But then, once every few centuries all the moons gathered at once and the substance of the world was shaken, and Niasa-in-the-egg was almost jolted from sleep to call wakefully to Her, The hatcher!
Then came time for the great dance. Only the great dance would serve. Timmys had done the dance time after time. All life upon Dosha had done the dance time after time, a hundred, two hundred times.
But then mankind had come and had done the evil thing. Over and over, done the evil, destroying the dance. And when Timmys had tried to get it back, the mankinds had done worse things. Now the time for the great dance was coming fast upon the world, and no one was left, no one at all who remembered how the dance was done.
22—A Dream of Falling Water, Flowing Green
In the small hours of night, Mouche dreamed he stood in the mists of an unlit chasm while a cataract fell before him out of darkness into darkness. The source was so far above him, the catch basin so far below that no sound of water reached him. The curved emerald surface of the water and the glassy shadows moving within it were lit by a single ray that pierced the darkness from behind him. In his sleep he could not name this falling water, yet he knew it poured forever through that solitary beam, a perfect and eternal miracle made manifest by this single and incomplete enlightenment.
So, Mouche remembered in his dream, had the emerald hair of the dancer poured forever across the dark and empty chasms of his heart, with only his flawed perception disclosing its mystery. The dance, the scent of the food and the smoke, the sound of the drums and the voices, the flutes and the bells, all became an experience that lifted him as on an unending tide, out of nowhere into everywhere, while mysterious mists rose around him, spreading the possibility of marvel through the moist and fecund darkness.
Certainly the dream mists permeated his sleep, soaking into certain opinions that had been already petrified when he had received them and which nothing in his life until now had served to soften. Each time he woke, he was different, as though his very bones had become pliable, bending to become the framework for some other, as yet unparticularized person. Hidden in the deep embrasure beneath the patinaed dome, he suffered the nightly torments of the unknown and itched with a fascination that drove him closer to madness every time he scratched it.
The change was a fearful thing. As it progressed he found he could take nothing as a matter of course. He could no longer submit to the ministrations of the invisible masseuses without wondering what color hair they had, and whether they sang in the evening, or whether they danced, and what their true purpose was and why they had come. He did not see their eyes upon him, equally wondering and weighing. He could no longer look aside from the brown-clad forms who swept the street without wondering where their homeland had been and whether they hated their present confinement or whether even that was part of the flow he could sense happening.
He did not see their glance follow him as he went, the gestures their hands made, signifying to any tim-tim watching that this was Mouchidi, the one Flowing Green had come for, the one Flowing Green said Bofusdiaga wanted.
The change overflowed the night hours and ran into everything he tried to do. Mouche could no longer pace the dignified measures his dancing master required without flowing far too gracefully, as though to emulate the dances of those he imagined were watching from behind the walls. He could not leap without being lifted, like a balloon. He could not twirl without spinning. He was become a dervish, all too full of inordinate intention.
“What’s come over you Mouche? You dance like a windlily!”
Mouche apologized, and went on apologizing, to the fencing master, to the conversation director, both of whom found him odd, eccentric, no longer focused, but oh, interesting, very interesting. He, meantime, was too busy to find himself interesting, for he was desperately attempting to interpret what was happening to him, and he was without tutelage, completely on his own. He was possessed without knowing how to be a possession. Even if he had sought help, he could have found no adviser among the mankind inhabitants of Newholme.