Radio Sphere Read Online Free PDF Page B

Absolutely certain. Those monsters have no food here.”
    I slowly wandered a few paces while gazing around, “aren’t we his food?”
    “Oh no, no, no. Of course not. They eat the ruin.” It’s stature was amorphous as it pulled a human corpse out of a plastic tube and brought it to the table, posing it in a seat. I felt as if I must’ve been dreaming, but I knew I was awake.
    “Why did that thing chase me?”
    “To kill you. You startled it. Perhaps it thought you were hunting him. Creatures, they have instincts,” it hoisted another corpse from another tube, sitting it in another chair.
    “It was never this dangerous before.”
    “Well, it isn’t “before” now, is it?”
    This creature did not seem dangerous, but when I saw how he handled the corpse with ease and whimsy I knew he could be malignant. He was some kind of powerful hermit beat—brain or beat—brain god.
    “What is your name?”
    I told him my name, he told me he has had many names since the start, “I am from and of the earth. I come from far out,” but I could call him Iktomi; Iktomi was male, or the creature’s all—at—once—ness disguise had given up, or decided, and presented me with one solid and consistent image. A tall, hunched man, only slightly older than myself, with brown hair like mine reaching down below his knees. “It is all rather simple if you can see all of human time. You won’t have to worry about any of that for awhile yet. Maybe you’ll be ready in the future. I’m not sure. I’m really rather uncertain. Good luck. You, well, you I like.”
    “What are you preparing for?” I asked knowing all along he saw nothing wrong or strange with how he handled the bodies, that if I offended him I might become one— a prop— and that his power so exceeded my own that once I entered the glen with Iktomi I would never be in control again.
    Iktomi was more interested in cleaning dishes with his button—less, open sleeve, then he muttered: “When there are clouds in the sky, and they are all brown, always brown, you may be sad, but remember they’ll soon pace away.”
    “Okay…”
    “Look—” he gestured around the glen, “do you see the point?”
    “What is the point?”
    “—not everything has a point. For example, a pencil is pointless.”
    “A what?”
    “Never mind, well, I want to know a ploy to distract us— There are apples, right there, on that tree.”
    On the table appeared a whittled porcelain tree with the largest apples I’d ever seen almost crying off the branches. Twice the size of the ones Saraswati grew, the apples were dark red and every shade till light yellows emerged. I quickly began to devour one from each hand.
    “Yesterday was the perfect day to be lonely,” Iktomi started, “but today it seems companionship is in order. This transient form is nothing more than a nodule. You are only a piece of what you think of as ‘self.’“
    I ate.
    “Each ‘individual’ is nothing more than a non—periodic signal, a decaying signal, we are but an effect produced outside of the mind.”
    Apple after apple, it felt like a trance as I focused on Iktomi’s words.
    “We are on a journey, an experience, to new realms of thought. The scope and content of the experience is limitless.”
    As I ate I felt strange.
    “Turn on! Think for yourself.”
    All of a sudden my entire
waking life
    seemed to be a dream,
    then a terror,
    then not mine
    I was laughing and crying in turn about
    it all, then moving on, instant after instant a new life.
    I felt as if my body was filled with air instead of blood, like I could float and if I tried to hum I would, I could, but I didn’t.
    I tried to stay on the ground,
    the moment passed like
    ripples
across
a pond
    I got scared I missed it forever—
    cursed to walk the land as I always had, blood bodied. I felt like all of life
    is some kind of careful balance between holding back
    letting loose
    just enough
    to keep from destroying
    butterfly wings with