The familiar voice makes my soul jerk in purple annoyance.
Murmursome swims into eye’s range, continues his yellow affection and begins circling me.
I stop swimming, look into the simple soul of the simple ayom—look at the hairy body, the slick flat limbs, the long curved whiskers on the face—and say “No” and resume swimming.
“Aooowahammmm? rakk!” The affection is persistent.
“No!”
(Murmursome left me alone six days ago, and I want to return the hurt. So I choose to ignore him. “And besides,” my soul tells me, “this day is too important to be wasted in the foolish games an ayom always wants to play.”)
But murmursome’s soul continues its offer, its confusion at my rejection, its request that I stop to play.
And when I listen deeply to the ayom’s voice, I find something new and odd in murmursome’s murmurs.
“Eoomahh (soulove) rakk rakk mooow (deatherenow) rak rak (go)....”
...As if the dumb ayom had suddenly learned to use the clear images common only to the souls of euyom and my own kind.
No, the images are not very clear, their forms too faint, so I explain them away as simple echoes of my own soul’s depths. Such echoing is not uncommon, and the lies it tells are frequently confusing.
(“After all,” I tell myself, “my soul has been disturbed by the coming of the bigshinegray—and is therefore an easy prey to tricks and lies of the inner eye.”)
“No,” I repeat, concentrating on the direction of the nearest female in the euyom line to the island.
Murmursome refuses to give up. He darts around me, nearly brushing me, trying to catch my eyes’ attention.
I close my eyes and do not pause in my swimming.
The ayom pretends to shiver in soul’s flesh, but fails to capture sympathy.
“Go away.”
“Eoomahh (listen) rakk! (fishdance) aooowahmm (listen).”
“Go away!”
Murmursome departs now, and the heavy brown sadness trailing from his simple soul surprises me. The brown face of feeling seems more complex than an ayom’s usual sadness—perhaps it is only a lie from—
It makes me recall the many brown levels of Father’s soul. And in turn the brown levels make me remember the advice screamdeep often gave.
(Father would ask me: “Murmursome bothers you?”
(“His friendship,” I would answer, “is too persistent. If he would pale his rushing yellow more often, demand less of my own soul’s yellow, I would be able to enjoy his presence.”
(“Listen to me,” Father would say, with the only plea he ever used to me. “You must be patient. I am not alone in feeling that a secret of truest truth lies in murmursome’s kind. The wish is that I possessed the voice to give you that secret, but I do not, so you must manage faith in an unknown depth. Murmursome is an ayom, and the truth which so many souls have sensed hides in the pounding bond between ayom and men, and I pray to blood that you will chase the secret from itself before the day you find your death has found you....”
(“I do not understand,” I would say, objecting as every son objects to his father’s life. “How may a soul carry faith in a truth—truest or not—which it cannot know?”
(“You are being stubborn. I am asking that you treat murmursome with some kindness, because I fear that if you do not you will see yourself a sightless fool someday—the day you find the ayom’s truest secret opening to your older soul.”)
I reach out faintly, but the ayom is gone.
And now my body announces its hunger.
I could cover hunger’s voice with a plant-soul lie, and try to surprise any fish in the immediate area—but this would take time, and it is rarely successful.
I could swim to the distant bottom and pluck sponges from their rocks or soft crabs from their burrows—but this too would take time.
And the colors of the day urge: There is time only for swimming....
So I will continue swimming until my body bellows, refuses to move arms and tails. Otherwise the shades of nearing guilt would manage to taint any food I took time to find now.
Suddenly, in the next moment, the question becomes important.
An uiu soul, clashing purple, jumps to my inner eye.
This far from the bottom?
The uiu’s flow comes: “Ssssssssss....”
I hesitate, feel the uiu’s nearing, watch with soul’s eye as the animal feels my presence and stiffens.
“Sssk!” The flow changes to the rhythm of attack. “Ksss! Sssk!”
I do what is necessary, and the lies covers my truer soul quickly. The image of a wounded female ioe will work equally well against the smaller jaws of an uiu soul.
“Sssk?”
I hold the lie tightly around me, and it blurs the incoming uiu image as well as my own outflowing soul.
But with my face’s eyes I am able to see the uiu’s form of flesh as the animal nears.
The uiu arches its back and begins to move its forelimbs in circles to slow itself. Its small jaws continue to open and close, but its body has begun trembling in gray of fear.
“Sssk?”
The uiu’s eyes see me as an unthreatening yellowish gray body, but its soul is stronger, believing that an enraged bulk of teeth, talons and bleeding muscle lies before it
The uiu utters its submission: “Shhhhhh...,” and begins to turn away.
But it turns back. “Sssk!”
I’ve found in the ioe lie a current to unfortunate memory. I stumbled in the vision of Father’s day of death, and my lie weakened for lack of attention.
The uiu ignores its own confusion and rushes forward screaming.
Scream in soul and rush in eye shakes my place in memory—but screamdeep still embraces me, and the tease of death begins.
(Do I want to die in the same way Father died? Jaws that would equal those who took him...blood flowing from my body so similar to his....)
Abruptly the bigshinegray of expectation finds a voice:
“You may not die until you come to know me.”
Quickly I shake the motherly fingers of death from myself, and lift the lie
