Coyotl wonders if Anansi is as smart as he believes himself to be.
“How can you be sure that if she does what you think she’s doing, it will have the result that you think it will?”
Anansi looks at him, aware that he is being ridiculed.
“Why are you here with me if you don’t believe? Why did you try to intervene?”
“I’m not pretending to know what is going on,” Coyotl says. “But she’s gone now, we haven’t been able to find her, so maybe she did find the path to eternity, but we can’t know for sure unless we find her.”
“Well, we’ve looked and nothing. She’s not here anymore. I’m going back to my body in the Quinspace to enjoy what little time we have left.”
Before Coyotl can respond, Anansi disappears from the mental realm, and Coyotl is alone in a great expanse of unformed space. He tries to remember the woman, the Alia, the way she felt to him as he watched her before his conflict with Anansi. She is bright in his memory, like a Quinspace star with its tactile heat and light that exist as subsequent orbs of varying colors that demonstrate the dissipation of heat and light around the main body of the star as one moves further away from its core. Inside each sphere that surrounds the Alia that Coyotl can conjure in his memory, Coyotl sees light, but not necessarily heat; it is a complex jumble, very unique to her.
Coyotl concentrates on that unique mix of light, of the feelings and emotions as a shell, the soul energies at the core, and then he opens his mind to every realm of existence that he has access to. Coyotl is well traveled across the realms and he can touch many of them.
“There you are,” Coyotl says and then he disappears from the mental realm.
When he is back to his body, Coyotl wakes on Quinspace Eel, in one of many pleasure houses in the Red Mountains. The house is like a cottage with walls whose colors bleed around the surface like watercolors, mostly black, green, and yellow, that is a stark contrast to the reddish mountain environment. There is what appears to be a rhino-type Quinspace being in the room with him; she is mostly human-looking, two arms and two legs with ample breasts and no clothing but a coating of fur that is practically black, and she has a large horn protruding from her forehead.
“Who are you?” Coyotl asks the woman, staring skeptically at her dark fur from a prone position on a bed; the walls of the room are a yellow color that occasionally melts to white or grey.
She leans over Coyotl, “I came while you were meditating,” she says, stroking his arm. “The many-armed woman you enjoyed before is quite popular and could not wait for your return.”
Coyotl stands slowly, obviously very skeptical of the woman.
“You seem strange,” Coyotl says as the multicolored fabrics around his waist settle into a kind of skirt that hangs down to his knees.
The woman tries to touch him but Coyotl grabs her wrist and her hand dangles in front of him.
“You are Ascendant,” he says, smiling slyly.
She doesn’t speak and then he tightens his grip on her wrist and pulls her closer; her horn brushes against his cheek.
“Since when do you all have a single horn?”
The woman appears to be embarrassed.
“It’s usually easy for me to pass,” she says, turning her head to direct her horn away from his face. “Some Ascendant have only one horn, but it is rare.”
“And what,” Coyotl asks jokingly, “you were hoping to find out how the Alia is faring on her quest to achieve the Hyperion?”
The woman is quiet and she looks at Coyotl, trying to decide whether to tell the truth. She nods.
“We heard that you wanted to stop her.”
“Anansi says we should. He thinks you all are trying to change the past to erase us.”
The woman shakes her head slowly.
“No one is capable of that,” she says. “We learned that lesson, not all of us, but enough. And what the Alia does, she does for the good of the universe. We want to erase ourselves, not you. We should only exist at the end of time.”
Coyotl smirks.
“What is the Hyperion?” he asks, aware that what the Alia is doing is very different depending on who you ask.
“We call it the Par-Cell Recommendation. Our ancient sister, Par-Cell 77 realized the blunder of the Ascendant, when we traveled back from the end of time to the relative beginning, and she trained us to do what the larger Ascendant population could not, to ask for help in undoing it all because we could not do it on our own. We have worked throughout the history of the universe to ensure that specific things happen in order to give rise to this present, to the Alia on her present journey. And the effect of her success will be that we Ascendant will no longer exist in this present, in the past of this existence or any other, but we will be there at the end of existence as is our rightful place.”
Coyotl knew that she was being honest with him though he wondered why she was being so forthcoming.
“We Ascendant are not well versed with the mental plane,” the woman explains. “When Alia came here to Eel, she accessed that realm and we understood that it must be part of her journey, but we cannot see it. We know that she is traveling in the physical realm, but she is only half of herself, half her soul, we don’t fully understand why. Is she ok?”
“I was just going to see her right now,” Coyotl says. “I found her somewhere other than the stiff world, I wanted to hear her intentions directly from her.”
“She’s not in the mental realm?”
Coyotl shakes his head. “She is in a dark place. Or I think she is, she was blinking in and out, but that could be the nature of this half soul.”
“Does she need help?”
Coyotl shrugs.
“How would I know? But I’m satisfied with your explanation, there’s no need for me to travel so far to speak with her. Do you work here or was this just a mission or something for you? I have interesting ideas about that horn of yours I’d like to try out.”
The woman shrugs.
“I don’t work here, but why not?”
PRL Serials 