The Path of the Four

Back on Earth, on a sunny day, in a white dress, the ten-year-old Ariana Orlando ran up a green and grassy hill. Over the top of the hill she heard voices. “Where’s the birthday girl?” “Are we going to have to eat all this ice cream and cake ourselves?” And so on.

At the top of the hill, the ten-year-old Ariana Orlando, in a white dress, looked out on a green and grassy lawn that went on forever.

Jesus Christ looked like just like all the pretty white people on the video-frame, only with long clean hair, and a neatly groomed beard, and in a white robe. Santa Claus looked just like he was supposed to look: red suit, fat happy belly, bushy white beard, and big black boots. The Easter Bunny looked just like a toy she saw in a store window once, only bigger. He was six feet tall, with beautiful white fur. All around Jesus, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny were many little girls, dressed in white dresses, just like the ten-year-old Ariana. For a second, she knew that their numbers grew and shrank as she looked at them, but then that realization faded. One third of the little girls had red hair. One third of the little girls were fair-haired. The last third of the little girls had black hair, like Ariana.

Everybody stood around a table and on the table was the biggest chocolate cake in the world, a great crystal punch bowl filled with strawberry ice cream, and boxes wrapped in pink and blue paper and pink and blue ribbons.

Everybody laughed and applauded as the ten-year-old Ariana ran toward them, toward the sunny weather and little girls and pretty white dresses and birthday presents and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and a ten-year-old girl’s idea of Jesus.

“Happy Birthday, Ariana,” Jesus said.

Then she was looking at the cool green glass field of the interior of a V.R. helmet. The adult Ariana took it off.

She was in a little virtual reality parlor in a fringe neighbor in the Old City.

Bored and distracted, the one-eyed Outer Clan Zah-Gre who ran this V.R. parlor looked at a video-frame, hanging on the wall, crooked. A news transmission was repeating what everybody above and on Zah-Gre must know by now. Sonic and electromagnetic scanning at the sight of Ab-Druh’s assassination confirmed that the weapon used was the same one used from the Two Worlds Club shooting. Since the killing of Ab-Druh, now almost ten hours ago, civil unrest had broken out in the North, South, East, and West Lands. (The Lower Clan was staying true to their word. Nobody reported any trouble from them.) Five Vertex crewmembers had been on planet-leave after the assassination; they were lost somewhere in the civil unrest. Killed? Unable to get back on the streets safely? No one knew. With that situation and the Landing Area, set aside by the Upper Clan for shuttle landings from Vertex and Golden Horizon, now the scene of riots and small clashes between Humans and Zah-Gre, Joe Whitney had indefinitely suspended work on Vertex. Human authorities shipped Bud and Mac back through the latest Corridor, under heavy guard.

“Hey! What the Hell? I paid for an hour! That wasn’t an hour!”

“I didn’t stop it,” the one-eyed Outer Clan member said. “They did.”

Ariana looked to the corner of the room where the ramshackle, broken down control panel for the secondhand V.R. system stood. Voh-Heem stood there, with his arms crossed.

“Hello, Voh-Heem.”

“If you say so, Miss Orlando.”

“Maybe it’s the proprietor’s one eye. You don’t qualify as a ‘they.’”

“I thought you Human ‘scientists’ were supposed to be observant.”

He pointed to another corner of the room.

Two other Zah-Gre stood there. Ariana suppressed the urge to laugh, surprised that anyone had found the robes to fit the two of them. One was tall and thin, so tall and thin he seemed like a furry, turquoise-colored skeleton; the other was, at most, four feet tall and if not three hundred pounds, close to it. The juxtaposition of these two body types was humorous.

Ariana didn’t laugh. She just squirmed in the old barber chair she sat in.

Somebody had drawn on the robes of both Zah-Gre large, black dots.

The insignia marked them as Inner Clan, and half of the planet’s spiritual leaders.

“Ariana Orlando of Earth,” Voh-Heem said. “It is my honor to present Kre-Nan of the West Land--” Then the skinny one bowed. “--And Ni-Vel of the South Land.” The fat one nodded.

“I’m honored I--Why have such august persons as yourselves--Uh, at this tragic time I’m sure both Humans and Zah-Gre can work together.”

“If you can shut up for moment,” Voh-Heem said. “Kre-Nan has something he would like to say.”

The skinny one took a few steps forward. He was so tall he had to lower his flat head to keep it from scraping against the low ceiling.

“Ariana Orlando of Earth.” (Kre-Nan had a rather high and squeaky voice.) “We, with respect, invite you to become Inner Clan of the North Land.”

Ariana fell out of her chair.

Voh-Heem helped Ariana up off the floor.

It should have been a gallant gesture and--well, it was. Although the players, the setting, and God knows, the wrenching horror of Ab-Druh’s murder, by the wielder of that Krink-Gaffin Two Thousand, suggested there should have been nothing gallant about the moment.

It was night in the Old City.

The virtual reality parlor was little more than a hut, with no proper door, just a rectangular opening the one-eyed Outer Clan Zah-Gre must have cut. The lights of business signs came through the open doorway and, suspected Ariana, the light of distant fires. The interior of the one-room hut was illuminated by a single, old-fashioned light bulb, circa twentieth century Earth.

Somebody, out in the night, in the distance, played a flute. (Some Humans and Zah-Gre, in an attempt to ease the unrest, had taken to going out into the streets and playing music.)

The smell of dirt and dust hung over the establishment. Ariana was hungry for vanilla icing. She hadn’t gorged herself on vanilla for since high school. A football player for whom she had a secret crush died in a jet bike accident. Ariana locked herself in the family basement on a Saturday night and ate vanilla icing for hours.

Ariana looked at the barber chair. It looked soft. It looked inviting. She picked the virtual reality helmet off the floor and placed it on the barber’s chair.

She turned to Voh-Heem, and skinny Kre-Nan of the West Land and chubby Ni-Vel of the South Land.

Then she brushed some dust off the barber chair, and walked around it a few times, clearing her throat.

Voh-Heem grumbled something under his breath, and then said something, in North Zah-Gre, to the one-eyed Outer Clan native.

The one-eyed native responded in kind, and started to the open street doorway.

Voh-Heem stopped the one-eyed native with a question, also spoken in North Zah-Gre.

The one-eyed native replied again in kind, then disappeared through the open doorway.

Voh-Heem went to the wall opposite the open doorway, moved a very loose panel, and stuck his head inside. He rummaged around for a few minutes, and brought out two folding chairs. He unfolded them and set them by the barber’s chair. He took the virtual reality helmet off the barber’s chair and set it on the ramshackle control panel. Then with a gesture, he invited Ariana to sit back on the barber’s chair.

Ariana did so, but until Voh-Heem had brushed off the folding chairs and Kre-Nan and Ni-Vel had sat.

Voh-Heem remained standing, with his arms crossed.

Silence filled the room.

“I think, Ariana Orlando of Earth, somebody should say something,” Ni-Vel said at last, with a smile. “This is a little too much silence, even for the Zah-Gre.”

Ariana ran her fingers through her hair. She had been wearing her hair loose around her face and shoulders. She did her best to use her fingers as a comb and get her black and gray hair out of her face, up over her forehead, and down her back and the back of her head.

“I’m sorry if I come across like an open-mouth, mute moron.” What do you mean, if? Shut up, she thought. “But I didn’t even this was possible,” she went on. “That Humans could even receive such an offer, to become Inner Clan.”

Coming on top of everything else, especially Ab-Druh’s murder, she felt like the drowning man who spends his last moments, in the water, opening a letter from his doctor to find out that he has a terminal disease.

“We don’t have rules one way or the other, on that issue,” said the skinny Kre-Nan of the West Land, in his squeaky voice. “But it is wise to make an exception, in your case.”

“Why?” Ariana was glad she got the one-word question out without creating another embarrassing silence.

Ni-Vel answered. “Has anyone told you, what you said what when you were--asleep, in a coma, however Humans put it, when--”

Bless this sweet, fat little native, Ariana thought. When some bastard killed Ab-Druh. I don’t want to say it either.

“No, no one has.” She paused. “What did I say?”

“Something in North Zah-Gre,” Kre-Nan said.

What? Impossible, Ariana thought. She hoped her face didn’t show any skepticism. “Oh,” Ariana said, even that word bursting with caution. “Of course, I don’t know any of the native languages.”

Ni-Vel dismissed this fact with a sweep of his hand. “Nonetheless, we have over a dozen Side Clan witnesses to this.”

“OK,” Ariana said. She kept her expression polite, but neutral. In moments of extreme tension and tragedy the most reliable of beings, like the Side Clan, would swear to many impossible things, with no deceit intended. “And what was I --” She almost said supposed to have said. She said, instead, “What did I say--in North Zah-Gre?”

Two of the surviving Inner Clan members looked at each other.

“What you spoke,” Kre-Nan said after a moment. “What you spoke was--the Fourth Book of the Garb Ock.”

“The final portion of your holy book,” Ariana said, straining to stay polite and not appear skeptical. “The content of which Zah-Gre has kept a secret from all Humans, for over twenty years, since Corridor One.” Something I had no way of knowing, and this is impossible! She wanted to shout this, but didn’t.

Kre-Nan and Ni-Vel spoke to each other again, in North Zah-Gre, for a good five minutes. At last, Kre-Nan said something to Voh-Heem, and Ni-Vel nodded.

Voh-Heem didn’t do or say anything for a moment. Then he uncrossed his arms and looked at Ariana. “I am about to tell you, in English, the contents of the Fourth Book of the Garb Ock.” He stepped back to get a fuller view of Ariana, sitting in the old barber’s chair. “As you Humans might say, I’m glad you’re already sitting down.”

(And this is what Voh-Heem of the Inner Clan told Ariana Orlando:)

Hear, oh Zah-Gre, the prophesy of the Path of the Four.

Many lesser turnings from now, the First will be born among you.

What Clan he is born to does not matter. Know only that he, the First, is the teacher.

More lesser turnings pass.

Then they will come, out of a hole in the sky.

They will be strange in speech and appearance, and from a distant land.

Among them will number the Second, Third, and Fourth.

The Second will have walked in many ways of the Turning, and will be practical as food, clothing, shelter, birth, and death.

The Third will seem as if a beast, his past casting a long shadow, but shadows are more and less than they seem.

Out of the Third’s past, will come the Fourth.

He comes in secret. He comes bringing woe and death.

It is the deeds of the Fourth, who will prepare the Second and the Third to begin the work of the Greater Turning.

(So spoke Voh-Heem of the Side Clan to Ariana Orlando of Earth.)

Ariana realized that if her eyes got any wider they were going to pop right out of her skull, and if her breath got any more labored she was going to choke and die.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she said at last.

“These things, we would never kid about,” Voh-Heem said. He walked over to Ariana and leaned down to her, and maybe just a slight smile played across him. “We knew you were coming, Human. All of us have always known that all of you would come.”