Bad dreams...

I dreamed the books in the neighborhood book room were gone, the pillars smashed and black blast marks all around them. The stained glass windows were gone too, the shards scattered all around the room. All that was left were the Bahro stones, and even they were cracked and damaged.

I went and checked, of course. And of course, everything was just as we'd left it. (I don't think any of my 'hood-mates have even been down to the Cavern recently. The holidays have a way of eating one's life.)

My subconscious is clearly having a field day with Yeesha's "destruction is coming" message. I just hope it's wrong.

Light and Snow

I linked back to Chert briefly last week; while I don't have the resources right now for any sort of proper exploratory expedition, I figure it's important to keep an eye on the place. After all, if it starts to go unstable, I want to know about it.

It wasn't unstable. It was under several feet of snow.

I didn't stay very long. I wasn't equipped for snow that deep; next time, I'll have to take snowshoes with me if I want to get anywhere. I'm now curious as to why the largely flat roof on the house that we found the last time I was there. Were there heating elements in it? We didn't explore that closely - it's possible that there was some sort of coating on the exterior of the roof that was meant to keep snow off. Or that this was an aberration in the normal weather. But still, several feet of snow was pretty impressive.

The next time I linked down to the Cavern was for the Cavern Choir Holiday Concerts. They went pretty well all things considered, aside from the snow in Delin giving us all numb fingers and toes. GameBoomers let us warm up by their fountain with some hot drinks afterward, and we all talked about the bits we'd gotten wrong and the bits we'd gotten right. A good time was generally had by all.

The last time I went down, I went to the City. From the 'hood scope and balcony, it doesn't look like our pellet-dropping activities have had any effect, but in the City proper, it feels brighter to me. Perhaps that's just because I'm not down there very often - really, I ought to start taking serial photos just to be sure - or perhaps its my new perscription, but I live in hope.

Perhaps the cavern will light on the Winter Solstice. I know that that far underground, the vagaries of heavenly bodies and the axial tilt of the planet really have no bearing on things...but it would be pretty cool, just the same.

I believe.

I know that others saw Yeesha, saw her in K'veer and heard her promise to lead the Bahro away as long as she could, to give us time to build ourselves some sort of defense - we hope - and community - we hope.

Reading about it secondhand isn't the same thing as hearing her voice again for the first time in three years. To walk back to the Cleft and find another message there in the empty place where some hand dropped me to the ground like a seed, to grow, to live. Where I first heard her voice, and where I met her - briefly - years ago when I first felt the call.

She wasn't there - it was just a recording, words left for me like a sign post on the way - but it was what I needed to hear. The gardener has not forgotten her seeds. And while I am much more than a seed to be planted, and I can make my own choices, informed or not as I wish, there is a consolation to knowing that there is a living link to history still out there, reaching her hands out of the past to the future that we are.

Yes, Yeesha, I believe. D'mala.

Pumpkins!

I've been to Relto and Er'Cana a lot for the past month - things have been quiet in the Cavern and decidedly unquiet on the surface, so aside from popping into Relto in the morning for my meditations and then a quick dash back and forth to Er'cana and the pellet drop point, I haven't had much time for D'ni.

(About the only thing that would have gotten me down there would have been if Jishin and Meiczyslaw had needed to evac to the 'Hood, at which point I would've been down there right from work to make sure they were OK. Thankfully, that didn't become necessary.)

Now, of course, the cycle has shifted - a number of my other commitments have calmed to the point that I can think about the Cavern again, and the politics down there are on the rise (again...) so this morning actually went into the 'Hood to check and make sure nothing was out of place.

I don't always like the idea of the DRC messing with my 'Hood, but I have to say, the pumpkins on the window ledges are really pretty. I love autumn, and now it's come to the neighborhoods.

I only wish that the DRC would leave me the ladders so I could try to get into the rooms beyond without needing my stupid climbing harness and pitons!

Shaman, Scientist, Shadow

There are days that I like to think that I understand Yeesha. And there are days that I know I can't understand her at all.

As a shortlived woman from the surface, who grew up in a community with friends that were all part of the same world that I lived in, there is no possible way that I can ever understand Yeesha. She lived with her mother and father for ten years, outside of but party to two communities - the D'ni on Releeshan and the Rivenese on Tay. She presumably had friends there, may even have linked there with her parents to visit.

But I don't know how much a part of that community she could really be, daughter of Atrus, daughter of Katran. Those two were each, in some way, the saviours of their people, and their daughter? No matter how much her parents may have tried to avoid it, there is a certain expectation that comes from that sort of thing.

Then, sometime when she was older - my best guess is sometime between 15 and 17, because that's about the usual sort of age to go Questing when you're a rash teenager - she left her parents an went into the Desert. She learned things there, and finally, she came to the Cleft and went down into the Earth.

There are a lot of legends about this sort of thing. Inanna in the Underworld. The Navajo myths of the worlds that came before that are startlingly familiar if one knows about the D'ni (indeed, the Navajo word for themselves is Dineh), and so forth. And down there, Yeesha was tested, made strange otherworldly friends with unusual powers, was granted great abilities...

And used them wrongly.

Now she has grown - older, wiser, I suspect. Lonelier almost certainly. The peril of being a Shaman is to stand outside the community, to be the gateway through which the young travel for their rite of initiation. The problem is that our world - the world which so many of our explorers come from - is not a world in which the path of the Shaman is understood.

Yeesha knows mysteries. The mysteries can be shown to those who are prepared for them - part of me wonders about the pillars, and swimming among the stars - but they can't be explained to anyone. Mysteries are things that have to be experienced and understood intuitively.

This is not a thing that anyone who follows her father's path - the path of the scientist, the path of logic and reasoning - can really grasp. And for all of those explorers who see only Yeesha's power and the ability to Link at will, or do any number of things...

It must be incredibly lonely to be a messiah, or even someone who is treated like one but isn't. There are a great many people for whom Yeesha - and to an even larger extent, Atrus - are the messiah.

I can't claim to be exempt from this. I'd love to see the mysteries Yeesha has seen. In my heart, I hope that I could learn from them. But knowing just how many people might see her and start clamouring - Dr. Watson is a perfect example of this - I don't think I will ever get the chance. I think she will see the crowds of the cavern and flee in terror.

Perhaps the Bahro have the right idea. All I can do is watch and wait and listen and learn, and try to see below the surface.

And drop pellets in the lake, hoping that a little more light might lessen the power of the greater lights. Light is powerful in the darkness...but if there are an equal number of shadows and lights, then who is most powerful?

Dreams and Echoes

I dream of the Bahro at night. I can't understand them there either...but I dream that I am walking in the ages, and they are there. I try to say things to them, but nothing comes out. Sometimes, Yeesha is there too, but she's always far away, looking for something that I can't see. I know I can't help her, for all that I want to in the dream, to earn some part of her wisdom.

Better to have much wisdom...

I never seem to remember to try to dance. I want to sing, but the words aren't there. And anyway, I only know how to sing one song in D'ni.

And now Phil Henderson and Dr. Watson are back, and Watson at least speaks of Releeshan and Yeesha and his journey. I envy him that. Part of me wants to do what he did - to throw away everything and go questing for the storyteller that is me. And then there is the part of me that thinks of hearth and home and knows just how hurt all the people I love would be if I went like that.

There were rather a lot of explorers who felt hurt when Dr. Watson left, to say nothing of the DRC, I imagine.

There doesn't seem to be a good answer to this one. And in the mean time, the miscommunication and the frustration all go around and around and around and the Bahro who were hurt strike at those who are convenient targets. When you are a part of a society, you seem to become responsible for that society's actions, even if you didn't have any part in chosing them. But if you are not part of a community, then you are alone, and limited only to your own resources, and there is no one to mourn you when you vanish off into the wilderness.

I don't think I want to vanish anytime soon. Or if I do, I don't want to do it forever.

History and Entropy

I've been kind of loathe to post here, partly because things are just such a mess in the Cavern of late, and partly because there's this sort of madness that seems to infect all new Explorers, that we can never get enough of the Ages we link to, never get far enough, high enough, deep enough...

I'm no exception some days, which is, I suppose, the reason I put my hand on that linking panel even when I could see that the book only had an old and smudged Maintainers mark, no mark from the DRC, and no mark from Yeesha. This was at the end of last month.

One of the rockfalls damaged the windows of the balcony overlooking the community room of our hood, and because I already had my climbing gear out and I wouldn't have to break anything -myself- (archaeology takes precidence over curiosity, at least for me) I went up there. There was the book. I think it must have been the original Garden Age for our 'hood. It had smudgy marks on the linking panel, no sign of anybody, bit of a mess in the room. I guess the DRC never went up there, since it was pretty well sealed.

I don't know the Age's real name, but I started calling it Chert after the rocks I found there - lots and lots of chert.

And fortunately, no supernova, because I didn't have any kind of Maintainers suit or anything. I realized seconds after I'd put my hand on the panel just how STUPID I had been, but... The age was stable. Or stable enough.

That was it for the stupidity, anyway. I went back and got Jack - him being the only one of my 'hood-mates I could find at the time, and we went back through together.

We found the aforementioned chert, with a fair bit of calcite and other limestone deposits as the local matrix for the mountains we were in. There were trees, wildlife of various kinds - it's a fairly Earthlike age, with a single sun and a single moon. But we also found old abandoned buildings. It looks like this was one of the ages the D'ni of our 'hood evacuated too just after the Fall...only, given the state of repair, either they moved well, well away from the link-in spot, or they didn't survive the plague they brought with them. I didn't find bodies, anyway, and if Jack did, he didn't tell me.

I spent a lot of time just walking around. Looking at things. The way they'd dammed the river for drinking water and electrical power. Puzzling out how the pump had worked - and getting it going so that I wouldn't have to haul water myself. Fixing a hole in the roof of the least time-worn building so that we'd have someplace to stay. There were food containers, but the local wildlife had long since got into them. Likewise, the buildings - but it meant they weren't living there anymore, since there was nothing worth stealing.

From the way the building was built, it looks like the winters are milder at the altitude we were at - we got lightheaded climbing hills, so either the planet's less dense or we were high up - or the snow just doesn't come down into the valley. But we could see glaciers aways to the north (sun rose in the East for purposes of definition) and there was enough leaf mold to make me think the trees shed their leaves every winter.

Anyway. We came back to more politics, and Engberg still missing. Er'cana had been re-released, and so I started fiddling with my ovens, trying to get a decent concoction to feed the algae with. But I pulled the book out of the 'hood and put it in my Relto, on the shelf where Yeesha left me the original Journey book, rather than on my nara-locked shelf, since I never know what's going to appear in there.

I've only been back once since Jack and I left. It was...very peaceful? But also very lonely. And it wasn't a 'finished' age the way the ones the DRC releases are. It was full of dirt and grime and a mess, and I was cleaning it up. Without time off to spend there, I don't think I could do anything more than get frustrated. And from the noises going on about the Bahro, it may not be safe for me to go there alone right now.

I'm hoping to get Jishin and Meiczyslaw out there at some point, though. Because I think if we got all of us there together at once, we could do some pretty hefty reconstruction work, and maybe get the place to a point that we could spend time there just as a retreat or something. Assuming the reactionary Bahro ever figure out that we are not the enemy they hate.