Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
As easy to kill as to be killed, he thought. Ulanda's fear, and for an instant, he
saw her and Poss a'ltic in a garden, a stone building rising before them. A child -
she ran like a storm driven wisp of cloud across the grass. This grass was as
damp under him as that would have been; he'd sat down quite suddenly. The
green sky, the green ocean. They looked strange again. In his borrowed fear, he
had taken the only familiar left him, that of being himself.
“Cassa?” he asked. “Was all this just to change her mind?”
The mountain was gone. As far as he could see in any direction was grass.
Waves of grass, an ocean of grass and a sky as green. He thought if he looked
too closely at the sky, it would be grass as well.
He held the spray of flowers to his nose. His hands, his own skin. “Oimit's
dead. I followed her here, as I did Simitta. Tu'pin saved...” What had he saved?
In his hand, the stem had become two beads. “I'm the wrong person to be asking
or answering questions.”
“Questions. Answers.”
Was it the wind? He turned his head, heard nothing more and continued. “The
questions and answers seem to be half in dreams and I seem to be content to sit
and wait in a dream while other people plan and still more die.” The beads were
flowers again.
Wind stroked the surface of the grass, light moved in a ripple from bright to
bright, moved in a wave that crested. He felt the warmth of her body next to his.
“There's a story,” she said, looking at the meadow as the sun played catch with
the wind.
In her hands was the white scroll, the wind unrolled it, he caught one free
edge and then the roll bar at the top. Carved fishes on the bar, each with a very
large head, the skull rising to a dome. Would the story be changed as much as
the roll bar?
“I've read it,” he said. She waited without speaking so he gave what he
thought the story had meant, adding the most likely translations of the oldtongue
ideographs.
She let him finish. “You make it very complicated.” One finger touched the first
drawing on the front then moved to second of the pair on the other side. “It's
only a love story. They almost all are. This form here...” She touched the first
again. “... see how the line changes... no, feel it.” She guided his hand. “And
this...” The other now. “And the linking symbols... here and here, where they are
the same. The modifiers define the time scale... it's not linear, but moves with
the other lines.”
He could fall into the lines he touched. “How small could I go before reaching
the end of these?”
Cassa laughed, leaning against his shoulder. “Wherever you look, there the
whole story exists. It's non-locational, the act of your looking brings it into place.”
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca