A Map of the Sky by Rachel Rodman continued...
In time, the launch of the Castor-and-Polluxes became a perpetual backdrop, familiar to every plebeian. The cycles of it, Fire and Boom!, served as a sort of clock, which could be regularly consulted. The Roma-Greeks came to rely upon it: another naturally occurring measure, like sunrise or sunset.
Sometimes, on return, rogue Castor-and-Polluxes would land in unexpected places. The plebeians, gathering them up, would make pilgrimage to the cartographers' towers, in order to claim a reward for their recovery. These kinds of windfalls, in turn, inspired popular new folktales, in which a clever beggar might elevate his or her status, simply by remaining attentive to the sky. In the most unlikely of these stories, a lowborn protagonist might marry into the house of the Emperor. Or, almost as laughably, become an Arch-Cartographer. A trade in counterfeit Castor-and-Polluxes also arose, though few artisans succeeded convincingly at it, and the penalties were severe.
The Castor-and-Polluxes changed the culture in other ways. This was particularly true with reference to an understanding of conjoined human twins. At one time, such twins had been, at best, neutral curiosities. Now, they were regarded with a special reverence. They were thought, in particular, to be spiritually close to Janus, the two-headed god, who had since been officially coopted as the protector of the turtle-doves and as the cartographers' favored deity.
Twins of this sort often died very young. (This had always been true.) Now, though, priests would cluster about them, eager to be present during that brief intermediate period in which one twin was still alive. During special communion ceremonies, they asked urgent questions about what happened after death. "What do you see?" they demanded of the living one. Into the infant's little pupils, they stared intently, as if to read the truth in them.
Conjoined twins that survived to adulthood often became priests. In a spiritually ideal scenario, some wasting, decades-long illness would eventually overtake them. Thus afflicted, they would be able to articulate mystic experiences to their congregations. In the trance of it, these congregants would roll their heads and gibber in odd tongues. In shadows, that is, of the languages that Roma-Greek had obliterated. As if to say: "Ah, that is what Death is..."
Against this backdrop, one set of conjoined twins gained an exceptional prominence. (This became more true in the years after they had gone, and the details of their story had had the opportunity to settle. Or to grow. After what, that is, some would call their death, others their disappearance, and others their ascension.)
In the traditional story, the twins were born in a wooden shelter. Above their birthplace, a streak of turtle-dove eggs passed exceptionally close: white and lovely, like the ray of a star. An omen.
The birth's outcome, at first blush, seemed a tragedy. One twin was alive, and one was dead. Their mother laid the conjoined mass of them in a wooden trough, which temporarily served as their cradle. (Later, it was assumed, it would serve as their coffin.) A bit of cloth covered them, part blanket and part shroud. About them, the usual parade of interested priests assembled. "What do you see?" they demanded.
The twins possessed an unusual ability. They employed it from the start. In them, deadness pulsed from one to the other, back and forth. At one instant, one twin's little body possessed all of the diagnostic qualities. Limpness, greyness, stillness. Then, at the end of an additional pulse, these qualities shifted to the other twin. Left, right. Right, left.
In the decades that followed, the twins would retain-and perfect-this behavior. Often, they used it to dramatic purpose. In later years, when their legacy was constructed, this ability would be recognized as essential to them. A part of their Aura.
In those hours just after the birth, though, their mother and the priests did not notice it. At least not consciously. The pulse of it was, in fact, curiously timed, in a weirdly playful attempt to coincide with moments when others in the vicinity had blinked their eyes or looked away. Every few minutes, the priests were forced to slightly shift their heads in order to continue to direct their questions to the living twin. They felt increasingly muddled about this, suspecting that they were misremembering something fundamental.
In time, though, the twins began speaking. At first, it was just a whisper, or less than that. "Leave us..." the twins said. Or, more accurately: they took turns saying it. After each pulse, the freshly living one would turn her head and open her mouth. And at each repetition, it became louder and louder, until the priests could no longer mistake its source. (They had never expected to get a real answer to their questions; equally, though, they had not expected to be so aggressively denied one.)
The twins' tone was implausibly reverberant. Almost otherworldly. It would have seemed out of place in any human mouth. As it was, coming from a sickly newborn that was tethered to a dead one, it was deeply disconcerting. "Leave us! Leave us! Leave us!"
At top volume, a scream, it drove everyone back. The priests bowed stiffly, under the cover of some unconvincing pretext. Once outside, they fled. Their mother, also afraid, crouched in the doorway. And the twins, though still pulsing, fell silent.
Other groups, in the meantime, were also attracted by the twins' light. The most prominent was a host of conjoined farm animals. From distant regions, they made pilgrimage. Down the agricultural furrows they hobbled, arriving a few hours after the priests' departure. Above the freshly planted seeds, they compressed the dirt.
Once inside the shelter, the animals reverenced the twins. A two-headed sheep nosed-nosed at them. A set of doubled-up horses, joined chest to chest, gently abutted-abutted them. There were also goats: a petite, vestigial one, fused to the back of its larger sister, in the position of a passenger. And there were dogs and cats and ducks and hens and little mice and many others, waddling or rolling themselves forward, all paired into fused sets.
After touching the baby twins, the animals began to pulse. Not between life and death, as the babies did, but between states of conjoinment and separateness. The two sheep sprang apart, each with its own functioning half-body. Then, they came back to together again. Then apart, then together. At the next stage, they entered more intense states of conjoinment. The twin sheep glommed onto the conjoined goats, and these onto the conjoined horses, and these onto the conjoined pairs of dogs and cats and ducks and hens and mice, until they formed a single ring of flesh, sharing blood, by means of many uncoordinated hearts: thump, Thump-da-Thump, theee-ummppp. Then, just as suddenly, at the end of another pulse, they all detached from one another-Snap!-like many beads, spilling from a broken thread.
The ability to induce these changes would be an important part of the twins' eventual fame. When they were older, they would apply it to more meaningful ends. They would repair, for instance, naturally conjoined pairs that secretly wished to be separated, against the societal honor of it, as defined by convention. Or they would join naturally-occurring singletons, who wished to be joined, either as an expression of their deep love, or to aid the furtherance of some decades-long project, which required intimate scholarly collaboration, head close to head.
At other times, the twins would apply such fusions as a stern corrective. They might, for example, incapacitate two evil-doers by being tangling them up with one another, legs fused to legs, and thereby prevent them from completing some evil deed. With such a fusion, continued in the long term, they might also force the evil-doers to understand what it was like-or almost like-to be another person. Sharing fluids, sharing flesh. And what generosity and human feeling might mean, stemming from that.
Remarkable stories of this sort would frame the twins' lives. Equally extraordinary things would be said about their ends. To each of these known-or rumored-details, points of religio-philosophical significance would also be attached. For many people, the twins were a Savior, both alive and dead, whose eventual sacrifice, for the good of humankind, was physiologically implicit, even at birth. Death, entwined with life.
In later centuries, the twins' birth came to frame a prominent Roma-Greek holiday. During these celebrations, renderings of conjoined animals, which resembled the twins' early visitors, were displayed in the town squares. Non-historical details outlined these renderings: these included, for instance, flashing lights and glitter-based paints. Other renderings, joined into long loops, served as jewelry. Clasped around the neck or wrist, they jingled subtly, whenever the wearer moved.
To commemorate the twins' first words, the people sang "Leave us! Leave us! Leave us!" These renditions were significantly re-choreographed, with an ear to contemporary tastes. Though the final verses were loud, and then louder, no one was frightened by them.
At festival mealtimes, the plates were set with lesser breeds of turtle-doves, which were not cartographically useful. These were prepared belly up, boiled and glazed. Their flesh was also eaten out that way, layer by layer, down to the shells. Afterwards, their bones were scraped and reassembled, then used to enclose gift packages, which were set at the base of a ceremonial plant, in preparation for giving. Within the plant's branches, cascades of polished turtle-dove eggs were also artfully interspersed, like a backdrop of stars.
To these turtle-dove bones, living turtle-doves were also occasionally tied. They flapped and croaked and tried to pull away, until one or more of the celebrants took pity and decided to release them. About them, the young people clapped and cried: "Life joined to Death!"
Contemporaneous with this, the maps became much better. Within a few centuries, the soldiers were able to march into custom-built war ships, which had been adapted to ride through the intermediary blackness, rather than at sea. When they marched out again, the terrain was truly foreign. To this weird dirt-or, sometimes, an insubstantial gas-they delivered a traditional incantation: "I will kill you." The phrase hearkened back to an earlier time, when one's opponents were actual, ear-possessing humans, who could be intimidated, and not, as then, abiotic forces, whose taming would have to be chemical.
By that generation, of course, no living soldier had actually participated in a campaign like that. For them, "I will kill you" instead roused a nationalistic wistfulness, or perhaps a racial one. It required no specific memory.
In these alien landscapes, the soldiers terraformed, terraformed, terraformed. They worked light-dark cycle after light-dark cycle, where that was relevant. Where that wasn't relevant, they used other measures, which their own bodies supplied to them: heartbeats, or urination sessions, or periods of sleep.
In the end, they completed overhauled environments, in which farmers and merchants and storytellers and architects might conceivably settle. Not comfortably, maybe, but at least viably. In the grind of it, they generally employed more workaday chants, which always had been apropos, and always would be. A cheer, for every kind of conquest: "Roma-Greece! Roma-Greece! Roma-Greece!"
As the Castor-and-Polluxes continued to collect mapping data, the cultural stories, underpinning their name, also evolved. In most of the new versions, the ancient twins were conjoined, rather than simply fraternal. They were also increasingly depicted as sons of Janus, the two-headed god, rather than of Zeus. At the same time-not wholly independent of this-Janus and Zeus came to be conflated with one another, to the extent that they were sometimes designated with a single appellation. Zanjus. This conflation was probably assisted-or at least made to seem more rational-by the fundamental two-ness of Janus' nature. Fusion: cultural unit to cultural unit. Later, as evidence of this history, one of Janus'-Zanjus'-heads came to be traditionally depicted as more classically Zeus-ish than the other.
In this conflationary context, Castor and Pollux were themselves joined to another cultural thread, which they had originally inspired. That of the Savior. The latter had traditionally been understood as a pair of conjoined daughters. In the newer renditions, they, like Castor and Pollux, had also been fathered by Zanjus. In certain sub-renditions, Castor and Pollux, the Savior's conjoined brothers, had preceded the Savior in the role of prophets. In this view, Castor and Pollux's own generosity with one another-their communal attitude, that is, towards life and death-had simply served to presage the similar, but ultimately more excellent qualities of their younger sisters.
In still other variations, there had only been one set of twins. The sons were the daughters and the daughters were the sons. This view also had many sub-variations. In one, both twins were hermaphrodites. In another, they were sexless. In yet another, discrete qualities of maleness and discrete qualities of femaleness were pulsed back and forth between them, in just the way that their aliveness and deadness always had been.
This conflation, Castor and Pollux as Savior, may also have served as the inspiration for an additional set of advances in turtle-dove breeding. In the newest sets of eggs, each embryonic twin now lay partway inside the shell and partway outside of it. Life pulsed between the twins, back and forth, diluted-or rendered less readily apparent-by death. This enabled two things. First, both twins could now share the tasks of observation and recording. Second, modified by death, their development slowed to a rate that, by traditional measures, was scarcely perceptible. As a result, the Castor-and-Polluxes could persist for what, in the measure of the Roma-Greek Centrum, amounted to years or decades or centuries. Millennia, perhaps, as that became necessary.
With these advances, in turn, it became technologically possible to revisit an old dream. Or: to re-dream it. In it, the Roma-Greeks would force the collision of two symbols, to produce Symbol. The latter would be, to mere symbol, what Sky had first been to sky.
At last: Castor-and-Pollux, the service animals, might be tasked with mapping the route to Castor and Pollux, the stars. Two stars, which lay within a one-time arrangement-a constellation-which had first been defined when Roma-Greece was very young. The Gemini Twins.
In organizing this expedition, the cartographers relied on preliminary data, which hinted at the stars' relative positions. At first, these data were disappointing. In real space, it seemed, the two stars weren't conjoined. At least not in a conventionally physical way. In addition to this, they probably weren't even adjacent, as they had first appeared to be, when viewed from the Roma-Greek heartland. As, that is, a standard set of twins might reasonably be expected to be. They seemed, to the contrary, to lie at some great distance from one another. A very very very very great distance.
Still, it was too soon for resignation. The cartographers, in any case, would never have acknowledged such a condition, at least not with reference to themselves. They believed, instead, in fortitude. Which was different.
First: wait and see. It was possible, to begin with, that the turtle-doves would ultimately discover some long dark piece of connective tissue, snaking through the darkness between the two bodies. All that time, perhaps, a rope had existed to join the two stars: edge to edge, or heart to heart. Like proper twins.
Second: act. If such a connection were not found to exist, it might, at some stage, be engineered. Built out of some symbolic material, it might even be superior to a natural one. Fragments of old Castor-and-Polluxes, for instance, which had been used up in the service of the Map, might work especially excellently. Imagine it: bones and shell pieces and mummified flesh, shaped to create an extended body, through which the two stars might be literally linked.
And yet, better still-if reality were to be amended-the two stars might simply be pushed closer to one another. To perfect this symbolism, Castor might be sacrificed, prior to transport, so that it was an ashy hull: dead, dead, dead. Killing-assuredly-could always be managed, even if the object were a star, especially if the ingenuity of many soldiers were brought to bear upon it. "I will kill you" was, after all, the army's historical chant, and it would never be entirely dissociated from its old-time roots, in actual killing.
After Castor's sacrifice, the burnt-out shell of it might be pressed against Pollux. There would be a flare-up, yellow to yellow, as sibling touched sibling. A final consummation. Maybe it would be physically beautiful, in addition to being spiritually so. A living hull, interlaced with the ashy one.
Beneath this modified light, eggs from a distant generation of Castor-and-Polluxes would one day briefly warm, before being catapulted into the Sky.
There was an additional tradition, attached to all of this, which may not even be worth mentioning. It was a curious thing, though. Perhaps even a touching one. And the Roma-Greeks perpetuated it faithfully.
To every new outpost, in every time, a distillation of ancient Roma-Greece was exported. It was packaged as an incense. On their worktables, near the maps-in-progress, the cartographers burned it.
The scent contained many threads. In main, though, four were discernible. (1) Olives, through which the oils dribbled, absorbed into cloth. (2) Salt spray, from the First Sea, which carried particles from sea creatures, whose stink was the same, alive or dead. (3) Scraps of metal-or wood or bone-stinging to the nose, which were smashed from the Roma-Greek weapons, during sparring practice. And (4) a cloying smell, like ambrosia gone sour, signifying the decay of a god, or maybe a monster.
In the cloud of it, the cartographers worked. Sketching, retouching, imposing new names. Occasionally, just to rest, they set down their quills and inhaled. "Ah, Ah, Ah..." they remarked.