Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 305
numbers: charts, mathematical figures, geometric shapes. It
was beautiful, and nonsensical.
The most important part of it, he decided, was that this
ghostly vision apparently let him see with his eyes closed. Was
this how Calandria May had seen the forest when she lured him
away from the path, so many nights ago?
He stared at the wavelets, listening down the chain of
nested identities: lake, swell, wave, crest and ripple. Each
sang its identity only for so long as it existed. In water,
consciousness arose and vanished, merged and split as freely as
the medium itself.
Jordan had been raised to think of himself and other
people as having souls. Souls were indivisible. What he heard
happening out in the lake were voices that could not possibly
be attached to souls, because the very identities behind those
voices freely changed, merged, and nested inside one another.
Even the word beings couldn’t be applied to them, because it
implied a stability impossible for them.
"What are you?" he whispered, staring out at the lake of
voices.
I am water.
Over the next hour Jordan asked a few halting questions
of the lake, the sand and the stones. Few of the answers made
any sense. For the most part he sat with his head tilted,
listening to voices only he could hear. If Tamsin or Suneil
crept up to watch and sadly shake their heads, he didn’t care,
because he had taken a great secret by the edge, and he wasn’t
going to let anything stop him from grasping it entirely.
When he finally dragged himself back to camp, the
others were asleep. Suneil had offered to let him sleep in the
wagon tonight, but Jordan was too tired to make the effort, and
saw no point in disturbing them. He rolled himself near the