Red

We are lodging in a small village on the coastal road south of Rillyon, a metropolitan area with a mixed population of half a million native bilachai, naturalised humans and thinderin. Rillyon is the leader of the ‘Rain Cities League’, the trading association that controls the majority of the commerce of the Silusia system, but our village is only a cluster of simple cottages, roofs thatched with sea rushes and limestone walls decorated with acid etched shells. One side of the main square is occupied by a long barn that serves as a communal refractory and meeting hall. A rustic two-storey circular bell tower stands on a low earthen mound opposite. Wind chimes hanging from the eves of the conical roof sometimes haunt the air with their faint metallic voices and there is a carillon of three small silver bells, rung in simple coded sequences to mark times and occasions.

My fellow pilgrims are nervous, at least as much because they don’t know and trust each other, as because of their apprehension of the coming Temple ordeals. We are all human, four men and four women, and all from off world. I wonder briefly if any of them are from Earth, but I am not paranoid enough to imagine that my pursuers have caught up with me yet. I make a conscious effort not to be concerned with such thoughts now. The fear of the meditations is enough for today. All other fears are superfluous.

Thinderin Light Guards line the steep route to the Temple which climbs away from the village and the sea. Perhaps the awe of the others has made me cynical. I am intensely conscious of the leaking sap which disfigures their vegetative bodies and find myself impatient with the battered decks of their life packs, traded in wild gambles which no sane human would dare to countenance. My old teachers would be ashamed of me. I try to rise above such unworthy thoughts, knowing that they can only hinder my meditations.

The Temple is carved into the hillside where it breaks above the forest crown like a great black whale, breasting the ocean. We need to climb the white gravel track through dark red trunks and mossy shadows until we surface into sunshine above the level of the tallest jungle trees. Even then, the Temple stretches high above us. Porticoes and balconies overhung with vines loom like beetling eyebrows above a score of recessed windows that are the deeply shadowed eyes. Twisted black barley sugar columns are criss-crossed by crystal trellises draped in nodding yellow bellflowers. And this is just the façade. I know that the hill is hollowed out. The ornate entrance in front of us is only the outer rampart of a much bigger, more complex, and ancient internal structure. At the very top of the hill is a free-standing latticework dome, which looks tiny at this distance but which I know to be a sizeable structure in its own right. It is the Melding Minster, home of the Temple’s highest altar and the ultimate goal of my quest. I wonder if I will ever get there.

Our thinderin guide awaits us by the gloomy bronze portal. She has been blessed by the priests and can lead us past the first hall to the chamber they have designated as ‘a luminous commencement’ for this human pilgrim band. As we ascend through the rocky corridors and shallow winding ramps of the hallowed interior, I feel simultaneously eager but diffident, a weird oxymoron of a mental state. A bland and featureless white glow illuminates our path, spread by metallic circuit worms, which crawl slowly over the polished walls. I judge the artificial insects to be viwodian work, no doubt sold to the pious thinderin priests by one of their ever-astute market teams. The level of illumination the worms provide is very low - unsuited for human eyes really - and it makes our passage a little difficult. One of my companions stumbles on an age worn step and curses. I almost wish we were in darkness. This dim milk is nothing. It is not the light we have come to see and so it might as well be darkness. Even as I entertain the thought, I chide myself for such inattention, knowing that I have failed to fully acknowledge the lesson of the first meditation. Perhaps I am not worthy of the coming experience. Perhaps. But I cannot afford to fail. We break into a tall fan vault of frosted crystal; an amphitheatre centred on a Chromatic Altar where our studies may begin.

“The Chromatic Altar plays upon a theme of light,” our guide enunciates as we take seats round the edge of the chamber. “Sequences and frequencies, precisely calculated to strike resonant chords of memory. Each band of colour has its own associations, both as a form of cultural iconography and as a stimulant to personal memory. In the Temple you can marry the two and make surprising connections.”

My fellow pilgrims are polite but restless – eager to begin now. We have all heard this before. Does she think that we knew nothing before we came to Silusia-Alpha? I am reminded briefly of the grotesque costumed guides in the Disney Cities of Europe, parroting their historic inaccuracies to the theme park millions where once free citizens carved out living destinies. I feel similarly patronised, but I strive to ignore the feeling and concentrate instead on the apparatus of the altar. Let me describe it to you.

The altar is a squat cylinder, perhaps a meter high but closer to ten metres in diameter. Even in this near darkness I can see that it has the rough yellow and black texture of polluted sandstone. On the circular top, two interlocked decorative spirals wind towards the centre. The guide is explaining that they represent the twin electric and magnetic aspects of the radiation we call light.

A forest of thin transparent tubes rises from the altar, some no thicker than my thumb and others as wide as my torso. They being to glow and suddenly the light of the circuit worms vanishes.

The second meditation is red; red roses, red as sunset, red as… blood. Arterial blood. Fresh blood. There was so much blood!

I remember it all and I try to stop myself from screaming. Fortunately, someone else screams first.