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“Where are you going now, Dory?” asked young Becky, who was watching over Dory’s shoulder as she booked flights on the computer. “You only just got back from Madagascar. I want to come with you this time.”
“Ok” replied Dory absentmindedly, who wasn’t really listening.
Dory was just about to set off for Rita’s house for the appointment with the hairdresser when she read the news. Rita was getting married soon and wanted to experiment with different hairstyles and make-up, and Dory had planned to join her for a bit of a make-over , out of curiosity, but the news of cyclone Ycart and its trail of devastaion caught her attention.
Intuitively she knew that the island that she had tried to book a flight to while she was on a Heathrow stop-over had been affected by the cyclone, and right then and there Dory made up her mind to go to the island on the pretext of helping the relief aid workers. In actuality she was merely curious ~ well, more than ‘merely’ curious, she was feeling the pull of an interesting probability choice.
Images floated across the dark screen of Elizabeth’s closed eyes as she lay on the bed. She was aware of the trees rustling in the breeze outside her window, and the soft breathing of the miniature giraffes curled up by her feet. The afternoon heat was intense, heavy and soporific.
An island, strewn with debris; fallen trees and unidentifiable mangled wreckage of a stainless steel tubuler kind; splotches of blue everywhere dried and cracked into oddly shaped human-like-alien forms, and the telltale battered paint can with the word Azure showing, unscathed.
Darkness, damp smells, grey stones and spiders webs, slippery underfoot, bone coldness, and then a glimpse of lime green maidenhair ferns, a shaft of light and the sound of gurgling water….
Water sounds becoming surging tides, roaring pushing sucking head spinning weighty and then silence and the tinkling of windchimes….
A dog barks in the distance, waking the miniature giraffes. Big brown eyes atop slender necks gaze at Elizabeth as her eyes flutter open and then close again.
Last orders gentlemen PLEASE! and a jostle of bodies in the smoke and laughter and babble of voices. A crush of humans across a long wooden barrier for large glass vessels full of foam topped amber liquids. A hush. Silence falls as a glass box perched high in a corner begins to speak. Elizabeth can see the head and shoulders and the serious face, she can see the lips moving, but the silence is total and she can’t hear the words being spoken. The Big Hush, she heard herself think.
Hurdy Gurdy music and a merry go round…..grinning white horses up and down and round and round …..
Elizabeth drifted off to sleep.
Elizabeth frowned as she hung up the telephoone. Finnley’s news was rather disturbing.
“Al has gone crazy!” he’d said. “He is sending everyone to the island and killing spiders and magpies and lord knows what else; that couple with the bad skin, they’ve been stuck inside their hotel room for weeks….”
“Whoo, whoo there, slow down a minute, WHICH couple with bad skin?” Elizabeth asked.
“Your couple with bad skin! They were your characters!” Really, Elizabeth could be exasperating at times, Finnley thought, and not for the first time.
“Oh, yes, them. HHHMMM.” Elizabeth had been silent for so long on the telephoone that Finnley hung up in frustration. He would communicate with Elizabeth telepathically instead.
Yurick, did you see what just arrived in the mail? Imagine that, and on the 8th of the 8th 2088, as well! Look, she said, showing Yurick the Random Daily Retro Shift Elias Session quote.
~“In this, the eight is not actually an eight. It is a
connecting symbol. Were you to turn the eight upon its
side, it would become the connecting symbol.”“It’s the symbol of infinity.”
“Correct, the infinite connection of the complements.”~
“HAHAHA! it is your first step now. Let me just remind you that you need not play MY game, the game is yours, ever.” said Georges. “The direction you follow is your choice, and where I come from is not relevant to this conversation.”
Becky read the random daily quote and thought: What incredibly perfect timing!
Elizabeth was beginning to realize that there WAS no ‘end of the road’, no grand finale, no finish line. Whenever her characters appeared to be nearing the proposed grand point of the story, she found herself following another thread in the impossibly huge tapestry. Maybe she didn’t want it to end, or perhaps it was that there was no ‘point’, no end point to aim for, that it was all just a process, a continual weaving of marvelously coloured threads. Some threads were gaily coloured silks, some were rough and coarse, some were woolly and comforting, and others were plain and functional. There were threads of the most unusual and unexpected fibres, other worldly threads tying the myriad dimensions and chapters together somehow. It really was the most fabulously intricate and absorbing construction.
“Oh just leave the reader to do the proof reading, Yurick! If ‘there are no accidents’ then a few misspellings or a bit of mangled grammar might contain a clue for someone somewhere, somewhen….
it might be best to leave them in. You never know, you know… and anyway, I have this funny feeling that the pages aren’t quite as officially fixed as we might be inclined to think. Not quite cast in stone, as it were….Don’t ask me what I mean, Yurick,” Dory said with a laugh, “Because I can’t explain it.”Yurick knew better than to ask Dory to explain anything, and remained silent, with one eyebrow raised quizzically as Dory rambled on.
“It’s like the branches of a tree,” Dory continued, with a faraway look in her eyes. “The branches on a tree look like such a tangle, but they are all connected to the trunk ~ the roots might look like a hopeless tangle too, if we could see them, but they do know what they’re doing ~ feeding the trunk or the core which sprouts out all over the place. There’s a bird in the tree, hopping from branch to branch. Does he care if he hops from one branch to another? No! Imagine if the bird was so rigid that he had to hop all along one branch from start to finish before changing to another branch.”
“Hahahah,” Yurick laughed, “A Sumafi bird?”
“You might say the little bird is the present moment, free to hop onto any branch at any time, or even fly to another tree…” continued Dory, who hadn’t heard Yurick.
“Another tree?” asked Yurick with a mock pained expression. “I have enough trees on my plate already.”
“And the thing is with trees, there isn’t really a place to start hopping or a place to stop hopping, from the birds perspective.”
Dory turned to Yurick with a grin. “It’s a book that you can read from any starting point. No beginning, and no end… maybe we can have all the pages loose with no numbers on, sort of a do-it-yourself assembly…”
Yurick laughed, a trifle nervously, and asked Dory if she would like a cup a coffee.
Bea sighed loudly, and dragged a tissue across her sweaty face. Leonora obviously hadn’t heard her, so Bea sighed loudly again.
What’s up with you now? asked Leo, who wasn’t really paying attention to Bea’s incessant whining.
Oh I dunno, I just don’t know what I want to do, Bea grumbled. My head’s in a fog. I’ve got hundreds of ideas, but I don’t want to do any of them badly enough to even think about starting anything. So then I try to sort a few thing out, you know, so I can bloody find things again, and I just end up with a big pile of bloody miscellaneous. It’s the bane of my life, all the miscellaneous stuff that defies categorizing. I should have been called Miss A. Laneous. I start to sort things out and then I get sidetracked; I never finish any sorting out, I just end up with more and more miscellaneous….her voice trailed off miserably.
Leo swiveled round in the computer chair, took off her glasses and glared at Bea. Bea, you know you always find what you need by trusting that you’ll find what you need when you need to find it. You’ve told me that time and time again. You’ve droned on and on about that, how you love finding ‘just the thing’ and ‘by accident’ and now you’re sitting there moaning and groaning because for some inexplicable reason ~ Leonora rolled her eyes ~ you think that having things neatly ordered would be a better way.
Well, it would be nice to be able to find what I’m looking for, Leo, Bea retorted.
Well if you found what you were looking for right away, you silly cow, you wouldn’t find all those other magical bloody surprises by friggen accident, now would you?
There’s no need to be rude, Bea said sniffily.
Now it was Leo’s turn to sigh. Why don’t you bugger off outside and find something to appreciate, you grumpy old bat. “Oh! look at this, Bea!” Leo exclaimed, “Look what I just found by accident!”
Leo swiveled the computer screen round so that her friend could see.
“Illi sat up and surveyed her surroundings. The sky was a deep azure blue, the sun was making twinkling stars on the waters of the lagoon, a warm gentle breeze rustled the coconut palm leaves, and birds sang and twittered in the foliage. It was indeed idyllic, and Illi decided to simply enjoy it, while her new ideas formed into a reality.
Illi was enjoying a new found freedom in her contentment, in not pushing her energy in frustration, and meandered happily around the island taking mental snapshots of a thousand delightful and marvelous wonders, appreciating even the smallest most insignificant things. Time lost all sense of meaning: there were deep velvet indigo skies full of sequins, and there were abstract multicoloured sunrises and sunsets; there were cottonwool clouds in cartoon shapes suspended on a canvas of blue. It mattered not the day or night; there was no longer a sense of time passing, just a glorious collage of appreciation and beauty.”
Bea read the excerpt reluctantly, and harumphed.
Oh for Gut’s sake, Bea! Leo was getting exasperated. Try appreciating miscellaneous floundering fog then.
Becky was undecided. Add to the last entry? Or start another? Grinning wickedly, she started another.
Her second impulse selection was a slightly late coincidence, but a coincidence notwithstanding. It was about Sand Dragons . A Few days previously Becky had been to an auction. She bid for and won a first edition copy of Wisp magazine; it had cost her an arm and a leg, but she was delighted with her purchase. It would increase in value, and was a delight to read some of the first published articles of the many authors, poets, artists and photographers who would later become famous. The article about sand sculptures had reminded her of the T.R.A.P. day out.
Well, how about that! exclaimed Becky, reading the rest of the comment. Wish House is one of my most favourites, and I chose it by accident!
She read:
“Illi used to play a game with Cranky (as she affectionately called nanny Chraddock) in the long months while her parents were away, called Wish House. Every room in the sprawling Elizabethan house was a different time and place, and the moment they entered the room they imagined themselves to be different people, in other times. Petunia Duster the maid loved to join in too; consequently not alot of housework got done, but with Gus and Flora always off travelling, nobody minded. Playing was, after all, so much more important than dust. In fact, a thick layer of dust made the rooms all the more mysterious and magical.”
Becky ran her finger along the dust on her desk and smiled.
OH! Becky jumped. I almost forgot to make a note of the number, now what was it? she mused, scratching her head. I think it was 171
Becky wondered whether or not to start another entry. Intuitively, she chose not to. Her third random choice was another synchronicity with the first edition of Wisp: it was about pyramids in Spain. The first edition of Wisp magazine was particularly valuable as it was the first mention in print of the discovery of the Iberian pyramid culture.
Number 835 she noted
Well, what a coincidence! exclaimed Becky. Becky was choosing her I Ching story comments, not altogether sure (not in the least sure, really) how it worked, but enjoying the opportunity to do a few random impulse searches. She had been reading the blog archives of Stilly from the early part of the century, all about cactus, beetles, and the investigation into the cochineal trade, when she suddenly remembered the Reality Play deadline. Anticipating buckling down to some serious writing, Becky was delighted to find the I Ching game, and made her first random choice.
Well, what a coincidence! Becky repeated. It’s all about beetles!
Becky made a note of the number: 638.
Becky noticed with a satisfied smile that the word ‘Becky’ was by far the biggest word in the cloud. Hhhhmmmm, interesting, she murmured as she perused her random (well semi-random ~ she had deliberately chosen a cloud-batch with her name in it) selection of words.
sudden feeling!!
breathe!! 
remembered sort (appear soft?) 
~ akayli?? ~ 
seem…. cave…. yeah, huge! 
known luce; knew agreed. 
becky full power hey! 
The rugrats have names you know Tina, she said, more to herself than to the benefit of anyone else.
And hell if I remember what they are now…Oh thank Flove for that! Bless him, he may be a sandwich short of a picnic lately but at least he keeps track of the names, exclaimed Becky gratefully, as she checked the latest additions to the Reality Play. Al had conveniently added a link to the triplets names.
Illana, Lean, and Oliver…Illana, Lean and Oliver….Becky repeated their names like a mantra, trying to etch them into her memory.
Question is though, which is which? They all look the bloody same!
PPPSSST!
Arona looked around, but couldn’t see anything. That sounded just like someone saying PPSSST, she said to herself.
PPPSSTT! Over here!
A large human form hidden behind voluminous dusty folds of indigo fabric was beckoning to her from behind a rock.
Arona! Over here!
Arona inched towards the apparition. Sanso? she whispered. Sanso, is that really you?
Ahahaha yes, it’s me, and this is my new friend Zhana, he said, courteously introducing the two girls.
I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation, Arona. I know where the cave entrances are. You’re most welcome to come with us, if you’d like to. There are no closed entrances in MY cave. Er, Our cave, Sanso corrected himself. Well, MY cave. He laughed. You know what I mean, he said, We all know we each create our own caves, no need to keep droning on and on about it, eh, but what I mean to say is, if you’d like to share a perception of my cave with me, where there are no closed entrances (or indeed exits, depending on your direction and point of perception), you are most welcome to join us.
Looking kindly down at Zhana, he continued: I’ll bet my young freind here would appreciate some young female company.
We’re going to Nishanti’s place, Arona, said Zhana shyly. Would you like to come with us?
I’m worried about Al, Tina, said Becky. He’s really acting strange lately, have you noticed?
Noticed! Of course I’ve bloody noticed! exclaimed Tina.
Aw, Tina! Becky gave Tina a warm hug.
I don’t think he’s getting enough sleep, Becky, Tina continued. Like for example, you know what you were writing in the Reality Play about Becky and the clones? Well, he thinks it’s real! He thinks the babies are clones. He even thinks YOU’RE a clone, Becky!
Oh surely not, Tina! Ahahahah! Becky couldn’t help laughing.
It’s no laughing matter, Backy, said Tina reproachfully, but Becky’s laughter was infectious and Tina started to smile. Oh stop making me laugh! I’m worried!
A gurgling sound erupted from one of the baby Moses baskets. Those babies have such a sense of humour for such tiny things! said Tina, smiling down at the sunny smiling little faces.
Haha yes, when they’re not screaming with rage, laughed Becky.
Tina frowned. I wonder what Al sees when he looks at them?
What do you mean, Tina?
Well, didn’t you read Al’s last entry in the Play? Don’t ask me for a link, Becks, look it up yourself!
Becky rolled her eyes with mock exasperation. You mean about them being emotionless?
He’s reconfiguring their energy to fit his delusions, Becky. He’s becoming so immersed in the Play that he’s believing it’s real . It’s all a bit worrying, because he’ll be going on about dragons and mermaids in the apartment next, or talking chairs or something. I don’t know how to handle it.
Hey, I have an idea! Becky said. How about that doctor Muir?
The latest Wrick connection…
An accidental connection between Ancient Siberia, and India(Sri lanka/Vedic etc)
“Somaras is said to cause hallucinations and therefore the consumption of soma was permitted only during sacrifices. Somaras gave a sense of growing to gigantic size and possessing superhuman strength or experiencing visions of the gods coming down to join the worshippers on the sacrificial site. Even today a few brahmanic families who try to keep up the very ancient Vedic rituals make a rather bitter drink from a kind of wild rhubarb which they call soma The modern Somaras is not injurious, because the powerful hallucinogenic property of the original soma plant, was replaced by the ineffectual substitute that is used today. It is said that Somaras is similar to the agarics mushroom widespread in central Asia and the Himalayan forests.” jayaraman