Necessity produced especially for the occasion. You liked paper. You liked the way it felt and sounded when you rubbed it, or ran your pencil across its surface. Your pencil itself—though it was not one thing but a chain of many, each replaced when its stub could not be held—became your most prized possession, bettering even your blocks. You took it with you everywhere and would not be parted from it. You sensed magic within.
How could you know how dangerous that magic would be?
— THIRTY-ONE —
ONE MORNING WE were late. I had a longer flight than usual ahead, since I had been tasked by the transcendence team with assessing the exact density of the atmospheric layers above the northern shores of the continent. This was to be the exit point, and the interface itself between our initial stages of materialism and the states that lay beyond.
You were dawdling.
‘Come on, we’ll be late,’ I said, grabbing your canvas satchel and my own supplies and pushing through the door. It was winter and a dusting of snow lay upon Fane’s circle. ‘Reed, please.’
You looked up from the table, where you had been sitting, practising your letters since breakfast, then sighed and gathered your things. At the door, I put on your coat and you handed me the paper upon which you had been scribbling.
‘This is for you.’
I looked down at it, frozen in horror. You had not been writing at all.
‘What is this?’
You beamed up at me.
‘You, of course.’
I had only ever seen one drawing before in my entire life. It was in one of the books my brother Greye had given me in India, The Once and Future King, depicting the young boy, Wart, with both hands gripping the handle of the great sword, Excalibur, still lodged deep in the rock. I flinched from it then, as I did to yours now.
This may seem strange to you, natural as I now know this compulsion to render flattened versions of objects upon surfaces is to you. But you must remember: by the time I came into existence, almost everything which humans had created had been destroyed, or, if it was made of polymers, compressed into the little moon. This included art of all forms.
Those books Greye had given me, and that story of the unlikely king with its rough sketch of the pivotal scene, were some of the only remaining artefacts, and I felt no urge to look for more examples. Why would I? The human trait of curiosity was as useless as its impulse to write, sing and draw, and every bit as dangerous.
This is how drawing was viewed: dangerous. There existed no better evidence of why human beings had failed than the mountains of art they had created in an attempt to decipher their existence. A trillion trillion marks etched in clay, canvas and memory chips time and time again over fifty millennia, everything from the fearful smudges made in dark caves to the lavish oil renderings of battles I had been told once hung in great halls, to the sketches of sweethearts and the ink needled into the skin of a loin-clothed hunter. Every human hand that had ever lived past infancy had drawn something. Each one was imperfect, each one a twisted reflection, each one proof that, no matter how hard humans tried, they could never understand reality enough to master it. And more than mere clumsiness, this misunderstanding had led to frustration, distraction, anger, blame, greed—everything that had led to their downfall.
That is why it was dangerous.
Homo sapiens’ one success was the erta, and the erta did not draw.
I looked down at the mess of lines and shapes flung together on the paper. A tall figure looked back at me, unsmiling, with long hair sweeping out to one side. Its eyes were too big, but accurately proportioned, and one long-fingered hand held another smaller one, attached to a scruffy figure beneath. Both stood at sharp, odd angles to the ground, upon which there were jagged outlines of leaves surrounded by the occasional spiral—the wind made visible. Behind them were the rough shapes of clouds and mountains, and what I thought might be the sea.
I loved it immediately.
‘And me,’ said Reed, pointing to it. ‘See?’
My heart gave a tremor. Horror—not just because I knew what would happen if he presented such a thing at school, but because, within those hasty scrawls and careless marks, within the confines of the larger figure’s broken oval head and somewhere between the