Positive Liberty

We came to the colonnade; in its center, at the back, was a door. Myra paused for a moment.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“I’m not quite sure what’s beyond this door. I do know that it is said to be the private meditation room of the Grand Curate.”

“What does that mean?”

“I wish I could tell you. He runs the Cathedral, and if your cause is just, he will surely rule in your favor. But such things aren’t undertaken lightly.”

“Well–” I thought for a moment. Which, after all, was worse, walking for half a day and facing down two well-muscled guardsmen plus the Prudent Predator? Or taking my chances with the Grand Curate, whose powers to help and harm, whose temperament, whose very outlook on life was quite in doubt? I could always turn back at this point, and risk facing my earlier adversaries instead.

“Ah…. What’s he like, anyway?” I asked. “Is he going to rip my head off if I cross him?”

“I don’t know,” Myra replied. “But somehow, I doubt it.”

I doubted it too, and I approached the door. Like all things that are truly important, it looked smaller in real life. It was made of wood–Did it come from the surface? Where did they get their wood, anyway?–and it had a rough, wrought-iron handle. To tell the truth, it was a little rusty. Only a simple latch-type lock protected the Grand Curate from whatever wished to intrude upon him, and I inferred that he must have his own defenses hidden behind the door.

I touched the handle. Then I looked back at Myra.

“For what it’s worth, thanks. I might not see you again, and you’ve put up with me, which is more than I can say about a lot of people. I’m certainly not an easy person to put up with.”

“Oh nonsense,” she replied. “What’s life without a little adventure? Sure, you’re hard to deal with. So what.”

“Well, I guess that’s that.”

“It is. Now get out of here, before I change my mind.”

I gave her one last, grateful look. I should have hugged her. If I had been a decent person, I would have. Then I turned toward the door, opened it, and walked through.

Like all things that are truly important, I could not recall all of the details that I wanted when the time finally came to write them down. Such is life. The door was open, and a long, gray hallway of roughly cut stone stood before me. It was the last thing I expected; more apropos would have been an enormous, brilliantly-lit chamber full of uniformed guards, or an ozone-scented room with a curtain at the far end, one that would open to the voice of the great and mighty Oz. No such luck. I walked down the humble hallway, which was lit only by a succession of candles in sconces every few feet. They reminded me, if anything, that the being–the person–that I was about to meet must after all be human: Candles burn out, and someone must replace them. I walked down the hallway.

At the end, in an anticlimax, there was another door. This one had even less ceremonial to it than the other one, if such a thing was possible. It was simply a door, shorn of all pretension. There wasn’t even a lock to it, just a handle that presumably allowed one to pull it open.

I did.

But I didn’t find what I had expected. Inside, was a venerable human man doing yoga. He was rail thin, wore a loincloth, and had a long beard down to his navel. He was the perfect picture of a guru, and he was the very last thing that I had ever expected.

And he wasn’t one of those passive, recumbent poses either: It was Shiva the Dancer, with the left leg planted firmly into the ground, the torso bent forward, the left hand reaching outward, the right, clasping the right leg and pulling it back, up, and over the head. It was a delicate and challenging pose, appropriate for beginner and expert alike, exercising and stretching the muscles from the tip of the forward hand down to the balancing foot. The man before me was a master: His clasping hand, rather than reaching behind the back, instead went over the head, and the graceful loop of Shiva’s dancing arc was complete. I stood awed in silence.

I’d expected the Wizard of Oz. I’d gotten both more and less.

He broke the pose, assumed a standing, resting posture, and looked directly into my eyes.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Are you the Grand Curate?”

“That is what the call me.”

“But are you?”

“Okay, I’ll stop being coy. I am the Grand Curate. And you’re here for some help, right? I am very sorry, but I don’t have it.”

“You don’t have it? But you don’t even know what I was looking for.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe I do have it. The trouble is, though, that so many people come to me asking for help, but I just can’t give it to them. I’m not a god, not an Avatar, not even a halfway decent wizard.”

“I’m not looking for any of those things,” I replied hopefully. “I’m just looking for a way to the surface.”

“It wouldn’t interest you,” he replied.

“It’s my home,” I said. He looked at me crosswise for a few moments, then spoke.

“No, I’m quite sure you’re lying. Your home is somewhere quite far away. But I can guess at least that you have some greater affinity for the surface than for down here.”

“Have you seen the surface?”

“Many times, yes,” he replied.

“Can you take me there–or show me the way?”

“I can,” he said. “Though the method is unreliable.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m going to make you ethereal, and you will ascend as rapidly as smoke through the passages of the Cathedral tower.”

“Spiritually?”

“What difference does that make?”

“No, I’m serious. Am I going there in person, or are you just sending my spirit up to have a look around? I’ve heard enough about your beliefs that I have to say I’m not sure I trust them.”

“My beliefs?” he asked. “My beliefs? Do not infer what I believe from the superstitions of residents of Kingsbarrow. I will send you to the surface both physically and spiritually–because there really is no difference between the two. The Kingsbarrowers seem to think otherwise, and there’s not a hope of convincing them. I gave up on that long ago, and they gave up on understanding me. I am still their spiritual leader, though, and they do their best to understand me in their own cramped way. But if it’s spiritual, then it not only exists for real in the world, but it is the very most important thing the world. But if it is immaterial, though, it doesn’t exist, spiritually or physically. You take your pick, but you can’t have one without the other.”

A light went off in my head. I passed him one of our secret signals, a powerful and unsubtle one. He responded in kind–and I knew, even more than I knew when I stood before the Prudent Predator–that the Grand Curate was a friend. I could trust him. He looked piercingly into my eyes once more.

“Why didn’t you say that you were one of us?”

“I’ve been burned before,” I replied. “It seemed best not to take any chances.”

“All life is a chance,” he said.

“Sure. And it all ends badly, too, right? Well I’m too young for that yet.”

“I suspect you will still be too young at seventy.”

“Fair enough.”

“So how do you propose to get me out of here?”

“We will make you ethereal, as I said. Your body will pass through the columns, and the worked stone, and the bedrock. It will flow through underground streams, and prehistoric refuse heaps, and the fossilized remains of the beasts of legend. It will seep through the topsoil and emerge precisely where you wish to be.”

“It sounds too good to be true.”

“I’ve done it many times myself. And I suppose that it won’t help you, will it, if I tell you that all life is a risk, and that he who hesitates is lost?”

“Won’t help a bit.”

“Consider your options then. For my own benefit, what are they?” I sighed and began.

“I could go back the way I came, where I would be attacked instantly by two strong men and an Avatar with a serious and unavenged grudge against me. Or I could travel back out the gate where I entered, head upstream, and make for parts unknown. I used to think that it probably led to a bunch of privies, but after seeing Kingsbarrow, I’m inclined to think that it goes somewhere rather worse.”

“You would not be wrong.”

“May I ask?”

“Trust me, it’s worse than having to face an angry Avatar with a grudge,” he said.

I gulped.

“And that brings us to choice number three: Become ethereal.”

There was a long pause where neither of us said anything.

“I’ll do it.”

“Then you will come with me,” he said. And he walked toward the back of the room, where a bead curtain separated the humble space from whatever lay beyond.

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