Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [62]
Her teeth chattered and her body shook as she waited for the Other-worlders. She could feel their proximity; they were no farther than a footstep away, but still in their own state of being. The boulder next to her might have been the Mirror Man, the stalactite above her the Lioness, but Troi could not make them reveal themselves.
She lay awake all night, waiting.
The Dissenters had walked for several hours along a rushing underground river. They were tired and thirsty.
Odysseus halted them, and went off to look for something in the rocks nearby.
The Nummo Twins climbed down to the river itself, and in a moment were passing cups of cold, clear river water back to the other Dissenters. The draughts were accepted gratefully. There was an atmosphere of ceremony and finality to the act.
Troi was the only one who carried no books. Even the elderly Gunabibi had a sizable bundle, which now rested on the rocks next to her, along with a light but long tube of wood, apparently the hollowed branch of a tree. Though Troi didn’t know what it was for, she thought the smooth, strong, ageless dark wood matched Gunabibi perfectly.
Gunabibi saw what Troi was looking at. “That is my dijiridu. A musical instrument. I’d play it for you now, but Odysseus has already told us we’re getting close to the surface and we have to be quiet.”
Gunabibi worked a couple of books from her bundle.
“Look at this,” she said to Troi. “Look at how they’re soaked from the flood at Alastor. We won’t have a chance to dry them.”
“You aren’t taking them …”
“Into CephCom? No. We’re going to hide them here. That’s what Odysseus is looking for; a hiding place. Even if the CS read our minds they’d have trouble finding some nondescript pile of rocks down here.”
She opened one of the books to see if the pages could be unstuck. It was a richly illustrated volume on Egyptian mythology and art. Troi glanced at one of the pictures and felt as though her heart had stopped.
For several seconds her shock at what she saw prevented her from speaking.
The picture was of one of the Other-worlders. The Lioness.
Gunabibi, unaware of Troi’s stare, started to turn the page.
“Wait!” said Troi. “Who is that a picture of?”
“Sekhmet, the mythological Egyptian lion-goddess. She is a symbol of the heat of the desert sun, life-taking and life-giving.”
Troi asked Gunabibi to tell her more. What she heard left no doubt that the mythological Sekhmet, and the Other-worlder Troi had called the Lioness, were one and the same.
Troi felt as though she were on the verge of discovering something she’d known, unconsciously, all along. She suddenly wanted to know if all the Other-worlders could be found in the waterlogged books.
She asked Gunabibi about the Mirror Man and the Matriarch-voice.
Gunabibi brought out a book and found Troi a picture of Tezcatlipoca the Dark Mirror, who was from Aztec myth and personified the savage, shadowy, militaristic side of humans—a sort of heart-of-darkness warrior who appeared to the night-bound wayfarer. Tezcatlipoca and the Mirror Man were one and the same.
The Matriarch and her mate, Gunabibi suggested, were the symbolic Mother Earth and Father Cosmos—Gaia and Ouranos of the Greeks, Maka-akan and Nagi Tanka of the Lakota, Awitelin Tsita and Apoyan Ta’chu of the Zuni.
There were small differences between all these myth characters and the beings Troi had encountered as the Other-worlders; but fundamentally, in their meanings and actions, they were the same.
Troi remembered the vision of the Other-worlders she’d had in Alastor, the vision of the great crowd of aliens. Now she realized that they, with their outlandish appearances, their many species and forms, might have all been characters from human imagination.
She started looking through other books that Gunabibi had laid out on the rocks. Once, every few pages, she would see an image that corresponded with an “Other-worlder” she’d encountered. As soon as she finished with one book, she went on to the next. She felt driven to understand