“Nobody in the ulterior can see, Meg. Eyes aren’t needed.”
Her heart beat in frightened counterpoint to the rhythm of the mitochondrion. She could not pay proper attention as Proginoskes said, “It’s what might be called a circadian rhythm. All life needs rhythm to—“
She interrupted. “Progo! Blajeny! I can’t move!”
She felt Proginoskes within her thoughts. His own thinking had calmed considerably; he was recovering from whatever it was that had frightened him and caused her so much pain. “Blajeny did not come with us.”
“Why?”
“This is no time for silly questions.”
“Why is it silly? Why can’t I see? Why can’t I move?”
‘Meg, you must stop panicking or I won’t be able to kythe with you. We won’t be able to help each other.”
She made a tremendous effort to calm down, but with each heartbeat she felt only more tense, more frightened. How could her heart be pounding so rapidly if Charles Wallace’s beat only once a decade?
Proginoskes thought noisily at her, “Time isn’t any more important than size. All that is required of you is to be in the Now, in this moment which has been given us.”
“I don’t feel like myself. I’m not myself! I’m part of Charles Wallace.”
“Meg. You are Named forever.”
“But Progo—“
“Say the multiplication table.”
“Now who’s being silly?”
“Megling, it will help bring you to yourself. Try.”
“I can’t.” Her mind felt battered and numb. She could not even remember enough to count to ten.
“What’s 7 times 8?”
She responded automatically. “56.”
“What’s the product of 2/3 and 5/7.”
Her mind whirled, cleared. “10 over 21.”
“What’s the next prime number after 67?”
“71.”
“Can we think together now?” There was considerable concern in Proginoskes’s questioning.
The concentration the cherubim had thrust on Meg had calmed her panic. “I’m okay. Where’s Calvin? Where’s Mr. Jenkins? And that—that Sporos?”
“They’re all here. You’ll be able to kythe with them soon. But first we have to find out what the second test is.”
“Find out?” Her mind was still blurred from pain and fright.
He was patient with her. “As we found out what the first test was.”
“You guessed that,” she said. “Do you know what this one is?”
“I think it has to do with Sporos.”
“But what?”
‘This is what we must discover.”
“We have to hurry, then.” She tried to check her impatience.
“Meg, I have to work with you and Mr. Jenkins together, because he isn’t capable of letting me move about in his mind as you can, so you’ll have to help. The grown farandolae don’t talk the way people do, they kythe.”
“Like cherubim?”
“Some of the Ancient Ones, yes. With the younger ones it’s a little closer to what you called mental telepathy. Never mind the degree; Mr. Jenkins can’t understand kything at all, and you’ll have to help him.”
“I’ll try. But you’ll have to help me, Progo.”
“Stretch out your right hand—“
“I can’t move.”
“That doesn’t matter. Move your hand in your mind. Kythe it. Kythe that Mr. Jenkins is standing by you, and that you’re reaching out to hold his hand. Are you doing it?”
“I’m trying.”
“Can you feel his hand?”
“I think so. At least, I’m making believe I can.”
“Hold it. Tightly. So that he knows you’re there.”
Her hand, which was no longer her hand in any way she had known before, nevertheless moved in the remembered pattern, and she thought she felt a slight pressure in return. She tried to kythe to the principal. “Mr. Jenkins, are you there?”
“Here.” It was like an echo of a faintly remembered voice hoarse with chalk dust; but she knew that she and Mr. Jenkins were together.
“Meg, you will have to kythe him everything I tell you. If I move into his mind I hurt him; he can’t absorb my energy. Now, try to translate simultaneously for him: make him see that a grown farandola’s matter does not move, except as a plant does, or a tree when there is no breeze to cause its motion, or as the great kelp forests move. A grown farandola moves by kything. Kything is not going to be easy for Mr. Jenkins, because it has been a great many years since he’s known himself, his real self.”
Meg sighed with a kind of anxious fatigue, suddenly realizing the enormous amount of energy taken by this intense kything. The cherubim moved lightly, swiftly within her, and his kything moved through and beyond her senses to an awareness she had never known before. She groped to contain it in images which were within Mr. Jenkins’s comprehension.
The sea, a vast, curving, never-ending sea; it was as though they were in that sea, deep down under the water’s surface, deeper than a whale can dive. The surface of the sea, and any light which might penetrate the surface, was hundreds of fathoms away. In the dark depths there was movement, movement which was part of the rhythm she had mistaken for Charles Wallace’s heartbeat. The movement assumed shape and form, and images were kythed to her mind’s eye, visual projections superimposed swiftly one over the other; she tried to send them to Mr. Jenkins:
a primordial fern forest;
a giant bed of kelp swaying to submarine currents;
a primeval forest of ancient trees with rough, silver bark;
underwater trees with silver-gold-green foliage which undulated regularly, rhythmically, not as though the long fronds were being blown by wind or current but of their own volition, like the undulation of those strange sea creatures halfway between plant life and animal life.
To the visual images music was added, strange, unearthly, rich, the surging song of the surrounding sea.
Farandolae.
She felt confusion and questioning from Mr. Jenkins. To him farandolae were little scampering creatures like Sporos, not like the sea trees she had been trying to show him.
Proginoskes kythed, “The sea trees, as you call them, are what Sporos will become when he Deepens. They are then called fara. Once he has Deepened he will no longer have to run about. A grown fara is far less limited than a human being is by time and place, because farae can be with each other any time in any place; distance doesn’t separate them.”
“They move without moving?” Meg asked.
“You might put it that way.”
“Am I to learn to move without moving, too?”
“Yes, Meg. There’s no other way in a mitochondrion. There’s nothing for you to stand on in Yadah, and no space for you to move through. But because you’re an earthling, and earthlings excel in adaptability, you can learn this motionless motion. Are you translating for Mr. Jenkins?”
“I’m trying.”
“Keep on, Meg. We’ll have time to rest later, unless—“ She felt a small, sharp pain, which was immediately withdrawn. “Some of the Ancient Ones can kythe not only from mitochondrion to mitochondrion within their human hosts, but to farandolae on mitochondria in other human hosts. Do you remember how shocked Sporos was when Calvin told him that human beings can’t do that kind of thing?”
“Yes, but Progo, Mr. Jenkins doesn’t understand about Sporos running around like a toy mouse. I don’t understand it either. He isn’t a bit like the sort of sea things you just showed us.”
“Sporos is, as he said, only a child, although he was juggling chronologies when he said he was born yesterday. A farandola well into adolescence has already passed through its early stages and taken root and is becoming a grown fara. It is nearly time for Sporos to leave childhood and Deepen. If he does not, it will be another victory for the Echthroi.”
“But why wouldn’t he Deepen?”
“Calvin is having trouble kything with him. Sporos is holding back. We have to help him Deepen, Meg. That’s our second test, I’m sure it is.”
To make an unwilling Sporos Deepen; it seemed a more impossible ordeal than Naming one of three Mr. Jenkinses. “How do we do it?”
He countered with another question. “Are you calm?”
Calm! Then, once again, she moved into that strange place which is on the other side of feeling. With one part of herself she knew that she was in Charles Wallace, actually inside her brother; that she was so small that she couldn’t be seen in the most powerful micro-electron microscope, or heard in the micro-sonarscope; she knew, too, that Charles Wallace’s life depended on what was going to happen now. She was beginning to get a glimmer of what Proginoskes meant when he talked about the dangers of feeling. She held herself very still, very cold, then turned towards the cherubim in quiet kything.
“Be a fara,” he told her. “Make believe. Do the inhabitants of Yadah seem more limited than human beings because once they have taken root they can’t move from their Deepening Place? But human beings need Deepening Places, too. And far too many never have any. Think about your Deepening Places, Meg. Open yourself into kything. Open,”