Grail - Elizabeth Bear [129]
Her fingers pierced the luminescence. She had expected to feel something, some pressure, some resistance, but it was like reaching into a ray of sun. The heat was palpable, but not material.
Light broke in shafts through her fingers, blinding her with its moving dazzle. Her colony should have reacted to protect her eyes, but she realized at that moment that she felt nothing from that connection at all. Her irises contracted on their own, with merely biological alacrity.
Her merely human strength might have failed her had the revelation not surprised her so that she tripped against the table, her outstretched hand plunging into the swarm of words siphoned off the pages of the Book and into Ariane.
… claws loss shame stones
distance miasma deceit mourning …
They caught her, too, in a spider-snare, a web of words, and noosed her wrist, and drew her in and in and in.
She half lay, half stretched across the table, and with the hand that was not sinking into the Book’s storm of words, she lunged for the hilt of the unblade that rested by Ariane’s hip.
Danilaw knew his body must be convulsing, his back arching, the pale froth bubbling between his lips. But it was an intellectual knowledge, divorced from any sense of fear or urgency, because he felt no fear, no shame, no concern for the friends he knew knelt around him, bruising their knees, trying to protect his body from its own wildly firing electrical system.
He was somewhere else, somewhere warm and buoyant, and the ocean moved around him, swishing between his muscular limbs. The dodecapus bore him along, a serene passenger in a serene passage, and Danilaw felt himself sliding into release, into the embrace of a warm and just and loving universe. Sliding into acceptance, into universal light, into universal love.
He was numinous; the dodecapus was numinous; the whole damn sea and everything in it was numinous, too.
He felt the creature’s awareness, its concentration, the strength of its mental processes. He felt its intelligence and the curiosity with which it surveyed its environment. He felt the bind of the scars on its lower side, and remembered in bright concrete images and sensation how it had been injured, and what it had learned from that injury: Do not play with your food.
He felt his own words, pushing to get out, to get into his new friend, and he felt the blankness with which this smooth, intricate intelligence greeted them. Sounds, concepts, ideograms. They were nothing to it. There was the being and the sharing, and the things he knew, viscerally, because the dodecapus knew them.
The scarred old thing sculled along the muddy bottom of Crater Lake, puffs of mud rising behind it with each squash-blossom contraction of its webbed tentacles. Now, through its eyes, Danilaw saw a bubble of light, the shadows moving against it. The observation port. The sickroom.
The dodecapus plastered itself against the glass and, with one giant jelly eye, it looked within.
Danilaw saw the man on the floor, the figures surrounding and supporting him, and another pair withdrawn to one side with their heads bent together. He saw it all through a haze of atmospheric distortion and sense of wonder, the brightness of awe that filled him up like a pressure bubble until joy buzzed from every pore.
An immanence filled him—a thing that went beyond words and math and music and into some other space—a gestural, nonverbal, sharp-edged reality of light and hope and companionship. You could never be alone again. There was something divine inside you, and all you had to do was give it a home.
It’s just the seizure talking. In there, electrical signals were looping and cascading, ricocheting wildly, triggering the same parts of his brain that gave rise to religious visions and ecstasies. It didn’t matter what he understood intellectually. He felt the presence, the benevolence, the