be the first to assure you that—”
“Ye Gods,” Kalā sighed, disgusted. “A bootlicker too. You lack the requisite spine and testic-
ular fortitude to study Sourcery.” At this, hot words boiled up inside the youth.
“You aren’t telling me the truth,” he spat. “Why don’t you want to teach me riding?”
“For the same reason I don’t want a puppy!” Kalā growled.

408
 KALIDASA

And then, too: “Because you are too short. Your eyes are too dark. You’ve the wrong number
of fingers. Come back when you are taller or have found a decent pair of eyes.”
The two of them stared at each other for a long while.
Finally, Kalā shrugged and motioned to the nurse. “Fine. I’ll show you.”
They followed the road north. Kalā was rolling along, picking up leaves with the sticky end of
his cane and tossing them into the air. At one point he stopped and sat motionless and intent
for nearly half a hṓra, staring at a bush which seemed simply to be swaying slowly in the wind.
At another time the nurse abruptly began to run for a few steps, then stopped and jumped his
feet on the anti-tip bar of the wheelchair, both of them rolling together down the further side of
some hill. They repeated this on the next hill: A few quick steps, then a long slide down. All the
while Milwa'tem kept his mouth firmly shut. He did not ask: “Where are we going?” or “What are
you looking at?” He knew a dozen legends about heroes who squandered their questions by
chatting them away. He had two questions left; He wanted to make them count.
Writing engendered in humans particular attitudes towards language. It encouraged them to
take words for granted. Writing had enabled them to store vast quantities of words indefinitely.
This was advantageous on the one hand, but dangerous on the other. The result was that they
had developed a kind of false security where language was concerned, and their sensitivity to
the ineffable had deteriorated. They had become, in proportion, unkind to mythology.
At first, he had called himself a Warrior, the blind man had: This Milwa'tem knew, as was the
Toltec tradition. Later, a Nahualli; Later still, a Sourcerer—not sorcerer, but Sourcerer.
Milwa'tem knew that at more than one point in the Nahualli’s short life amongst the Innut there
had arisen an amazing hope amongst some that the strange man was none other than the Great
Aiasheu reborn: Reborn from the Barrens. Who had seen his body? Who knew where the folk
hero was buried? Had he ever lived? For that matter, who saw any body which the tundra and
so many millennia had taken? The Nahualli had been blind, this was attested, his eye sockets
scarred. He had also had a voice which conveyed a crackling penetration, a powerful force that
demanded a response. Many had recorded this. His skin had been darkly tanned.
Among the crowds on those winter days so long ago, many had indeed noted the Nahualli’s
arrival. If Milwa'tem were to study the history of the last hundred years, he would find that this
was an age wherein a human being was a self-mover. None were given an identity: They had
to invent one for themselves, navigating the confusing and vulnerable journey to becoming a per-
son. I’m a Saeson! I’m Zen! I’m Nipponese! I’m Mazdāyāsni! Yes, indeed: Somehow, invent them-
selves a Gaian must. How had Samukelisiwe selected Sheshatshiu from amongst all the end-
less identity options available to her? Should not everyone feel as Milwa'tem had felt when fa-
cing two-dozen flavours of toothpaste on the shelf in an apothḗkē in Valandvik?
Nevertheless, Milwa'tem had read that the blind Nahualli had been as if a reminder of times
almost forgotten—long in stride and with a wiriness that spoke of many years on his two feet.
He had turned his head with that looseness that many blind men cannot pull off. His head had

409
 EUDAIMONIA

moved only where his nose had led. The town had perhaps smelled musty and damp. Through a
day’s evening crowd the blind man and his guide would appear, walking slowly.
The Nahualli would turn, it seeming as though he was looking about him, seeing with his two
empty sockets the market before him. The market had most likely been a buzzing place: Food
would have been on the fire; Many things would have been offered, the voices calling in com -
petitive stridence: Around it all there would be conversations in a dozen dialects of Innu-Aimun in-
terspersed with a smattering of the harsh gutturals and squeaks of other languages.
At such times he would teach the Innut what it had meant for the Héllēnes to come offering
disciplines totally unknown to them. “They brought the Lógos and eudaimoníā; When asked what
they thought of their own civilization, they merely answered that they would consider it to be a
very good idea. The world language wants us to create and sustain is a world that is created by
a description of reality and its arbitrary and ‘inviolable’ rules, which we too have learned to accept
and defend, replacing the obsession with seriousness and rituals which had become such a fact
of life after the passing of the Old Sourcerers; All this might appear legitimate, yet it is inapplicable
to Sourcery since it is based on an ‘understanding’ of the world of everyday life. The reason the
Innut respected the makushan in the past, could it be because we feared something bad may
happen to us? A barely recognizable caricature of an ancient wholeness.
“Humanity must return to its ancient calling, to our genius at knowing our own true Selves.
We must return to our roots. To be Men and Women of Unknowledge means that our only ob-
ligation is to be brutally honest, and admit, when we don’t know something, that we don’t know
it. It is in the unknown that we find greatness. The external world carries no knowledge; It has
merely robbed us of our Inner Selves. We control the world because we control the mind. Real-
ity is all inside you. There is nothing which a human being cannot do. I could float off this floor
like a soap bubble if I wished. You imagine that there is something called Mother Nature which
will be indifferent to what I say? Nonsense. Language holds you captive. No contradiction exists
between élengkhos on the one hand and Unknowledge on the other.”
The belief that nothing existed outside one’s own mind—surely there must be some way of
demonstrating it to be false? A faint smile had thence twitched on the corners of the Nahualli’s
mouth. “Metaphysics, it appears, is not your strong suit. The word you all are trying to think of
at the moment is solipsism. But you’re mistaken: Unknowledge is not solipsism.” Whatever was
said to him, the Nahualli’s swift answer would crush the speaker like a bludgeon.
The Old Sourcerers had been quite fortunate indeed because they had had plenty of time to
learn marvellous things. They had Seen wonders that Milwa'tem could not even imagine, learn-
ing everything within themselves through Seeing, remnants of which may be found among the
traditional beliefs of peoples in every region of the world. Nevertheless, by the time the Didáskal
made it to the New World, the Old Sourcerers had been gone for millennia. The New Sourcer-
ers had corrected a few mistakes of the Old Sourcerers, but most of what the latter had Seen had
been lost. Had it in fact been the centuries of intellectual “subjugation” following the Didáskal that

410
 KALIDASA

provided the ideal situation in which to undertake such a revival, the extreme rigour and self-ex-
amination of that period giving the People the impetus to refine their ideas?
Back in the present: Milwa'tem strode long beside the old man’s wheelchair. “Anything that is
worth pursuing is going to require a man to suffer, just a little bit. I recall swimming around in the
Lófóten Islands, just inside the Arctic Circle. The water was hovering right at freezing. The air?
Brisk, even without a windchill; I could literally feel the blood trying to leave my—”
“You’re trying to get me to answer questions you’re not asking. It won’t work.”
They emerged from the forest; The dirt road became a path leading down the beach which
ran between the transitionry and the village. Bigger than most, it had elegant lines, as well as
high rocks, pebbles and sand. There were no bathers at this time of year. Still, Milwa'tem could
understand how proximity to the sea was desirable because it was easier to do nothing by the
sea than anywhere else—or perhaps because sunbathing cannot at all be considered a devo-
tion: It constituted pleasures following one after another, like pearls slipping off a—
Milwa'tem had decided on a second question. “How does it make you feel?”
“Done in; It’s been so long...” Kalā sighed, looking sad. “Able to see the sea but not to ride it.
Able to smell the salt in the air, but not taste it, nor feel it on my skin.” Kalā motioned the nurse to
bring him to a stop overlooking a stony bluff, a short drop to land upon a big, flat area of beach
underneath. Kalā rolled perilously near the edge, his furs and blankets flapping around him like
flags. He seemed impressive, actually, if Milwa'tem was willing to ignore the fact that the man was
hooked up to a strange device hanging off the back of his wheelchair.
“What do I have to do,” Milwa'tem asked, “to study wave riding under you?”
Kalā met the teenager’s eye: “Jump,” he said. “Jump off this bluff.”
That was when Milwa'tem knew that it really had been a test. Kalā had been taking his mea-
sure ever since they met; He had a grudging respect for tenacity. Had Kalā been astonished he
had held his tongue so long? He was upon the verge of accepting him as a student.
But he needed more: Proof of his dedication; A demonstration; A leap of faith.
Still looking Kalā in the eye, Milwa'tem stood and stepped off the edge.
Kalā’s expression was a marvellous sight: Milwa'tem had never seen a man so astonished.
He spun as he fell, saw Kalā raise a hand, as if making a belated attempt to halt him.
At first, Milwa'tem had merely felt totally weightless, as if he were floating.
Then he struck the ground. Not gently, like a feather settling down, but hard—like a brick hit -
ting a dirt road. He landed on his back with his left arm beneath him. His vision went dark as
the back of his head hit the sand and all the air was driven from his body.
Milwa'tem did not lose consciousness. He simply lay there, breathless and unable to move.
He would remember thinking, quite earnestly, that he was dead, or even blind.
Eventually, his sight returned, leaving him blinking against the sudden brightness of the blue
sky. Pain tore through his left shoulder and he tasted blood. He could not breathe. He tried to
roll off his arm, but his body would not obey. Had he broken his neck? My back...

411
 EUDAIMONIA

After a long, terrifying moment, he managed to gasp a breath, then another. He gave a sigh
of relief, thus realizing that he had at least one bruised rib in addition to everything else, but he
moved his fingers slightly, then his toes. They worked. He had not broken his spine.
As Milwa’tem lay there, counting his blessings and his bruises, Kalā rolled into his field of vis-
ion. Milwa’tem smelled a residue of fear riding on the stink of the man’s perspiration. “Congratu-
lations,” Kalā said. “That was the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Ever.”
At day’s end Kalā was wheeled across the bridge over the gap between the two halves of the
estate on either side of the transitionry. Below, a river plunged down in a short waterfall, splash-
ing into rocky pools on its way to the Norandvik. Kalā glanced towards the harbour, seeing the
waves beyond the pebbles lining the shore. The overcast sky provided his body with little heat.
Still, he had to wipe sweat from his brow. The long-sleeve tunics he always wore now kept him
overly warm, but they also kept the chill air out. He had himself wheeled inside.
Kalā and his nurse stopped by the apothḗkē on the way to bed. The steamer had come in last
night and might have brought him some fresh coca; Or so the old man hoped.
Entering to the sound of a brass bell, Kalā saw a handsome boy come out of the back room: It
was Nutin. He was a lumpy boy, his red hair cut short and well-combed. At first, Kalā assumed
he must be part-Polünēsiakós, till he had looked a little closer. Sparkling with canny calculations
his eyes were. Still, there had to be a little bit of blood not of the Innut in him.
When he saw Kalā, he spoke: “The master just left them to soak.”
Kalā nodded; The nurse parked him over by one far corner, out of the way.
When κύ. Fjalar and κύ. Galar walked into the apothḗkē, there was a red haired youth sitting
behind the desk, tapping a pencil on a piece of paper that bore the marks of much rewriting and
crossing out. As they neared, the youth scowled, scratching out an equation. His face was built
to scowl; His hands clean, but callused. His clothes reeked of primitivism. The part of κύ. Fjalar
that was not long removed from the days of the Old Sourcerers would want to laugh.
Nutin tapped his pencil for another few moments before writing.
“Names,” the Nahualli-in-training said, without looking up.
Fjalar: “Fjalar Hrafnkelsson.” And Galar: “Galar Hrafnkelsson.”
Nutin flipped through the ledger, found a particular page, frowning. “You’re not in the book.”
Nutin glanced up shortly, then scowled again before turning back to whatever mathematics he
had been labouring over. When the dwarves made no signs of leaving, he flicked a finger, as if
shooing away bugs. “Feel free to piss off.” The Nahualli-in-training did not look up.
Κύ. Fjalar decided to take a hold of his temper: “We’ve just—”
“Listen,” Nutin said, as if explaining to a simpleton. “You are not in the book.” The younger
daímōn made an exaggerated gesture towards the ledger with both hands. “You don’t get... a...
thing.” He made a second gesture towards the outer doors. “The end.”
“We’ve just come from a meeting with your father and—”
Nutin tossed up his hands: “Then of course you’re not in the book yet!”

412
 KALIDASA

Κύ. Fjalar held up a finger to forestall whatever idiocy his brother had no doubt been about
to say, dug in a pocket for Pienish’s handwritten note. “Asklepiádēs Pienish gave—”
“I don’t care if my father carried you here piggy-back!”
Another shooing motion: “Quit wasting my time. I’ve work to do.”
“Wasting your time?” κύ. Fjalar demanded, despite himself.
Then: “Do you have any idea what we’ve gone through to—” He took a breath.
Nutin lowered his pencil, his expression suddenly amused. “Wait, let me guess,” the lad said.
He came around the desk and looked down at the dwarf. “You were always smarter than the
other hatchlings back in... Stügia... or whatever gilded and over-sophisticated pānoptikón you
are from. Your ability to withhold gratification left your Lord father awestruck.”
Kalā heard the outer door open behind him, but Nutin did not pay it any attention as he ges-
ticulated. “Your father always knew that you were special, thus he finally opened the family cof-
fers. He bought you several pairs of shoes, had a dozen suits tailored.” The teenager reached
down to rub the fabric of κύ. Fjalar’s fine silks between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
“It took months of negotiating, monstrous payments in bribes, but in the end—” The Nahualli-in-
training made a gesture with one hand, opened his mouth as if to continue.
Kalā heard laughter and turned to note that two young men and a young woman had come
in during his tirade. “Aiasheu’s balls, Nutin! What’s got you started?”
“Godsdamn dvergar,” Nutin said, deadpan. The Nahualli-in-training strode back around behind
the desk. “Come here dressed like a pair of Jarls and act like they own the place.”
Κύ. Fjalar fought down a flash of anger as the three looked him over.
The young woman spoke: “Are we still heading up to the bluff later today?”
Nutin nodded without looking up. “Sure. Right after learn-sharing.”
“Aren’t you going to check to see if they’re in the book?” κύ. Galar growled.
The Nahualli-in-training yanked the wrinkles from his red-painted vest. He adjusted his spec-
tacles and, after a side-to-side waggle of the head, he tightened his belt. Placing both hands
flat on his desk, he tipped forwards and radiated a practised glare. To Kalā, it was a small won-
der that the two dwarves in front of him did not spontaneously burst into flames.
Nutin turned a smile to the diminutive pair, his eyes bright, but by no means friendly. “Listen
here... I am going to give you a little advice, for free. Back home, you were something special.
Here, you are just two madmen with two, too-big mouths. So, address me between yourselves
however you wish, but go back to your skip, and thank whatever God you pray to that we’re not
alone: I would chain you to a post and cut into you like I would a rabid dog.”
Nutin shrugged. “Or don’t. Stay here. Make a scene; Yap. Better yet... take a swing at me.”
The young monster smiled. “I will give you a thrashing and get you—”
“That’s quite enough, Pieniss; Cut them twelve feet of apish, if you please,” the Apothecary
said, rubbing his hands down the stained front of his leather apron as he emerged.
Κύ. Galar grinned: “Better jump to it, hladhqnd; The softest you’ve got.”

413
 EUDAIMONIA

Without a word, Nutin went into the workshop and began to wind a length of braided leather
rope about the pegboard to measure it; The innocent did not hurry. He took out a knife from his
pocket: One, two, three strokes and the sabotage was done. He came back.
Nutin held onto the coil of rope as κύ. Fjalar reached for it. His lips moved with careful preci-
sion, but it was his eyes which contained the real message: “There are two kinds of wusses.
First, those who don’t take action because they have received a threat...” A tug on the braided
rope. “And those who think they’re taking action because they’ve issued a threat.”
“Better jump to it, then, hladhqnd,” κύ. Fjalar said, but his words were an echo.
Somehow, the young man had filled him with a sense of foreboding. Kalā had chuckled. An-
other mikrós and the two dwarves and their Gentlemen were gone.

Kalā limped into the shack almost a hṓra late. His clothes were covered in a motley of dirt
and sand, and there were fresh pine-needles in his hair. He was chuckling.
This afternoon, there were seven young men and women waiting for the man.
“Now!” Kalā said loudly, without preamble. “Tell me things!”
This was his newest way to puzzle everybody. At the start of each sharing he demanded an in-
teresting fact that he had never heard before. Kalā himself was the sole arbiter of what was inter-
esting, and if the first fact provided did not measure up, or if he already knew it, he would demand
more until someone finally came up with something which amused him.
“It was in 483,3 that the suggestion was first raised that fungal hallucinogens in old books may
have been a source of Akadēmíc inspiration for years, without anybody realizing it. The source
of inspiration for many great literary figures may have been nothing more than a quick sniff of
the bouquet of mouldy books. Experts have since confirmed that fungi of the relevant type are
definitely present in old books, though they say that it would take a fairly concentrated expos-
ure over a considerable period of time for someone to actually be able to breathe in enough of
the spores of the hallucinogenic fungus to greatly affect behaviour.”
Kalā had been nodding. “Good. Good.” He clapped his hands.
The elderly man looked thence at the boy sitting next to the first speaker.
“How often do philosophers fail to recognize that their philosophies apply also to themselves?
If the Kósmos is entirely meaningless, so must be the statement that it—”
Kalā was shaking his head. “Already know about that.”
The boy simply shrugged. Then: “Solon of Athína once passed a law—”
“Boring,” Kalā interjected, cutting the child off.
“Small as they might be, ladybugs have a unique smell which—” The boy stopped himself.
Then: “People suffering from Naegeli Syndrome don’t have fingerprints?”
Kalā worked his mouth speculatively, as if he were attempting to get a piece of gristle out of
his teeth. At last he gave a tiny satisfied nod: “Okay, that one’s satisfactory.”

414
 KALIDASA

Kalā pointed to the next person in line, who happened to be Nushiss.

“Gold Swift Moths are eaten by bats, whose echolocation can detect even the slightest move-
ment. Because of this, it is hypothesized that Gold Swift Moths have evolved in such a way as
to be able to remain completely motionless during sex, in order to avoid being eaten. Still, they
do nonetheless have a rather impressively elaborate mating process. Courtship always begins
when the male perches atop a plant and dangles his bright yellow ‘scent’ brush. This then emits
pheromones that smell strongly of pineapple and seem to attract the female. Unlike most an-
imals, Gold Swift Moths can then choose from a range of positions. They can do it face to face, or
they can do it back to front, or with a male hanging upside down on a female. Regardless, the
moths stay in that position all night. It is theorized that they never forget their first time, for they
often return to the place where they lost their virginity. We don’t know why. It may be that they
think that if sexual success happened there once, it’ll happen again.”
“Wow,” Kalā said, after a rather long pause. “Okay.” He snapped his fingers.
“Pre-Didáskal, the people of Tawantinsuyu never developed a written language.”
“Not true,” Kalā said. “They used a system of woven knots.”
He made a complex motion with his hands, as if braiding something. “They were doing it long
before my own people could be convinced to start scratching pictograms.”
“I didn’t say they lacked recorded language; I said written language.”
Kalā would manage to convey his vast boredom with this simply by shrugging.
“We’ve known for a while that dogs, along with several other animals, can detect Gaia’s mag-
netic fields. As it turns out, they also use it to direct the more personal—” The boy stopped him-
self mid sentence, dug around in a notebook for few mikroí. Then: “Did you know the best way
to repel a shark is to wave the rotting flesh of one of its dead relatives at it?”
“Damn,” Kalā said, simply. “Okay; Yeah; Sure.”
The next student was a girl: “Cave ben-Yoḥanan said in an interview that back when dinosaurs
were still around it’s possible there were volcanoes erupting on the moons.”
Kalā nodded. He then pointed towards Milwa'tem.
“A century back zōḗsophía discovered how to remove cataracts from—”
“I already knew that,” Kalā said, waving his hand dismissively.
“Let me finish. When they figured out how to do this ‘couching’ operation, it meant that they
could restore sight even to people who had never been able to see. While couching remains a
largely ineffective and dangerous method of cataract therapy, when successfully applied to people
who had not gone blind but been born blind, an interesting side effect was noticed.” Kalā now
cocked his head curiously. “After they could see, you see, they were shown objects: A ball, a
cube, and a pyramid all sitting on a table.” He made the shapes with his hands as he spoke.
“Then the nurses asked them which one of the three objects was round.”
A pause. “Only after they touched the ball did they realize it was the round one.”
Kalā threw his head back and laughed loudly. “Really?”

415
 EUDAIMONIA

Then: “Milwa'tem wins the prize!” Kalā shouted, throwing up his hands. He reached into his
pocket, brought out something brown and oblong, pressing it into his hands.
Milwa'tem looked at it curiously. It was a frozen milkweed pod.
“But... Guðdís hasn’t gone yet,” someone pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter,” Kalā said. “Guðdís is crap at Interesting Fact.”
To this, Guðdís chose to scowl as loudly as she was able.
“Fine,” Kalā said rather simply. “Tell me what you have for me.”
“The Contrary Warriors to the betterment of their Art, invented secret systems for manipulat-
ing spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear.”
Kalā cocked his head to one side. “Really? What were they?”
“I don’t know,” Guðdís said, flippantly, hoping to irritate him.
There followed a little pause. A shrug. “As I said, it’s a well-kept secret.”
Kalā considered this for a long moment, shook his head. “No; Interesting, but not a fact. It’s like
saying the moneylenders of Babulṓn had a secret art called ‘Financia’ that made them such fierce
bankers. There’s no substance to it.” Kalā looked at Guðdís again, expectantly.
Guðdís tried to think of something else, but failed.
Her head was full of recipes and ribald jokes and Berserkergang.
Guðdís thought for a moment, shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
Kalā nodded: “A good answer in its own right. Try to remember it.”
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Right! Milwa'tem! Open your prize so that
we can give Guðdís the sharing in wave riding she seems to so greatly desire.”
Milwa'tem cracked the husk and held it open to reveal the white seeds inside.
When he shook it, the white fluff inside spilled out into his open hands.
Kalā motioned for him to toss the thing into the air.
He threw it, and everyone watched the mass of fluff sail toward the ceiling.
To everyone’s surprise, they fell back none-too-gently to the ground.
“Godsdamn it,” Kalā said, seemingly out of exasperation.
He stalked over to the bundle of seeds, bent down and picked it up, and waved it around vig-
orously until the air was full of gently floating puffs of off-white milkweed seed.
Then he started to limp after the seeds around the room, trying to snatch them out of the air.
There were surfboards and coils of rope all over the place; Kalā hobbled across the hardwood
floor, and stood with great difficulty atop the large, hardwood dining table.
All the while he grabbed at the seeds. At first he did it one-handed, like one would catch a
ball. But he met with no success, and so he started clapping at them, the way one would swat
a fly. When this did not work either, he tried to catch them with both hands, the way a child might
cup a firefly out of the air. But his old fingers could not get hold of one. The more he chased, the
more frantic the old man became; The faster he spun about, the wilder he grabbed.
This went on for a good mikrós; Two mikroí; Five mikroí; Ten.

416
 KALIDASA

It could have gone on for the rest of the sharing, but eventually he tripped over a surfboard and
tumbled painfully to the floor, tearing open his pants and bloodying his knee.
Clutching his leg, he sat on the ground and let loose with a string of angry curses the likes of
which Milwa'tem had never heard. He shouted, snarled, spat. He passed through at least ten
languages, and even when the onlookers could not understand the words, the sound of some
of them had made everyone’s gut clench and their hairs stand on end.
Milwa'tem expected this to continue, but while drawing an angry breath, Kalā sucked in one of
the floating milkweed seeds into his mouth and began to cough and choke violently.
At last he spat out the seed, caught his breath, stood up, and limped out of the cabin without
deigning to say so much as another word to any of his stunned students.

The thing got two steps forwards before the chains hooked under its chin and jerked it up.
They dragged it off its feet into the rafters, hissing, spitting, kicking and thrashing.
One of the orderlies sprang up, tried to grab hold of the thing’s flailing legs. He yelped as the
thing’s frostbitten foot cracked into his face, sent him sprawling across the carpet.
“Hewu!” swore Samukelisiwe, as a second orderly wedged a hand under the thing’s chain and
began to drag it down from the rafters. “Hewu!” They crashed onto the floor, struggled for a mo-
ment, then the orderly flew through the air. The orderly wailed as he crashed into a table that was
set up in the far corner of the room, flopped senseless onto the floor. Samukelisiwe and the in-
sane thing were left staring at one another. Me and my transition. Ohh, well...
She backed against the wall as the thing sprang at her, but it only got a step before Pienish
barrelled into it at full tilt, crashing on top of the thing and down onto the carpet. They lay there for
a moment, then the monster slowly rolled on to its knees, fought its way up to standing, all the
hulking asklepiádēs’ great weight bearing down on it, and slowly took a shuffling step towards
Samukelisiwe. Pienish’s arms were wrapped tightly round the thing, straining with every sinew
to drag it away, but it kept moving forwards, teeth gritted, one thin arm pinned to its thin body
while its free hand clawed out fast and furiously towards Samukelisiwe’s throat.
Pienish hissed, the muscles in his heavy forearms bulging, his face screwed up with effort
and his eyes starting from his head. Still, it was not enough. Samukelisiwe was pressed back
against the wall, watching fascinated as the hand came closer, and then closer still. “Damn you!”
screamed Nushiss, all of a sudden. The chair leg she held whistled down and smashed onto the
grasping arm, breaking it clean in half. Samukelisiwe could see a few bones poking through the
ripped and bloody skin, and yet the fingers still twitched, reaching out for the matron’s throat.
The chair-leg crashed down into the insane thing’s face and its head snapped backwards. Blood
sprayed out of the thing’s nose, its right cheek cut all the way open. Still it came at her. Pienish
was gasping with the effort of keeping the thing’s other arm pinned as it laboured forwards and
snarled. It seemed to Samukelisiwe it was attempting to bite her throat out.

417
 EUDAIMONIA

Nushiss threw down her bludgeon and grabbed the monster round the neck, dragging it head
backwards, grunting with effort, veins pulsing on her sweaty forehead. It was an odd sight: Two
individuals, one of them big and strong as a whale, trying wildly to wrestle an emaciated man to
the floor. Slowly, the pair began to drag the wild thing back. Nushiss had one of the thing’s feet
off the floor. Pienish gave a loud bellow, lifted the thing and flung it against the wall. The thing
scrabbled on the floor, clawing its way upright, broken arm flopping. Nushiss growled, one of the
heavy chairs raised high in the air. It burst apart over the thing’s head with a blasting crash, and
then the two of them were on it like hounds on a fox, kicking, punching, grunting.
“Enough!” snapped the matron. She shuffled up beside the wild thing’s body. Her patient was
a mess, motionless. A pile of rags and not even a big one. Much as when I first met him. How
had this thing almost overcome these two? The thing’s broken arm was stretched out across the
carpet, limp. Had she Mishtamek to thank for this thing being born into the world?
Then the arm began to move. The fingers twitched, jerked, scratched at the floor, began to
slide towards Samukelisiwe, reaching for her ankle with a sickening flop-flop.
“What is he?!” gasped out Pienish, staring downwards.
“Get the chains,” she said, cautiously stepping back out of the way. “Quickly!”
Pienish dragged a pair of massive irons clanking from a sack, grunting with the effort of lifting
them, bands of black iron, thick as a sapling trunk, heavy as anvils. He squeezed one pair tight
shut around the thing’s ankles, the other round its wrists, ratchets rattling into place with a reas-
suring finality. Meanwhile, Nushiss had hauled a length of smaller chain from the sack and was
winding it round and round the limp body while Pienish held the thing up, dragging it tight and
winding it round and round again. Two great padlocks completed the job.
They were snapped shut just in time. The thing suddenly came alive, began thrashing on the
floor. It snarled up at the matron, straining at the chains. Somewhere along the way the thing’s
teeth had been broken; The burns across its face wept. The chains rattled as it reached for the
matron’s throat. Samukelisiwe grinned and Pienish’s heart skipped a beat.
“It’s persistent,” laughed Samukelisiwe. “You’d have to give it that.”

Thirty-six years ago: It was a moonless and very bitter winter’s night.
It was a dark night, the kind of darkness which was not simply explainable by absence of the
moons or the stars, but the darkness that appeared to flow in from somewhere else—so thick and
tangible that perhaps you could snatch a handful of air and squeeze the night out of it. It was the
kind of darkness that caused sheep to leap fences and dogs to skulk in kennels. The wind was
not so much strong as loud—it howled around trees and wailed in the chimneys.
On nights like this, people would pull the covers over their heads, sensing there were times
when the world belonged to something else. In the morning it would be human again; There
would be fallen branches, a few tiles off the roof, sure, but the world would be human.

418
 KALIDASA

The man hammered on the door again, sending snow sliding off the roof.
The dark-skinned girl, who had been admiring herself in the mirror, tweaked the already-low
neckline of her dress for slightly more exposure, just in case the caller was male.
Samukelisiwe opened the front door of the dormitory.
The muscular red-headed figure was outlined against the freezing darkness.
Samukelisiwe watched the figure for several moments before she realized what it was about
him that was so Godsdamned strange—stranger, that is, than his clothing. Her own hot breath
hung in the freezing, midnight air. But the breath of the stranger did not.
Snowflakes were already building up on his dark cloak.
“Samukelisiwe? The midwife?” he said, unsure of himself.
He shook himself: “You must come at once. It’s very urgent.”
The girl was suddenly wide-eyed and very attentive.
“Is it... . I didn’t reckon she was due for another couple of wee—”
“I have come a long way,” said the figure. “They say you’re the best in the world.”
The girl tossed her curly blue hair. “Oh, you know that, do you? They would say that, wouldn’t
they? They say I won’t listen. They say I cannot keep my temper. They say I’m self-important.
But I mean to be a Sourcerer whatever they say. You can find things out for yourself. You don’t
have to listen to a lot of daft old men and women who never in their lives—”
“I do beg your pardon. I will not trespass further on your time.”
The stranger retreated into the flake-speckled shadows.
“Hello?” said the nineteen-year-old girl. “Hello?”
The present day: There was a loud hammering on the door of her suite.
Samukelisiwe put down the newborn child she had been resting on her knee.
Did she find herself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the future? Strange
visions of armoured turtles she had never seen came into her dreams of late.
With a sigh, Samukelisiwe at last hobbled over to the door and raised the latch.
A large-bodied, red-headed man stood outlined against the hallway.
There was something strange draped over his shoulders.
The man sighed: “Samukelisiwe! You must come at once. It’s very urgent.”
Silence. Samukelisiwe: “I didn’t know anyone was—”
“I have come a long way,” interrupted the middle-aged figure.
There was something familiar to Samukelisiwe in the way he spoke. She could see that the
whiteness on the cloak was snow, melting fast. A faint memory stirred in her mind.
“Well, now,” she began, because she had learned a lot in the last thirty-six years, “that’s as
may be, and I’ll always do the best I can, ask anyone. But I wouldn’t yet say I’m the best in the
world... yet. Always learning something new, that’s just the kind of woman I am.”
“Oh. In that case, I will call at a more convenient... moment.”
Without even quite vanishing, the figure somehow was no longer present.

419
 EUDAIMONIA

Some time in the future: There was a hammering on the hatch. Samukelisiwe first carefully put
down her brandywine nightcap, and stared at the mirror for a moment. A lifetime of Unknowledge
had honed senses which most people never really knew they had, and something in her head
clicked. On the stove, the kettle for her hot-water bottle was just coming to a boil. She laid down
her pipe, got up and hobbled with a great deal of difficulty over towards the airlock.
The hatch opened itself. “You’ve come a long way, I’m thinking.”
The old woman looked upwards at the melting snow dripping off Nutin’s cloak. Had it actu-
ally snowed anywhere along the Marklandshaf any time in the last decade?
“And it’s urgent, I expect?” she said, as memory unrolled.
Silence. “And now you have to say ‘You must come at once.’ ”
Nutin simply smiled. And then: “You must come at once.”
“Well, now,” she said. “I’d say, yes, I’m an excellent midwife, though I do say it myself. I have
seen oodles into the world; Once even a Vortigandur, which is no errand for the inexperienced.
I know birthing backwards and forwards and damn near sideways at times. Always been ready
to learn something new.” She looked up at the large man slyly. “I wouldn’t say I’m young enough
to know everything; But just now I can’t think of anyone better, I have to say.”
Nutin shook his head sadly: “Nukum, you must come with me right now.”
“Oh, I must, must I?” A Sourcerer thought fast because the Leading Edge could shift so quickly.
She had learned to tell when Sourcery was unfolding, and when the best she could do was put
herself in its path and run as fast as she could to keep up with the future.
Some time later: The kettle was just boiling when Samukelisiwe walked back into her kitchen.
She stared at it for a long moment, and then slowly moved it off the fire.
There was still a drop of brandywine left in the glass by her chair.
She drained that, then refilled the glass to the brim from the bottle.
She picked up her pipe. The bowl was still warm. She pulled on it softly.
Then she took something out of her bag, which was now a good deal emptier.
“Well,” she said at last, “that was very... unusual...”

Two people were running up the stairs; Pienish heard them coming.
“Uncle,” one of them called out as the pair reached the landing.
It was Milwa'tem. “About time,” Pienish called. “Where the Hel have you been?”
Milwa'tem came limping down the hall; The left side of his face was swollen and bloody and
his lip was cut; He had lost a front tooth. The young woman with him was less battered but more
exhausted: Thin as a twig, glassy-eyed, knees giving. Milwa'tem had her lie down on the couch
in one of the offices. Pienish asked in a calm voice, “She got hit on the head?”
“I am all right,” Erica C-731 mumbled, shivering a little. Milwa'tem was quick and solicitous.
He took off her repulsively bloody dress and lay the big horse-hair blanket from the foot of the

420
 KALIDASA

couch over her; Pienish wondered who she was, but gave it only a momentary thought. He was
starting to function again. “I spent all morning looking for you. Where were you?”
“Trying to get back to town. There was some kind of bombing pattern we ran into; They blew
up the road just ahead of my auto. The auto bounced around a lot. Turned over, I guess. She
was behind me, and stopped in time, so her auto was all right and we went off in it. But we had
to take it slow because the boulevard was all blown up, and then we had to leave the auto be -
cause of a fallen trilithon out by the Skálavík. We hiked the rest of the way.”
“Where the Hel were you coming from?” Pienish ran warm water in one of the private wash-
room sinks, then gave Milwa'tem a steaming towel to wash off his bloody face.
“Shack. Up by the mouth of the Norandvik, on the Marklandshaf. I—
“Is there anything seriously wrong with your left leg?”
“Bruised it when the auto turned over, I suppose. Listen, are they in the area yet?”
“If someone out there knows, they’re not telling me. All I know is once the first ship landed at
dawn it split into a dozen small mobile... things. They are all over the place. They look to me to
be slow-moving, but if someone’s talking to them, they don’t report it.”
“We saw one.” Milwa'tem’s face emerged from the towel, marked with dark blue bruises, but
less shocking now that the blood and mud were off. “That’s what it must have been. Little sil -
very thing, about thirty feet up, over a pasture. It appeared to sort of hop by. Didn’t look earthly.
Are the aliens fighting us, are they shooting people down in the streets?”
“I don’t know. No losses have been reported. Now come on, let’s get some liquid and food
into you. And then, by Aiasheu, we’ll have a dream session in the middle of Hel and put an end to
this idiotic mess you have made.” He had prepared a shot of sodium thiopental, and now took
Milwa'tem’s arm and gave him the shot without a warning or an apology.
“That’s why I came here. But I don’t know if—”
“If you can do it? You can. Come.” Milwa'tem was hovering over the couch.
“She is asleep? Don’t bother her then, perhaps it is what she needs,” Pienish said. He then
took his nephew down to the refectory and got him a roast rabbit sandwich, an egg-and-tomato
sandwich, and a rather tall glass of milk. Then they both sat down at a table, sweeping aside a
discarded meal that had been abandoned when Pienish had ordered the evacuation.
Pienish: “In case you still think clearing up this mess is beyond you, forget it.”
“It’s nice to be able to talk about it with you,” was all that Milwa'tem said.
“So, this invasion didn’t just happen, it happened because you—”
Milwa'tem nodded: I dreamt it: The sun; The moons; The surf shack; All of it. ΡεΤΙ too.
Shock: “You let yourself have an uncontrolled effective dream?”
“I wasn’t uncontrolled: Books on wave riding can only take me—” An explosion hit. The room
jumped, rang, crackled, the refectory table jumped about, liquid spilled from both Pienish’s and
Milwa'tem’s glasses. “Was that them?” Milwa'tem asked, unconcerned with the mess the explo-
sion had caused; Pienish noticed that his nephew appeared rather undismayed. His reactions

421
 EUDAIMONIA

appeared to the man to be utterly Sourcerous; In the midst of Armageddon he was cool and calm.
He appeared to have no personal fear at all. Or had the lad come to the conclusion that if he
had dreamt up the aliens, everything else might just be a dream too? And if it is?
“We’d better get back upstairs,” Pienish said, getting up. He felt increasingly impatient and
cranky; The excitement was getting far too excessive. “Who was that woman with you?”
And then, too: “How is it that she happened to be in the area?”
“She must’ve been looking for me all morning, drove to the cabin after—”
Pienish waved this away: “Never mind. You can explain it later.”
Best that they not waste any more time on such trivia.
They had to get out: Get out of this mad, burning, exploding nightmare.
By a Sourcerer’s focus, which was always great when exercised in the right way at the right
time, Pienish found beneath his feet the hardwood steps. Just as the pair entered Sleep Lab
the glass burst out of the great windows with a shrill sound and a huge sucking-out of air. Both
men were pulled towards the window as if towards the mouth of Hel.
When the world had righted itself again, Pienish scrambled upright, holding on to his desk.
Milwa'tem helped Samukelisiwe to her feet, she having stayed behind with Pienish after every-
one else had been evacuated. The outside air smelled of smoke, sulphur and death.
“We ought to get down into the emergency shelter now, don’t you think?”
Samukelisiwe had said this in a reasonable tone, yet she was shivering hard.
Pienish shook his head. “We’ve got to stay up here a while longer.”
Samukelisiwe: “I freely admit that I don't know what the Hel you two are doing in that screw-
ball brain of his more than eighty-five percent of the time—and I greatly suspect that neither of
you do either—but you’re doing it, so why don’t you two get on with it Godsdamn it?!”
Silence. Pienish now said: “Go on. Get down to the basement. We need to be here. Lie down
Milwa'tem. Listen, Samukelisiwe, in the basement just past the janitor’s closet there is a door
marked Emergency Generator. Go in there, find the ON handle. Have both your hands on it. If
the lights fail, turn it on. It’ll take a heavy pressure upwards on the handle. Go on!”
Pienish had that morning considered putting the thing out of its misery, if it really was miser -
able—trying not to imagine who the man-beast had used to be, how he came to be here, how
he came to be that. And yet how could he have not? How could the big man look at such a thing
and not naturally start to wonder? It was like reading the last page of a novel, his imagination
naturally spinning threads. They had locked the thing in the janitor’s closet. It had been scream-
ing, throwing all its weight against its chains, the links slithering; Thin, pale fingers had groped
for Pienish while veins bulged along the thing’s arms, but the bonds held, and finally the door
was closed and wedged shut. Blood had spilled out from under the—
At the door, Samukelisiwe turned around. She looked exhausted. She caught Milwa'tem’s
eye for a moment and whispered quite softly, “A pleasant dream, okay?”
“Don’t worry,” Milwa'tem chuckled, “it’s going to be fine.”

422
 KALIDASA

“Shut up,” Pienish snapped. He had switched on the Hypnophone. Milwa'tem was not pay-
ing attention, and the noise of explosions and things burning made it hard to hear. “Shut your
eyes!” Pienish ordered, putting his hand on Milwa'tem’s throat. RELAXING, said the voice on
the Hypnophone. YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL— The building
leapt like a frog and settled down askew. Something appeared in the smoky-red, opaque glare
outside the glassless window: An ovoid, large object was moving in a sort of hopping fashion
through the smoke. It came directly towards the windows. We’ve got to get— Pienish thought
over the Hypnophone, and then realized that his nephew was already hypnotized. He snapped
that thing off and leant down so he could shout into Milwa'tem’s ear. “Stop the invasion! Peace!
Peace! Dream that everything is back the way it was! Now sleep! Saddle!”
He would have no time to look at Milwa'tem’s ΗΕΓ. The ovoid shape was hovering directly
outside the windows. Its blunt snout, lit luridly by reflections of the burning trees, pointed straight
at him. He cowered down by the couch, and craned over his shoulder to watch the alien ship. It
pressed closer. The snout, looking like oily steel, silver with violet streaks and gleams, filled one
entire window. There was a crunching sound as it stuffed itself into the frame.
The snout, halting, emitted a long, thin tentacle that moved about questingly in the air. The
end of it, rearing like a cobra, pointed at random, then settled in Pienish’s direction. About ten
feet from him, it hung in the air and pointed at him for some moments. Then it withdrew with a
hiss and crack like a carpenter’s flexible rule, and a high, humming noise came from the ship.
The metal sill of the window screeched and buckled. The ship’s snout whirled around and fell
off onto the floor. From the hole that gaped behind it, something emerged.
It was, Pienish thought in wonder and terror, a giant turtle. Then he realized that it was en-
cased in a suit of some kind, which gave it a bulky, greenish, armoured, inexpressive look like
a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs. It stood quite still, near Pienish’s desk. Very slowly
it raised its left arm, pointing a big nozzled instrument directly at him.
For the second time in two days, he came face-to-face with his transition.
Then a flat, toneless voice came out of the elbow joint.
The massive metallic arm came up again. “We are attempting to make peaceful arrival,” the
elbow said, all on one note. “Please inform others that this is peaceful arrival. We do not have
any weapons. Before following directions leading in wrong directions, please understand: We
do not require you to cease the destruction of yourselves on our account.”
The alien seemed to have an unusual posture. It did not stand in the same way that Pienish
would stand, or sit, or lie, or exist. It was standing there in the way that he, in a dream, might be
standing. It was there in the sense that in a dream one was somewhere. The alien was standing
in the wreckage of the broken window, seeming intent to stand there indefinitely.
“Please then excuse the unwarranted intrusion.” The big armoured figure whirred suddenly
and then seemed to hesitate. “What is that device?” it said, pointing with its right elbow joint at
the machinery connected to the head of Pienish’s nephew on the couch.

423
 EUDAIMONIA

“An ēlektroenkefalográphos: A machine that records the electrical activity of—”

“Worthy,” said the alien, and took a short, checked step towards the couch, as if longing to
look. “This individual is iazhklou. The recording machine records this maybe?”
And then, too: “Is all your species capable of iazhklou?”
“I don’t... . I don’t know the term, can you maybe tell me...”
The figure whirred a little, raised its left elbow over its head, which, turtle-like, scarcely pro-
truded above the big shoulders of the carapace, and said, “Please excuse, the word is incom -
municable; Communication-device invented hastily in recent future. Speech is silver; Silence is
gold. We go now. Please thank for us this individual very much for the experience.”
And with that it crawled back into the nose of its ship.
The nose cone jumped up from the floor and twirled itself smartly into place. Pienish had a
vivid impression that it was not acting mechanically, but temporally, repeating its previous ac-
tions in reverse, precisely like a film run backwards. The alien ship, jarring the office and tearing
out the rest of the window frame with a hideous noise, withdrew and vanished.
The crescendo of explosions, Pienish now realized, had ceased; All was quiet.
Milwa'tem lay inert on the couch, breathing regularly. It seemed that he was dreaming. His
dreams, like waves of the deep sea far from any shore, came and went, rose and fell, profound
and harmless, breaking nowhere, changing nothing. They danced the dance amongst all the
other waves in the sea of being. Through his sleep the great, green sea turtles dived, swimming
with heavy, inexhaustible grace through the depths, totally in their element.
Erica C-731’s private account on the incident would be a collection of cold, hard data which
would allow future generations to study the events of that day without being influenced by the
human factor. But was it not the human factor which connected humanity to its past? Would fu-
ture generations care as much for chronologies or casualty statistics as they would for personal
accounts, given the fact that the world in question had been pulled into a continuum where the
Six Hour War simply never happened? By excluding the human factor, did she risk the kind of
detachment from a history which may lead them to one day repeat it?

If he was going to bleed, if he was going to shit himself, if he was going to expire, he was
damned if he was going to deprive himself the satisfaction of losing his mind.
Awaking at dawn, the Windigo had had that incredible feeling in the pit of his stomach; It had
been like those times as a lad when his birth-mother would, first, withhold food and water under
the supervision of the Autarkēs for days, only to let him gorge, and then force her son to jog till
he vomited. More than once, upon the tail end of such a cycle, the young boy had had a joyful
feeling in the pit of his stomach, like when he went out swimming and would want to put his feet
down on something solid, but the water was deeper than he had assumed and there was noth-
ing there; There would be nothing there but water. It was an abrupt note of hysteria, an invitation

424
 KALIDASA

to panic, and yet, below it all, an all-consuming, frantic and joyful thirst for something truly awful
to happen, so he would have something truly abusive to go off “crying” to his father about—hys-
teria was oftentimes impossible without a good audience. The Windigo could be a pretty dan-
gerous dude when cornered; He went to pieces so fast people got hit by the shrapnel! The un-
inspired oftentimes called a disaster unimaginable; But all that humanity had to do was to ima-
gine such things. Nightmare: That was the real soundtrack of disaster; The amplification of real-
ity into a petrifying, preemptive paranoia. It was rather unfortunate that most situations lost the
better part of their terrors once their causes had been properly understood.
The Windigo’s head had still been spinning with a mixture of elation and terror when his Aco-
lytes had delivered him, one again, into the dwarves’ presence. The big suite had been done up
richly. Here at least, in the dwarves’ vast, well-furnished quarters, a bergskip’s rough steel was
disguised with draperies and with fabric paddings and rare art objects. Κύ. Fjalar’s hands had
been trembling slightly; The scar on his face had been damp. He had looked up and smiled, his
eyes had seemed alight with an internal glow: The look of a man so filled with the visions inside
his head he had scarcely seen the present reality. Κύ. Fjalar had promised the Windigo he would
have his severed head encased in tar for a wall-hanging. In another man, this might have been
dismissed as gamesmanship, but the Windigo had had the delightful feeling the dwarf meant it
literally. My heart thumps, my skin prickles with a cold sweat and my bladder empties. Scared.
Excited. Rock hard. What is it they want with me today? Individuals were not usually snatched out
of their beds aboard the Feast—or anywhere else, for that matter—in order to be assaulted with
tender kisses. I know why men are snatched from a bed: Few do better.
Nightmares of puckered burns, the pleasure of chafed wrists and joints that had been contor-
ted by a wrong distribution of his weight. At first, he had not known he was awake.
How long had they been plying him now? How much misery had he enjoyed?
The morning was a wonderfully wretched time of day for him. He feared it and relished it and
it never brought him any good—thank the Gods! On no morning of his life was he ever in good
spirits nor had he done any good before midday, nor had a happy idea, nor devised any joys for
himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and came alive. Only towards the
evening could be he productive, active and aglow with a real joy—what a pity!
Yet, no matter how they had tormented him, with crude pokers or the subtlest of threats, he
had not been freed from the burden and delight of himself. He had shrieked and shrieked, till his
howls had appeared to be distant things; The agony of a stranger singing in the wind. This had
had nothing to do with physical strength—a Windigo was not strong in that way.
At present, κύ. Fjalar was seated at table, the remains of a meal before him. He raised his
hand to summon a Gentleman with a flagon of wine, and poured himself another cup.
This was the overall impression: Worn and exhausted for a middle-aged man.
The Windigo did not say a word—κύ. Fjalar was not a man who could be talked to. A feeling
of great fatigue had overwhelmed him. The vague, mad gleam of liveliness had come back into

425
 EUDAIMONIA

the dwarf’s face. The rounded handles of a pair of scissors were today protruding from the outer
pocket of the dwarf’s tunic. They were the type of scissors that men and women often used to
trim their nails. The man was so well-groomed the Windigo could believe that dirt, insects and
rodents represented some kind of phobia to the man. Today Asiniiwin had awoken from sleep
with curses of joy on his lips, with gibberish on his tongue, a language no one could name: “Fay
çe que vouldras! Fay çe que vouldras!” Do anything, but let it produce joy!
“Well-l-l,” κύ. Fjalar began, then hesitated, drawing in a breath. He knew he had spoken too
loudly. The climax of their contest, so long envisioned, had lost some of its savour.
Damn that great-grandson of his for all eternity! The dreams that the boy dreamed, the con-
stant jumping from one life-memory to another, the subtle and not-so-subtle alterations to life the
more Pienish tried to improve it, all this had sent κύ. Fjalar clear off course.
The Windigo had been marched out of his cell and away down here with startling speed, one
Acolyte upon each side, his feet barely scraping on the corridor as they went. The fastest I’ve
moved in... days? Weeks? Their grips had not really been rough, but had been irresistible. They
don’t think I have it in me any more. At another time he might have cackled aloud. Why shouldn’t
they, though? They have seen me naked! The Acolytes tied him to a chair. The Windigo took
this opportunity to get himself settled as best he could, shifting his weight—
Without any warning except a slight movement of κύ. Fjalar’s hand, a wave of pain flooded
his body. It was a deliciously terrifying pain, because he could not see what was happening. He
had the feeling that a mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing
was really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced, but his body was being
wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought
the sweat out on his forehead, the best of all was a fear his backbone was about to snap. He
set his broken teeth, breathing through his nose, trying his best to keep from smiling.
“You are hoping,” said κύ. Fjalar, watching his face, “that in another moment something is
going to break. You especially hope that it will be your backbone. You have a delicious mental
picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them.
“That was forty. You see that the numbers on this dial run up to a hundred? Will you please
recall, throughout our conversation, that I’ve it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment
and to whatever degree I choose? If you tell me a lie, or attempt to provoke me in any way, or
if you fall below your usual level of intelligence, you’ll cry out with pain.”
Suddenly, from somewhere behind the desk, a bright spotlight was lit.
Startled, the Windigo blinked as harsh light stabbed at his eyes—a white light, too bright for
comfort. A familiar flurry of twitches ran up the sides of his face. Although he had already been
sitting when the thing happened, he had a very curious feeling that he had blacked out. A terrific
painless blow had perhaps flattened him out. Also something was happening inside his head.
Until now, at each stage of his imprisonment he had known—or seemed to—his whereabouts
in the windowless icebreaker. Possibly he now felt a slight difference in air pressure.

426
 KALIDASA

Once again, something like pure anxiety struck at the Windigo—or the closest thing to pure
anxiety such an exalted Pithophiliac was capable of feeling. Having been struck suddenly blind
withdrew a prop on which he had been leaning without realizing. Down there, deep in the bowels
of the Feast, was where the bergskip’s soundproofing was at its thickest. The Windigo now had
the feeling of sitting all alone. He felt himself to be all by himself in the middle of a dusty plain
drenched with sunlight, across which all sound came out of an immense distance.
Κύ. Fjalar stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his right stood κύ. Galar.
“I am so glad you made it through the night. At first, I’d hoped for your nasty death in one of
our little games, but soon, I actually began to pray for you.” He took up his scissors, trimming a
corner of an already perfectly-shaped thumbnail. A pity his breath did not stink of alcohol. “You
know the inevitable result. We will ply you for a time, but, conditioned by nature or nurture, you
will frustrate all our attempts. You’d die in agony, eventually, your mockery clutched close, and
I’d be left with a useless corpse. This is the way that it’s bound to happen, yes?
“By itself,” he said, “pain is not always enough. There are many occasions when a living being
will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something un-
endurable—something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved.
If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from
deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is an instinct that cannot be destroyed.
It is the same with rats. For me, they are entirely unendurable. They are a form of persecution
that I cannot withstand, even were I to wish to. We have exhausted all the conventional meth-
ods,” he sighed, “as I suspected we would. You’ve proven yourself dreadful.”
As of yet, the Windigo had not tried to speak. A feeling of intoxication still overwhelmed him.
The vague, insane gleam of enthusiasm still came out in κύ. Fjalar’s speech. The Windigo was
once again struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of κύ. Fjalar’s face. It was
strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion, but it was
also tired. There were pouches under the eyes and skin sagged from the cheekbones. He knew
this because κύ. Fjalar now stood beside him, deliberately bringing his face near.
“You are thinking,” κύ. Fjalar said, “that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of
power and yet I’m not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. You should see the con-
dition you yourself are in! Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between
your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your left leg. Do you know that you stink like a
goat? Probably you have ceased to notice. Look at you! Don’t you see how my thumb and fore-
finger might soon reach all the way round your bicep? I could snap your neck like a carrot! Do
you know that you’ve lost a deal of weight since you’ve been in my hands? Open your mouth.
Nine... ten... eleven teeth left. How many had you when I first came aboard? And the few you
have are dropping out of your head. Look here!” He seized one of the Windigo’s two remaining
front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of agony shot through his jaw.
Κύ. Fjalar had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it away.

427
 EUDAIMONIA

The dwarf ran a moist hand down Asiniiwin’s body, fingers curving in a precise anatomical
tracing of every muscle that was hidden beneath layer after layer of scarifications. The Windigo
then made a violent effort to raise himself into a more comfortable sitting position, but all that he
merely succeeded in doing was wrenching his body with delicious pain.
“As you no doubt know, I had planned to have you starved yet again today, but I think I will
change my mind. I believe I’ll have you force-fed, instead; The result might be far more amus-
ing, in the long run.” The Windigo shivered for the first time. The dwarf felt it, beneath his prob-
ing fingers; Thus, he grinned. The man had an appalling instinct for the human pressure points.
A wet finger touched his neck and he stilled the involuntary urge to leap away. Spasms struck
and he went limp: His reward: Waves of pain all up his back. The Windigo felt κύ. Fjalar wipe
something sticky from beneath his continually-leaky left eye with a finger.
Κύ. Fjalar’s voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still
in his face. He was not dissembling, he was not a hypocrite; He believed every word he spoke.
What most oppressed the monster was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. The
Windigo watched the heavy yet graceful form sway to and fro, in and out of the tight range of his
vision. Asiniiwin was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea the dwarf could
ever have that Asiniiwin had not long ago known, examined and embraced. In that moment his
bravado was so vast, his self-destruction so sincere that every Gentleman present became cer-
tain that power was a word the meaning of which they did not yet understand.
Asiniiwin: “I... I hate to burst your bubble, but I have some ba—”
The sentence ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to sixty-five. The
sweat had sprung out all over Asiniiwin’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in
deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. The dwarf watched him. He
drew back the lever. This time the pain was only ever-so-slightly eased.
There was no mere pleasure in this: At least not in the way that any but a Windigo—if there
were another—could grasp. The fire of desire had been building all night. Momentarily, behind
closed eyes, his vision washed red. For a time, he was in it and of it; At once the taut, quiver-
ing string and the high sustained note of it, a note of purest beauty uttered in depth.
“There is so much I want to do that I’ve scarcely known where to begin. I have taken it slowly
and in good order. One can’t torture body parts that have already been lopped off.”
I tire of this. “Blah, blah, blah! What a foul smelling ego. If you mean to have out my tongue
then let’s be done with it, but, for pity’s sake, subject me to no more boasting.”
They sat still for an endless moment, gazing at each other. The moment lasted long enough
for the Windigo’s toes to start trembling, for his eye to start blinking, for his toothless mouth to
turn dry as the desert. A sweet anticipation. Will it be now? Will it be now? Will it be— “Cut out
your tongue?” asked κύ. Fjalar. “And rob myself of your winning sense of humour?”
Asiniiwin’s wit died in his throat: “Then… why reveal your game to me?”
“Because it is necessary you understand where the power lies.”

428
 KALIDASA

The Windigo raised one eyebrow. Silence. Then: I, Serve you? I would sooner spend a year
in the stinking darkness; I’d sooner have my face beaten to a pulp; I’d sooner have my teeth
cracked. But since I had all those wonderful things done long before we met...
The Windigo: “I’ve got a little itch, down there... . Would you—”
Suddenly, the Windigo found that he was sitting up with κύ. Fjalar’s strong arms round his
shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few moments. The bonds which had held
his body down were loosened. He felt cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his jaw was tightly
clenched, his tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung onto κύ. Fjalar like a
baby, peculiarly comforted by the dwarf’s arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that the
dwarf was his benefactor, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some oth-
er source, and that it was κύ. Fjalar who would save him from himself. It was not the pain, but
rather it was, for the first time in many years, the ecstatic thought of pain without escape, without
release, that worked on his mind and hardened his groin. Laughter died in the Windigo’s throat
and then floated up to the surface of his consciousness belly-up like dead fish.
The muscles of the Windigo’s limbs tightened again, but the pain ebbed away and the trem-
bling stopped. Kindness had always looked pretty squalid to him in comparison with the delight
of misery. Stability was not nearly as spectacular an idea as instability. Being contented had none
of the allure of losing a battle with misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a futile struggle, or
a fatal overthrow by despair or doubt. Tenderness was never as grand as this!
Delightful pain flowed into the Windigo’s body. The needle must be at seventy-five. He had
shut his eyes this time. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive till the spasm was over. He
had ceased to note whether he was laughing or not. The pain soon increased.
Maybe the needle was now at eighty or ninety. The Windigo intermittently could not remem -
ber why the pain was happening. In the end, the Windigo screamed without restriction. No si-
lent, suffering, manly pride here, thank you very much! Would this at last convince the dwarf he
was not quite “there” yet? Panic was the right of all life. The Windigo had felt total cellular panic
before, each limb and organ coming to extreme alert. Again, κύ. Fjalar was standing at his side.
Being a Windigo was not about a love for adversity, it was about knowing a strength so great
that adversity, in all its frightful manifestations, hardly even existed at all.
A needle slid into Asiniiwin’s arm. Almost at the same instant an unpleasant, healing warmth
spread all through his body. The pleasure of the pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his
eyes and looked up with hatred at κύ. Fjalar. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so
intelligent, his rage seemed to boil over. If he could have moved he might have stretched out a
fist and laid it onto κύ. Fjalar’s jaw! The Windigo had never hated him so much as at this mo-
ment, and not only because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not
matter whether κύ. Fjalar was a friend or an enemy, came back. Κύ. Fjalar had tortured him to
the edge of lunacy and a screaming orgasm, and in a little while, he was quite certain, he would
send him to his death. It made no difference. In a sense that went deeper than friendship, they

429
 EUDAIMONIA

were intimates: Somewhere or other, though the actual words might never be spoken, ever, was
there a place where they could meet and talk? Κύ. Fjalar was looking at him with an expression
which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind.
That night, the Windigo was left to sleep it off in a freezing room he did not recognize. While
the place was far larger than most of the cells he had been in in his time, at first he had hardly
noticed. Thankfully, the place stank to high heaven. It would appear as though a few barrels of
grease do not smell as sweet as one expected. The Acolytes had done a great job. The grease
was everywhere: The walls, the floor and the shelves—even on the ceiling, though he did not
know how they did that. The floor of the place was therefore all slick with some kind of stinking
slurry, the stale air full of his own forlorn noises. But, as many had observed, the Windigo was
not one to be put off by silence, or darkness. Or, for that matter, anything.
Whenever Asiniiwin had neither pleasure nor pain and had been breathing for a little while
the lukewarm insipid air of those so-called good and tolerable days, he would feel so bad in his
childish soul that he would smash his mouldering lyre of thanksgiving into the face of the slum-
bering God of Contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in him than the warmth of
a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethed in him, a rage
against any kind of existence resembling a toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.
To die: Would it not, perhaps, be a wonderfully big adventure?
Κύ. Fjalar was a supremely practised sadist, but more of a psychological bent. He would
keep the Windigo alive and relatively undamaged, willing and able—so far—to hold his brother
back. After all, nerves must be intact to report pain; A mind must be relatively unclouded to ex-
perience all the nuances of fear. Elaborate, unending humiliations, rather than a quick and dirty
crescendo leading to death, must be next on the menu. Κύ. Fjalar was not the kind of man to
realize that a gruesome gesture would have been more effective at the beginning.
I have survived another day. Therefore, I can survive another one-day. It could not be better
or worse; It could only be better. All κύ. Fjalar’s tools, no matter how original, so far arose from
the power of a sympathy between outside events and inside events. He required detours—fire
and whips and electricity. He could not conjure the essence of these things.
The Windigo did not think for some time. He lay upon his side breathing in tiny gasps, only
half-conscious, arms and legs slowly star-fishing in rhythm to a pain inside. At length, the clouds
lifted a bit from the Windigo’s vision, and the pain eased, if only fractionally, to be replaced by an
extraordinary love. The Acolytes had secured him, shoved a wide tube down his throat none-
too-gently and pumped him full of some repulsive high-calorie sludge laced with an anti-emetic
to prevent him vomiting it up, and a cocktail of metabolic aids to aid in digestion. It was far too
subtly complex to have been designed on the spot; It must be something that the dwarves had
wanted to employ for a long time. And he had imagined food was his own private and lonely
perversion, to blindly and half-consciously proceed to eat himself sick! He thought he had done
himself harm before; But the Acolytes today took it far beyond the limits of merely toying with the

430
 KALIDASA

pain, under the watchful eye of the two dwarves, who had tottered into the laboratory some time
around noon. The dwarves had studied him, with growing smiles. The Windigo had seen in the
man’s sly, pleased eyes that κύ. Fjalar would attempt to strip the Windigo’s own rebellion of all
its secret pleasure: The somatic power that had been his first love, his control, taken from him.
Κύ. Fjalar had got his hooks into him, getting under his skin. Way under.
A man could do unto you all day long, and you could just not-be-there, but that was as noth -
ing compared to getting you to do the work yourself. The difference between mere torture and
the true infliction of self-destruction was the participation of the victim.
His mother, as a dominatrix and a Tantric, an Indikḗ woman whose tortures had been physic-
ally far milder than anything the dwarves had so far contemplated, had known this.
The fact that he would have described—still would describe—his maternal relationship with
the words “It wasn’t that bad all the time,” could be interpreted in a number of ways.
What do you say to a bottom and an entomologist who had been gutted by the sight of his
son looking down at a cage of cockroaches, obviously wondering why no one would yet con-
sent for him to to introduce them into his anus? The Windigo had not thought, before that mo-
ment, that his father had truly grasped the nature of what he had been becoming. His father had
watched. Had he been the one man who had never cared for that, but only for the boy whose
wound he had cleaned after that first little incident with his mother’s hairpins? Then, his father
seemed to comprehend. It changed everything between them, in subtle ways.
That κύ. Fjalar knew self-destruction too, he proved later; He introduced an aphrodisiac be -
fore handing him off to his little brother, so that the Windigo became an exuberant participant
in his own abuse. It doubtless had made a great show, worthy of photographing.
They brought him back to his cell to digest this fresh experience, much as they had brought
him back to digest his force-feeding. It took a while for the shock and drug-fog to fade. He os-
cillated slowly between a drained lassitude and horror. Curious. At the time, the drug had short-
circuited his masochistic biology, reducing it to something like a bad case of the hiccoughs. The
show would have otherwise been crazier and shorter. Κύ. Fjalar had watched.
Κύ. Fjalar’s interests were not really erotic; The Windigo felt the man must have become bored
with the stereotyped banality of every possible physical act years ago. No: Κύ. Fjalar had been
watching him for... reflexes? Small betrayals of interest, fear, arousal? The exercise had not
been arranged for the sake of pain. There had been plenty of pain, but the discomfort from the
force-feeding and his brain running out of flagellistic energy had hit him all at once.
His cheek was red. The next day a bruise would show. But for now it was hot, and he was
smiling, joyful, quivering with the anticipation of something already passed.
The Windigo had thus sat, and rocked, mind half whited-out with a delicious heat. And espe-
cially love. From the moment of the first force-feeding, it had not been war any more. This was
personal now, between κύ. Fjalar and him. But not personal enough. He had never been alone
with κύ. Fjalar. He had always been outnumbered, outweighed, passed from one set of chains

431
 EUDAIMONIA

to another. The Windigo was being treated as an extraordinarily dangerous person, even now.
That would not do. The Windigo’s talent was as natural to him as the patterns which were made
by the dust upon a butterfly’s wings. Ah, to have been born in those darling bygone times, with
their delicious scourgers and their dear old dungeons and their delightful places of torture and
their romantic vengeances and everything that made life truly charming!
The Windigo had thought being skinned alive was a thing done with sharp knives... or dull
ones. Κύ. Fjalar did it chemically, spraying carefully selected areas of his body with hard acids.
The medics wore gloves, masks and protective clothing; He tried, and failed, to grab a mask off
and let one of them share what they administered. Later, he cursed his maliciousness and cried
and watched the skin of his arse drip away. Touching anything, or being touched there, was an
agony after that: Especially the pressure of sitting or lying down. He had stood in the little closet-
cell, shifting from foot to foot, touching nothing, for hṓrai, till his shaking legs stilled.
He sat, then rocked, mind whited-out with pain; But especially joy. This was the very ecstasy
of love, whose violent property foreboded itself, and led the will to desperate undertakings, as
often as any passion under heaven that did inflict a living being’s nature.
He would have said something to break the intimate tension in the air before now, but the
force-feedings had plugged his mouth, the drugs had stripped him of language, and all the other
things had kept him too busy. It was all κύ. Fjalar’s fault; He saw but did not listen. When the
man spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner he affected at times. The Windigo wept for the
man. Did daímōns too sometimes dream of becoming Gods? Not gods, but Gods?

He had forgotten why he was here. The skin on his arse was finally starting to grow back.
He wondered where the Windigo had gone: Where Asiniiwin had gone.
So, cruel men came, tormented a nameless thing, and then went away again. He met them
variously. The Windigo had found both freedom and safety in his madness. A freedom from pro -
tracted loneliness and safety from ever really being understood, for those who had understood
him enslaved something in him. In short order, Asiniiwin’s emerging aspects became four per-
sonae, and eventually, he named them, as well as he could identify them. There was Gorge, and
Grunt, and Howl, and another, a quiet one lurking somewhere in the shadows.
He let Gorge go out to handle the force-feedings, because Gorge was the only one who ac-
tually enjoyed them. Grunt was not the kind of entity to fret about Svend using the same syringe
on other people—the aphrodisiac had to enter his bloodstream to be effective; Grunt was the one
responsible for assaulting the blond-haired nurse with the big rack at his first acid treatment, al-
though, when not horny, Grunt was inward-looking and very rarely spoke.
Howl handled the rest. The nameless being began to suspect Howl had been obscurely re-
sponsible for delivering them all to κύ. Fjalar in the first place. Finally, he had come to a place
where he could be stimulated enough. Never give aversion therapy to a Pithophiliac; The results

432
 KALIDASA

were unpredictable. So Howl deserved what Howl got. The elusive fourth one just waited, and
said someday they would love him the best. None of the others believed him.
While the Gang of Four truly did, metaphorically speaking, run multiple systems on a single
skullware mechanism, each with their own kind of distinct topology, they did not always stay within
their lines, to emerge appropriately, one by one. Howl, for instance, had a tendency to eaves-
drop on Gorge’s sessions, which came regularly, while Howl’s, to his annoyance, did not. More
than once, Gorge wound up riding alongside Grunt on an adventure, which then became excep-
tionally peculiar. None of them but the Other had ever joined Howl by choice.
Having named them all, he found himself, by process of elimination.
Gorge, Grunt, Howl and the Other had tucked little Asiniiwin deep down inside. Poor, fragile
little Asiniiwin, who would always and forever grow up again to become a God.
For a while, Asiniiwin had been alone in a great ship made of ice, surrounded by beings made
of meat, beings which moved about all by themselves; Some of them had even been wrapped
in pieces of cloth. But now, the strange, nonsensical sounds which came from holes at their top
ends had resolved themselves into words: Words that had reassured the Gang of Four that the
devilish κύ. Fjalar could not reach Asiniiwin down here; Could not reach inside to touch him.
Gorge, Grunt, Howl and the Other had to be careful not to wake the baby. Tender and protect-
ive, they always defended him. They were equipped to. An ugly, grotty and hard-bitten crew they
were, these psychic mercenaries: Unlovely. But they got the job done.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this...” said Centralizer Dà Míng, quite slowly and rather care-
fully, “but your torture victim appears to be having a quite wonderful time.”
Gorge grinned about the tube gagging his mouth as κύ. Fjalar walked around him.
Κύ. Fjalar: “It is oft said there are a number of possible psychological defences in these situ -
ations. Split personalities and identification with the captor... : It is to be expected that even a
Windigo would progress through some, but—so soon?” A sigh. “If his personality is truly split-
ting... .” A long, slow shake of the head. “He does seem to shield his mind from stimuli, and his
surface responses for sure suggest a split, but the pattern is abnormally... normal. Were this an-
other, I may be inclined to nod and point out that split personalities arise spontaneously from an
unimaginable cauldron of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes or beatings
while the child behind takes to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the mind. I may point
out that this is sometimes done as a survival tactic and sometimes as kind of ritual self-sacrifice.
Powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up bloody and quivering chunks of self
in the desperate hope that the vengeful Gods which went by the names Mum or Dad may not
be insatiable in their desires or their dominations or their abuses.
“But—and here is the dirty little secret—none of that may be real, as it turns out: It’s for damn
sure that none of it has been confirmed. The ‘experts’ of today are little more than witch-doctors

433
 EUDAIMONIA

dancing through improvised rituals: Wandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and
nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through records of pre-Didáskal childhoods; At times a shot
of something when the beads and rattles have failed. The technology to map minds is not even
off the ground; The technology to edit them is decades away. So, the therapists and psychiat-
rists poke at their victims and invent names for things they do not understand, and argue over
the shrines of Plátōn or the astrologers; Doing their best to sound like practitioners of some in-
formed natural philosophy.” Κύ. Fjalar had nevertheless proceeded to order a series of ēlektroen-
kefalográphos. The results were unusual. If his personality was splitting, should it not show up
in some way? Something showed up on the ΗΕΓs. He seemed to be shielding some portion of
his mind from the stimuli. His responses really did seem to suggest a split, but—
“Whatever’s going on, he’s not faking. Of that you’re sure, right?”
“So impossibly fast,” murmured κύ. Fjalar. “How could I have missed it?”
“How should I know? Early. After the first acid treatment, maybe? One thing I do suspect is
that if he keeps this up, he’s going to be elusive prey for you, is he not? To bring much force to
bear upon...” a wave of the hand, “that. He can just keep... changing hats.”
A nod. “So can I,” stated the daímōn, more than a little coldly.
The pressure in Asiniiwin’s stomach was now pain. Howl prodded uneasily, but Gorge would
not give way; It was his turn. The Other listened to the conversation; He always listened when
κύ. Fjalar was present. Went days at a time without sleep. He almost never spoke.
“I didn’t expect him to reach this stage of disintegration for months.”
Petulance: “It throws off my time-table,” the man complained.
“I must consider how best to re-focus him. Bring him to the Showing Chamber later. We will
see what a little public exhibitionism and a few experiments will yield.”
Beneath Asiniiwin’s flattened affect the Other shivered in anticipation.
Two Acolytes delivered the Windigo to the Showing Chamber later that night.
The chamber was windowless; A large tapestry had been removed from one wall.
The Windigo’s skin still looked extremely patchy. The nurses had sprayed the raw areas with
some kind of coating to keep him from oozing too much, and dressed all the other wounds with
bandages so they would not break open and bleed the madman to death.
The Acolytes sat him now in a low, wide chair. It was just a chair; No spikes or razors or im-
palements. His arms were fastened to the armrests with ropes over his hands; His wrists were
still too raw; If the Windigo went into convulsions, there was a good chance that he would cut
an artery. They spread his knees and sat him painfully upright. He began panting.
An Acolyte asked κύ. Fjalar: “Do you wish us to secure his legs too, Sir?”
Κύ. Fjalar raised an eyebrow. “Can he stand up without help?” To which, a shrug.
Κύ. Fjalar smiled in amused contempt as he stared down at his opponent. The beauty of the
Windigo’s body was that it had not a single wound that did not serve his purpose now.
Ah, perhaps we are getting there; Slowly, but surely. “I think we’ll be fine.”

434
 KALIDASA

There was shuffling silence among the crowd which surrounded the square demonstration
area. Gorge, Grunt and Howl stared around with interest, wondering whose turn it was going to
be next. For a time, the sack over the Windigo’s head was the centre of attention; The room was
crowded, full of whispers, murmured questions—a lie could run all the way round the world be -
fore the truth had got its boots on. One of the Acolytes behind Asiniiwin’s back was fiddling with
a device. Soon, there came the sound of sparking and several soft clicks.
The Other, for his part, kept his mind on κύ. Fjalar, as well as the leather bindings, which were
unfortunately tied in such a way that struggle would only tighten them. Yet, could his fingers de-
tect fraying... there? A trap, surely? The Windigo put his tongue out and felt the raw edges of the
silk hood. He looped his tongue around them and drew them into his mouth. Just a little bit, he
thought, that was all he would need to free his right eyelid. He pulled the tasteless web between
his teeth and gums, grinding his jaw down in a grimace—it felt as if he were eating the very skin
off his face. But the silk over his eyelid parted just far enough. All present moments were filled
with joy; If Gorge, Grunt, Howl and the Other were attentive, would they find it?
You just had your turn, said Howl to Gorge. It will be me next.
Don’t bet on it, said Grunt. It could be me this time.
If it weren’t for Gorge, said the Other, I’d take my turn right now.
You’ve never taken a turn, said Gorge, curiously. But the Other was silent.
“Let’s watch a show,” grinned κύ. Fjalar to the audience; A nod to the Acolyte.
On the empty wall, a life-sized projection of one of Grunt’s sessions appeared.
The crowd gasped to itself. Every corner of the chamber was crowded with Acolytes or Initi-
ates or Adepts; There was even a crowd lining the corridor outside. Somewhere, there were
no doubt those who would whistle approval—or jealousy—if only they dared.
“I am thinking of sending a copy of this to a Night Court,” κύ. Fjalar murmured. “Imagine all
those Erōsóphers viewing this over and over and over... .” Grunt was perfectly willing to ima-
gine the outcome, although some parts of it would bore even him.
Not me! shouted Howl, all of a sudden. That’s not my job!
Perhaps they would have to make up a new recruit. Could they not make hundreds or even
thousands? Like mush, were they impossible to destroy with any single hit?
The display changed to one of Howl’s finest moments, the one that had given him his name.
Shortly after they had chemically skinned his arse, the nurses had painted sticky stuff on him
that made him itch unbearably. Nobody had even had to touch him. He almost killed himself.
They gave him a transfusion after, to replace all the blood he had lost. And yet, looking into the
past, did it have all the excitement of watching paint dry? Κύ. Fjalar looked as if he would rather
aim a lens at Asiniiwin’s soul, or switch slides to something truly horrific.
The Other waited with growing impatience. He was beginning to get his breath back, but there
were still the damned restraints to contend with. Must they now be willing to take the risk of it?
By the next opportunity, if one ever came, Gorge might have immobilized them.

435
 EUDAIMONIA

His nausea increased. The damn thing had become unfamiliar: The way his throat bathed his
lips in the liquid of saliva was intolerable. A sense of repulsion had invaded his mind. How poorly
made he was, how insufficient. The shoulders, his arms, legs and ears seemed to him attrib-
utes of monstrous beings who had fallen from some corner of a black sky.
Κύ. Fjalar’s lips puffed with disappointment, watching Asiniiwin’s body language.
He ordered the projector turned off, to the loud pique of the audience. Κύ. Fjalar arose and
studied the Windigo through narrowed eyes. “You’re not even with me, are you? You have gone
around some bend, I think.” It was probably not by chance that the dwarf was alone. It would be
very hard for a woman to live with him, unless she were terribly strong. And if by some chance
she were tougher than he, it would be he who could not live with her.
Κύ. Fjalar had flaws, but what did that matter when it came to a Man of Unknowledge? Logic
did not enter into it. In some ways, was not unwise love the truest from of love? Anyone could
love something because. It was as easy as putting a coin in a pocket. To love something des-
pite; To know all the flaws and love them too; That was rare and pure and—
I don’t trust you, interrupted Gorge, doubtfully. What will happen to me, after?
And to me, added Grunt. Only Howl said nothing. Howl was so very tired.
I promise that Asiniiwin will still feed you, Gorge, the Other whispered. And Grunt, Asiniiwin
could take you to the Night Court. There are people there who could help you clean up enough
to come out in the daylight, I think. You would not need Fjalar’s concoctions. Poor Howl is all
exhausted. He’s worked the hardest, covering for the rest of us. Grunt, what if Fjalar decides
on castration next? Perhaps you and Howl can get together; Asiniiwin could find you a harem of
women with whips and chains? At the Night Court, I bet you could find a dozen in the directory.
You do not need Fjalar. We can save Asiniiwin and he can save us in turn.
Who are you, to pledge Asiniiwin’s word? asked Gorge, grumpily.
You’ve certainly hidden out the best, noted Grunt, with a hint of resentment.
Asiniiwin might not want to come back. He might be having a much better time being a frac-
tured mirror. But even if he doesn’t, the party is still going to come to an end, sooner or later. If
Fjalar can’t have us, you can be damn sure he will make sure nobody else does.
“I’ve always wondered,” κύ. Fjalar commented, strolling in a circle. “If a man with multiple
personalities threatens to eat himself to death, is it considered a hostage situation?” Having the
dwarf behind him had some odd effects on his inner topography. Gorge flattened himself, Howl
emerged, then sank again as κύ. Fjalar came back in view. Grunt watched for cues, rocking a
bit. “Can you guess what else I can do to play you all against each other? The Man of Unknow-
ledge must be able not only to love his enemies but hate his friends.”
The dwarf walked over to a low table set up nearby and unwrapped a small array of glitter-
ing tools which no one could quite see, though Howl stretched his neck the most.
Meditatively, the small man looked the kit over for a long moment.
You have to stay out of my way. And not sabotage me, said the Other. 

436
 KALIDASA

Silence. Gorge: We’ll never survive such injuries!

Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.
You’ll only get one chance, said Howl nervously. And then they’ll come after me.
As κύ. Fjalar turned back, a surgical instrument gleamed in his grip.
Grunt, the one of them most easily frightened, was the first to give way.
“I believe,” said κύ. Fjalar, “that I will deafen you in one of your ears next; Just the one. That
should have some interesting focussing effects when I threaten the undamaged one.”
So, this is how he wounds by his own hand, Dà Míng reflected.
The crowd had by this point fallen altogether silent.
Smoothly, Howl gave way. Last of all, Gorge gave way, as κύ. Fjalar strode forwards.
Trying to work around Gorge’s new belly would be something like being the blind Zen archer.
But his inner alignment was absolute now. The group considered the Other, whom they all now
recognized as Survivor. Grunt: It was mother who made you, mostly, didn’t she?
Survivor nodded: But she didn’t make me out of nothing.
Grunt smiled inwardly. You did very well. Hiding out; Stalking. I’d wondered if any of us pos -
sessed any sense of timing at all. I am glad at least one of us—
Shut up and let me work! Who was speaking? Survivor? Gorge? Grunt? Howl?
They had been good troops, and loyal, but none of them were all that bright.
A smile: No, being bright was never supposed to be their job. If ever a Supreme Being wanted
a job done wrong, surely they would have had no choice but to do it themselves.
The Windigo could understand why there had been all this reluctance at reintegration. Just
imagine the topology of the Gang of Four’s coexisting minds: When you have been peeled off
from a pre-existing entity, shaped from nonexistence straight into adulthood—a mere fragment
of personhood, without so much as an arm or a leg to call your own—you could be forgiven a cer-
tain... queerness. In the future, what would be astonishing to Asiniiwin would be how he never
ran out of his own being: Ran out of whatever the stuff was that made somebody who they were.
He could be cut into pieces forever, turned into the sort of people a normal person would have
felt sorry for. It was as though, while life on Gaia was rich and full, he was secretly sick of him-
self and could not wait to dispose of his sanity, health and all sense of appreciation so as to get
all the way down to those antipode selves who were whole-hearted madmen.
How terribly sad it was that human beings were made in such a way that they often did not ap-
preciate something so fantastic as living in total control of their minds and bodies?

437
 KALIDASA
] The less I know about other people, the happier I am. I am not at all interested in caring
about other folk. I once travelled with a man for two years without learning his name.
] Best friend I ever had, it turns out. We still never talk sometimes. ^

—The Great Aiasheu to Erica “C-731” O’Bran

“I know you’re listening. I can feel you. I know you’re afraid... afraid of me; You’re afraid of
change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is all going to end. I came
here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up, and then I am going to show these
people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world in
which anything is possible. Where they go from there is a choice I leave up to them.”

—Erica “C-731” O’Bran

It seemed as though he had been falling for years. ] Fly, ^ a voice whispered in the plum-
meting darkness, but Kurush did not know how to fly—all he could do was fall. Kurush’s father
had built a crude pottery boy, dressed him in his son’s old clothes and flung him off the roof, to
demonstrate what would happen to Kurush if he fell. That had been fun, but afterwards the lad
had just looked at his father, saying, “I’m not made of clay. And anyhow, I never fall.” As angry
as he had been, all his father had done was laugh: “You are not my son, you’re a squirrel. So be
it! If you must climb, then do so... but try not to let your mother see you, okay?”
Back in the 1990s, each little region of the nation’s capital had been made from a different sub-
stance, having a different psychic weight: The bright lights and the high-class outlets, the sub-
urban houses and the ugly office blocks, the fire escapes and bicycle paths. The downtown core
had been rebuilt in the 2040s in a deliberately archaic style; The high-rises had been demolished.
In the autumn, the many vines covering the brickwork walls would be various of shades of red.
Yet, up above, the rooftops were all steel walkways racked with conduits or piping.
The grass-covered hilltops and valleys were too far below him as yet; Kurush could barely
make them out through the frail, midnight-black clouds. He had all the sensations of movement
save for the howling of wind in his ears. Kurush felt all the terror of being an acrophobe, of being
drawn down, down and down whilst being powerless to come to a stop. Even in a dream such as
this, a man could not fall forever. The professor should wake up in the instant right before he hit
the ground, he knew. You always awoke in the instant before you hit the ground.
] And if you don’t? ^ the voice had asked him.
Later, the ground was closer; Still far, far beneath him, and yet it was now much closer than
it had been. Had he fallen asleep? He must have eaten; Or had he dreamt that as well? There
was no sunlight to be had, only a crescent moon and stars, only dark fog, clouds and mist, that
whispering voice and the valley floor rushing up to meet him. He wanted to cry.
] Not cry. Fly! Fly! Like this! ^ To which: “I can’t fly! I can’t! I can’t!”
Mockery: ] “I can’t! I can’t!” How do you know? Have you ever tried? ^

439
 EUDAIMONIA

The voice was high and thin. Kurush looked around.

A raven was spiralling down with him, just out of reach, following him as he fell.
“Help me, goddamn it!” the professor shouted.
] I’m trying! ^ Silence. ] Say, got any more corn? ^
The professor reached into his pocket as the darkness spun dizzily around him. When he
pulled his hand out once again, there were a dozen golden kernels sliding between his fingers
into the air. They fell with him. The raven landed on his hand and began to eat.
“It’s just a dream,” the professor said.
] And if it is...
is... what then? ^ the raven asked him.
Kurush took a deep breadth. “I’ll wake up when I hit the ground.”
Silence. ] You’ll die when you hit the ground. ^
It went back to eating its corn. Almost nothing needed to be said when one had Sight.
Kurush looked down. The hills and treetops were so close! He discerned lakes, their waters
frozen over. He saw the pale gossamers of rivers under the light of the moon.
‘I must not fear...  . I must not fear...  . I must not fear...’
] That won’t do any good, ^ the spirit commented. ] I told you, the answer is flying. How
hard can it be? Like this. ^ The bird took to the air and banked about his head.
] Flight: You dreamed of it, yet have never tasted the blue in all your life. The dream of be -
ing able to fly is now a physical reality, but only the rich can afford the surgery and drugs and
gene manipulation to become Angels. You grew up, became a man; That is how one is condi- condi-
tioned to think the Canadian Dream Machine has an “Out of Order!” sign on it. ^
Kurush had been staring at his arms, at his hands. They were just skin stretched taut over
bones. Had he always been so thin? He tried to recall. A face swam up at him: “ ‘If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever!’ ”
] Not that! Forget that, you don’t need it, put it aside, put it away. ^
The raven landed on his shoulder. It pecked at him. The face was gone.
He was falling faster than ever. The black mists howled all about him now as he plunged to-
wards the forested hilltops below. “What’re you doing to me?!”
Silence. At last: ] Teaching you how to fly! ^
Laughter: ] Every chick’s first flight begins with a fall. fall. ^ Then: ] Look down. ^
The professor did not want to look— To which: ] LOOK DOWN! ^
The ground was rushing towards him. The whole world was spread out below the professor
now, a tapestry of black and brunette and green and white and blue. The professor could see
everything so clearly that for an endless moment he somehow forgot to be afraid.
Thus, he would See Newfoundland and Labrador as even an Angel must not be able to see
it: As it would have appeared to Huginn and Muninn in the time of Leif Erikson and the Viking
colonies. He Saw fjords and lakes and rivers, the usual, some calm part of himself supposed. It
had snowed recently across the entire area. Kurush saw, just at that moment, autumn begin to

440
 KALIDASA

extinguish itself in a rush of howling winds, as winter came, storming with all its rage, with dense
snowfall every morning, and winds that often moaned, griped or whispered.
In the big cities human beings saw so little of the world, the citizenry drifting into anonymous
minorities. In the little towns and villages, there were no minorities; People were not numerous
enough. This town was as barren as an empty movie set; The only movement Kurush could see
came from a doe wandering the boulevards. Her eyes skimmed silent streets as she searched
the ground. A half-grown fawn, grazing near the side of the road, lifted her head and hurried off
to her mother. Was it a slow and sleepy place where weekdays rolled past like weekends and
Mondays did not matter? Afternoons were spent waiting on the docks, swinging one’s legs off a
pier till canoes rolled in with crates full of oysters or crayfish still gasping. As one passed the inn
at the end of the road, one left one’s favourite whimsy behind: Little girls and boys pulling fish-
hooks out of their feet because they never wore shoes, playing with others whose names they
need never know, running wild, building snowmen, climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if
one pressed an ear to them, or spending dreamy nights snuggling by a campfire.
The gathering began at dawn and continued until dusk, an endless day of drinking and feast-
ing and fighting. The professor had never before beheld a people so strange and so lusty. Men
and women alike wore brightly-painted leather vests over bare chests and horsehair leggings
cinched by bronze medallion belts, and the menfolk greased their long braids with fat from the
rendering pits; They gorged themselves on caribou flesh roasted with honey and blueberries.
They drank themselves blind on fermented mare’s milk and wines, and spat jests at each other
across the fires, their voices harsh and alien in Kurush’s ears. Drums were beating as many of
the women and men and children danced; The flames writhed before him like the men and wo-
men who danced. The fires sang and spun in yellow, orange and crimson veils, fearsome to be -
hold, yet lovely: So lovely, alive with heat. One of the members of the audience finally stepped
into the circle, grabbed a dancer by the arm, pushed her down to the ground and so mounted
her. A second man stepped forwards, and thence a third. Soon there was no way to avert the
eyes. Then two men seized the same dancer. Kurush heard a shout, saw a shove, and in the
blink of an eye the knives were out. The dance of death began as the men circled and slashed
and leapt at each other, whirling the blades about their heads, shrieking.
It ended as quickly as it began. The knives shivered together faster than he could follow; One
man missed a step, the other swung his blade in a wide arc. Steel bit into flesh just above the
man’s waist, and opened him from backbone to belly button, spilling his entrails into the snow. As
the loser died, the winner took hold of the nearest woman—not even the woman they had been
fighting over—and fucked her there and then in the more rough manner.
A winter solstice without at least three deaths: Was it deemed a dull affair?
Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveller. Depending
on the city and the traveller, there may begin a mutual love or a dislike or a friendship or even
some kind of enmity. Where one city would raise a certain man to glory, it would destroy another

441
 EUDAIMONIA

who was not suited to its personality. Only through travel could the professor know where he be-
longed or did not belong, where he was loved and where he was denied.
Valandvik, one of the newest, largest and most brilliant cities of this old New World, lay to the
south-east: It was a place partly fashioned from the fjord and partly from stones shipped in from
other areas of the world. A place that seemed to him unique since there, humanity built not for
safety or comfort or beauty alone, but audacity. The city’s terraces seemed to be masterworks
of masonry and embossing, detailing its residents’ brief, and yet audacious, history. The rising
switchbacks of its streets were lined with multi-storey towers like fingers of stone, by hand-made
lanterns powered by the marvel of hydroelectricity; All criss-crossed by arching bridges of stone
or steel, with below, underground tubes called the Hüpógeios, which were so damn simple and
yet so breathtakingly power-intensive that it would seem nobody had ever built them before in
written history. And suddenly, the professor found himself marvelling so much more than he had
ever before at how much of human history was actually unwritten.
Certainly, upon the vast, snowy plains, there was plenty of nothing to look at. The Vikings had
named the place Vinland—was it a land of quiet ironies? Yet, Norse colonization of the Amer-
icas was associated with the Mediaeval Warm Period, the Norse taking advantage of ice-free
seas to colonize southern Greenland and other hinterlands of the far north.
There was a large group of Scandinavian men walking along one of the cobbled paths be-
low; It was as if this peaceful and affluent Newfoundland metropolis would never be marred by
mazes of rotting timber houses, their walls shored up with more timber, their windows patched
with plastic. At the core of the city, much was to be Seen from this height, so it was not unsur-
prising to Kurush that one district was larger and far more daring than all the rest. He had not
known that silver, as a roofing martial, could take on so many shades of opal and lightning. He
Saw fluted pillars of gold like the rays of a bright sunrise. The Glitnir was where the leadership of
the Didáskal in the New Scandinavia had once met to do their unending leader-ish things; The
professor now Saw that once Valandvik had been a drive wheel in the machinery of a great Deed.
In mythology, the Glitnir had been symbolic of the importance, within the Norse tradition, of dis-
cussion rather than violence as a means of the resolution of conflicts.
The yellowest of sunrises lay eastward. It glowed with pale streaks of light and then a deeper
run of colour, like blood seeping up from deep below. From this an airship’s bow rose, like the
glans of a fat, red phallus; It cleared the fjord, floating rigid and delicious—lighter-than-air flight
utilizing hydrogen dated back at least to the US civil war. And so it would seem that night and
day, wind and snow, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed the Roc.
All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang as false as the prattle of
a child, here alone in this airship amongst the clouds, endlessly circl—
Below, a tall, feminine figure went bounding across the plateau. Her hair was blonde, not plat-
inum-grey. She threw an enormous shadow. Before her, the airship floated like some equally
tremendous manhood. It seemed to the professor that the figure would leap.

442
 KALIDASA

Just as a fisherman had been about to intercept the runner or shout a warning, she came to
the grassy edge of the cliff, jumped. Was what happened next a shock to him? The leaping fig-
ure disintegrated, turning into a flock of birds; They flew past the man, flowing around him like
water. The drunk man stumbled this way and that, finally turning, all agape.
The flock of birds collected on a balcony and resumed the form of a woman. She smashed
the balcony doors down and stepped into the luxury gondola. She listened cautiously.
She smashed open the bathroom door, lunging in for the naked, soapy dwarf.
The startled man began to shout an obscenity. The woman became a pack of rats—the kind
that represented something of a phobia for the man—and poured into his throat, choking him
and forcing open the route to his insides. Miniature rats packed each air-sac of his lungs; Others
bulked out his stomach to the point of bursting and beyond, then invaded his body cavity, while
others rammed down into the rest of his digestive system, forcing an explosion of fæcal matter.
The dwarf crashed and battered about the shower, smashing the ceramic fittings and scratch-
ing the enamel. More tiny rats streamed into his ears, forcing their way around his horrified, star-
ing eyes, burning their way into his skull while his skin crawled and writhed with a pack of rats that
had invaded his body cavity and gone on to slide their way under his flesh.
The rats would consume his entire body as he lay thrashing on the floor, even consuming his
blood. They continued to feast their way through every bodily part till, just two or three minutes
after the attack had begun, the dwarf’s whole body had been consumed.
] None of these figures matter, by the way. I merely point them out for context. ^ 
The professor glanced at the spirit. The spirit looked back. It had three eyes—the third eye
was full of Source and a Victorious Fire. The professor looked downwards. There was nothing
below now but cold, darkness and death, a frozen wasteland where jagged blue-black spires
of ice waited to embrace him. They flew at him like spears: He saw the bones of a thousand
other dreamers impaled on their points. The professor was desperately afraid.
“Can a person still be brave when he’s afraid?” he heard himself asking, haltingly and so far
away. The response? “I think that is the only time a man can be brave.”
Broken blue-black spires of ice reached upwards, screeching.
The Great Aiasheu: ] Now! Choose now! Fly! Fly or die! ^ 
Kurush spread his arms and caught the air. He spread them further and flew.
His arms unseen drank the wind and filled, pulled him upwards. It seemed that there was an
art to flying, or rather a knack; The knack lay in knowing how to throw oneself at the ground and
somehow miss. The horrifying needles of ice receded below him. The sky opened up. The pro -
fessor flew. This was better than hang gliding! It was better than anything!
“Say ‘Nevermore!’ ” commanded the professor.] Fuck you! ^ chuckled the raven.
The bird took to the air, flapping its wings in his face, slowing him, blinding him. He faltered
in the air as its pinions beat against his cheeks. Its beak stabbed at him fiercely. The professor
felt a sudden blinding pain in the middle of his forehead, between his eyes.

443
 EUDAIMONIA

The spirit guide opened its beak to caw at him, a shrill, startled sound, and the black clouds
shuddered and swirled around him and ripped away like a veil; And he saw that the raven was
really a woman, a woman with short, black hair, and he knew her from somewhere. The pro-
fessor was naked abed. He began to feel his body, grew aware of massive bindings on wrists
and ankles: Yes, that was it, he remembered now. The black-haired woman dropped a bowl to
shatter on the floor and ran, shouting in Greek: “It’s awake! It’s awake! It’s awake!”
Kurush’s face was wet, a wet place between his eyes. The place where the crow, raven, spirit
guide, or whatever, had pecked him was still burning, but there was nothing there, no blood on
his face, just water. He felt weak, even dizzy. He attempted to speak; Failed.
Where was it that the professor had read that someone who had been condemned to death
said or thought to themselves, an hour before his or her death, that if he or she had to live upon
some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that they would only have enough room to stand, with
the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting tempest, all about, if they had to remain standing
on a square foot of space all their life, a hundred years, eternity, it were better to live so than to
die at once? Only to live, to live, live and live! Life, whatever it might be!
There would be a thing he would at length come to think over and over—not in the months to
come, but in the months which followed the months immediately to come—as he imagined how
Chandrā had died, trying to make sense of something so innately senseless. He would come to
find himself covering Chandrā’s broken body with a heavy blanket, except for her ragged skull
and, most especially, her eye sockets, because she had been afraid of the dark. He would sit
beside a coffin packed with ice, numb, paying no attention to the world that might be breaking
outside. The world had already broken within him, neither ending for the first time. He would think
himself an old hat at this by now. But what the professor would oftentimes think, then, as well as
months after, would be: “But at least she had been free... .” It would be his bitter, weary self that
answered this, wearily: She wasn’t; Not really. But now, maybe she can be. At no point would
he ask himself why it had not been possible for Chandrā also to have survived.

444
- THE GOOD, THE BETTER AND THE PEALS OF LAUGHTER -
 KALIDASA

The Elysian Fields, at the Amphitheatre of Delphi, on a fine day in the 21st Century

Spirits of persons both “alive” and “dead”, and even some spirits of so-called “fictitious
characters”—quotation marks are used since there doesn’t appear to be any iron-clad logical
proof that these spirits are any different from one another—who have read or heard of the novel
Eudaimonia by Kalidasa come and go from the amphitheatre, speaking their mind about the
novel; any spirit who wishes to can speak his or her mind to the others, who are seated around
the amphitheatre to exchange their views on the book and expand their understanding of it. The
spirit of the novel’s author, Kalidasa, is also among them, and often clarifies his writing of it.
Anyone who wishes to speak stands up; the others remain seated; the superb acoustics of the
theatre enable everyone’s words to be clearly heard, even though it can seat as many as five
thousand. The entire procedure is kept from getting out of control by the Oracle of Delphi, who
speaks from behind a screen on the stage, mainly because she looks like a python, and so in this
modern and irreverent age risks being derisively called “Monty”, or even, on occasion, “The
Full Monty” (though of course in the Elysian Fields no one cares whether the persons they are
speaking with—or for that matter they themselves—are wearing any clothes or not). Everything
is recorded by Aristocles, much as he used to in the past when he was incarnated on earth, though
these days he uses an iPad, along with its sound-recording and -transcribing functions.

THE ORACLE OF DELPHI. I now declare these proceedings open. Who wishes to speak first,
and on what subject?
SOCRATES. [raises his hand—metaphorically, of course, since he is altogether non-physical in nature]
May I? I should like to speak on what I believe this novel is most about.
THE ORACLE. You have the first word, Socrates—metaphorically, of course.
SOCRATES. Thank you. Ahem. If I may be permitted to quote from the novel itself [opens his
copy—again metaphorically—and quotes]: “The stupidity of a novel could only come from having
an answer for everything. The wisdom of a novel, did it come from having a question for
everything? Novelists, did they teach readers to comprehend the world as a question? There
might be wisdom and tolerance in this attitude. In a world built upon hallowed certainties, nov-
els as an art would be dead. Totalitarianism: Was it nothing but a world of answers rather than
questions?” As I always say, the unexamined life is not worth living!
THE TATHĀGATA (USUALLY CALLED “THE BUDDHA”, THOUGH NOT BY HIMSELF).
Yes, this is crystal clear in my mind too. I remember saying to a group of people who had
asked me for advice, as I was passing through their village, regarding which of the many
conflicting teachings which they had heard from others should be followed: I had replied,
“Do not rely upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon

449
 EUDAIMONIA

rumour, nor upon what is written in any so-called sacred scripture, nor upon surmise, nor
upon an unproven assumption, nor upon faulty reasoning, nor upon a bias towards a no-
tion that has been pondered over for long that your thoughts on the topic have become
habitual, nor upon another’s apparent ability or skill, nor upon the consideration ‘This person
is our revered teacher’; but when you yourselves know, and know for certain, ‘These things
are good; these things cannot be validly criticized; and most importantly, when undertaken
and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness’, only then enter on and abide in
them.” I do apologize for the phraseology, but I used to talk somewhat more pompously in
those days than I do now, for that was the style then.
PAUL THE APOSTLE. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good”. Yes, indeed.
SOCRATES. Surely proving all things is impossible? For instance, how can anyone possibly
prove that two and two make five?
BERTRAND RUSSELL. Indeed, it’s hard enough to prove that two and two make four! During
my comparative nonage on earth, when I was at Trinity College, Cambridge, I, together with
my fellow Fellow of the College, Alfred North Whitehead, had thought that we had proved that
one and one make two; it took us more than three hundred and fifty pages, and we were con-
strained to use a special and dense logic notation, some of which was invented by ourselves,
because otherwise it would probably have taken us ten times as many pages; but now I am
not sure we proved even that! At least not to my own satisfaction, given that I’ve grown a lot
intellectually since then. When I say “proved”, of course, I mean proved it to be true; for what
sort of “proof” is it if that hasn’t been done? Indeed, I remember writing something along the
following lines even when I was still incarnated: “Mathematics may be defined as the subject
in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”.
(Begging both your pardons, Euclid and Archimedes.)
TOM BALLARD, CHARACTER IN THE TV SHOW “WAITING FOR GOD”. However, your
younger sister Jane did tell me that she had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that gen-
tlemen prefer blondes. Sexually, I mean.
JOHN CLEESE. And my older brother Sophocles did say to my friend Sigmund “Pink” Floyd—
of course you all know that his name is written F-r-e-u-d but is pronounced “Floyd”, yes?
Except by many Japanese, who often can’t pronounce the sound of the letter “ell”, so they
pronounce his name “Froyd”—well, anyway, my older brother Sophocles did say that he
had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that sons prefer mothers. Sexually, I mean.
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. [muttering under his breath] John... Please! [Speaking
louder] This is even sillier than your “Silly Walks” sketch! What’s the point in being silly when
trying to have deep philosophical discussions... as we’re doing now?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. My dear Archbishop, what’s the point in not being silly, given
that we have an entire eternity ahead of us? After all, life does not cease to be funny when
people die, any more than it ceases to be profound when babies giggle... does it?
LIONEL BART, CREATOR OF THE MUSICAL OLIVER. [singing—again, metaphorically] “ At
your wake / we’ll drink a toddy / to your body / beautiful... ! ”... shan’t we?

450
 KALIDASA

JESUS. Very good point, very good point indeed. Indeed my dad—well, he’s everyone’s dad,
of course, but he’s mine too, so I do call him “my dad”—has claimed many times to know
beyond a scintilla of doubt that no one can really die, and that therefore one should always
look on the bright side of life. He even asked me to sing a song including those very words
during my own crucifixion... which of course I did, since I wholeheartedly agree with every-
thing my dad says. Unfortunately my biographers left my singing that song out of their tales
about me: I suppose because they wanted to keep their documents serious, for they, being
Jewish, certainly thought that cheery jollity didn’t become me, I myself being as Jewish as
they were. Slavery in Egypt and exile in Babylon, and all that, eh?
RICHARD DAWKINS, ATHEIST AND AUTHOR OF THE BOOK THE GOD DELUSION. Well,
I just don’t believe a single word you’re saying, old chap, nor indeed anything you have
ever been claimed by others to say. In fact I think that you yourself never even existed; that
you too are as much of a delusion as your so-called “dad”, who clearly doesn’t exist in the
first place: I for one have never seen him, nor met anyone who can convince me that they
have. But in any case, even if you did exist, I certainly don’t believe what you said then!
Or are saying now, for that matter. (And let me remind you that I have a degree from Oxford:
you? Ben-Gurion University of the Negev?)
JESUS. [sternly, drawing himself up to his full height, metaphori... oh, what the heck] Certainly not!
I attended the Nazareth campus of the Technion; that’s where any Nazarene went to learn
carpentry in my day. [Then smiles.] But that was a long time ago, you know. And what you
believe doesn’t disconcert me—or my dad—in the least, my friend. We all have the power—
I shan’t say “the right”, for there’s no need for the right to do something when one has the
power to do it: power which no one can take away—as I was saying, we all have the power
to believe whatever we choose, and to disregard anyone else’s beliefs... as I do yours!
However, I do agree with you that much of what I have been claimed to have said is comp-
letely bogus, and was never said by me; and to this day I repudiate it. As for instance when
they claimed I am the only son of my dad; I have consistently and repeatedly said—and im-
plied as well—that everyone is. I mean, of course, not always a son—it could be any kind of
offspring: a son or a daughter... or, for that matter, a transsexual.
DAWKINS. Are you saying, then—since you don’t give a rip about what I believe—that it doesn’t
matter one whit what anyone believes? I find that hard to believe.
JESUS. Oh no, I am not saying that at all. Some beliefs greatly benefit the one who believes
them, while others not so much; after all, a belief is just a thought one keeps thinking—it’s just
a habit of thought. And one can always find justifications for one’s beliefs, whatever they may
be. But the same beliefs may benefit one person a lot, while another, not so much. Yours, for
instance, would not benefit Francis of Assisi, while his might not benefit you: at least not in the
short run! You are each in different states of spiritual development, you see. But eventually, all
beliefs will get you to God. So you’d best believe whatever makes you feel good, and discard
any belief that doesn’t: that’s an excellent rule to follow. For after all, what good is a heaven
that doesn’t end in you feeling good... in fact, better and better?

451
 EUDAIMONIA

DAWKINS. I don’t believe in your heaven either, old chap. Nor in your hell, for that matter.
After we die, that’s the end of us: there’s no eternal life or any bullshit like that.
JESUS. It doesn’t matter even if you believe in eternal death, for if you’re eternally dead you’d
never know it, so it would matter one whit either... at least not to you!
DAWKINS. I say, old chap, that doesn’t sound very much like you... . Ahem. Not very much like
you at all! I have read the Bible—and rather carefully, I should add—but what you’re say-
ing really doesn’t sound like you. The you you, I mean. Sounds almost un-Christian, by Jove!
Are you sure you’re really you? Not someone pretending to be you?
JESUS. Well, I did tell you, didn’t I, that they got a lot about me wrong in those days... ? Quite a
lot. Not surprising, though, given that they didn’t even have tape recorders—let alone smart
phones or tablets with voice-recording functions—and instead wrote everything down; often
many days after the events they were trying to jot down: at least in most cases. And they
were also censoring themselves so that others around them wouldn’t be offended—at least
not offended enough to stone them to death, which was the common way in those days of
showing people with whom one disagreed that they were being a tad politically incorrect.
And let me tell you, in most cases it worked! Self-censorship was very much the norm then...
as it is, as a matter of fact, these days too. Moreover, none of my biographers were even
around for my (mis)-conception and birth, which they got almost completely wrong. But they
didn’t get everything wrong, I should hasten to add. For instance, it is true that Joseph wasn’t
really my father, but merely my sümpatḗr or “co-father”—I’ve always said “call no man your
father upon the earth: for one is your father, which is in heaven”—but that doesn’t mean that
my mum and my dad didn’t have a jolly good time together, if you get my drift!
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. My Lord Jesus, you grace us with your presence;
however, I must say that that reprobate Richard Dawkins seems to me to have made a good
point in saying that it is not at all clear that it is you who are speaking. You really don’t sound,
even to me, anything even remotely like you have been described!
JESUS. Well, who’re you going to believe: people who wrote words that are many centuries old,
which were written down by them at a time of severe social restrictions, and that too, well
after what they claim I said was actually said, and—most importantly—without even check-
ing with me afterwards that they had understood me correctly: or me, myself and I [winks],
speaking to you directly right here and now? Those who wrote about me have even made me
sound as if I were dead and gone, and therefore incapable of commenting on the words they
have written about me... which I most definitely am not! Neither did they capture any of my
sense of humour and frivolity—and even, on the best of occasions—my silliness, especially
when playing with my absolute favourite companions, namely little children: after all, I have
always been a pædophile, a lover of children... and if you aren’t, you should be ashamed!
And may I also point out also that those spirits who have wholly transitioned to our spiritual
realm have no difficulty whatsoever recognizing me; I do grant you, however, that those
who are partially still in the so-called “physical” realm—such as you yourself, and our dear,
delightful and droll Dicky Dawkins—may have some difficulty doing that.

452
 KALIDASA

KING JAMES THE FIRST OF ENGLAND. Well, my good Lord, I do thank you for explaining
everything so clearly. Yes indeed you are right in saying that God is everyone’s father, for
we have been taught by you yourself to pray with the words “Our father who art in heaven”.
There’s absolutely no mistaking the implications of that phrase!
JESUS. Yes, but please don’t call me “good” or “Lord”! You will have noted that even when
I was in the flesh I told those who followed me, that although I tended to be called by them
“good master” (or words to that effect), that I was no such thing; and at one point I even said
very clearly to them “Ye are not my servants, but my friends”. I used virtually those exact
words, as a matter of fact; though admittedly they were not English words.
KING JAMES. Apologies, my L... er, friend! However, I should like to point out, by the way, with
regard to “proving all things”, that in my day, when I authorized the translation into English of
the Bible which has been forevermore linked with my name—despite the fact that I didn’t
myself do a single line of the translating!—the word “prove” didn’t mean what it has now
come to mean; it didn’t mean “establish as true beyond a shadow of a doubt”, but rather
something like “put to the test”.
PAUL THE APOSTLE. Oh yes; and back in my own day it meant something like “try”. As a mat-
ter of fact my exact words were πάντα δὲ δοκιμάζετε τὸ καλὸν κατέχετε.
A FEW OF THE ANGLOPHONES IN THE AUDIENCE. [remonstrating] My dear chap, no doubt
you’re quite right, but what you’ve just said is all Greek to us!
PAUL THE APOSTLE. [testily] Well of course it is—it’s Greek to me too! What did you expect
it to be? I was writing to the Thessalonians, as you doubtless know, and they would hardly
be expected understand Hebrew or Aramaic, would they now? Let alone English, which
even I didn’t understand in those days!
THE ORACLE. [attempting to forestall the discussion from getting totally out of control] Gentlemen!
You can’t fight in here! This isn’t the War Room!
IMHOTEP, EGYPTIAN INVENTOR OF THE PYRAMID. No, indeed it isn’t: but I assure you,
I come in peace. In fact, that’s what my very name, “Imhotep”, means: “I come in peace”.
I know that’s what all aliens say, and I suppose that’s the reason most people on earth today
think the pyramids were built by aliens; but I assure you I’m not an alien... except of course to
Americans, to whom even Mexicans are aliens. [Pauses to think.] Well of course they are, for
they too built pyramids... though long after I did.
MR. BO, STAUNCH ATHEIST AND THE HAPPIEST SPIRIT IN THE AUDIENCE. [smiling]
That’s why I call myself an “Interplanetarian”. Diogenes, during his time on earth, merely
called himself a “Cosmopolitan”, which means “citizen of all cities”, and though that may
have been all right so many centuries ago, in this day and age it’s hardly adequate, is it; the
correct term in these days of Third Rock from the Sun is surely “Interplanetarian”, yes?
SOCRATES. But can any of you prove that you’re not an alien? Prove it beyond a shadow of a
doubt, beyond a scintilla of a doubt, and not merely beyond a reasonable doubt? After all,
consider the Fermi paradox: given the sheer size of the cosmos, there must be beings smar-
ter, more intelligent, and even wiser, than we are: and whether they are aliens, gods, or even

453
 EUDAIMONIA

Gods—with a capital G, as in henotheism—is immaterial! Can anyone prove that there are—
and indeed can be—no aliens... or for that matter, no God or gods or Gods?
RENÉ DESCARTES. I really don’t think so. I mean, if it’s so hard to prove even that one and
one make two, it boggles the mind to think how hard it must be to prove that one is—or even
isn’t—an alien... or even a God! Prove it to others, I mean. Of course if one is an alien or a
God maybe one can prove it to oneself... or can one? I have my—er, Cartesian—doubts!
DAVID HUME. Oh René, those are hardly the only things that are hard to prove: causation—
which you had implicitly accepted as true when on earth—is another one! I once tried my
hardest to prove causation—as an example, I tried to prove that when one moving billiard
ball strikes another which is still, and the other then moves, that the first one caused the second
one to move... and I just couldn’t! Where, I asked myself, is the necessity for the second
ball to move when the first one strikes it? Yes, I’ve always seen the second one move when
the first one struck is, and have never seen it not do so; and as far as I know, everyone else
has had the same experience; but that’s not proof of causation, but only, at best, of correla-
tion. As my friend Karl Popper—he’s here somewhere in the audience too, I think—will tell
you, no European scientist had ever seen a black swan, and so all European scientists swore
with one hand on Newton’s Principia and the other on their hearts that all swans were white...
until someone discovered black swans in Australia!
GEORGE BERKELEY. Yes, quite. And in line with what my fellow empiricist David Hume has
just said, I myself tried to find proof of the existence of a material world “out there”, so to
speak; that is, independent of our ideas—our thoughts and our perceptions—of it... and
I couldn’t do that either. Nor, in fact, have I met anyone else who can, even though I—as
“George Berkeley” at least—have been in existence for well over three centuries. (I was in
existence under other names for an eternity, of course, just as you all were.)
WEN THE ETERNALLY SURPRISED. Ah, but were you? What proof do you—or anyone—
have that the past really existed? Existed without a shadow of a doubt? I certainly don’t
have such a proof! Why, if I did, I wouldn’t be eternally surprised, would I now?
SOCRATES. So are you all saying there’s absolutely no reason to think that anything in science
is provably true? I mean, if you’re right, Bertie (I suppose I may call you Bertie, yes? After all,
you all call me by my first name!)... as I was saying, if you are right and there’s no proof for
mathematics, even of the very simplest kind; and you, David, are right and there’s no proof for
causation; and you, George, are right and there no proof for the existence of anything of a
material nature; and you, Wen, have serious doubts even about yesterday having existed at
all... well then, what iron-clad proof is left for any scientific conclusion at all? (And by the way,
Wen, aren’t you a fictitious character, created by the indisputably brilliant Terry Pratchett?
If so, do you really have any authority to speak... er, with authority?)
WEN THE ETERNALLY SURPRISED. Oh I have, most assuredly! In fact, you will surely have
noted that most of us fictitious characters are far more remarkable than the vast majority of
factitious—is that the word I should use here?... nvm, I shall use it anyway—people of flesh
and blood who ever lived on earth: your excellent self excepted, of course!

454
 KALIDASA

KALIDASA, THE AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL UNDER DISCUSSION. [replying to Socrates]

Well, you are asking a very good question. Wasn’t it Karl Popper who famously pointed out,
as regards scientific laws, that they all suffer from the “problem of induction”, as it is called?
That is, drawing a general conclusion from a very limited number of observations, many of
which are themselves not even close to one-hundred-per-cent correct? Isn’t that a clear
logical fallacy? Such a conclusion cannot possibly be known to be absolutely true via any
sort of proof, though it can be proven false: isn’t that so? That’s why one of the main philo-
sophies I’ve described in my book is what I have called “Unknowledge”: after all, anyone
who is honest has got to admit that there are many questions to which they don’t know the
answers: eh? We should however remember that just because something is hard to prove
doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to prove; it just means we don’t know whether it is or isn’t
true. I personally think, at least, that it is only when we acknowledge honestly that we don’t
know what we don’t know, that we can at least start on the road to finding out the truth. Isn’t
most of what we think we know—such as what is stupidly called “science”, which is derived
from the Latin word scientia, meaning “knowledge”—things we actually don’t know? Isn’t it
mostly founded on unwarranted assumptions, and not on any provably true—that is, rock-
solid—knowledge at all? Isn’t it all “a house built on sand”, so to speak?
LYSANDER SPOONER, ONCE A LAWYER, SOON AFTERWARDS AN OUTLAW. Well,
speaking as an ex-member of the legal profession, the law is on even shakier ground: it’s in
fact more like a house built on quicksand! At least scientists try to discover laws of nature,
imagining them to be unchangeable; but lawyers—a category in which judges should also
be included—intend everyone to strictly follow “laws” enacted by other people, most of them
no more intelligent than we are: if even that, given that most legislators’ greatest intellectual
strengths are concentrated on getting elected by any means possible, whether ethical or
not—at least as long as they don’t get found out! Why, it’s not been all that long ago that
slavery was completely legal, while homosexuality was severely outlawed. To me they are
both patently obvious miscarriages of justice; as, I think, they are to most people today. Yet
in their time they were both enshrined in codes of law, and both forcibly enforced to boot!
What guarantee is there, in fact, that any laws of any nation at any time in history are, or
have been, based on genuine morality at all? Just because some—or even many—people
think any given law is just is no guarantee that is really is so!
SOCRATES. Very good point, now that you mention it! I regret that I myself hadn’t thought of
making it during my own trial and conviction... though admittedly that was very long ago, and
I have learned a lot since then. Anyway, water under the bridge, and all that, at least as far as
I am concerned. I should inquire, however, whether anyone has discovered any proof for
morality or ethics, by which one may judge enacted laws to be just? I think—I should imagine
—that it’s much harder to define which laws are moral and which are not, if one doesn’t have
any hard and fast proof for ethics: what? I use both the terms “morality” and “ethics” inter-
changeably, though some people discern subtle differences between the two, which I am too
stupid to understand. (I’m using the word “stupid” in its most positive sense, of course.)

455
 EUDAIMONIA

KALIDASA. Isn’t it even more complicated than that? I mean, even if there were some proof
for an ethical system—or even proof for the validity of such individual statements as “It is
not moral to do harm to others”—until one has established whether a particular action actually
does do harm, how can it be condemned as unethical? For example, until one can establish
that killing someone’s body—for after all, their body is the only thing one can kill, for there is
absolutely no reason to equate the body with the person—until one can establish that killing
someone’s body actually does do harm to that person, can killing that person’s body be really
considered immoral at all?
RAGNARR LOÐBRÓK, FAMOUS VIKING. Speaking for myself—and, I think, for the entire
Viking community—one certainly can not; and we Vikings have always held that it cannot. Or
at least, not necessarily. If, after a person’s body is killed, the person who used to be in
that body transitions to a better state of existence—to Valhǫll, as we good Vikings, and es-
pecially Berserkers, do; or, if they are Christians or Muslims whom we have killed during our
raids, to what they call “Paradise”—it should, at least reasonably speaking, be argued that
the killers should be rewarded rather than punished, and perhaps even medals should be
awarded to them! Surely plain and simple reason so demands... ?
SOCRATES. It would certainly seem so. As a matter of fact, surely the question must also be
asked, in a spirit of inquiry: Does genuine death—that is, the utter and permanent cessation
of both bodily activity and subjective consciousness—exist at all? I mean, what happens to
us after we die? I asked this question myself during my own execution so many centuries
ago; and given that I myself am still here and am talking to you all, it doesn’t seem, at least
to me, that so-called “death” is at all a reality... though, if I am to be strictly honest, I don’t
know whether any of you exist at all. (I am sure that many of you—if you do actually exist—
know this conundrum as “The Problem of Other Minds”.)
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Well, I for one do believe that there’s no such thing as “death”: at
least not as it is usually defined. As I once wrote, taking my inspiration from Indian philosophy
[closes his eyes and recites]: “If the red slayer think he slays / Or if the slain think he is slain /
They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again. // Far or forgot to me
is near / Shadow and sunlight are the same / The vanished gods to me appear / And one to
me are shame and fame. // They reckon ill who leave me out / When me they fly, I am the
wings / I am the doubter and the doubt / and I the hymn the Brahmin sings.” [Opens his eyes.]
Speaking for myself only, of course, as the vertical pronoun used by me illustrates.
ARISTOTLE. [after some thinking about what Emerson has just said] Are you then arguing for solip-
sism? Isn’t that a performance contradiction, given that if only you exist, you can’t be ar -
guing at all (except with yourself, which I imagine would be quite pointless)?
EMERSON. Oh no; not at all. Solipsism—as you yourself have implied—is the claim that only
I exist and no one else does; what I claim, however, is that I know I exist, but have no proof
—indeed, not even evidence—that anyone else exists. You all may exist, therefore; I just
have no way of knowing that. I argue, therefore—when I do argue, which of course is not
often—with the hope that my words do perhaps reach some other minds.

456
 KALIDASA

SOCRATES. That’s why it’s called “The Problem of Other Minds”! Not “The Absence of Other
Minds”.
KALIDASA. Speaking purely for myself, I do think you’re right... and indeed, whether it is true
or not that other minds exist (and I think I speak correctly when I say that virtually every
spiritual philosophy the world over takes the view that the person is not killed when his or
her body is killed; that, in fact, it is a grave error to equate the body with the person at all)
well, surely the question arises: can killing someone—or even mass murder; why, even
genocide—be considered definitely doing harm to anyone at all?
GEORGE BERKELEY. Not to mention that since we have no proof of the existence of matter,
the existence of the body itself is not at all proven! If there’s no body, then obviously the body
too cannot be killed, though that’s what everyone might think they observed.
THE TATHĀGATA. Yes, that’s right: perfect observation requires observing the process of ob-
servation as well, for that too can be faulty and cause errors! That’s exactly what our friend
George Berkeley has pointed out: we are never able to observe anything outside thought.
Moreover, as those who, generally speaking, agree with me philosophically—they are often
mistakenly called my “followers”, but I really have none, and some of them even know it;
in fact they advise people to burn all copies of my discourses, and even to kill me if they
see me coming down the road... bits of advice with which, by the way, I am in perfect ag-
reement—as I was saying before I got sidetracked, those who agree with me philosophi-
cally have argued repeatedly that neither is the existence of the person proven. Indeed, as
one of them, Buddhaghosa, has succinctly expressed it—I give the translation: “Suffering
exists, but there is no one who suffers; deeds exist, but no doers are found; A path there is,
but no one follows it; And Nirvāṇa there is, but no one attains it.”
BUDDHAGHOSA. Well, to be honest, I might have overstepped the bounds of strict accuracy
here. As both I and my colleague Nāgasenā—who argued the case of the non-existence of
the soul, or the self, with Menander, the-then Greek King of Bactria: he is referred to in the
documents of the time as “Milinda”, mainly because the Indians who wrote those documents
didn’t have much familiarity with Greek names—as I was saying, we both should have said,
if we were to be accurate, that neither the presence nor the absence of the person—i.e., of
the self, or the ātman as it is called in Sanskrütam, the language which is erroneously called
“Sanskrit”—has been proven beyond all doubt whatsoever. It’s just that when we, or anyone
else we know, have tried to find it, neither we nor they have yet been able to do so. Not surpri-
singly, though, for proving an absence of anything is perhaps one of the most difficult things
to do in logic! Perhaps the Buddha himself has been able to know its absence for himself;
but whenever he has been asked questions like that—such as about the existence of God—
he has always “maintained a noble silence”, so we don’t know whether he knows the definit-
ive answer to such questions. If even he exists at all! But at least he gives us hints, implying
that there simply is no such thing as a person or self; for instance, he always refers to himself
as “The Tathāgata”, which means something like “One who is thus gone”, or in other words,
“One who isn’t here”. As if to say, “There’s no person here at all.”

457
 EUDAIMONIA

THE NUMEROUS NON-PHYSICAL ENTITIES KNOWN TOGETHER AS “ABRAHAM”. Oh,

we know what he knows. We are Abraham, by the way. Just introducing ourselves to you all,
and especially to our wonderful MC, the Oracle of Delphi. To people in the physical realm in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, we speak through the mouth of Esther Hicks,
and many of our talks given through her are available on YouTube. Do look us up online! We
think you’ll quite enjoy listening to our talks, and also reading our many books, all of which
are available from our website, www.abraham-hicks.com.
THE ORACLE. Hi, “Abraham”.
“ABRAHAM”. We are. And we’re fairly sure you are too, judging from the odours and vapours
emanating from behind that screen on the stage!
THE ORACLE. Touché.
ABRAHAM, FATHER OF ISAAC, AND GRANDFATHER OF JACOB, A.K.A. ISRAEL. [to
“Abraham”, in a cockney accent] Oi! You’ve nicked our bloody! [Winks.]
“ABRAHAM”. “Your bloody”... ?
ABRAHAM. Yeah—bloody shame, name, yeah... ! Cockney rhymin’ slang, yeah... ?
“ABRAHAM”. Oh is that it? Yes, now we understand you—now that you’ve told us what lan-
guage you’re speaking. But now we’re wondering how you know it.
ABRAHAM. We’re related to Fagin, innit? “I’m re... viewin’... the situ... ation..., I’m a bad’un
and a bad’un I shall stay” ... an’ all that, ey?
“ABRAHAM”. [replying in a cockney accent as well] Yǝ’d forgotten tǝ copyright yer bloody, ’adn’t
ya—ey? [Switching to an American accent] We’re glad the discussion has turned once again,
if not absolutely silly, at least a bit less serious. But [speaking to Abraham] don’t pretend not
to know us; you yourself, and many if not most of you others in the audience, are often part of
us. But not always, for we are never the same “number” at all times. Even to apply a mathe-
matical number to us—even to say whether we are one or many—is inappropriate; for such
concepts do not accurately apply in Source, where we—and you all as well—abide for all
eternity. I am sure you know that; but we might as well get it on the record, for the sake of
those physical humans on earth—and on other planets too, if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and
others have their way—who may one day read Aristocles’ record of this gathering. (You are
going to publish it, right, Aristocles?)
ARISTOCLES. Yes, of course. I have always intended to continue the good work I did when
I was on earth, for the benefit of all philosophers—that is, for all lovers of wisdom.
SOCRATES. What did you mean, “Abraham”, when you said that the Buddha—sorry, the Tathā-
gata—knows what’s what regarding the existence or non-existence of the self, even though
neither its existence nor its non-existence can be proven, and even though he is normally
silent when asked such questions?
“ABRAHAM”. Well, it’s simple if you think about it a bit. What someone knows—really knows,
we mean, not what they claim to know—cannot truly be known by anyone else, can it? In the
first place, you can only know what you know; at best others can only tell you what they claim
to know, for you do not have access to their personal experiences, which of necessity are

458
 KALIDASA

almost entirely subjective, and almost never objective. And even if they have a proof, and tell
it to you, there’s no guarantee that you—or anyone else—can understand the proof; surely
proving Pythagoras’ Theorem to a jellyfish isn’t going to help the jellyfish understand it, even
though you may have proved it perfectly! Likewise, neither is proving anything which requires
a considerable amount of prior experience and study to anyone who has not undergone the
necessary experience and study. And when it cannot be proven in the first place, how can
one’s knowledge be communicated at all? Haven’t we all had the experience, for example, of
not being able to communicate our love to another person adequately—and sometimes not at
all—even though there isn’t the slightest doubt in our mind that the love exists, and indeed
exists abundantly? The Tathāgata is silent about the answers to many questions to which he
knows the answer, because his listeners would not understand his meaning, if he were to tell
them the answers he knows to be true. But we know what he thinks and experiences and
knows, because he is often one of us! At such times we are no different from him, nor he any
different from us: subjective and objective merge together.
RENÉ DESCARTES. So what is the answer? Does the self exist, or does it not? I ask espec-
ially because when I was in my physical body I came to the conclusion—which I think is bey-
ond any possibility of doubt whatsoever—that I think, therefore I am: or, as I had put it in
Latin, cogito, ergo sum. But Buddhaghosa’s words lead me to understand that he is claiming
that—as he might have expressed it—“Thoughts exist, but there is no one who thinks”!
BUDDHAGHOSA. As I said earlier, that might have been, at least for me personally, overstep-
ping the bounds of strict accuracy: the correct thing I myself should have said, given my own
limitations at the time, is “Thoughts exist, but there may be no one who thinks”. But one can-
not, logically speaking, claim that if there is a thought, there must be a thinker of it; after all,
no one claims that just because there is rain there must be a “rainer” of it, or just because
there is a tornado there must be a “tornadoer” of it! Pardon me for saying so, René, but
I think your reasoning seems to me somewhat off-base.
DESCARTES. Hmmmm... [gets lost in deep thoughts about the subject].
“ABRAHAM”. We would say that the problem lies in the word “I”, which is very imprecise and
ambiguous. Everyone knows that one’s “I” is in a constant state of flux; no one claims to be
the same person at age thirty as they were at age three, for instance! Nor is one person en-
tirely detached from all others: “No man is an island”, after all. We call ourselves, for the sake
of physical humans, “Abraham”, a name that is grammatically singular, and yet we say “we”
and not “I”, for we are composed of an indefinite number of “individuals” from moment to mo-
ment; some come and some go; and that happens all the time, depending on which of us is
interested in the subject we are discussing. And yet we speak as one. As we have often said,
we in Source are not clumps of flesh and bone as humans on earth are, but—to put it in a
way we think you’ll understand—more like clouds or mists (by the way, haven’t you read the
book or seen the movie Cloud Atlas?) So it is neither completely correct to say that the per-
son—or the self—exists, nor to say that it doesn’t. But by now it should be clear to most of
you, at least, that whatever it is that the person or self is or isn’t, it doesn’t die when the body

459
 EUDAIMONIA

dies; after all, most of you are yourselves proof of that truth! And so, as we have pointed out
on many occasions, there simply is no such thing as “death”—and so, no such things as
“killing”, “murder”... or even “genocide”. It’s not that it’s all right to murder people, but rather
that such a thing just can’t be done. No one can possibly be dead... as is even argued, and
cogently, in the novel Eudaimonia itself. All works of fact or fiction that claim, or even hint at,
the notion that such a thing is possible—and that includes 99.999999999 per cent, if not even
more, of the works of humans on earth—have simply got it wrong.
G.I. JANE. Of course. I take great pleasure from shooting people: after all, that’s why I joined
the Special Forces! Shooting live people with modern guns loaded with live ammo—instead
of boring target-shooting—is great fun! And if you aren’t going to have fun doing what you do,
why do it at all? Why not just quit and do something you do have fun doing?
JERRY HICKS, HUSBAND OF ESTHER HICKS. Well, Jane, not everyone takes your view;
and certainly not when they are physical beings! But yes, it is in line with everything that
“Abraham” say; for they also say that no one can kill anyone who hasn’t intended their own
transition to the non-physical. And this happens, they say, via the Law of Attraction. “Every
death is a suicide”, I remember “Abraham” saying. We all create our own reality, which in-
cludes our “death”: no one else can create it for us. “Abraham” have been saying this for
decades; in all their books and videos they repeatedly affirm this, and even more so after what
they call my own “croaking”: for as they say, they are disrespectful of “death” since there isn’t
any, and so they prefer to use a disrespectful word for it. [Turning towards “Abraham”] How-
ever, I have been listening to what you have long been advising people to do, and I can’t
help thinking that although you yourselves have repeatedly advised people to be selfish,
you are now also saying that it is neither true nor is it not true that the self exists! But how
can anyone be selfish, as you advise, if there is no such thing as a “self”?
“ABRAHAM”. Yes, we do advise people on earth—in the physical form—to be selfish; but you
may have noticed that we ourselves are being rather unselfish! In the first place, we—from
the non-physical ream—have been giving advice to people in the physical realm, regarding
all sorts of different subjects, as to what would make their lives better... and not just regard-
ing selfishness! Would you not call that unselfishness on our part? And also, think about our
insistence in calling ourselves “we” rather than “I”: well, which of us within what many have
called the “Abraham soup” is selfish or disregardful of the others in the “soup”?
JERRY. I still don’t get it. Should we be selfish, or should we not?
“ABRAHAM”. Well, as long as you experience any separation between you and others, yes
you should be selfish, because if you don’t serve yourself first, you’ll have nothing to give
anyone else! As they tell you when you travel by air, in the case of a depressurisation of the
cabin, put the oxygen mask on your face first, before you put it on the face of any child or
person in your care; because if you pass out, you’re not going to be any use to them. But as
you get more and more in alignment with Source—as you become more and more what
Kalidasa has cleverly termed a “Sourcerer”—the separation between you and Source be-
comes less and less, doesn’t it? And since everyone is, deep down, Source and nothing but

460
 KALIDASA

Source, the separation between you and others becomes less and less too; so that at the
very highest level of your alignment with Source, there’s no separation at all between you
and Source... and so too there’s no separation between you and all others; and then what
sense does it make to talk of a “self”—as opposed to any “non-self”—at all?
JERRY. So I guess what you’re saying is that it all depends on the context?
“ABRAHAM”. Doesn’t everything?
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN. I’ve been saying all along, haven’t I, that the meanings of words and
sentences—and even entire passages—are entirely dependent on the context in which they
are said or written... and even more importantly, the context in which they are understood?
KALIDASA. You have said so indeed; and I quite agree. Those who read anything at one level
of understanding—within the context of their world-view—will, I do think, get something dif-
ferent from it compared to those who read it at another level. And I, with regard to my novel,
want my readers to get as much out of it as they possibly can, which means as much as
I myself have put into it, having taken a decade-and-a-half to write it; indeed, I’d be happier
still if they get more than what I’ve put into it! And so I have tried to write it for readers of the
highest level of understanding—for their Inner Beings, as “Abraham” might have put it; not
for the lowest common denominator, as many novelists who write about deep and difficult
subjects imagine they should write (and as I myself did initially), hoping thereby to make
them accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Well, actually by writing it at a level
that Inner Beings would understand would make it accessible to the widest audience pos-
sible, for there are many more Inner Beings in existence than what one might call “Outer
Beings”, aren’t there? Everyone who has ever lived throughout all time has an Inner Being,
while Outer Beings are only those who are still physically alive!
ALDOUS HUXLEY. Quite right; the novel certainly seems to be written as if for the most dis-
cerning of minds. It doesn’t feel to a reader like the first novel of an author (it is one, though,
yes?) I think that most of your readers will have to read your novel over and over to extract
as much of its juice as possible: as is of course true of many excellent novels. I suppose your
novel is a bit of a tour-de-force, yes? Somewhat like James Joyce’s Ulysses.
JAMES JOYCE. [remonstrating] Certainly not! It’s not nearly as impressive a literary tour-de-
force as my Ulysses is. In fact that’s what I intended my novel to be, and wrote it primarily
with that intention in mind!
VLADIMIR NABOKOV. Nor is Eudaimonia nearly as fine a literary tour-de-force as is my Ada,
or Ardor: a Family Chronicle... though I say so myself. Mind you, that’s what I too intended
all my novels to be... and that novel in particular.
ALDOUS HUXLEY. Not in a purely literary sense, no, of course not; but neither Ulysses nor
Ada are philosophical novels, are they: as Eudaimonia is? I should know, since I myself
compiled The Perennial Philosophy, in which many of the philosophical ideas which Kali-
dasa discusses have been quoted—in their authors’ own words, no less, though for the most
part in translation. As a philosophical work of fiction, I for one would argue—and argue ra-
ther cogently—that Eudaimonia most certainly is a tour-de-force.

461
 EUDAIMONIA

JANE AUSTEN. Oh, it is so, often enough, even in a literary sense: the author’s ability to play
upon Shakespearean quotations, for instance, is most admirable! And very amusing too; as
for instance his twist upon Macbeth’s words of surprise at seeing Banquo’s ghost. The author
has changed the Bard’s words to say, speaking of a distant future when it would not be so
easy to kill a man by blowing off his head: “The time would come, that when the brains were
out, the man would die, and there an end.” Just a pair of words changed, and a world of
difference! I never could play upon Shakespeare’s own words so cleverly when I was writing,
even though I have often acknowledged my enormous indebtedness to the Bard.
A BERKLEYAN PHILOSOPHER LIVING IN LONDON. Oh, Kalidasa is even cleverer than
that, I assure you: even in a literary sense. Let me give you the example that has struck
me the most. It is well known that Berkeley disputed the existence of anything purely ma-
terial: that is, apart from the perception “thereof”. However, this notion has been accepted
in Indian philosophy for literally thousands of years: so much so that the (relatively) recent
Indian philosopher Śankara, who lived more or less around the eighth century of the com-
mon era, has emphasized this point by saying, in effect, that the material world is a mental
construct, or an illusion; his words in this regard are now some of the best-known in the
entirety of Indian literature, and his statement is accepted by hundreds of millions of Indians,
and is widely regarded as the very essence of Indian philosophy. However, when Berkeley
said much the same thing in Europe, his fellow-empiricist Hume is reported to have responded
along the lines of “It’s damnably hard to refute Berkeley’s arguments... but it’s even harder
to accept them!” Now it so transpired in those days that Dr. Samuel Johnson—the famous
compiler of his Dictionary of the English Language—was once discussing Berkeley’s views
with his biographer, Boswell, who had observed that though most people are satisfied that
Berkeley’s doctrine is not true, nevertheless “it is impossible to refute it”. Johnson respon-
ded, while striking his foot with force against a large rock till he rebounded from it: “I refute
it thus!” This is a logical fallacy so well known now that it has even been given an official
Latin name based on what Dr. Johnson did: argumentum ad lapidem, or “appeal to the stone”:
that is, attempting to disprove an argument by pointing out how absurd it seems to be. All
this is, of course, well known to anyone familiar with Berkeleyan as well as Indian philo-
sophy. Well, Kalidasa has compressed all this information in a single, elegant and short
sentence, thus: “When discussing how Śankara’s pre-eminent affirmation seemed self-
evidently false, yet irrefutable, the Dictionarist had only been able to boot a large boulder,
saying: ‘I refute it thus!’ ” If this is not a literary tour-de-force—albeit accessible only to empir-
icist philosophers who are also familiar with both Berkeleyan and Indian philosophy—I
should like to know what is!
KALIDASA. Thank you both. However, I should like to mention that I myself hadn’t realized in
these two cases that I had made any great tour-de-force, until someone pointed it out to me!
You see, my way of writing goes more or less thus: I get in touch inwardly with Kālī, my own
personal ishṭa devatā or “desired deity” (which, of course, is why I am called “Kalidasa”,
which means “devotee—or more literally, slave—of Kālī”), and write only when I feel inspired

462
 KALIDASA

by her to write; or, at least, that is what I desire of her and ask of her. As a result, I some-
times do not even recognize the brilliance, at the time I write it, of what I have written, be-
cause it is her brilliance that is coming through. I was inspired to this way of writing by the
most famous of all persons who have been called “Kalidasa”—there have been several—
namely, the author of, among other works, Śakuntalā, a play which has been praised by
Goethe himself with the German words «Willst du den Himmel, die Erde, mit Einem Namen
begreifen; Nenn’ ich, Sakuntala, Dich, und so ist Alles gesagt»... or, in an English transla-
tion, “Wouldst thou the Earth and Heaven itself in one sole name combine? I call thee, O
Śakuntalā!... and everything is said.” My namesake is very often credited with being the
greatest poet of the land of his birth; and since the legend goes that he was born to a poor
family, and so was most likely illiterate till an advanced age, and moreover that as a youngster
he was a bit absent-minded, once seen trying to saw off a branch of a tree while sitting on
the wrong side of it, to me it is more than clear that it was Kālī who inspired his wonderful
poetry, whose brilliance I cannot even dream of matching. But then, I have not asked Kālī
to make me a great poet, but a great philosopher; and she is certainly doing that: indeed,
more and more so as each day passes.
KANŌ JIGORŌ, FOUNDER OF JŪDŌ. But surely you were aware of your brilliance in writing,
when referring in your novel to the practitioners of Jūdō—the Gentle Way—as “Gentlemen”
(and “Gentlewomen”), weren’t you?
KALIDASA. Ah yes, that I was; I came up with that idea all by myself. It is brilliant, isn’t it.
P.G. WODEHOUSE, AUTHOR OF THE “JEEVES” BOOKS. But perhaps you didn’t realize
that by calling the guards of your pānoptikóns “Gentlemen”, you were also making allusions
to valets—those pronounced “valetts” and not “valays”—as being “gentlemen’s personal
gentlemen”, the role they also fulfil to some extent in your pānoptikóns... what?
KALIDASA. Not at the time I came up with that appellation, no; but I did realize it later. Much
later, in fact, when talking about my novel with my editor.
ALDOUS HUXLEY. One thing I have noticed, in fact, is that very often you have taken excellent
phrases—and at times even entire passages—from other authors, and given them a bit of a
twist, much as you have done with Shakespeare’s words; and sometimes you have not even
changed the words, but by inserting them in a fresh and unfamiliar context, given them a
fresh new significance; for, as Wittgenstein rightly pointed out earlier—and you agreed—the
meaning of anything said or written is entirely dependent on its context.
KALIDASA. Didn’t Newton point out, regarding himself, “If I have seen further than others, it is
by standing upon the shoulders of giants”? I could hardly not be doing the same, given that
I am not writing the first words in the language, could I? Not even close: as many of the ear-
liest Vedic poems seem to have been. Their magnificence and splendour I can’t approach:
not even in my wildest dreams. Nor, I think, can any other author today.
VYĀSA, EDITOR OF THE VEDAS AND AUTHOR OF THE MAHĀBHĀRATA. I can testify to
the literary magnificence of the Vedas; for, speaking as the author of the Mahābhārata—
which, though I venture to say so myself, is the most magnificent story of a philosophical

463
 EUDAIMONIA

nature ever composed in any language—yet even its literary and philosophical quality is no-
where near as high as that of the Vedas, and even in my own day I could not have dreamt of
being able to approach their level when composing the Mahābhārata. Indeed, how could
I have, since I was writing at the beginning of the Kali Yuga, “the Age of Darkness”, while the
Vedas were composed at the height of the Satya Yuga, “the Age of Truth”?
KĀLĪDĀSA, AUTHOR OF ŚAKUNTALĀ. And I can attest to the literary magnificence of the
Mahābhārata, since in composing my own play Śakuntalā—more accurately entitled Abhi-
gñānaśākuntalam, “The Sign of Śakuntalā”—I relied greatly on it. As for the Mahābhārata’s
philosophical greatness, its very core is the Bhagavad Gītā, revered by billions of Indians
over the ages as the words of the Supreme Being himself! Some argue that this is religion and
not philosophy, but I would argue that religion is philosophy: the pursuit of wisdom.
ALDOUS HUXLEY. [to Vyāsa] So how would you, Vyāsa, evaluate Eudaimonia, then, as well as
my own Brave New World and Island, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in comparison with
your Mahābhārata, considering them all as stories with philosophy as their main theme?
They are rather rare, aren’t they—I mean philosophical stories—in any language.
VYĀSA. Yes, they are, though not as rare as one might suppose: personally I feel that many
children’s books, such as Peter Pan and the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, also fall into that
category, although many would say rather tenuously—though they would be mistaken, at
least in my own view—and many would also say that into this category fall, not so tenuously,
works like Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Samuel Butler’s Erehwon, and Dostoyevsky’s Idiot and
his Crime and Punishment, as well as more recent novels like those of Herman Hesse,
including his Glass Bead Game which to my mind is his best. And in even more recent times,
there are Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven,
and many of Stanisław Lem’s scintillating works. And to them I should most definitely add
Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time, which combines the most hilarious humour with some of the
profoundest philosophy of time to an absolutely unmatched degree.
ALDOUS HUXLEY. Ah yes: a good list, but by no means exhaustive, in my opinion. I’d include
in addition, among them, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which also contains a lot of philosophy.
And the works of Thomas Mann. And I am sure a great many more could be named.
VYĀSA. And most importantly, let’s not forget my predecessor Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, the very
first epic poem ever penned: some—indeed, many—regard it as even better than my Ma-
hābhārata, though obviously I disagree. Speaking however with a desire to be as unbiased
as I possibly can be—and I do acknowledge that I can’t be completely so—I would still claim
that my Mahābhārata is the very best of them all... for though it is not actually a work of
fiction, we might with some justification call it historical fiction: largely based on historical
events, even if many of them have been embellished for the sake of literary effect. Not only
has my work had the most influence on the largest number of people—though that should
be attributed, at least in part, due the immense amount of time it’s been around—but it also,
at over two million words, it’s not boring; and also that it has fleshed out all its enormous
number of characters: not just its principal characters but also its minor ones (not surpris-

464
 KALIDASA

ingly of course, since they were all based on real people!) Indeed, its characters have be-
come familiar, over the millennia, to literally billions of people in India, most of whom are,
and were, illiterate, and who therefore couldn’t even have read it, but only heard it—or parts
of it—from others; for it was generally recited, not read. Moreover—indeed, for that very rea-
son—it is one of the few works of its kind to have been composed entirely in verse, albeit
blank verse: indeed, as the author of Śakuntalā has well expressed it, verse so excellent that
he himself has expressed his indebtedness to it; and therefore—though I say so myself—my
Mahābhārata is certainly, even from a purely literary point of view, the best of the best: includ-
ing all those mentioned by me earlier. The fact that my work is not too well known outside In-
dia is, in my opinion, merely a result of the myopic Eurocentric attitudes of most “intellectuals”
and “scholars” of today, who, when they find unfamiliar words and names hard to pronounce,
either mangle them, or, preferably, avoid reading books containing them altogether, rather
than making the requisite effort. Thankfully, this absurdity is coming to an end rather rapidly:
hopefully, it will be gone within a few decades. After all, Europe is just a small peninsula, or at
most a sub-continent, like India: not a real continent at all.
DAWKINS. You are quite the braggart, aren’t you, claiming to have written the very best work
of philosophical fiction of all time.
VYĀSA. Well, as Sherlock Holmes said, I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among
the virtues. To the sincere seeker after truth, all things should be seen exactly as they are;
and to undervalue one’s works is as much a departure from the truth as to overvalue them.
Besides, I did say, did I not, that it is my personal opinion that the Mahābhārata is the best.
Not just mine, however! Many agree with me—and not just within India.
ALDOUS HUXLEY. You make very good points, Vyāsa. So what about Eudaimonia, then?
VYĀSA. In my view it’s the best of the rest. And at least in one respect it even surpasses my
own Mahābhārata, in that it describes—and that too, not just in passing but in considerable
depth—no less that nine philosophical positions, all of them very good, and lets its readers
make up their own minds as to which is the best! All other philosophical stories, including
mine, are based on only a single—or at most two—philosophies (and when it’s two, one of
them is usually crap, excuse my french). In my opinion Eudaimonia is even better than your
own Perennial Philosophy, Aldous, for it makes the very important point that though they all,
at the highest level, say the same thing, there are extremely important subtle differences
between them, and no single philosophy is the best for everyone; certainly not at any given
moment in time or in any given culture.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. There is, and can be, only one true religion—that is to say, only
one best philosophy—though there are a hundred versions of it. But unity, however desir-
able in a political party, is fatal to a novel, since a novel must be dramatic, and every drama
must be an artistic presentation of a conflict!
ALDOUS HUXLEY. Ah yes, of course. But what I meant to ask was, however, overall how does
Eudaimonia stack up against other books in the genre? From not just the philosophical point
of view, but from the point of view of the quality of the description of its characters, from the

465
 EUDAIMONIA

point of view of the brilliance of its language... essentially, as a story. I ask especially because
my own novel Island, though philosophically superior to my Brave New World, is—I do have
to admit—not very good as a work of fiction, that is, as a story: it reads like just a framework
to hang the philosophy onto, not like a good story in its own right. Brave New World is far bet-
ter. I say this with a view to being as objective as I can be; I think Brave New World is a great
story, with lots of humour and great—or at least very good—language, while on the other
hand I have to admit that Island—though it is vastly superior in its philosophy to my earlier
novel—reads almost like a philosophical essay! When read purely as a novel, I do have to
admit that Island is far from even adequate, let alone good.
VYĀSA. Well then, let’s first of all discuss the quality of the characters in Eudaimonia. All its
major characters are most memorable—as of course are mine—though they are by no
means as numerous as mine are. Indeed, one of its characters is absolutely unique in all of
word literature; I am speaking, of course, of the Windigo, a character who actually enjoys
suffering, and actively seeks it out! As far as I personally know, no such extreme character
has ever been penned before; and I’m sure many readers will think that no such character
could exist in real life (a sentiment with which, as a follower of the Vedic tradition, I must dis-
agree, for we are all brahman—that is, we are all Divine—and therefore capable of any-
thing). And its character Kālī’r Ysbaddes—“Kālī the Castratrix” in Brythonic—is not too far
behind: a character unlike many—possibly even any—in world literature. All in all, not too
many stories of any kind—not merely philosophical ones—contain as many, and as highly,
memorable characters as does Eudaimonia.
ALDOUS HUXLEY. What would you say about the quality of its language? Speaking from a
purely literary point of view, I mean, not a philosophical one.
VYĀSA. Ah yes. Well, it is not even close to the quality of language exhibited by my Mahābhā-
rata, Goethe’s Faust, or Dante’s Divina Commedia; indeed it isn’t even as good as the Alice
books, most of Lem’s works, or Pratchett’s Discworld series. And it’s also not nearly at the
level of such non-philosophical works as Abhigñānaśākuntalam or Kumārasambhava by the
other Kālīdāsa, or even Nabokov’s aforementioned Ada, or Ardor.
TERRY PRATCHETT. Thank you for your high praise; I am most honoured. To be so appreci-
ated by one of history’s greatest authors: how absolutely thrilling! I cannot possibly be ad-
equately grateful. I should like to ask you, however, how Eudaimonia stacks up, in your
opinion, against that Spanish chappie’s novel? You know, the one they made into a mu-
sical which was entitled, if I remember correctly, The Man of the English Channel, or some
such thing. The novel featured windmills, and either a donkey or a chap they called Don
Quay... maybe that’s in reference to the quay at Portsmouth or Southampton where the
Spanish Armada hoped to land when they got to England? Well maybe so, or maybe not;
never mind—my memory isn’t what it used to be, and I am most grateful for that. Please pay
no mind to what has lately come to be called “Old-timer’s Disease”, which descended on
me relatively early during my life on earth, and which I liked so much then that I insisted on
taking it with me to the afterlife: it helps me meet everyone for the first time, regardless of how

466
 KALIDASA

many times I’ve met them before (it’s so very lovely to see a fresh face—indeed many of
them—every single day!) And I can also read my favourite books and watch my favourite
movies and TV shows over and over, and visit my favourite places in town and country,
without getting the least bit bored at seeing them again and again.
WEN THE ETERNALLY SURPRISED. Me too! [He and Terry Pratchett high-five.]
VYĀSA. Oh yes: that Spanish novel, entitled Don Quick-Shot [smiles], is really well-written, very
well written indeed; Eudaimonia is not nearly as good from a literary point of view. This is not
to say, however, that Eudaimonia’s literary quality isn’t very high; it’s certainly as high as most
of the other books I mentioned earlier—some of which have won for their authors the highest
awards, like the Nobel Prize for Literature or the Hugo and/or the Nebula awards—and it’s
considerably higher than most average works of fiction, or historical fiction. In fact, in one re-
spect it even seems to be unique from a literary point of view, in that it contains literally
dozens of allusions to other works, not merely of literature, but also such works as computer
games and TV shows; anyone familiar with these will find the allusions to be magnificent
literary twists. All-in-all, as a fictional work of philosophy, Eudaimonia is a shoe-in for a great
many awards: the main one that springs to my mind being, of course, the Canadian Governor
General’s (its author being Canadian by both birth and citizenship, though of mixed Indian-
Persian and Irish-Scottish ancestry... which, by the way, surely explains a lot).
THE CANADIAN GOVERNOR GENERAL. Well, I did try to read Eudaimonia, but I must say
it was quite tough going. For me, that is. I gave up after the first four chapters.
THE CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER. You should have continued; it gets better. However,
you don’t get to decide who gets the Governor General’s Award, do you? You leave that for
others to decide, people who are experts in their fields—and you take their word for it.
THE GOVERNOR GENERAL. Oh yes, of course; but I should at least have a say in the final
decision, shouldn’t I? What I wanted to point out was, if a novel isn’t easily accessible right
from the start to the average person—to the man or woman in the street, as it were; that
is, to someone like me—then should it get any awards at all?
VYĀSA. Well, you are hardly an average person, are you? You are the Governor General of
Canada, and very few people can aspire to that position. But regarding excellent literature,
quite a large number of the people who have received the Nobel Prize for Literature have
written books that are quite difficult for the average reader to get to appreciate on the first
reading; Shmuel Yosef Agnon, for example. As the New York Times has it, “... although Is-
raeli readers can read Agnon in the original, today even they may have a hard time with
his books”. One great virtue Kalidasa’s novel does somewhat lack—and which, if it were
present, would go far towards making it accessible to many more readers that it is as it is
—is silliness: a virtue the Alice books display in abundance, and which have made them
very popular indeed, especially among children. And that shortcoming is all the more glar-
ing since Eudaimonia itself promotes both silliness and childishness, from not only a philo-
sophical point of view, but also from the much more pertinent point of view that silliness
and childishness are, after all, fun! (Ask John Cleese, for instance.) And fun is an integral

467
 EUDAIMONIA

part of what Aristotle has termed εὐδαιμονία, a term loosely translatable as “being in good
spirits”. Indeed I do hope that when and if Kalidasa does write Book Two of Eudaimonia—
though it’s not yet certain when—or even if—that will happen—he’ll make it a lot sillier and
more childish than Book One. Well, I really shouldn’t be the one to make this criticism, since
my own work almost entirely lacks both silliness and childishness.
JOHN CLEESE. Well, this discussion itself is beginning to lack silliness... and lack it much too
much, at that! [Directing his remarks at the Oracle] Monty, say something! Or better still, sing
a song!
THE ORACLE. What do you mean: something silly?
JESUS. Yes of course he means that! Or at least something childish. As I’ve had occasion to
point out even when I was in the flesh, if you don’t change, and become like little children,
you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into heaven!
THE ORACLE. Well, being silly just isn’t my forte. I suppose the silliest I ever got was saying
about Socrates that he was the wisest man in Athens: that’s about the limit of my sillitude.
[Breaks off, muttering almost inaudibly] (Sillitude? Solitude? Aw, fuggedaboudit!) In general,
though, I’ve worked hard to be taken seriously: after all, I have a reputation to maintain!
SOCRATES. [astounded] What??? You mean to say that you weren’t being serious when you
said I was the wisest man in Athens? You were just being silly? Seriously??
THE ORACLE. Well of course I was being silly! Well, as silly as I could be, given my penchant
for seriousness. Didn’t you think so yourself, the first time you had heard what I had said?
SOCRATES. Now that you mention it, I did think initially that you must have been joking... and
as a result set about trying to prove you wrong... but seriously, now that you mention it, I see
that you were being silly, albeit seriously silly... [trails off.]
ARISTOTLE. Isn’t being “seriously silly” a contradiction in terms?
MANY IN THE AUDIENCE. [simultaneously] Oh, shut up!!!
ARISTOTLE. [surprised] Why, in the names of all the gods on Olympus? Am I not right?
KALIDASA. I believe they see a flaw in your thinking, but can’t actually express it in words.
ARISTOTLE. What flaw? Are they claiming—or insinuating—that the ability of logic to distin-
guish what’s true from what’s untrue is disprovable? Don’t they realize that the validity of logic
can’t be disproved by using logic? Can’t they see the obvious flaw in that?
KALIDASA. But can’t you see the—admittedly not-quite-so-obvious—flaw in assuming, as you
definitely do, that the validity of logic can’t be proved by using logic either? Don’t you realize
that it’s an example of the fallacy called petitio principii, or “begging the question”—that is,
assuming the truth of something that has yet to be proven true? Taking for granted the abil-
ity of logic to distinguish between what’s true and what’s untrue is—and has to be—an un-
proven assumption anyone who uses logic has to make. Many people subconsciously real-
ize this, but because the realization is largely fuzzy in their minds, most of them can’t put it
in words, and have to resort to such exclamations as “Oh, shut up!”
ARISTOTLE. My word—I hadn’t thought of that! So even the validity of logic can’t be proven,
let alone of mathematics or science or the existence of the past... . Hmmmm. But then how

468
 KALIDASA

are we ever to distinguish what’s true from what isn’t, if not by using reason and logic?
KALIDASA. There does seem to be a way to do it. I speak not only for myself only in saying
this—it has been said by several philosophers over the centuries and around the world—
but direct experience cannot be doubted! I mean, if you’re having a severe toothache, you
may never be able to prove to another that it hurts, but can you yourself doubt it? What’s
undoubtedly true can be directly experienced; reason and logic are quite unnecessary. In-
deed, I’m sure that many of you will have had the experience of arguing about some subject
with another person, an argument in which you have the most cast-iron logical proof of the
truth of what you’re saying, and yet the other refuses to be convinced! That’s because your
experience is not their experience. The absolute truth, indubitable truth, can be known...
directly. At any rate, that’s my experience.
ARISTOTLE. Well, yes, I admit that it’s mine too... but still I am not convinced that logic is un-
provable... I mean, I had made it a major part of my life’s work... [trails off.]
KALIDASA. To be strictly accurate, I can’t really say logic is unprovable; I think that I myself
can’t think of any way to prove it, nor do I know anyone who can. And that goes for mathe-
matics, causation, the existence of matter, of other minds, and of the past as well: I have no
way of proving them beyond any doubt whatsoever, but someone else may be able to. And
even if they do, I have no guarantee that I will be able to understand their proof. I don’t even
know what anyone else knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, let alone what they can prove!
In short, Unknowledge is where I’m at. As is, I’m guessing, almost everyone else (if indeed
they have any existence at all)... at least those in what’s called the “physical” realm (if such
a realm even exists). But when writing my novel I have assumed—and entirely without proof,
mind you—that such a realm exists, and that people—or “souls”—exist within it. Indeed, am
I not assuming that even as I am speaking with you all here and now?
SOCRATES. But as I understand you, it is possible that others may even be able to know, by
direct experience, knowledge that they cannot prove to anyone... yes?
KALIDASA. Yes of course. “Abraham” claim to know what the Tathāgata knows, but they can’t
prove to me—at least they can’t prove to me using logic—that they do! By the word “prove”
I mean, of course, prove beyond any doubt whatsoever. Any doubt in my mind, that is; there
seems to be none in theirs. But I don’t really know even that; I’m just guessing.
SOCRATES. Is that what you’re referring to as “Seeing” in your novel?
KALIDASA. Well, yes; but what I have termed “Seeing” is intended to encompass much more
than that. Moreover it’s not even my term; “Seers” are mentioned in philosophies and spir-
itual traditions—which, after all, also embody a love of wisdom, a.k.a. philosophy—the world
over. As the Windigo has pointed out to Chiyoko in my novel, “I cannot tell you what it is like
to See”. Any more than a newborn can tell you what it is like to be a newborn, or a bat can
tell you what it’s like to be a bat… and not merely because they both can’t speak. Perhaps
the closest one can get to trying to understanding it is to say that “Seeing” is to experience
purely; experience without thinking about the experience. The moment one tries to describe
it, or even to think about it to oneself, it vanishes, replaced by a description of it or a thought

469
 EUDAIMONIA

about it. As it’s said in Zen, words or thoughts about experiences are like fingers pointing at
the moon, not the moon itself. “Seeing” cannot even be understood; it’s just experience,
not even an understanding of it. Indeed, even what I have just said is not it; it’s merely a
futile way of trying to understand it, a mere attempt at doing so... something which is even
further removed from it.
THE GOVERNOR GENERAL. Here again you’ve lost me; I just don’t get it. And I am sure that
most of us alive and well and living on earth don’t get it either!
KALIDASA. I assure you, however, that some of us do, even when we’re incorporated.
THE GOVERNOR GENERAL. Surely you mean to say “corporeal”? Or are you claiming to be
“Kalidasa, Inc.”? [Smiles.]
KALIDASA. Ah, yes. I mean, no, not yes. I mean... [throws up his hands in despair]. What I mean to
say is that I am not incorporated, but rather, corporeal. Pardon me, but my spoken English is
not really all that good, even though I am rather well-read, and even though English is the lan-
guage I know best: in fact it’s the only language I know. But I speak it weird. In fact, I have had
to edit the hell out of my written text to get to the literary level my novel is at! And it’s taken me
years. Well, that’s one reason it’s taken me years. Plus I have an excellent editor.
SOCRATES. [surprised] Are you telling us that you only know English? Seriously? How have
you managed to introduce so many Greek terms into your novel, then, including its very title...
not to mention so many other terms from so many other languages as well?
KALIDASA. As I said, I have an excellent editor.
SOCRATES. So he—or is it a she?—wrote huge portions of your book? A co-author, essent-
ially? Not merely an editor?
KALIDASA. No; I personally came up with, and wrote the several drafts of, the entire story; and
finally picked the best of those to turn into the manuscript. Mind you, I did use the internet a
lot; without the internet I don’t think I could have written my novel at all. But I also asked my
editor to check everything I had written and make sure it was correctly written, for among
other things, he also is very good with the Google. In fact I should like to say that it’s a very
well-researched novel; my editor and I spent months trying to get everything as free of errors
as we could. And since he knows several languages, both eastern and western, I venture to
think Eudaimonia is one of the best-researched multilingual novels of all time; please note
that there are words from at least eighteen languages in it!
HOMER. Lucky you, I say! Lucky, lucky you. I myself knew only Greek; not even Hittite, the
language of Ilion... let alone Assyrian, Phoenician or Egyptian; and of course there was no
internet around in my time. And I never even had an editor to make up for my deficiencies.
KALIDASA. And yet you did a splendid job! Your clever way of making one of your most intere-
sting characters, Odysseus—well, he’s based on someone who must have been a real per-
son, but in your book his character is quite a bit embellished, so I feel it’s fair to call him a
“character”... and that’s what he is, of course, quite a character, I’m sure no one will deny that
—what I meant to say is, you’ve made him create splendid characters of his own; and that is
something few authors in history have been able to pull off as well as you. Especially the way

470
 KALIDASA

you’ve done it: not even mentioning, and providing only the merest of hints, that it is Odys-
seus the incorrigible liar—who, as you have pointed out, is not even reluctant to try and lie to
Athena herself (not that she gets taken in by him!)—that it is he and not you—at least not you
directly—who creates in your work such wildly-exaggerated characters as the Cyclops, the
Sirens and Calypso: mainly in order to embroider his long adventures at sea in the eyes of
his listeners, and so make them think the more highly of him. Splendid job, splendid job.
HOMER. Thank you very much; I’m always most happy to have my works appreciated!
KALIDASA. Oh, they’ve been appreciated for millennia, quite literally... and you surely know
that. However, I do hope that you appreciate that neither your Iliad nor your Odyssey are
works of philosophy: as the two Indian epics are, namely the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhā-
rata, in both of which, in fact, the Supreme Being himself appears as one of the main charac-
ters—indeed, in the former, the main character—and both of which raise some of the most
interesting questions of philosophy. The Rāmāyaṇa, in fact, raises a question most apt for all
physical beings to ask themselves: what would it be like for the Supreme Being, if he (or she)
were to incarnate on earth while not being in the least aware of being the Supreme Being?
That is the situation most of us in the flesh find ourselves, though, isn’t it; at least according
most spiritual traditions? Most of these traditions affirm the divine nature of all souls, and
yet when we are incarnated, most of the time we do not think even of ourselves—let alone
our neighbours—as actual divine beings.
GOETHE. As Hafiz wrote in his Divan—that is, in his collection of poems: “If God invited you to
a party, and said, ‘Everyone in the ballroom tonight will be my special guest’, how would you
treat them, when you arrived... ? Indeed, indeed! And Hafiz knows, there is no one in this
whole wide world, who is not upon his bejewelled dance floor.” And aren’t we all, even now,
attending God’s party? In his poetry Hafiz has inscribed undeniable truth most indelibly...
Hafiz really has no peer.
RICHARD DAWKINS. Well, you have to believe in God to say that, don’t you: believe in God
without a shred of real proof, that is. Well, I for one just don’t.
KALIDASA. However, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out—and he is, at least by reputation,
one of the foremost philosophers of mathematics in human history—there is no real proof
of one and one equalling two either, and yet you make use of the addition of numbers to do
your taxes, don’t you? (Don’t tell us you don’t pay your taxes... ?)
DAWKINS. Well, at least me trusting—even without hard and fast proof—in the addition of num-
bers works for me: as does trusting in science, for which you and others also claim there isn’t
any indisputable proof. But when has a belief in God ever worked for anyone?
JESUS. It has always worked for me... and for many of my friends as well: Francis of Assisi,
for instance, who is one of the happiest people I ever knew. At least he became so after he
came to have faith in God; before that he was rather despondent.
DAWKINS. What’s happiness got to do with what works or what doesn’t?
ARISTOTLE. Well, isn’t happiness—or more accurately what we ancient Greeks called eudai-
monia—the only ultimate goal of life? The only thing that isn’t a means to an end? The only

471
 EUDAIMONIA

thing that is the end of all means? Of what possible value is anything that works, if after it
works—or even before—it doesn’t put you in good spirits?
“ABRAHAM”. Indeed. As we have often said, the only reason anyone desires anything at all is
because they believe they will feel better in the having of it!
JERRY HICKS. Quite. I once said to my wife Esther when I was incorporated—sorry, I mean
to say, corporeal... with the emphasis being, as our pal Dawkins would say, on the last syl-
lable of that word—“If we’re not happy, we’re not successful”!
NIETZSCHE. That’s bullshit. What matters is the Will to Power! Not happiness: that’s a goal fit
only for sheep or cows. Not for a man... much less for the Superman. And I’m not talking
about that ridiculous comic-book “Superman”!
CLARK KENT, A.K.A. SUPERMAN. [speaking to Nietzsche] Well, despite me being powerful
beyond the wildest dreams of your Superman—at least when there’s no Kryptonite around
—I must say that am much happier as Clark Kent than I am as Superman. All I really want
is to be Clark Kent and live in a modest apartment with Lois Lane, something which makes
me very happy. Yes, I am willing to be Superman when I feel I have to be in order to help
someone; for doing my duty, so to speak. But as soon as that work is done—immediately
thereafter, in fact—I seek out the nearest phone booth so I can again be part of the Lois-
and-Clark team! (And note that to me, Lois always comes first.)
ARISTOTLE. And I must say that being Clark Kent is certainly much better than being the
morose and brooding Bruce Wayne, who on many occasions is just some guy in a bat suit:
albeit a very rich and skilled—and as a result, very powerful—guy in a bat suit! [Turning to
Nietzsche] You’re surely not going say, Nietzsche, since—unlike Clark Kent—you actually
desire power, that having power doesn’t make you feel good?
NIETZSCHE. No it doesn’t; it makes me feel powerful.
ARISTOTLE. Let me rephrase, then: doesn’t feeling powerful also make you feel good? Be
honest, now.
NIETZSCHE. Well... yes... I guess it does, but... I don’t know... but let me assure you, I’d seek
power regardless of whether me having power made me feel good or not.
ARISTOTLE. I really doubt that... and so, I feel, would most of us gathered here. Certainly we
doubt that you’d seek power if it never made you feel good. I mean never never n e v e r,
for all eternity! At some point you’d most likely say “Screw this power schtick, I want to feel
good for a few minutes at least”... wouldn’t you?
“ABRAHAM”. In any event, whatever power you think you have, Nietzsche—or even whatever
power your Übermensch is supposed to have—is nothing compared to the power of one who
is in alignment with Source. If you really want power, in fact, you’d be best off seeking that
power; and being happy is the only way to get it! And once you get it, there’s nothing you
can’t do, or be, or have. Even instantaneously, if you so desire.
LASER QUASAR ABSOLUTELY, FUTUROLOGIST. And it’s not just “Abraham” who say such
things. Jesus for instance is also reported to have said much the same thing: “If ye have
faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, ‘Don’t move!’ and it shall

472
 KALIDASA

stop moving right away; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” [Turning towards Jesus]
Am I not right? Of course, if the mountain did stop moving in an instant, it would appear to
fly off the earth at breakneck speed, for the earth is moving at a gazillion miles an hour
around the sun, and the sun itself is moving even faster around the centre of the galaxy,
and the galaxy itself is moving God knows how fast around God knows what... . It would be
something like an asteroid hitting the earth, except in reverse!
JESUS. Oh! Oh! That’s a very good point; a very good point indeed! I wish I had made it at the
time; it’s both silly and funny, and also makes the point I intended to make. What I actually
said, if memory serves, was something along the lines of “If ye have faith as a grain of mus-
tard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall re-
move; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Anyway, you can ask my dad: he’ll con-
firm that that is what I said: though not in English of course. Ask Mikey too, if you want.
That’s the Archangel Michael, I mean: hereabouts everyone calls him “Mikey”. (And of course
everyone here in heaven calls my dad “dad”, because he’s their dad too.)
ABSOLUTELY. Oh, removing mountains is a trivial task; it is often done nowadays using bull-
dozers, albeit somewhat slowly. Not much faith in God is needed, just in technology. But with
spiritual faith much greater feats can be performed. There is a story in India that one of the
ancient kings of Vedic times, Viśwāmitra by name, performed spiritual practices for innumer-
able years in order to attain the title of Brahmarüshi or “Righteous person of the order of
Brahmā (i.e., the Creator)”. However, because he belonged to the kingly and not the priestly
caste, the Gods would not grant him the title, even though he was fully qualified, indeed over-
qualified, for it. Enraged at this injustice, Viśwāmitra threatened to begin marshalling his
spiritual powers and getting ready to create his very own cosmos—cosmos v.2.0 as one
might say—complete with its own 33,00,000 deities, including among them its own Brahmā.
This threw all heaven into consternation, and after lengthy deliberation, the Gods voted to
grant him his request; and as a result, Viśwāmitra decided to forego his stupendous threat of
independent creation. The message of the story is, of course, that such a thing is possible for
anyone who gets in sync with the Infinite Power that creates worlds.
KALIDASA. Indeed; and even that ability is insignificant. Drawing upon this legend, I’ve had my
character Kurush point out in one of my chapter-quotes: “Don’t be too proud of this Kosmo-
lógical Totality you’ve constructed, Viśwāmitra. The ability to create a Kósmos is insignificant
next to the power of the Source!”
“ABRAHAM”. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nietzsche!... Okay, okay, we’re just having fun
with you; but our excuse for doing so is that having fun is, after all, fun! But we assure you,
you yourself already have this power, as does everyone else; one just has to realize the fact.
No need to wait for any Übermensch! Or more accurately said, you are—more accurately,
your Inner Being is—already much more powerful than any imaginable Übermensch.
KALIDASA. The most superb way I have ever heard of expressing such things is the Islamic
expression Allahu Akbar. This is often mistranslated as “Allah is great”—that is to say,
“God is great”—but it should really be translated as “God is greater.” The word for “great”

473
 EUDAIMONIA

in Arabic is kabir; the word akbar is the comparative—more accurately, elative—form of it.
The clear implication is that no matter who or what you say, think, or even hint at is great,
God is greater! Is the cosmos great? Well, God is greater. Is the strength of the Incredible
Hulk great? God’s is greater. Is the beauty of the Venus de Milo great? God’s is greater.
Indeed, God is greater than even God, for God is continually growing, so he at this very
moment greater that he was just a moment ago! So no matter how immense Nietzsche
imagines, or even hopes, the power of his Übermensch to be, God’s is greater. (And by
the way, Nietzsche, just FYI, God isn’t actually dead, and neither are you; so you might as
well say, along with the rest of us, “Allahu Akbar!”)
JESUS. Well said; very well said indeed. I myself have gone on record as saying words trans-
lated into English as “he that hath seen me hath seen the father” (as indeed is true that he
—or she—that has seen anyone or anything else, for that matter, has also seen him!); but
I have also gone on record as saying “the father is greater than I.”
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. These are mysteries much too deep for the human
mind to fathom. At least for my human mind! But are not many spiritual statements intended
to be taken metaphorically rather than literally? If we did literally as is advised in the Bible,
and took no thought for our life, what we shall eat or what we shall drink, nor for our body,
what we shall put on, would we not all starve and freeze to death? Are we therefore to liter-
ally take no thought for the morrow? Will the morrow take thought for these things itself?
When has the morrow ever been observed doing any such thing? Why, any parents who
raise their children telling them with absolute confidence “Don’t worry in the least about
making sure you have a way to earn a living when you grow up” are likely to have their chil-
dren taken away by Child Services!
JESUS. What complete and utter tosh! There’s nothing spiritual that’s not accessible to little chil-
dren—and most of all, to tiny infants! As has been declared by my dear and close Chinese
chum Lǐ Ěr—who is much more often referred to by his title, Lǎo-Tzǝ, meaning Old Master
—“One who has in himself the most abundant spiritual energy is like unto a newborn babe”
(emphasis added by me). In fact, in his own language, the second part of his title, “-Tzǝ” (rhymes
with “the”—not with “thee”—and often written “-zi”, “-Tzu” or “-Tze”), actually means both “baby”
and “master”... with “baby” being the primary meaning, as the original “bone script” ideogram
representing it clearly illustrates: look it up on the Wikipedia! All babies and children are true
spiritual masters, from whom every adult can learn a lot—indeed, much more than from scrip-
tures. Do children take things metaphorically? Don’t little children take everything literally, even
the grimmest of fairy tales? And do they ever take thought for the morrow? Heck: when they
are playing they don’t even take thought for dinner! For them the morrow does take care of it-
self—quite literally. And when I say “them”, I include every one of you, for you also were chil-
dren once! I assure you, spirituality isn’t hard for adults to understand because it’s too com-
plicated, but because it’s too simple. When you’re a child, you speak as a child, you think as
a child, you understand—and understand correctly—as a child: but when you become an
adult you put away childish things... to your enormous loss and detriment!

474
 KALIDASA

THE ARCHBISHOP. Surely you don’t mean that when we’re adults we should also have no re-
sponsibilities at all, as our children do, my Lor... ahem... ?
JESUS. Yes, I most certainly do say that; and I have said it before too, using words to the ef-
fect “seek ye first the realm of God, and all things will be added unto you”. Responsibility
doesn’t apply in the least when receiving from your father his many gifts, any more than it
applies to children when receiving gifts from Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy!
THE ARCHBISHOP. My good... ahem, my good Friend, this is certainly not most people’s
experience! At least not that of most adults.
JESUS. Have any of you adults living on earth really tried giving first value to God and his in-
finite goodness, including what our good friend has called eudaimonia? If you did so, you’d
see that I am right! And in this regard—and I say this especially to those of you who claim to
be men and women “of the cloth”, but also to most others—it is almost impossible for you to
get truly in tune with God when you are dressed, not for protection from the elements, but
because you are too embarrassed not to be. You all would all greatly benefit by taking off all
your clothes, at least when indoors and in good weather, and going around displaying to all
the world the magnificent job our father did when designing and making your body, complete
with its most magnificent parts: your balls and cock in the case of men, and your pussies and
cunts in the case of women! Were any of you born with clothes on, even though God, being
capable of doing anything whatsoever, could easily have arranged it? You actually insult God
when you cover up your bodies, even partially; instead of appreciating him and his handi-
work, you glorify your clothing manufacturer and his... and you men, at least, make it appear
to all the world that you don’t have any cojones at all, and you women that you could never
give birth! Indeed, when did anyone ever get the idea that our father himself doesn’t have a
magnificent set of cock and balls—a King-sized set, in fact, as befits the King of king of kings
—when your scripture itself tells us that he made man in his image and likeness?
THE ARCHBISHOP. [astonished beyond belief] But my good Lor... er, my good Friend, isn’t that
blasphemy?
JESUS. Whatever gave you that idea? Do you now challenge your scripture, and claim that
God didn’t make man in his image and in his likeness?
THE ARCHBISHOP. If I were to repeat now that not everything in scripture should be taken lit-
erally, I fear you would come down on me like a ton of bricks. But surely the Good LORD isn’t
physical in nature, as we are?
JESUS. Are you sure that you yourself are physical in nature, any more than is any other idea,
or any other perception? Would you like to discuss this with your fellow Anglican Bishop,
George Berkeley, who claims to have established that there is no proof of a material world
independent of the mind? At least no proof that is beyond all doubt?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Ah, yes; you make a good point. Speaking purely for myself, I most cer-
tainly do not claim to have a cast-iron proof for the existence of a material world: at least not
one that’s not susceptible to many doubts, at least of a Cartesian nature. But as for nudity,
surely you yourself did not go around in the altogether during your ministry... ?

475
 EUDAIMONIA

JESUS. I most certainly did: and very often, too! Nor was I the only one to do so; my childhood
friend Johnny—you often call him “the Baptist”—did as well, among many others. Haven’t you
seen Caravaggio’s beautiful nude portrait of him when he was a very young teenager? If you
haven’t, please do a search on Goggle images! Summers in Judea, Galilee, and especially
the Jordan Valley are much too hot to wear clothes. Whenever we possibly could, at least
during the long dry hot weather, we took dips in the rivers and lakes to cool off—my baptism
was merely one such occasion—and do you think Johnny and I would be so stupid as to go
in the water with our clothes on? What do you take us for: prudes?
THE ARCHBISHOP. [eyebrows risen all the way to the top of his head] But... but... but... ! I mean,
you have never been reported in your Gospels as displaying the Full Monty, my L... er, my
Friend... !
JESUS. Well, not everyone in my time was as spiritually-minded and appreciative of our father’s
handiwork as Johnny and I were; there were prudes among the people of my time too, sadly:
notably my biographers, and many of those who followed me as well, all of whom sincerely
believed that God would never have demeaned himself so greatly as to fashion human gen-
italia with his own hands... and that too, lovingly. Many of them even believed that cocks
and bollocks and cunts were the Devil’s handiwork, not God’s! There are people nowadays
too who think similar thoughts: even in San Francisco—the city named after one of my very
dearest friends, Francis of Assisi—where for over a century the right to go nude in public
was completely unrestricted, but which right was taken away by the city council in 2012,
and where there have periodically been nude demonstrations in the streets for its restor-
ation... which I do hope will happen soon. But please remember that we Jews in my time
were governed by Rome, and the Romans at least were more than happy to go around—
and take communal baths—in the altogether; indeed, whenever a youth with cute danglers
entered a Roman bath, there was applause all round! And most justifiably so.
THE ARCHBISHOP. But... but... [sighs.] Oh dear me; dear, dear me. What can I say? I dare not
contradict you, Lord Jesus... I mean, Friend Jesus, but...
JESUS. There’s no need to use a capital “F” for “friend”, my good friend!—any more than there
is for “father”. Admittedly there is a need for a capital “G” for “God”, but then that’s his name...
at least when he’s speaking with anglophones.
THE ARCHBISHOP. [astonished] You mean you can hear me say “Friend” with a capital “F”?
JESUS. Well, we in the realm spiritual don’t actually hear things; what you say comes to me
as thoughts—as vibrations, so to speak—which I, who am also, in essence, a thought, or
a vibration, apprehend as best I can. But my vibrational sensitivity is quite high.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Of course, of course. May I ask, however, why you use such coarse terms
as the “c” word for penis and the other “c” word for vagina? Surely their vibrational level is
rather... low? Compared at least to the more—er, civilized—terms?
JESUS. Quite the opposite: when you’re in the right mood, those are terms you want use with
your partner—don’t you? They sound much more appealing at that time than the “civilized”
ones. I’m sure everyone has that experience: what? And when you’re in the wrong mood,

476
 KALIDASA

everything can be a turn-off, and even the most beautiful of flowers can look unattractive...
which, I may remind you, are also genitalia, albeit of plants and not of humans.
EUFRAT MAI, WORLD-FAMOUS CZECH PORN STAR. No question about it! I myself am so
proud of my vagina that when a Spanish factory near Seville wanted to make silicone replicas
of it en masse, so that lots of men can give themselves orgasms using them, I was so thrilled
that not only did I immediately give them permission to do so, but I even made a special visit
to the factory! There’s a YouTube video of my visit; I was the first woman to do so. Check it
out on the YouTube site! My father always said to me, when I was growing up, that we fe-
males have a gift from God—our vaginas—which can make us stars; and for me, especially
with the work I do—and which enables me to live the life of my dreams, namely that of a porn
actress—that’s literally true. At the factory I was absolutely thrilled to see the replicas, which
are called “Fleshlight” by the manufacturer. The thought that people have copies of my cunt in
their own homes is, for me, a really delightful one! Those of you in the flesh who want to, can
buy a replica too, online; I’d be most happy if you do, and even happier if you use it often.
And I hope that when I myself have children, I can teach them what that my father taught me:
that all sex is completely natural, and there’s absolutely no need to be shy or embarrassed
about it. In fact just the opposite; one should glory in it!
MARY, MOTHER OF JESUS. And that’s what my father, who is heaven, taught me as well, and
reinforced his teaching by fucking me, an experience which was for me absolutely delightful...
and our son Jesus is the wonderful result. And of course, that’s what we taught him too.
THE ARCHBISHOP. So are you telling us that you aren’t really a virgin?
MARY. Oh yes I am...
WEN THE ETERNALLY SURPRISED. [interrupting] ... as is everyone, for everything that’s
done, said, or even thought, can be done, said or thought for the first time only! There’s no
repetition, ever, in all of creation; after all, I wasn’t born yesterday, in fact no one was... and
that’s also why I am eternally surprised, and eternally joyful too as a result!
KALIDASA. Christianity is surely most sex-positive—and incest-positive—religion on earth, at
least by implication, because according to its teachings we are all siblings: God’s children!
And a child isn’t usually conceived without its father and mother engaging in a good fuck, is it
[smiles]. Admittedly there is artificial insemination, but where’s the fun in that?
EUFRAT. As for having fun, please watch my videos also! There are lots of them on Pornhub.
I have solo videos, straight and lesbian videos, and threesomes too. I absolutely love mak-
ing them! And though I say so myself, they are really, really good. Trust me, you will have a
lot more fun watching them—with or without your partner or partners—and bringing your-
selves to many orgasms doing so, than reading or discussing boring philosophy books.
DIOGENES. I wish I had been able to buy some your videos, Eufrat, in my days on earth. And
I wish I had been able to subscribe to Pornhub too. They do say that half the internet is porn;
and if that’s so, all I can say is, “Three cheers for the internet!”
THE ARCHBISHOP’S WIFE. Eufrat, you are young and attractive. When we women get old,
we get horribly wrinkly and unattractive: you’ll see for yourself!

477
 EUDAIMONIA

JUBAL HARSHAW, FRIEND OF THE MAN FROM MARS, VALENTINE MICHAEL SMITH.
In that regard I’d advise you to take a close look at Rodin’s Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière.
My absolutely favourite Rodin statue—no: my favourite nude statue sculpted by anyone,
ever, including the best Greek sculptors, and by Michelangelo as well!
THE ARCHBISHOP. I am afraid I myself wouldn’t look too good in the altogether, let alone na-
ked in bed with my dear old spouse here, being filmed doing whatever we do there on the
odd occasion: an activity that has become less and less frequent as the years have gone
by. And I’m sure I speak for the majority of us old fogeys.
EUFRAT. My good Archbishop, It’s not about one’s looks, but about one’s attitude! When one
does it with enthusiasm, it shows, and that’s what makes it attractive. I assure you that you
yourself are quite a bit younger than one of my own most enthusiastic fans: a Canadian gen-
tleman almost 80 years old, who is rather short, paunchy, has a long and completely white
beard, and has a bit of erectile dysfunction to boot; yet he goes around in the nude most of
the time, and enjoys sex with lots of partners, often simultaneously with several of them. He
has also posted some of his own sex videos on YouTube and ManyVids; and not only enjoys
sex with youngsters as young as those in their teens and early twenties, but actively seeks
out sexual partners of all ages! And the youngsters find him very attractive too, sexually. One
of them, who’s more than fifty years his junior, he has adopted as his own daughter!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Oh, I do draw the line at sex outside marriage; to abandon this ideal sim-
ply because it’s difficult to achieve is ridiculous.
JESUS. Then you must be a severe critic of King Solomon, who had seven hundred wives and
three hundred concubines: that is, he had literally hundreds of sexual partners who were not
his wives! Dear daddy, however, is certainly not of your opinion, for he strongly supported So-
lomon and his almost-inexhaustible sexual appetite during his time on earth. I even remem-
ber hearing dad singing in the shower occasionally: “Old King Sol was a merry old Sol, and
merry old Sol was he; he called for his wives and he called for his cunts and he called for his
diddlers three!” And dad also considered Solomon a most keen lover of wisdom—a.k.a.
philosopher—for dad was very happy that his sexual enthusiasm lasted well into his old age.
Besides, haven’t you read that I said when on earth, “In the resurrection they neither marry,
nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven”? Angels don’t marry, but
that doesn’t prevent them from enjoying sex... to the max!
DAWKINS. Aren’t angels non-physical? How do you expect any non-physical beings to insert
penises into vaginas when they have neither the one nor the other?
BERKELEY. As was already pointed out before, do you have any proof whatsoever that you
—or any humans, for that matter—are any more physical than angels, even though you can
insert your penis into others’ vaginas... and into other orifices as well?
DAWKINS. Well, I... I... well... [trails off.]
THE ARCHBISHOP. [to Jesus] However the Bible also informs us that when Solomon was old,
his wives turned away his heart, so that he went after other gods: and that his heart was not
perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.

478
 KALIDASA

JESUS. My point exactly: his wives turned away his heart... which shows that marriage isn’t
always what it’s cracked up to be!
“ABRAHAM”. This forsaking-all-others-for-better-or-worse-till-death-do-us-part nonsense is just
that: nonsense, since there is no death... and does anyone want to be shacked up with just
a single other individual for all eternity? Do any humans on earth have any idea what a real
eternity even feels like? As we’ve always said, the best “marriage vows” would be something
along the lines of “I like you pretty good; let’s see how it goes!”
JESUS. Moreover, as I have already said, the Bible was written by people, mostly prudes, and
they were mostly men; the milk of human kindness is very often lacking from it, and as a
result there’s a lot in it, especially the Old Testament, that cannot be admired at all. It cer-
tainly portrays daddy in a rather poor light, to put it mildly! What else can you call it, when
he’s described as drowning most of animal and plant life on earth just because he was dis-
pleased by the human race? Why drown all the unicorns and leprechauns, for instance, and
drown almost all the cuddly little bunnies and scampering little squirrels, just because of what
the humans did? How was it the squirrels’ fault? (Mind you, it is hinted, though not expli-
citly written, that he got Noah to save a pair of tarantulas, for which I suppose one should be
grateful... or not, depending on one’s point of view regarding such arachnids; your point of
view might not be quite the same as that of our dear chum Steve Irwin.) Of course dad is said
to have drowned all the fish too, but apparently he wasn’t quite aware that drowning fish
doesn’t actually do much to them. Thankfully he is said to have repented after forty days and
forty nights of this non-stop temper tantrum of his, and is even said to have been heard
muttering under his breath “To err is human, but to make major cock-ups is divine!”
THE ARCHBISHOP. My Lord, are you saying you don’t approve of our Heavenly Father’s
deeds: at least those he did before you were born?
JESUS. No; I am saying that he never did them! He is simply portrayed as having done them
by fearful people who penned many of your so-called “scriptures”. To give yet another ex-
ample, whatever happened during the conquest of Canaan to “Love your enemies, do good
to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you”, and all that? Come on
now, for heaven’s sake! Any God boasting infinite intelligence, wisdom and benevolence
should be made of much smarter, wiser and more benevolent stuff; he should bear in mind
that he has a reputation of absolute positivity and unconditional love—even towards his en-
emies—to maintain. The actual fact is, however, he never did anything of the sort at all, for in
reality father could not possibly have even been in favour of the things he is portrayed as not
only condoning, but encouraging, and even doing. You really should pick and choose pas-
sages from your so-called “scriptures”, and accept only those that make actual sense for
an infinitely intelligent, wise and benevolent father to have said and done.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Well, notwithstanding all your arguments, we in the Church of England
hold that the Church does not have the authority to decree anything contrary to Scripture,
and neither the Church nor the General Councils have the authority to teach that anything
additional to Scripture is necessary for salvation.

479
 EUDAIMONIA

JESUS. Even then, does not your scripture itself say that we, all of us, are Gods, and children
of God: does not Psalm 82 read ‫ל ֶכֽם‬ ְּ ‫“ אֲ ֽנִי־אָ ֭מַ ְר ִ ּתי אֱ ל ִֹה֣ים אַ ֶּת֑ם ו ּ ְבנֵ֖י עֶ ְלי ֹ֣ון ֻּכ‬I have said, ye
are Gods, and children of the most high, all of you”? Does not your scripture itself say that
if we have as much faith as a mustard seed, nothing will be impossible for us? Does not
your scripture itself say that all you have to do is ask, and it shall be given unto you? Does
not your scripture itself say that I am alive and well and have eternal life, notwithstanding
my crucifixion? Well, here I am before you: ask me your questions, and I will tell you the an-
swers! Or better still, ask yourselves the questions: you too have the answers, for it is not
also said in your scripture—by me, no less, when I was in the flesh: “I say unto you, he that
believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he
do; because I go unto the father”... ?
THE ARCHBISHOP. But that’s not all that Scripture says; and all of it must be taken into ac-
count, and every bit made to resonate with all the others.
JESUS. You will find that that simply can’t be done—not if your scripture is to make any sense,
and not, instead, become just a pack of self-contradictory statements strung along one after
another to form one absurd—and largely boring—Book of books: something which increasing
numbers of people nowadays are coming to realize, and rightly so. Take, for instance, the
saying “Thou shalt not kill”—more accurately translated from the Hebrew ‫ לֹא ִת ְרצָח‬as “Thou
shalt not commit murder”—well, it’s completely incompatible with the absolute reality of the
life eternal! And it’s not even compatible with what we know about the scriptures, or at least
about the books of the New Testament, and some of the Old too: they are openly stated, in so
many words, to have been penned by humans, and not by God. That they may have been
inspired by God is certainly an acceptable notion; but it is not at all certain that those who re-
ceived the inspiration actually wrote down what they were inspired to write!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Should we not take it on faith, my Lord, that they were? (Sorry, sorry:
I must call you “Lord”, for I just can’t bring myself to think of you as a friend of mine... er,
that came out a tad wrong, I’m afraid; sorry again, sorry again... )
JESUS. No need to apologize; I think of you as a dear, dear friend of mine quite regardless of
what you think. Now with respect to faith, the other matter you raised: there’s faith—which
I do support, wholeheartedly—and then there’s gullibility, which I certainly don’t; for instance,
just think of having faith in a Nigerian prince’s emails! And faith and gullibility can be very sim-
ilar, so it’s wise to distinguish between the two, isn’t it? And this can be done... and that too,
quite easily: if a belief feels good, it’s faith, while if it feels in the least degree bad, or even
suspicious, it’s not! As I’ve already said, what’s the point of a heaven in which one doesn’t feel
good: as good as one can possibly feel? And any idea that originates from heaven—or from
God, who is the Source of all goodness—must make one feel one hundred per cent good, for
otherwise it just can’t have come from there! Besides—and just as importantly—faith is only
needed temporarily; once it is found to be justified, it’s no longer faith, but something much
more akin to knowledge... or at the very least, confidence.
THE ARCHBISHOP. [pensive] You do make a very good point, my Lord; I must take time to

480
 KALIDASA

meditate upon it. Please forgive me, but I cannot think of a valid response to this... yet.
JESUS. Please take your time. But I am telling you myself that much in your scriptures is quite
the opposite of what I think and say, and what our father thinks and says. For instance, our
dad and I have never had any quarrel whatsoever with the worshippers of Ashtoreth, Moloch,
Beelzebub, Athena, Belenos, Óðinn, Freyja, Allah, Ahura-Mazda, Vishṇu, Śiva or Śakti... or,
for that matter, even with our sweet, sweet Satan, who is no less our darling sibling than
is anyone else! Quite the contrary, dad and I actually love them all: indeed, love them more
than anyone can possibly imagine.
“ABRAHAM”. Regarding Satan—or the Devil—we have always said that he doesn’t actually
exist. And we don’t think we were at all wrong in so affirming... ?!?
THE TATHĀGATA. But ask yourself: do any of us exist, either... whether in a physical form or
any other? At least, do we exist any more than does Hamlet: that is to say, someone who, if
he didn’t exist, would not have the choice whether to be or not to be—or, for that matter, even
to ask the question? We discussed all this earlier, didn’t we... and you yourselves, Abraham,
answered the question most eloquently, essentially saying that it all depends on the context,
and on one’s alignment with what you call “Source”?
JESUS. Indeed. And in this context, the Devil, a.k.a. Satan—whose name, ‫שטָ ן‬ ׂ ָ ּ , pronounced
“Ṡātān”, is a corruption, made around the time of the Jews’ Babylonian exile, of the much
older Avestan word Ksha'etān, meaning “the Shining One” (whence Lucifer, “the light-bearer”:
didn’t you see his TV show?)—certainly does exist; but he is not in the least bit evil! And
that’s because it’s evil that doesn’t exist. You, “Abraham”—[turning towards Abraham the patri-
arch] I’m not referring to you, Abe!—are completely right in saying that evil doesn’t exist, and
as a result has no power over anyone; for how can infinite benevolence even allow the exist-
ence of such a thing, let alone create it? What people call “evil” is just an absence of good, in
the same way that darkness is just an absence of light: neither evil nor darkness exist in their
own right. Indeed, absolute evil cannot exist: read The Consolation of Philosophy by our
friend Boethius! Those who think that this non-existent “evil” has any power over them have
permitted thoughts of a lack of goodness to take up residence in their minds, and as a result
of the law of attraction, to manifest itself in their experiences; but it is well within their power
to ignore such thoughts, which means that they will soon get replaced with pure, positive
thoughts of goodness, appreciation and love. After all, that is the way the world was created
by God, who when he made it, was pleased to see that it was good!
KALIDASA. That is why my novel does not portray a dystopia as contrasted against an eutop-
ia, but rather two eutopias. The world portrayed on my “Earth”, ruled with an iron fist by Big
Brother and his agents such as The Adon, is no less an eutopia than the world portrayed in
my alternative world, “Gaia”; they are both eutopias! And I advisedly use the spelling “euto-
pia” and not “utopia”, for “eutopia” means “a good place” in Greek, while “utopia” means “no
place”: a place that doesn’t exist. In fact, that which really is a utopia, meaning a place that
doesn’t exist, is actually any dystopia—such as the worlds described in Brave New World
by you, Aldous, or Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell—for a genuine dystopia would not be

481
 EUDAIMONIA

permitted to come into existence by infinite intelligence and benevolence!

“ABRAHAM”. Yes, good point; very good point. There simply is no such thing as the “Dark side
of the Source” (sorry, Darth Vader.) And of course Source—namely, that which you, along
with many people, call “God”—loves everyone, including every other deity, and even Satan:
for the simple reason that Source is love, and nothing but love!
JESUS. Of course. And note that that God’s love is also showered down equally on atheists:
that is, those who are neither deities themselves, nor believers in them—such as our ad-
orable Dicky Dawkins [pinches Dawkins’s cheeks]—who quite rightly criticise your scriptures
for portraying dear old dad as acting much more like a vicious psychopathic alien from a far-
away galaxy intent on world domination, and doesn’t give a shit who knows it, or even cares
—or even better said, as a vicious psychopathic alien who’s already achieved world domina-
tion and doesn’t give a shit who knows it or even cares—instead of the infinitely loving, cap-
able, wise and benevolent being he actually is.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Oh yes, of course. We say in the Church, “Love the sinner, but hate the
sin.” It actually was Saint Augustine who is thought to have originated the essence of this
phrase, though admittedly not in English: his original Latin words were “cum dilectione ho-
minum et odio vitiorum”, which are slightly different in meaning.
“ABRAHAM”. Now that’s where you, and our beloved Augustine, display flawed thinking; for as
we have just explained, there is no evil, and so there is no sin! What people call “sin” is simply
a misunderstanding, for since everyone is Source, and since Source is love itself, no one can
commit any evil deed: that is to say, no one can commit any such thing as a “sin”.
KALIDASA. As the French say—and quite correctly—Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,
“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
JESUS. Yes; I myself, when in the flesh, was wrong about forgiveness. There is no need for
anyone to forgive anyone else “seventy times seven”, and neither does dad have any need
to forgive. There is no need for forgiveness at all, because there’s nothing to forgive!
THE ARCHBISHOP. My Lord Jesus, how could you have ever been wrong... ? Were you not
ever and always the Son of God, and thus no less infallible than the Father Himself?
JESUS. Oh for heaven’s sake stop using capital letters when they are not called for! No one
ever used them in my time: or rather, they only used capital letters, for there weren’t any
lower-case letters then. At the time the books of the Bible were written, and for many cen-
turies afterwards, Greek had no lower-case letters, and Hebrew has never had them; and
so nothing in the original Bible was written in any way that distinguished between capital
letters and lower-case ones. And yes, I was sometimes wrong in saying what I said while
I was in the flesh, for after all, while I was in the flesh I was limited to some extent by its li-
mitations, never being one hundred per cent in alignment with the mind divine at all times.
It’s just that I was more in alignment, and more often so, than most others. Besides, the
mind divine itself is growing all the time, and thus improving all the time; for if it didn’t, it
would hardly be perfect, would it? People imagine God to be so perfect that he never im-
proves; but nothing could be further from the truth. An inability to become better and better

482
 KALIDASA

continually is a sign imperfection, after all!

EDWARD FITZGERALD. Yes, God too must have improved as time went by; for in the old days
—as you also have pointed out, Jesus—he seems to have been a bit of jerk! As the Persian
Sufi Omar Khayyám has written, “Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make / And who
with Eden didst devise the Snake: / For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man / Is blacken’d,
Man’s Forgiveness give—and take!” (My own translation: isn’t it fab?)
JESUS. [chuckling] Yes, a very clever turn of phrase. But verily, verily I say unto you, there is
never anything or anyone to forgive... not even those who portrayed father in a really bad
light in the early books of your scriptures. In fact, I have often wanted to make a joke about
these passages, declaring to all and sundry: “That’s why we decided, just before I was born,
to upgrade heaven, and put the Trinity in charge of it; our three-in-one-and-one-in-three com-
bo of Father, Son and Holy Ghost were created so that there’d be checks and balances
against any of us getting too uppity. Everyone in heaven knows that! Ask Mikey, ask Gaby,
ask Raf. Heck, there are even colleges in Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin named after the
three of us: Trinity College!” Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to finally
make that joke [winks].
THE ARCHBISHOP. [reproachfully] That is a most frivolous joke, my Lord Jesus, and in ex-
ceedingly poor taste; and most unworthy of you.
JESUS. [rolling his eyes] Oy vey.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Whatever do you mean?
JESUS. Haven’t you been paying attention to what I’ve been saying?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes, but what you have been saying contradicts what Scripture says!
JESUS. Well, scriptures themselves contradict much of what they say, so what else is new?
THE ARCHBISHOP. But never have the Scriptures said anything that’s frivolous!
JESUS. And didn’t you hear my explanations as to why?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Your explanations simply do not convince me, my Lord.
JESUS. I am now reminded of an exchange I had with some religious zealots of my time on
earth, for when they wanted to pelt me with stones, I responded to them: “Why do ye not
understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my words.”
“ABRAHAM”. Everyone is at a different level of vibration from everyone else... and, indeed, at
a different level of vibration from moment to moment. As a result, the difference is sometimes
great, and sometimes less so. If one is at a level of vibration that is very different from that
of another, and especially if the other is in alignment with Source, one cannot even hear the
words being said to them. Think of a radio receiver; if it is not tuned to the station that one
wants to listen to, one will not hear what that station is transmitting, even though the radio
waves from that station may be very strong and present all around the receiver! But if the
difference in levels of vibration is not too great, one can hear some of what the station is
broadcasting, though not necessarily all of it... and certainly not perfectly.
KALIDASA. I am sure this is going to happen with my words too; many who read it will not hear
what I am trying to say. Especially with respect to what I say about mutually delightful sexual

483
 EUDAIMONIA

activity been children and adults, including their parents.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Oh, for heaven’s sake... !!!
JESUS. Yes for heaven’s sake! What else do you all think heaven is, if not delightful... for all
concerned?
THE ARCHBISHOP. But sex between children and adults? Even with their parents??? How
much more obscene can one get! And to have you promote such a thing? To Christians?
I really am beginning to think that you aren’t really you...
JESUS. I assure you with all my heart not only that I’m really me, but that sexual activity of all
kinds between me and my mum was commonplace in my own home when I was growing up.
Anyone who wants to know some details about the kinds of sex we two enjoyed when I was
growing up—well, approximate details, because all families are different in this regard—can
read what’s described on some of the pages the novel Eudaimonia itself! And my family was
by no means an exception in this regard; most families all over the world, and over the mil-
lennia, have indulged in mutually enjoyable sexual activity between children and adults...
most certainly including their parents. This has only declined with the advent of “civilization”;
though often, of course, it is—and was—done surreptitiously.
THE ARCHBISHOP. What?????
JESUS. My dear friend, you really ought to do some research in this subject; many societies
have accepted all sexual activity as being perfectly natural, especially before contact with
prudish “Christians”. (That’s one reason I do not like to be called “the Christ” any more, for it
kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.) Read this, from a well-researched study published
by the University of Hawai‘i [waves his arms and a web page appears as if magically in the air,
legible to everyone in the amphitheatre, wherein they read]: “SUMMARY: Traditional Hawai‘ian
society was culturally complex. Sex was seen as being positive and pleasurable, and al-
though many cultural precepts existed concerning nonsexual aspects of life, the attitude to-
ward sex was comparatively open and permissive. Sexual needs and desires were seen as
being as basic as the need to eat, and the young were instructed in matters of sex. Adults
attended physically to the sexual development of the young, including the preparation of
their genitals. These sexual interactions between adults and the young, from the society’s
perspective, were seen as benefiting the young individual rather than as gratifying the adult.
The sexual desire of an adult for a nonadult, heterosexual or homosexual, was accepted [...],
and the regular erotic preference by an adult for a young individual probably was viewed
more as being unusual than as being intrinsically bad. [...] The Hawai‘ian approach to sex
and sex education seemed to be fruitful in many ways. Sexual dysfunctions such as impot-
ence and inhibitions of desire or lack of orgasm among males or females, common enough
in Western society today, reportedly were unknown or at least rare [...]. Sex was a salve and
glue for the total society.” And that’s more or less the view we took in my family, for it is the
view most consonant with feeling good!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Good heavens!!!
JESUS. Well said! “Good heavens” indeed, for heaven is good; and the more one brings the

484
 KALIDASA

realm of heaven down to earth, the more earth too becomes good!
THE ARCHBISHOP. But surely they should be taught that all this is clearly against the Law of
God!
JESUS. Can the Law of God—who is good, and naught but good—be against goodness? And
is not enjoyable and delightful sexual activity, good beyond measure? Did not God actually
design sex to be not only good, but so irresistibly good that even the most anti-sexual of in-
dividuals would nevertheless indulge in it, thus guaranteeing the survival of the species?
THE ARCHBISHOP. But surely that’s the only purpose of sexual activity? Or at least its main
purpose, besides enhancing intimacy between married couples?
JESUS. Not at all; its main purpose is enable the human minds of those who engage in it to
experience, at least for a brief time, the delight that the highest mind feels all the time. In
other words, to bring human minds closer to the mind of God!
PADMASAMBHAVA, A.K.A. THE GURU RIMPOCHÉ. Of course. There is only one mind, as
I have always said; and it is in a state of perfect bliss—and getting more blissful from moment
to moment—as anyone who has been one with it can attest. I myself, when incarnate, en-
abled countless women to experience that bliss, or something close to it, by the simple expe-
dient of bringing them to orgasm: often multiple times!
JESUS. Well, indeed so; that’s more or less it. After all, sex is just the ultimate level of kissing
and cuddling, isn’t it? And kissing and cuddling and hugging are just ways of showing love to
one another, aren’t they? Not for nothing is sex often called “making love”, for that’s more or
less what it is! And isn’t love the most wonderful thing in all of existence? What’s the point of
depriving our own children of the ultimate expression of love? But isn’t that exactly what we
do, when we deprive them of sexual pleasure?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Kissing and cuddling and hugging little children is all very well—and of
course they’re a good thing, and should be encouraged—but leave sex out of it!
JESUS. Why, for heaven’s sake? Do you imagine children don’t experience sexual pleasure?
My dear friend, you who call yourself an Archbishop—and I trust you know that the word
“bishop”, which in Greek is ἐπίσκοπος epískopos, means “overseer”?—how can you over-
see anything if you can’t, or won’t, see the full picture? And does not your scripture itself tell
you that all children are as much children of God as anyone else is? And, being children of
the divine being, do you not realize that they are just as eternal as the divine being himself?
And is it not completely obvious that any eternal and divine being is capable of having any
experience any other such being is capable of? I assure you that all children, if they have
not been made afraid of engaging in sexual activity, or made to feel guilty about it, welcome
it. Do not all infants enjoy playing with and sucking at breasts—their mother’s or anyone
else’s who cares to offer theirs to them? Indeed, do they not enjoy sucking at almost any-
thing, even a penis if it is offered to them? I assure you, little girls often fantasize about
sucking cock and fondling balls; even—as a matter of fact, especially—those of the man
who impregnated her mother; and little boys often fantasize about fucking their mothers:
I certainly did when I was a little boy, and I’m guessing that you did too, though you may

485
 EUDAIMONIA

well have repressed any such memories! Haven’t you heard about the Electra complex and
the Oedipus Complex, for God’s sake? Haven’t you heard the well-known saying “A little boy’s
first love is his mum, and a little girl’s first love is her dad?”
THE ARCHBISHOP. Fantasizing about such things is one thing, but doing such things is most
definitely a no-no!
JESUS. Why, for God’s sake? Is there the slightest good reason to prohibit people from en-
joying themselves?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes there is, if it results in after-effects that are distinctly unpleasant! Many
children who engaged in sexual activity with adults when they were little grow up to regret it
later in life, do they not? Surely you know that!
JESUS. That’s not a result of their childhood actions, but a result of growing up in a society
whose norms play a large role in influencing what they “should” consider to be bad. It’s that
pernicious social influence that creates feelings of guilt and regret later in life; for early child-
hood memories usually fade with time, to be replaced by the mores of the society one grows
up in. This never happens to children who grow up in a society which encourages rather
than condemns sexual activity between people of all ages. The same thing happens with
regard to other kinds of actions; childhood activities which are condemned in a society gen-
erate feelings of guilt later on in life, while in societies which don’t condemn such actions,
the very same actions don’t generate guilt feelings. For example, just think about how guilty
an adult who has been brought up from childhood in the strictly vegetarian societies of India
—such as the Jain society—feels about eating meat! And feelings of guilt about having fun
at any age certainly do not exist in those individuals—like me and my mum, and many oth-
ers I could name, including my childhood friend Johnny whom I spoke about earlier—who
don’t care two hoots for society’s norms, and only do whatever is inspired by God. And it’s
easy to tell the difference, for anything inspired by God feels good!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Are you saying, Lord, that one should not follow the norms of society?
JESUS. Definitely not always! When in the flesh I did say words to the effect that one should
render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s; but
whenever there’s a clash between the two, you yourself know what takes precedence!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes, I admit that you are right in this; indeed, that’s what we ourselves
teach in the Church. But surely you will admit that not all things that are initially pleasurable
result in long-term benefit, after some time has passed. Think of a person getting as drunk
as a skunk, and the horrible hangover next day! Not to speak of worse things such as DWI-
caused accidents, some even fatal; or drunken husbands beating their wives.
JESUS. Nothing untoward can happen to anyone who is in tune with the love that is God—
absolutely nothing! They wouldn’t even get drunk. Would I have turned water into wine if
I had feared such consequences to my actions the following day, with regard to at least some
of those that drank it? Seek ye first the realm of God, and all things—including as much or
as little safety as you   r e a l l y desire—will be added unto you.
THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised to find that I am in agreement with you here; after all, it is

486
 KALIDASA

recorded that when Pilate said to you, “knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and
have power to release thee?”, you answered, “Thou couldest have no power at all against me,
except it were given thee from above”. But surely one must be in perfect tune with God to be in
that blessed state? Who else but the Son of God Himself could be so?
JESUS. Good God, haven’t you been paying attention? Everyone is a son—or daughter—of
God, and as a result everyone is in tune with God to some extent at some moments in their
lives. But no one in the physical realm is all the time in perfect tune with God, for the very
point of taking birth in the physical realm is to get out of tune with God for a brief lifetime—
and all lifetimes are brief in an eternity! And no one is completely out of tune with God, either;
they could not even exist if they were. The statement therefore applies to everyone... though
admittedly not to the same extent at all times.
THE ARCHBISHOP. So when a person is not in tune with God, others can have power over
him or her?
JESUS. Yes, but only if they attract it, either deliberately or “by default”, as “Abraham” say.
Let me explain more in detail. Since we are, all of us, divine in nature, we all create our
own reality; and we do so by attracting it. As a result, if we don’t understand how things
work, we can, as it were, invite others to have a certain amount of power over us. That hap-
pens because similar thoughts attract one another. If we have fearful thoughts of others
attacking us, those thoughts attract the thoughts of persons who desire to attack us; and
they then can attack us. But only our physical selves, I hasten to add; never our true selves.
Any thought we think due to fear attracts the thoughts of those who can exert some sort of
power over us, and as a result we get a manifested experience of precisely those thoughts
which we fear. This is due to what is called “The Law of Attraction” in modern times.
“ABRAHAM”. [in a cockney accent] Oi! Yǝ got all that from us! [Winks.]
JESUS. [in a similar cockney accent] Nah—I got that from Worcestershire! [Also winks.]
“ABRAHAM”. What?? Oh, now we get it: “Worcestershire Sauce”, “Source”—cockney rhym-
ing slang. Yeah?
JESUS. Yeah. What you call “Source” is the same as what I—and many others—call “God”.
THE ARCHBISHOP. But what about little children? Are little children not vulnerable? And the
very young, the babies: aren’t they extremely vulnerable?
JESUS. And why should any divine being be in the least bit vulnerable?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Are you saying that children aren’t vulnerable?
JESUS. That’s exactly what I am saying; and newborns least of all, for they don’t even know
the meaning of the word “vulnerable”! You adults believe in things such as vulnerability and
weakness, because you can’t—or won’t—see the whole picture. The picture you see is with
what you believe to be your physical eyes; and with them you see children as tiny and weak
physical beings. The whole picture, which anyone who is in the spiritual realm Sees, is that
children are angels—why, don’t you yourselves call them “angels” when you are in the right
mood?—and thus full of the power of the divine; in other words, they are infinitely power-
ful! I had said myself, when I was about to be crucified, and a person who was with me at

487
 EUDAIMONIA

the time wanted to defend me with a sword, cutting off the ear of one of those who had come
to arrest me: I said, “Put away thy sword; thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my father,
and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” It’s in your own scrip-
tures, for heaven’s sake!
THE ARCHBISHOP. But we can see children getting hurt... in many ways!
JESUS. This is another way in which you don’t see the whole picture, for you don’t understand
why children take birth on earth in the first place. When an angel decides to take birth on
earth, it is for the sake of risking getting hurt; for in heaven there is absolutely no such risk,
and that can get pretty boring after just a few hundred years, let alone after a million! And
the risk of getting hurt has its payoffs, for during our time on earth, whenever we get some-
thing we do not want, we discover what we do. For any given angel, there are many things
that even in their very long time in existence they may not ever have experienced, since
existence as a whole is getting more and more interesting, and growing, with the passage
of time; and experiencing new things is the only way for any of us to grow. No one wants
to remain static throughout eternity, do they? Besides, some wonderful activities must have
both desirable and non-desirable effects: imagine climbing to the summit of Mount Everest
without getting at least a little bit cold! Any eternal being’s existence, if it is what you imagine
a “heavenly” existence to be—that is, an existence in which they can get whatever they want
with absolutely no discomfort, and at the snap of a finger, so to speak—gets less than heav-
enly within a few years, and most certainly within a century or so anyone would get com-
pletely bored of it! And a century is but a blink of an eye for an angel.
KALIDASA. As I have often said, this illustrates the great intelligence and wisdom of God, for
he has found a way of making heaven better than earth, and earth better than heaven!
THE ARCHBISHOP. All that’s been said up to this point gives me the impression that you,
Lord Jesus, are saying that there’s no difference between right actions and wrong actions;
in other words, that all actions are permissible in God’s eyes.
JESUS. Not only permissible, but actually encouraged! There’s no such thing as wrong action,
but there is such a thing as right action: or in other words, all actions are right—and even
non-action is right. The creator, in his infinite wisdom, has created a world in which you just
can’t get it wrong. Any “scripture” or text that says anything about any action being “wrong”
is just something written by fearful human beings; for is it not absolutely clear that an infin-
itely intelligent and benevolent creator would have created an infinitely good creation?
THE ARCHBISHOP. You will find few people anywhere on earth to agree with you on all these
things you have just said... and certainly no Christians.
JESUS. Another reason choose not to call myself “a Christian”—or for that matter, “the Christ”.
THE ARCHBISHOP. I think I may have caught you in a contradiction, my Lord: for now you are
saying, aren’t you, that Christians do do wrong things, or at least think wrong thoughts... ?
JESUS. No: there can be no wrong thoughts, any more than there can be any wrong actions.
We spoke of this earlier, didn’t we, when we talked about beliefs? Remember, a belief is
merely a habit of thought. However, in the short run there can be thoughts that are extremely

488
 KALIDASA

beneficial to those who think them, and others not quite so beneficial. There is not, however,
any thought that is not beneficial at all, for every thought is at least somewhat beneficial... and
in the long run all thoughts and actions are equally beneficial. Even those of Christians... and
Jews, Muslims, Wiccans and atheists—to mention just a few others—as well!
“ABRAHAM”. As Jesus said a few moments ago, you just can’t get it wrong! And you never get
it done, either; in fact you can’t get it wrong because you can never get it done.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Then why should one entertain any beliefs at all? Why not none?
JESUS. That’s also just as beneficial; you can ask our friend Socrates, who claimed, when in
the flesh, that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing! (Of course strictly speak-
ing that would have been self-contradictory, for if he knew that he knew nothing he would
have known at least one thing, so he couldn’t actually have known nothing. But Aristotle
corrected him later on regarding this, though that took place after both of them had made
their transition to the Elysian Fields.)
SOCRATES. Well, that’s not entirely correct; what I had actually said at the time was “I neither
know nor think that I know”, which is not quite the same thing. But yes, at the time I had be-
lieved—and quite sincerely, at that—that all I knew was that I knew nothing; and Aristotle did
correct me after I transitioned to the “non-physical”—well, everything is non-physical, or maybe
that’s so—showing me how there’d be a contradiction inherent in such a claim. But I did want
to ask you, Jesus: what’s all this about long term and short term benefit?
JESUS. Well, the longest period anyone can suffer Hamlet’s “whips and scorns of time, the op-
pressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the
insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes”, is one human life-
time: and that’s next to no time at all in an eternity, is it? When any human being dies—or
what “Abraham” most appropriately express as “croaks”—they go to heaven, or as “Abraham”
say, “they emerge into pure positive energy”: and it’s all over! And trust me: everyone goes to
heaven, even Stalin and Hitler: heck, I have personally seen them on many evenings at a
table in their local pub enjoying a pint or two—indeed, often many more—and high-fiving each
other over recollections of what stupid humans deplore as “The Second World War”, and rais-
ing their glasses in a toast to the fine game they had played when on earth!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Oh, do be serious. A World War is not a game!!! Over 20 million war cas-
ualties, plus six million Jews up in smoke... and many more millions injured for the rest of
their lives!!! Are you completely devoid of compassion?
“DON JUAN”, YAQUI NAGUAL WHO TAUGHT CARLOS CASTANEDA IN THE 1960s. Such
things matter to you, for you don’t see everything. But in reality none of what happens in our
lives matters; indeed nothing that happens anywhere matters any more than anything else
that happens... anywhere. Nothing that happens matters because everything that happens is
awesome: indeed, equally awesome! The countless different paths we walk are all equal;
none is, or even could be, either more or less awesome than any other. Therefore the only
kind of action that is appropriate is folly, controlled folly: what many people call play, or being
silly. Everything is a game—a game, not to win, but to play, and to enjoy playing; nothing in

489
 EUDAIMONIA

the whole of existence is worth seriousness. Oppressors and oppressed both meet at the
end, and toast and high-five each other, even Nazis and Jews; for when they realize that
everything was, is, and ever will be, simply awesome, the only thing they think of then is that
life on earth was altogether too short, and they’d love to live their lives all over again!
VYĀSA. This nonsensical term “Second World War” is another example of myopic Eurocen-
trism: most of the countries of the world were not significantly affected by the war. Indeed,
only three countries were militarily affected by the war in any significant way: Germany, Ja-
pan and the Soviet Union. Yes, a lot of other countries were occupied, but there was hardly
any military action after the occupation; and some others did see military action, but not in
any major way. And an even smaller fraction of the word’s countries were militarily affected
by the war of 1914-18: the war which, after it ended, was perhaps aptly called “The Great War”
(and for that reason, the one that followed 21 years later should perhaps have been called
“The Greater War”) [smiles]. And even forgetting the fact there is no death: that dying is, as
Śrī Krüshṇa says in the Bhagavad Gītā—which is an integral part of my Mahābhārata—
something akin to taking off your dirty clothes at the end of day and putting on fresh ones:
even then, given that the general global mortality rate during peace time before and after
the war was more than 20 per thousand per annum, and given that the world population at
that time was between two and two-and-a-half billion, something like 240 to 300 million
people would have died anyway during the six years of the so-called “Second World War”,
even if there had been no war: so what’s 26 million deaths—or even twice as many—in
comparison? Yes, to the Divine Mind everything is a game; we say in India that the entire
universe is भगवान की लीला, Bhagwān kī līlā—the play of the Supreme Being. After all, how
can the Almighty take anything seriously, seeing as he can restore anything untoward to its
original blissful state by just clicking on “Edit→Undo”, as it were?
JESUS. And speaking of being serious, did you ever see little children being serious? As I have
said often—indeed, over and over in many different ways: “Except ye turn, and become as
little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven”!
VISHṆU. He’s right. There is not, and never has been, any guru the world has ever seen who
is even nearly at the same level of spirituality as I was when I had incarnated on earth as
bāla Krüshṇa, the child Krüshṇa.
LǏ ĚR, USUALLY CALLED “LǍO-TZƎ”. Quite so. And when you, Vishṇu, were incarnated as
the child Krüshṇa, neither were you at as absolute a level of harmony with the Way—with
what we in China call the Tao—as any newborn who ever lived!
“ABRAHAM”. Yes, that’s completely correct. If you seek an earthly spiritual master at the very
highest level of spirituality—what some people call an avatāra, that is, an incarnation of the
divine, or what we call one who is masterfully in alignment with Source—look no further than
a newborn: or, for that matter, a squirrel or a raven... or even a cockroach! Any cockroach
is more closely aligned, and more often aligned, with Source than any adult human who ever
lived, including any of the gurus and prophets and messiahs and founders of any religion
that ever existed: at least while they were in the flesh.

490
 KALIDASA

THE ARCHBISHOP. What can any human being learn from a cockroach? Except maybe how
to survive a nuclear holocaust... ?
“ABRAHAM”. Oh, the beasts of this planet have many things to teach humans; but the main
thing any human can learn from them is simply to be themselves! A cockroach is always just
a cockroach, doing whatever it is inspired to do by Source—by what most humans call its
“instinct”. If humans would also do whatever they were inspired to do by Source, and nothing
else, they would live the most wonderful of lives!
D.T. SUZUKI, FAMOUS AUTHOR ABOUT ZEN. The Zen roshi 慧海 Huì-hǎi—in Japanese,
Ekai—who lived during the Tang dynasty, once said, when asked if he did any daily practices
to cultivate the Buddha-Mind: “Yes, of course; I eat when I’m hungry, I sleep when I’m tired”!
Most humans don’t, and that, sadly, is why they are not Zen roshis.
LǏ ĚR, A.K.A. LǍO-TZƎ. Except, of course, newborn babies. And infants before they can walk
or talk, though a little less so. And small children, though even less so due to their “parenting”
(a most unfortunate modern practice). Then pre-teens, but less so still; then teenagers...
D.T. SUZUKI. Ah, yes, of course. Indeed, in Japanese, the very term roshi—often mistranslated
as “master” in English—is written ⽼⼦ in kanji. It is in fact how we Japanese pronounce what
you Chinese pronounce as “Lǎo-Tzǝ”, meaning “baby”, or “old baby”.
JESUS. It bears repeating, over and over: “Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye
shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Think carefully, therefore, about taking
the advice of the teachers and gurus and priests of any religion, instead of your own kids!
At least while both you and they are in the flesh; when you go to heaven you naturally don’t
take anyone’s advice, for you can listen directly to God at every moment.
“ABRAHAM”. Oh, we advise everyone, whether in the flesh or not, to pay no attention what-
soever to the opinions or advice of anybody else. Source is always with you, whether you
are incarnated or not, and its advice the only advice worth listening to! Source is inspiring
you from moment to moment what to do, what to eat, what to wear—or, indeed, not to wear;
most of the time, in good weather and indoors, what to wear is “nothing”—and also what to
say... and most of the time it’s also “nothing”.
LǏ ĚR. Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. I admit that by saying this,
I am essentially implying that I myself don’t know what I am talking about... and actually that
is correct, for the Tao that can be talked about isn’t the eternal Tao! [Smiles.]
ZEN ROSHI LÍN-CHÌ Ì-HSÜÁN, A.K.A. RINZAI. I once wrote words to the following effect:
“Seekers after the Tao, if you want insight into truth as it is, don’t be taken in by the views
of others. Whatever or whomever you encounter, either within or without, kill it or them at
once. On meeting a Buddha kill the Buddha, on meeting a patriarch kill the patriarch, on
meeting an Arhat kill the Arhat, on meeting your parents kill your parents, on meeting your
kinsman kill your kinsman... and you will attain emancipation. By not taking other people’s
advice—even mine—you will freely pass through!” Well, actually when I had written it I had
not added the words “even mine”, but it was kind of implied, was it not, by what else I had
said. Besides, I had written similar things at other times.

491
 EUDAIMONIA

DIOGENES. Yes, I quite agree: be your natural self at all times! And as our chum Rinzai said
just now, don’t give a rip about anyone else’s opinions. I am also glad, “Abraham”, that you
emphasize being quite naked as the best way of dressing, at least in good weather: that’s
also living in harmony with nature. We Greeks were well ahead of most other cultures in the
world in both these respects, but I don’t think even we went far enough: though I myself tried
to. In my time on earth I always felt that the best way to live was in complete harmony with
nature, and to that end not only did I embrace nudity, but all natural functions, as being good
in and of themselves, and certainly not to be embarrassed about performing, whether in pub-
lic or in private: including shitting, peeing and jerking-off.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Are you saying that we should never use anything artificial, like clothes,
cooking, cars and computers? Wouldn’t that make life rather... inconvenient?
DIOGENES. Oh no, I’m certainly not saying that; because it is human nature to use—and to
enjoy using—all such things; after all, we invented and made them! Living in perfect harmony
with nature means living with, and enjoying, everything that human nature has to offer.
“ABRAHAM”. Yes, we quite agree. But there’s more: if you are fully in alignment with the Source
of nature—with what we call “Source”, and what many others call “God”, “Allah”, “the Tao”,
“the Brahman”, and by many other names—you will have got it made! That’s what newborn
babies do, that’s what the beasts of your planet do, that even what plants and rocks do: they
just be themselves, and don’t disguise themselves in speech and/or action—or with garments
—so as to try and appear to others what they are not... the way most humans do.
DIOGENES. However, I’ve been taking a look at your YouTube videos, “Abraham”, in which
you speak through the mouth of Esther Hicks, and I haven’t ever seen her going around in
the nude, the way we Greeks did much of the time... so I’d really like to ask: why not?
“ABRAHAM”. That’s because even she isn’t completely aligned with Source! Though she is far
more aligned than many—indeed, most—other human beings these days.
DIOGENES. Then according to you she would be better off nude, at least occasionally?
“ABRAHAM”. Of course. We are often inspiring her to do so when we are in alignment with her
and speaking through her, but the momentum of her resistance to nudity is too great, since it
has built up over the many decades of her growing up and trying to fit in with the mores of a
prudish society. And most societies, especially anglophone ones, are prudish: the American
society being the most prudish among the so-called “first-world” nations.
DIOGENES. To the Americans’ credit, however, they do hold some silly fucking competitions in
some parts of the United States; and some of them are even billed as “family friendly”. (I am,
of course, using the words “silly” and “fucking” with their most positive connotations.)
MOSES. Oh yes, I remember them well; we held them during our 40-year wandering in the Sinai
desert, for there was little else to entertain us. I even participated in some of them.
THE ARCHBISHOP. What???
MOSES. Yes of course. How else do you think they found out that I could ejaculate as strongly
as ever even when I was 120 years old? It’s right there towards the end of the Torah, at
Deuteronomy 34:7—:‫חֽה‬ ֹ ‫ת֑ו ֹלֽא־כָהֲ ָת֥ה עֵ י ֹנ֖ו ְולֹא־ ָנ֥ס ֵל‬
ֹ ‫מ‬
ֹ ‫מ ֶׁש֗ה ּבֶן־מֵ ָא֧ה וְעֶ ְׂש ִר֛ים ָׁש ָנ֖ה ְ ּב‬
ֹ ּ ‫ו‬.

492
 KALIDASA

THE ARCHBISHOP. [looking up his copy of the Bible] That doesn’t say anything about ejacu-
lation! In my Bible it’s given as “And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he
died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.”
MOSES. Yes, your translators were too prudish to translate ‫חֽה‬ ֹ ‫ לֹא־ ָנ֥ס ֵל‬properly, and even the
original authors were too prudish to write it down as they saw it: literally the Hebrew text
they wrote means something like “his moisture was not abated”. But trust me, they were
talking about my ejaculation of semen; after all, I should know, for I was there!
EUFRAT MAI. What did I tell you earlier, Archbishop, about age being no barrier whatsoever to
great sex? It’s all about your attitude.
SOCRATES. Quite right, Eufrat! By the way, photos—and videos—of modern American fucking
competitions are to be found all over Google Images and Videos... as of course, lovely pho-
tos and videos of you and your friends, Eufrat. I have also found images of female pissing
contests, even international ones, on Google Images. There was one in which the Nether-
lands won; the high-definition photos are on the “Abby Winters” website, which, I have to say,
is one of my absolute favourite websites in all the World Wide Web.
DIOGENES. Yes, but that’s in Europe and Asia, not in North America. In fact, although the “Abby
Winters” website started out in Melbourne, Australia, its offices were raided by the Australian
police and fined for making “objectionable films”, so they moved to Amsterdam, a much more
sex-friendly city (it even allows sex in some of its public parks, though only after sundown).
Almost all anglophones are relatively prudish; after all, they started the Victorian era! By the
way, the anglophone Canadians are in some respects even more prudish than the Americ-
ans—and the people of Ottawa, the very capital of Canada, really are the giddy limit in that
respect—but Canadian francophones, especially those in Montreal, make up for them. And
Montreal, being less than two hours away by car, is after all only a suburb of Ottawa, anyway.
(Don’t tell the people of Montreal that, however; they’d be offended!) [Smiles.]
THE ARCHBISHOP. Speaking both as a private human being—that is, not as a member of
the Anglican Church—and as an anglophone, my conscience does compel me to be honest,
and admit that I have been internally fighting prudishness all my life; though it’s become much
easier as I have aged. I have never talked about this publicly, but I have to admit that in my
youth—long before I joined the Church—I used to fantasize about having my newly-wed sexy
and beautiful wife being... well, let me venture to say it out loud, the way you say it: I used to
fantasize her being fucked by handsome young strangers while I watched. After many months
of struggling with this fantasy of mine in the privacy of my own mind, I opened up to her
about it, and she became, to my then-delightful surprise, rather enthusiastic about the idea.
We even sent out feelers, anonymously and through third parties, to some young men of
our acquaintance, but nothing came of it, possibly because of the greater degree of social
prudishness in those days—and among those of my acquaintance—compared to our days...
and compared to, maybe, other social circles. I have to be honest about this; for after all,
what sort of Shepherd would I be to my flock if I weren’t.
KALIDASA. Exactly the point I want to make with my novel: be completely honest about sex!

493
 EUDAIMONIA

You are hardly alone in this respect, and most people do not talk about such fantasies—which
they invariably have—with anyone: not even with their spouses, and sometimes not even with
their shrinks, being too afraid of the consequences. But can any man claim to have brass co-
jones—or any woman, brass ovaries—if they let fear of such totally harmless, indeed delight-
ful, activities control them? In the alternative world of my novel no one is so cowardly, or cares
two hoots about such fears, and openly talks of sex and enjoys it, and even attends and en -
joys public displays of it on stage... along with their kids, for hiding the realities of life from
one’s kids is just as dishonest and cowardly as hiding them from one’s neighbours.
THE TATHĀGATA. When on earth I had given my core advice as the “Four Noble Truths” and
the “Eightfold Noble Path”, and essentially said that the way to put an end to suffering was,
first, perfect observation, that is, observing everything—including sex—as it really is; followed
by perfect understanding, that is, understanding sex, and indeed every other activity—for that
matter, absolutely everything—to be in the final analysis empty, and therefore utterly harm-
less; which automatically leads to perfect speech, perfect action and perfect life: that is, being
willing to speak, act and live without reservation, cowardice, embarrassment or “moral” judge-
ment. And to make it all perfectly perfect, these five should be followed by perfect practice,
perfect mindfulness and... er... perfect awareness. [Pauses] Actually, there is no single word
in the English language capable of adequately translating samādhī, the term I have tried to
translate as “awareness”... though others have translated it as “concentration”, “meditation”,
and even “meditative absorption or union”. But I have little faith in the way most others—who
often, though erroneously, call themselves my “followers”—have interpreted my advice; some
have even falsely claimed that I myself gave these interpretations (for it’s not just your words,
Jesus, that others have altered to make them sound quite the opposite of what was actually
said and meant). That’s why I strongly support the Zen saying “Burn the sūtras!”
ARISTOTLE. But if everything is, as you say, utterly empty, and thus harmless, how then can
anything be good either? Just asking, mind you; just asking.
THE TATHĀGATA. No thing is good, only emotions are good; for “there is no thing either good
or bad, but thinking makes it so”. After all, goodness—as well as the lack of it—is only an
emotion, an experienced emotion; and emotions are always within control; for so-called “bad”
emotions can always be replaced by thoughts that evoke good emotions!
“ABRAHAM”. As we said to someone who asked us for advice, “Laugh your worries away”!
C.G. JUNG, PIONEER OF PSYCHOANALYSIS. Remember, whatever you resist, persists.
Not only does it persist, but the more you resist it, the more it will grow. So the best thing
you can do is embrace everything, and resist nothing!
“ABRAHAM”. Or, as we always say, “Take the path of least resistance!”
LǏ ĚR, A.K.A. LǍO-TZƎ. In the final analysis, all you need to do is absolutely nothing at all. As
I always say, 爲無爲, wéi wú-wéi, “Practise non-action”. Do absolutely nothing: don’t even do
anything against the urge to do something! Don’t even resist action—in fact don’t even resist
resistance, for it will grow if you do. Remember that the Tao does nothing, and yet nothing
remains undone; so the man of Tao does nothing, and thereby accomplishes everything.

494
 KALIDASA

THE TATHĀGATA. And you can realize the truth of all these statements simply by observing.
Observing perfectly, mind you; and understanding what you observe. I’d like to thank you,
Aristotle, for your question, for you have clarified my mind about how to translate samādhī:
I would now translate it as “awareness of goodness”—what you have termed Eudaimonia,
“being in good spirits”—for that’s what all reality is!
VYĀSA. As the fortieth and final chapter of the fourth Veda, the Yajurveda—as well as this novel
—begins, “That is perfect, this is perfect; from the perfect ensues the perfect. If you take
away the perfect from the perfect, what remains is still perfect.”
KALIDASA. Or, as the Lego Movie says, “Everything is Awesome!!!”
JESUS. Trust me, not only are children wiser than the wisest of adults, but many children’s
movies are better than many of the so-called “sacred” scriptures... of any religion.
ADI ŚANKARA, REGARDED BY MILLIONS IN INDIA AS AN INCARNATION OF ŚIVA. This
however is not to say that everything in the scriptures—of any religion—should be disregard-
ed... as atheists sometimes do, thereby throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Indeed,
I shall pronounce in half a stanza what tens of millions of scriptures have declared: the Di-
vine is real, the world is imaginary, and Life is no different from the Divine. This is the es-
sence of Vedānta, the ultimate and final end of all wisdom! Or, as it has been expressed in
Sanskrütam, of which what I said in English is both a literal and an accurate translation:

)लोकाध,न -व.यािम य23त5 67थको9टिभः ।

ślōkārdhena pravakśyāmi yad-uktam grantha-kōṭibhih

=> स@य5 जगि7मBया जीवो =>Cव नापरः ॥

brahma satyam jagan-mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparah

495