Menagerie - Martin Day [3]
There is no beginning, no end, just a terrible, cyclical now.
'Yet, for the purposes of writing, it is helpful to analyse the slight changes, the slight shifts in the now that gives us our life — our sense of life. For, without progress, we are mere animals — but progress, it must be remembered, is a mere fading change in the now, not something we make of our own volition.
The heretic might say: "Does not the light of the sun and the darkness of its absence enable us to assign names to our lives and to the development of our people?"
'But they do not understand, my children. Each one of us carries with him a sense of awesome wonder, a sense of the long existence of our race — a long existence because of not in spite of our absence of progress. How can this be? How can this be when each generation passes on less than nothing to the next?
'Progress is an illusion. We have always been, will always remain here — and our "history" (which might best be defined as our irrational sense of the slight movement within the cyclical now) is a phantom. A phantom no less real for being exposed.
'What then shall we say to the heretic? That changelessness is a virtue, an attitude, a moral imperative to be grasped? Of course, but such words cannot convince the evil-thinker. Our words fall down on their heads like rain from the skies but are barely a hindrance. Their souls must change to find the true now, the ongoing is-ness of life that death merely ripples. We must pray that the sinners change, and, if they do not change, we have no option but to encourage them to enter into a new stage of being.
'This fills them with fear. It is so difficult, my children, to tell them that to truly attain that most beautiful sense of the undeviating constant involves the casting-down of our fear, of our conception of beginning and end, of dawn and dusk.
'Yet it seems self-evident to me that the nature of our life, as I hinted previously, does indeed lead to the illusion of change, of progression. We lack history, and yet we know of the concept of "history": we lack true change, and yet we acknowledge that it could exist.
'But what could exist is mere fancy in the face of our undying nature. The heretics have their ideas, and try to read them into the world. Much better to do as generations have done, as generations will do, as generations are now still doing, and look first to the constant, the immutable. To do otherwise is to talk to a mirror or gesture to a blind man
— the ultimate in folly.
'We are alone. We are all. We have no beginning and no end. We will pass on nothing, and will inherit nothing.
'These words write themselves: I commit them not to any sense of time (thankfulness to the "past" or a legacy to the
'future") but to now. These words have always been written, and they were never even dreamt of — never, even in our most diffuse dreams of change.'
Extract from the introduction to Systematic Approaches to the Thoughts of the Kuabris, written by Grand Knight Magisuan. Subsequently banned and destroyed by order of Grand Knight Uscolda.
One
Over the years the city had developed in a rain-soaked valley, banked with fog. Even on those days when the clouds receded the damp buildings and blunt green spires looked like an ancient conurbation discovered beneath the lapping waves of a great ocean.
The smaller buildings shrank back from the strident winds and thunderous rain clouds. The narrow passages between the overhanging houses were flickering with activity, as men and women pulled on furs and woollen garments and went about their business. They no longer noticed the constant background patter of the drizzle, but, heads bowed, shoved their feet forwards through the grime and sodden refuse that sat in putrid layers over the cobbled streets. Their downcast eyes avoided the watching black castle, the largest of the handful of buildings tall enough to split the lowlying fog. Three large towers were set into the broken rocks of one