another, this one bearing a flaming brand. As Bennett looked about him, he realised that the Chamber of Rebirth was no longer a scene of carnage. As if nothing untoward had occurred, a circle of Ancients stood about its circumference.
The alien who had spoken to Bennett now lifted a long, skeletal arm and gestured to Mackendrick, who stepped slowly forward.
Rana moved from Bennett’s side, rushed to her father and held him. For long seconds they embraced, Rana sobbing like a child, before Mackendrick released her, coaxing her with gentle whispers to rejoin Bennett. She nodded and stumbled across the chamber. Bennett pulled her to him, holding her as they watched with a sense of awe and disbelief.
Mackendrick took his place between the two aliens.
“First,” the Ahloi said, “you will be touched… granted a glimpse of the way. You will make your decision, and if you wish salvation, then the ceremony will commence.”
Mackendrick raised his head. He seemed a small figure, reduced by age and illness. He stared back at Bennett, Ten Lee and his daughter, something proud and at the same time apprehensive in his eyes.
“I’m ready,” he said at last.
The alien reached out, spanned Mackendrick’s head with its long fingers, and Mackendrick staggered but remained upright. The alien lowered its long head and whispered to him. Mackendrick raised his face to the alien and spoke, then seated himself on the central stone.
The Ancient turned towards Bennett, Rana and Ten Lee. “Mackendrick has perceived the way, and wishes to join us.”
At once, the Ahloi stationed around the chamber moved forward, causing great disorienting shadows to fly and flap around them. They surrounded Mackendrick in an orderly yet frightening melee, a ritual Bennett found dreadful in its similarity to nothing in his experience. It was as if the aliens were devouring the human, taking something from him instead of giving. For long minutes they reached out with attenuated arms and caressed Mackendrick with long fluttering fingers, obscuring him from sight. Bennett was aware of a charge in the atmosphere of the chamber, as if, truly, the miraculous was being performed.
Then the Ahloi backed off, resumed their silent stations around the chamber, and the Mackendrick seated on the stone seemed like a man transformed. His face glowed, Bennett thought, though it might only have been an effect of the torchlight, and his posture was that of a man years younger, no longer bent with age and pain.
He stood and walked to Bennett and Rana. He embraced his daughter, touched Bennett’s arm in a wordless communication of his joy and transformation.
“Father?” Rana began.
“I must go now,” he said. “I… there are many things I need to consider. In time we will meet again, talk…”
He staggered, almost fell. Quickly two Ahloi moved to his side, caught him under the arms and carried him from the chamber.
Bennett turned back to the central stone. Ten Lee squeezed his hand, then let go and hurried towards the Ancient pair.
“Ten!” Bennett said. He wanted to say something, a farewell that might fully express his sense of loss, but she was already stationed before the central stone.
The alien without fire reached out, spread its fingers across her shaven skull, and Ten Lee rocked and gasped at its touch. She took her place upon the stone, and again the ceremony was repeated. The Ahloi moved to her, enveloped her, two circles of dark and light, obscuring her from sight, and when they backed away she too had been affected, and the look upon her face, her expression of hallowed rapture, convinced Bennett.
She tried to stand, but collapsed, and was carried by two Ahloi from the chamber.
The alien stepped forward. “Please, if anyone else…” It gestured to the stone.
Bennett took a step forward. He thought only of Carstairs’ description of the Ahloi and their way, and it seemed so right to him. He felt Rana’s hand in his, restraining him. He heard her say something, but her words were reduced, stripped of meaning, just so many sounds conveying emotions beyond his comprehension.
He stepped forward and moved slowly towards the waiting Ancients, then stood between them and turned, and across the chamber Rana seemed so small and vulnerable as she stared at him with tearful eyes. She reached out to him, pleaded with him to think about what he was doing, and in that second Bennett wanted to explain to her that he was trying to leave all the pain behind.
He inclined his head, trying to prepare himself for this foretaste of the universal truth, but he knew that preparation was impossible. The Ahloi reached out and touched his head with hard, cold fingers.
Instantly his awareness was transformed. He knew nothing of time. The concept of duration was meaningless. A part of him knew that Mackendrick and Ten Lee had experienced this foretaste for as long as the Ahloi’s hand had spanned their skulls—a matter of seconds only—and yet it seemed to him that the time during which he experienced the wonder of the universal essence was limitless.
He was at once aware of himself as an individual identity, and aware too of the many other countless identities that constituted a whole; a kind of gestalt mind, and yet not a mind but an essence made up of every living thing that had ever been. It was an ocean of life that underpinned this reality, an essential ur-reality from which life as he had known it sprang and to which it would return. He seemed always on the verge of mentally apprehending this universal truth, this essence, but prevented from doing so by the fact that this was a foretaste only, that he had not yet relinquished his human form and joined the gestalt.
He knew that he was experiencing the truth not through any of his usual senses: he could not see the gestalt, or hear it, or even touch it. He sensed it, was aware of the fact of the ur-reality with a part of his mind he had never before been fortunate enough to use. Apprehending this, he
With that same part of his mind, which he had never before used, he asked for Ella. He discerned her essence on the very edge of his consciousness, a faint presence like an elusive ghost. And as he failed to make contact, as he felt within him an awful ache of loss, he heard a voice that was not a voice, felt an explanation enter his consciousness. He was told, or he was suddenly aware, that though the essence of Ella, and of his father and mother, and indeed everyone else who had ever existed, was maintained in this limitless ur-reality, they were now a vast and indivisible whole that could not be said to be made up of individuals, but which was something more. He understood that, because he was still an individual, still part of the realm of the physical; he could not truly apprehend the wonder of the truth, could grasp but a fleeting glimpse. Only when he relinquished his present material life would he conjoin with the ultimate, the infinite and eternal.
He understood then that human life was in some way an aberration, his existence like an individual drop of water thrown from an ocean, which would exist alone for a time before it was drawn irrevocably back into the body of the vastness to which it truly belonged. It was as if life was a travail of hardship through which one had to pass to truly appreciate the sublimity of the essence, and upon realising this the man who was Bennett was granted something of how it felt to be part of the whole. It was, he thought later, a feeling very much like, but greater than, the sacred experience of being loved, of being accepted and accepting and knowing only the rightness of belonging.
And then the Ahloi removed its hand from his head, and Bennett lost consciousness.
25
For a long time before he came to his senses, Bennett tried to regain something of the experience of the ultimate, the foretaste of the truth. Like an elusive dream, vanishing upon awakening, it would not be caught. He was aware of his body moving, of taking steps, of breathing, but the fact of his physicality seemed so distant and removed that it hardly mattered.
When he finally came to his senses and opened his eyes, he was no longer in the Chamber of Rebirth. He was blinded by a glare of whiteness, assailed by a cold wind that seemed to scour his very soul. He was aware of
