The Unreasoning Mask Read Online Free Page B

was it occupied with

its own thoughts or with whatever went on under that impenetrable surface?
     
     
Though the glyfa had never hinted at it, Ramstan felt that the egg hid

inside it a world as thickly populated as a dozen planets. Within that

white compress was a seething, a ferment. Sometimes, he imaged a nest of

jam-packed writhing and hissing snakes, sometimes a multitude of angels

on pinpoints, sometimes snakes with angel wings.
     
     
More than once be envisioned a tiny sun hanging in the center of the

hollow egg. It glared down upon the curving surface, a closed infinity

of living sculptures a million times more intricate and extensive than

those on the exterior. Through them wandered a tiny old man, creator of

the egg-world, self-exiled, self-enclosed, nomadic and monadic.
     
     
Why did be see an old man there? Why not an old woman or a nonhuman male,

female, hermaphrodite, or neuter?
     
     
Ramstan thought he knew why. The adult tended to use the mental images

he'd lived with in childhood. He had been raised and educated in a Muslim

sect which was orthodox enough except for its focus on the mysterious

al-Khidhr. The Green One, talked of but not named in Surat 18 of the Qu'ran.
     
     
But al-Khidhr had been a figure of Arabic folklore long before Muhammad

became the voice of Allah. He was supposed by scholars to be, in fact,

Elijah, the Hebrew prophet. Certainly, many identical tales were

told of them, and they were often equated in the people's minds.

Late twentieth-century scholarship, however, had indicated that the

legends of al-Khidhr existed before Elijah had been born.
     
     
Ramstan didn't know the truth about the Green One nor did he care. When he

was a child, he had believed that there truly was at least one immortal

with magical powers. But, in his early adulthood, he had decided that

al-Khidhr was only one of the legion of folklore figures, no more real

than the Mulish Nasruddin, Paul Bunyan, or Sinbad the Sailor. He also

became aware that the Khidhrites had incorporated many of the elements

of that other mysterious person of Muslim legend, Loqman, with those

of al-Khidhr.
     
     
Still, though his mind denied its verity, his emotions, connected to

and powered by the child buried in him, were ready to evoke the image of

the Green One when the proper stimulus touched him. Within him, as there

seemed to be within the egg, an old man -- Melchizedekean pre-Muhammad,

pre-Kaaba, pre-Mecca -- wandered the lion-haunted, lion-yellow deserts,

coeval with Ishmael, that "wild ass of a man," when Ishmael was a senile

great-great-great-grandfather babbling of Ibrahim and Hagar and of the

lover of his youth, the divine Ashdar. The adult Ramatan classified

al-Khidhr as a myth, a symbolic figure, or an archetype fleshed only

in dreams.
     
     
But there was that puzzling and disturbing encounter, if it was such,

which he could not forget. . . .
     
     
He was a third-year cadet at the space academy at Sirius Point,

Australian Department, and on this day, the star pitcher, he was in the

ninth inning during a game against the University of Tokyo. The score

was 6-6, and he had just struck out two men. Next up was Jimmy Ikeda,

the best batter Tokyo had. Daishonin Smith had just stolen second. And

then, while Ramstan was winding up to pitch the first ball at Ikeda,

he had been stopped. A messenger from the commandant told him that he

was wanted immediately in the commandant's office.
     
     
Ramstan had been furious, then he became frightened. Only a few minutes

ago, the commandant had been in the first row in the section reserved for

the higher officers. Now he was gone. And what terribly serious event

had made him halt the game at this moment? Ramstan could think of only

one thing. He was numb as, still in his player's uniform, he hurried to

the commandant's office.
     
     
"Your father has died," the commandant said. A moment later, his mother's

stricken face was on the