The Pleiades
1.
As you may know, there are populations on many worlds, and those worlds have many populations, and most of them build altars to the gods, or have done so.
Where Hermes dwelt, the soil was cracked from thirst, and plants were loathe to grow. Fresh water would not pool on the ground and could only be found beneath it. The people there built altars to the god of fresh water, and they walked in circles when they prayed.
And there were four cities, each of them protecting a well. They were coastal. The people lived in structures built by their ancestors, and when they did form their own bricks, it was using partially desalinated seawater.
They formed schools. They searched for evidence of what had happened, studying old texts, trying methods to bring forth water, recording their results. One text told of a lodestar that, if one were to follow it, would lead them to a great aquifer. The problem was identifying it. And theories varied. Some believed that it could only be found if the constellation that it dwelt in was drawn. Then, observing the drawing, one would somehow know which star to follow.
So that is why they sat every night and drew--some on vellum, some in the soil, others on clay tablets, still others on the soft inner husk of a kind of plant. Wrapped in their thick robes, they connected the stars with their pencils and styluses and brushes and pens.
They sat wrapped in thick robes because this had become a cold planet, and dark. There had been some catastrophe--there must have been. The ground was hard and brittle, and vegetation was loathe to grow.
Hermes was a novitiate in the sect that was sometimes called the feelers. The sects came out of a series of schisms that had occurred before any of them were born, or at least it seemed that way. Hermes found that people spoke of ancient history as if it had happened in their youth. The distant and the near past were commingled, and nothing was new, and the past and the future stained the present, making it something else. It was only a reference to them.
There was a sunken corridor that contained so many cubic shelves along it that one could retrieve a slip of paper from one of them every day and die before they reached the end, and Hermes visited it every day and retrieved a slip of paper. It was outside of the city they called The Pleiades, the oldest of them, the city with the most temperamental well. One could reach it by walking for an hour from the edge of the city, and its entrance faced the west, meaning when the sun set, it shone into the corridor. This was when Hermes visited, when the orangeness poured into it, and he could read in that remnant light.
There was another sect, sometimes called the seers. The seers--those who believed that the light was primary--were interested in optics and biology. They were lens-grinders and gardeners, and they built observatories and also laboratories, where they concocted powders intended to improve their vision.
Some would place cards with figures drawn on them behind semi-opaque screens, and they would take turns staring at these screens and announcing what they believed they saw.
They would engage in colloquy concerning the image and what appeared to them when they were staring. Remember that were interested in light, the relationship between light and objects.
Some took hallucinogens.
Others would gaze at the bark of a rare tree and trace the lines that seemed important. Others did this with the cracks in the ground. There was a theory that the universe itself had sustained a fissure, and the constellatory stars of which the lodestar was the crowning piece were not like the other stars. They were fissure stars. A hero had fallen there, some said, damaging a celestial barrier.
There was a hardy subterranean rhizome that grew at the edge of the aquifer they called only 'Brother', and some would sit near where it was known to grow, and they would trace that, staring at the surface of the soil. After covering vellum with markings, another would dig, broadly at first and shallow, carefully excavating the organism to reveal its shape. And the two would stand and place their fingers on the vellum and point at the subject, speaking of the differences. And then they would recover the rhizome.
When Hermes asked him what was the reason for this repeated excavation, Pluto answered:
Of course it is in one sense unnecessary. The rhizome has been unearthed hundreds of times. They could make a definitive drawing of it. But what would it benefit the seer to examine the drawing of another seer?
Hermes said:
But how does staring at the soil allow them to see the rhizome?
Pluto only raised his eyebrows briefly, as if to say:
Not my sect.
Some seers believed that the veins in the eye of a future adept would be identical to the constellation itself and that, seeing through them, they would recognize it.
Then there were the feelers--Hermes's sect. They believed in the primacy of the object, the substance itself. Some became great artists because of their practice of drawing objects, especially trees and stalky plants. Some sat for hours tracing. It is said they believed that they could touch the surface of an object from a distance. Their pencil was not an interpretation of light on the object, but of touch. It was not the light that they drew but the surface itself.
Some drew the folds of cloth, others the fur of a predatory dog as it fluttered in an evening breeze. The feeling would come and go, and they would sit and wait for its return, the cold of the night coming eventually to accompany them. The law was to never move the pencil until they could feel the surface that was their subject.
Then there were the diggers and the walkers and the dowsers.
They didn't disagree on everything. They agreed that when one prayed, they should walk along a circular path. This practice was common among them. Some walked in the morning and others the evening and some both. Most of them constructed stations along the circles and performed procedures there.
And many of their procedures were similar. How could they not be? They spoke of their desire for water and of their memories or the memories of others. They spoke of their theories concerning its attainment and of their efforts and of the arguments for and against their holding any promise. Theories were extolled and disdained. Some bickered to the gods, lamenting their not being listened to.
Some theories pertained to which god could intervene and which could not.
Pluto says to Hermes:
Brother, notice that while time is in fact linear--with one event occurring after the other, and events never repeating themselves, and what is lost being unrecoverable--yet virtual repetition is everywhere. It is what is normal.
He says:
The universe exists because of it. Objects are here because of it. They occur, over and over. That is their repetition.
He says:
See the diagram of it. It moves left to right. Every event, every actual occasion, every collision. It is drawn from left to right. The timeline of everything.
Hermes sits and listens, holding the edges of a slip of paper, his eyes moving from it to Pluto and back.
Pluto continues:
The drawing can either continue on forever, left to right, with every rotation of every planet receiving its mention in a little square, or, at some point, the divine auditor can save himself some effort and, noticing that some squares on this diagram are quite like their predecessors, draw a conditional recursion: an arrow pointing to a question--has the repetition broken?--and if the answer is no, draw an arrow from that question back to the square that points to it.
If no, repeat, it says. Do what was done before. Of course it is never done quite like this. But in some ways, it is. The scrupulous auditor will record the differences. They will report the smallest exceptions. Change in velocity. Wriggle. Dust accumulation. Wobble.
Some adepts were known to swing a stalk with a concrete weight secured to the end of it, over and over, as if they were in love with the circularity. And this repetition would change them, which would change the repetition. They would grow strong, and they would swing harder, until it appeared the stalk would tear from the stress of it, and sometimes it did, creating a plume of dust on the cracked plain.
There are those processes that apparently occur only once--meaning it might appear that way. Or maybe someone told you that this was the case. A salvation, for example, or a birth or a death, or an acquisition of some kind. But this is questionable. Maybe those patterns that appear the most singular are the most recursive. What is more identical than a death? Do the differences have meaning?
Hermes says:
But what about alchemical processes?
And Pluto answers:
Those processes are circular because they are focused on purification, which is the most recursive of all the processes, being synthetic and teleological--but it is also the most terminal, in that purification always leads, eventually, to the destruction of the object itself. It is eventually washed away as another impurity. And work always wears us down eventually. It has that tendency.
Among the differences between the sects, the largest pertained to the number of stations that should be on the circle. The seers and the feelers could tolerate one another. Their differences were qualitative. But the relationship between the believers in three and the believers in four was different.
And indeed, believers in adjacent numbers detested one another the most. Believers in seven stations could bear to point out a distant cloud to a believer in three stations, but they would not step on the shadow of a believer in six.
Hermes sometimes consulted the corridor for the meaning of these differences.
It seemed some of the reasoning was geometric.
For example, consider the believers in two stations. Two points are required to represent a line. A constellation starts with the second star. So twoness is somehow primary. But what did the believers in four say? For them, four is two squared, and so it is contains the essence of twoness, but more abundantly.
With three points, one can form a triangle, from which they can form a circle.
Some differences stemmed from beliefs concerning time and the nature of cycles.
In general, believers in the three revered simplicity--seeing the object, the memory of seeing it, and the abstraction of what it was they saw.
Some believers in four agreed on these three but added another stage. They believed one had to do something with the abstraction. This was abhorrent to the threes. For them, the fourth was obviously the first.
The believers in five added other prayers. Acts of speech, acts of contemplation. Many sixes would not name the stages. For them, six was composed of three sets of two, but nothing beyond that could be named or described. And the sevens? It is thought that they believed that orders of interconnectedness were represented by seven and that it was composed of a triangle and a square.
Hermes was friends with a digger. They believed in inspecting the soil itself. They were nomadic, as their activities were illegal in the four cities, and yet they relied on them for water. Consequently, they traded with the citizens for it. They traded wild game or iron or salt for the replenishment of their canteens and waterskins.
The diggers were known to be good blacksmiths and repairers of tools, which skills were necessary for the maintenance of their augers, picks, mattocks, and shovels. They were worshippers of Pluto, the god of the underworld and keeper of the minerals and gems. But was he the god of the aquifers? Certainly not. Nor was Poseidon. And this world did not know of nymphs.
It would seem that they worshipped Apsu, the god of fresh water and of order and the known, but they did not cleave to the known. Here fresh water did not mean that. They cleaved to the plain and to searching. All they knew was to want.
2.
And they did not worship Apsu.
This is how they dug. When they began, one struck the earth with a pick and then one with a mattock, and with a shovel the third removed the soil that the two had loosened, and when the flat ground was at their waist, they took turns working in the hole, stabbing the soil with a tool similar to a pike and periodically tossing it out--two resting, one digging.
With the pike they loosened the soil in flakes and shards. The soil loosened so slowly at times, a digger would exhaust his stint and only once, at the end, would he toss up what he had displaced. They continued in this way until, with the tallest man in the hole, the youngest of the two would kick as if a ball floated there, and if he did not strike the head of the subterranean digger, then they were finished for the day.
When the soil was strong and did not want to be reduced to particles, they would shout to one another in hushed a voice.
They would say:
Mover of the world! Breaker of stone and soil! Your pike is the bolt of Zeus! Or is it the trident of Poseidon! You strike stone with it, and the stone produces water. The world beneath you is flour. It is sand at the ancient shore. It yearns to be upraised. Dig, damn you! Dig your stint! You have nearly reached Hades. Do you hear that? The fiery river is lapping at its banks. You will find lava if not water. You will meet Pluto, whose hands are dry. He will give you rings, which you will trade for companionship in The Pleiades. Dig! Dig!
In this manner they consoled one another and coaxed. And they laid out the world shards and fragments and sought meaning. They studied pigmentation and texture and smell. The elder produced fragments from prior digs, and they held them side by side.
The youngest, whom they called Pluto, sometimes swore he could smell sulfur, but the others never said that they could.
And they would ask him:
Does the scent of sulfur wax or wane? Tell us, so we know whether we can extend the line from the last hole.
Or: they didn't say this, but they had before. People talk this way. For the onlooker, for the newly arrived, there is silence. It is the silence of the present. But for those who were there, the words persist.
Hermes asks:
What measurement matters the most?
Pluto answers:
Moisture, though some speculate that what we seek is not an aquifer but a subterranean ocean, so we should be looking for salt. Their logic being that oceans are salty.
Hermes says:
That doesn't make sense.
Pluto answers:
I know. There are others who believe that we should search for bones and fossils because large bodies of water are always populated with fauna. Some say that they don't know what we're looking for.
Hermes asks:
How long do you walk for before digging? How do you know when to dig?
Pluto answers:
Believers in seven stations say that whatever body we are seeking is so vast that we should travel for seven days before stopping to dig, but our triune colleagues object that we do not know in which direction to travel, so seven days is too long.
Hermes asks:
What do they say to that?
Pluto answers:
They only say, we have to extend the radius--by which they seem to mean: farther, farther.