Chapter Five: The Indigo
The Training Hall grew out of the Toabu-Ah’s central pylon like some square, metallic variety of giant tree fungus, emerging near the base of the column. Inside the building was an arena with thickly padded, white leather walls and a floor made of very dark, mahogany-like hardwood.
Dean began his
training here, which initially had nothing to do with the Indigo. He spent several weeks firming up his body,
toning and building his muscles.
Dean 2.0 was a much stronger, more streamlined Dean, a man with a beautiful and responsive body, a sharp and flexible mind, and, perhaps most importantly, a new purpose. Though, for the most part, he was still unsure exactly what that purpose was.
Two months into the process, Sid added various types of martial arts to Dean’s fitness training, making him wonder anew what the God of Pain had in store for him. Masters of several diverse fighting styles, techniques and weapons (from simple bladed instruments to complex projectile weapons) were brought in to extrude the latent warrior inside of the once-scrawny, undisciplined dreamer of a few short months ago.
Then again, he had no way to be sure if time was consistent here with earth’s hours, given what Sid had told him about the hyper-closets. It felt the same, though, through some intangible sense that was becoming more and more acute as the days advanced steadily like an army on the march, only breaking camp on the riverbank of his growing self-awareness when he slept. And even then his dreams often seemed to be leading him somewhere deeper into himself than he had ever been.
All of this and
still he had not received the first lesson pertaining to the Indigo. But, with the rise in knowledge of the true
nature of his identity came also an awareness of how close he was to being
prepared for the Indigo. He remained
eternally patient for that reason. And
one day he knew he was worthy of the gift of the Indigo’s power, but he didn’t
force it. He waited for
* * *
“You’re
focusing too hard on it,”
“I’m either focusing too hard or focusing too softly. I can’t seem to find a middle ground,” Dean replied. The fact didn’t frustrate him exactly, but it did bother him enough that his emotions stood in the way of further development, and he knew it.
“What you need is the perfect metaphor from your own experience. I will direct the Indigo to prompt a memory that will fit that need.”
“I guess I don’t have to ask then—”
“—if I’m an Indigite?” Sid interrupted. “I think you’ve known the answer to that all along. Why have you not asked before now if you weren’t already aware of it somewhere within you? After all, you behave as if you aren’t the least bit surprised.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right, Sid. Okay, do whatever you have to do.”
Sid touched the crown of Dean’s head so lightly with one of his spindly fingers that Dean could just feel the pressure at the very limit of physical sensation. At once an image in a newspaper popped into his head, and he felt both slightly exhilarated and slightly annoyed at what it was that had manifested as the “perfect metaphor.”
A curious expression came over Sid’s face.
“You have something, don’t you?” he said, “Something good.”
“Good? I guess so. On my world there’s a kind of picture game where a two-dimensional image has been altered by a computer and interwoven into a pattern. In order to see the image, you have to concentrate your vision in the distance, as if you were looking at a three-dimensional scene. Then, the hidden image will come into focus. Or so I’ve been told. I hate them. I’ve never been able to see shit.”
“‘Shit’ is a very interesting word in deep-speak. It suggests a multitude of meanings, including several profanities. I sense you did, in fact, intend for it in its profane sense?”
“Yeah, I did. I guess I need a break.”
“You should try again. You have the ability, but fear and doubt chain you to the wall of shadows. Renounce your fears—they’re useless now. Break free and turn around, face the truth that lies behind you.”
“Why does that sound familiar?” Dean wondered aloud. “Damn, you’re the reincarnation of Plato, aren’t you?”
Alpha Sidney grasped his student’s shoulder in a firm but friendly grip, the strength in his hand belied by his pencil-thin fingers, and looked solidly into Dean’s eyes with his own shiny black orbs.
“Please try.”
Not another word issued from Dean’s lips—he knew from the solemnity in Sid’s tone and the slightly threatening undercurrent in his teacher’s voice that he wasn’t taking his training seriously enough and that he was disrespecting the honored status that Indigites held.
He
relaxed and loosened his body, then made another attempt at visualizing the
Indigo. For several minutes he saw
nothing, and his thoughts began to wander, cycling through the faces of young
girls he had known: first, the achingly soulful face of the God of Pain, his
mood softening with the sight of her sorrow-laden gaze. Then, he saw the eager, elfin face of
A violet-hued mist, faint at first, drifted into Dean’s peripheral, but he ignored it, his thoughts following the train of little girls rolling backward through time. The next face he saw was that of Amanda, the girl from the school bus all those years ago, sweet and proud in her quiet way.
The Indigo was now a translucent curtain that covered everything in his sight, and still he was mostly oblivious to it. His mind’s eye, meanwhile, was still riding the tracks into his past. But the train stopped abruptly, arriving at its terminal, leaving Dean to linger on a portrait that hung in the air in front of him. H saw her, the girl from the painting and from the God of Pain’s tattoo, but she was a three-dimensional (if ghostly) image this time, almost real, almost . . .
Dean’s focus snapped back to reality, but the Indigo did not dissipate. It floated in tiny globules that occasionally collided and formed larger globes or pulled apart into smaller ones. They covered Sid like a million purple bubbles and formed a sheen over the door that lead into the training hall and over the picture window-sized mirror that hung on the wall at the far end of the room. And they were so thick around Dean himself he could barely make out anything through the unending stream of violet corpuscles passing before his face. He could wave them away for a few seconds, but they always returned.
He lifted his hands to get a better look at the Indigo, noticing that it was attracted to them like a magnet and flowed out of the air toward them from all directions.
“I see it! My god, it’s everywhere!” he shouted. “It’s amazing, Sid. Just amazing . . .”
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Dean watched the Indigo play, aqueous blobs chasing each other around the room and tentacled hydras juggling pieces of themselves, a veritable circus of the purplish-blue stuff taking pleasure in its own existence. The Indigo was almost . . . dare he say it? Alive! It was so lovely he felt like crying and laughing and shouting all at once, but he kept his emotions in check (incredibly) and simply observed, for well over twenty minutes.
“Congratulations,” Sid finally broke into Dean’s meditation. “You’ve reached the first level. Next lesson: learning to manipulate the Indigo. We will take that up tomorrow. Good day, Dean, and enjoy your newfound ability.”
“Uh, Sid? How do I turn it off now?”
His mentor chuckled and left without a word.
* * *
Dean’s training passed quickly, relatively speaking. In a matter of months, he had advanced faster than any other student in the history of Indigites, save two. One of them was Atilev Knorr XXVIII, who now retained control of the Order of the Purple Mind, the elite force of Indigites that protected the Toabu-Ah and served in various capacities in the deep army.
When Master Knorr learned of Dean’s acumen with the Indigo, he appeared at the training facility to watch the wunderkind and was instantly impressed. He wished to recruit Dean into the OPM on the spot and complete the young man’s training himself, but Sid was quick to point out that Dean was being groomed by the God of Pain for a particular mission and wanted him to serve directly under her, at least for the time being.
“The God of Pain will still have direct authority over him,” Master Knorr rebutted, “but why forbid him the companionship and expertise of his fellow Indigites?”
“I see your point, good master, but you should not forget that our beloved deity is in constant communion with the Indigo. She has never failed to make sound judgments concerning the Indigo’s interests.”
The old man conceded and spoke no more of recruiting Dean. He did continue to enjoy the spectacle of Dean creating intricacies with the Indigo that many Indigites who had been practicing their arts for years could not equal. One day Dean would be among the ranks of the OPM, Master Knorr decided. Of that he was fairly certain.
* * *
Dean held out the large amethyst crystal and willed the Indigo to emerge from its tip into the shape of a blade, then shifted his thoughts to the painting of the girl until every swirl of color, every brushstroke of her face came into perfect focus. The rest of the painting remained foggy and muted, but her face was all that mattered to him anyway.
The Indigo, as Dean came to understand, was intricately tied to memory, and it worked exponentially; the more he was able to recall, the more his control of the Indigo increased, and the more that control increased, the clearer his memories became.
Of course, memories were as mutable as the Indigo itself, but that was also important in some capacity to how the Indigo worked. He wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but he did know one thing—memories that had once disturbed or frightened him were beginning to change, shedding the tough, filmy layers of emotional residue that had accumulated on them over the years and altered them from their original shape and clarity, darkening them and weighing them down in his head.
As his consciousness climbed randomly over the details of the face he had begun to love, a deeper place in his mind concentrated on solidifying the Indigo blade into something more sustained and real, something that could do damage in the real world. Slowly it began to cast off heat, and Dean knew it had become a viable weapon, invisible to the enemy but deadly nonetheless.
Dean then surveyed the scene before him; he was in a large outdoor arena, where his training was being put to a test. With his Indigo sword aloft, he leaped into the midst of several mechanical targets that were set to attack him. His mission was not to destroy the equipment but merely disable it.
First, he took out a bolt discharged from a self-loading crossbow-shaped robot. The machine got off a second shot that Dean expertly dodged. A third fired low, narrowly missing his knee, but he saw his opportunity and jumped at the thing, shutting off its power button.
Next, he approached a device that swung two heavy iron balls on long chains, helicopter-fashion. The angle was not fixed either, so that the “propeller” wobbled on its fulcrum, sending the balls at him at random heights as he approached. A short antenna extended from the top of the axle, and this was his target. He ducked below a head-high arc of one of the balls and cut the antenna cleanly, then dived to the ground and rolled away as the rotation slowed and came to a halt, dropping the heavy spheres to the turf.
There were ten obstacles in all, increasing in difficulty, and he bested them all, though not without some injuries. A mechanism that fired miniature darts put one of its projectiles into his thigh, and his leg was now soaked in blood. Another machine, a kind of tight, shifting maze, jerked him off his feet and forced him to catch his fall awkwardly, causing him to sprain his left wrist. A laser had nicked his skull, singing his hair in a little streak and searing the flesh just below it. But all in all, he had passed with flying colors.
His injuries were easily repaired by Sid’s hyper-closet, and he was back in the training facility the following day.
“I think I’m almost ready,” he said upon entering the building.
Sid protested: “Oh, no, far from it. Now you must learn to use the real weapon, the one you were born to wield.”
“And what’s that?”
Sid had carried with him a rectangular matte black case about five feet long by two feet wide and perhaps eight inches deep. He set it on a small stand that emerged from the floor and popped the latches, opening the lid. Inside was an acoustic guitar of an unknown make and with some peculiarities to its design. It was gorgeous, stained such a deep plum it was almost black, and there was a brilliant-cut amethyst with its table mounted to the narrow top of the guitar’s head and its culet pointing out. The gem was mounted in an intricate silver setting with Art Nouveau-style tendrils of the precious metal branching off from the setting and vining around the guitar’s head and neck.
The body of the instrument was not too much of a radical departure from a standard guitar, at least, but it retained its own oddities. For one thing, the bridge was thicker than normal and appeared to be more . . . mechanical, and there were four tiny buttons across the back end of it. Also, the rosette was not a straight sound hole but more of a funnel that curved inward, which most assuredly would affect its sound.
Picking up the guitar, Dean discovered it to be lighter than any guitar he had ever held before, almost delicate—too light, in fact, despite the additional metal and decorative flourishes. Of course, he was much stronger now than he had been when last he’d held a guitar, but still, he could tell that this one simply was not of comparable weight to any earthly guitar.
“This can’t be very durable,” he told Sid. “I’m almost afraid I’ll break it.”
“It’s quite a bit more durable than you think, young man. Almost indestructible, you might say. It isn’t made of any sort of wood you are familiar with. It’s designed for battlefield conditions, after all.”
Dean shook his head in disbelief. “Who would carry such a beautiful instrument into battle? They’d have to be out of their mind.”
“A trained Indigite would. Out of their mind? No. Inspired? Yes. Though, there is little difference between madness and inspiration when you get down to it. Remember what I said earlier—there is no such thing as madness other than that caused by true brain damage. And even then, it’s debatable.”
“If you say so.”
“Well? Aren’t you going to play it?” Sid asked. “I know you’d like to. It’s been awhile, has it not?”
He handed Dean a bright purple guitar pick, taking it from a row of several identical picks sheathed inside little pockets in the interior of the case’s lid.
Without speaking another word, Dean picked and strummed the guitar, twisting the tuning keys until he had the correct configuration of notes. It didn’t sound so strange after all, but the music seemed to contain more power somehow, as if it pulsed with electricity just waiting to burst out at any moment. It energized Dean, and he played a wily, thumping rendition of Dave Matthews’ “So Much to Say.”
When he finished, Sid made a loud, clicking noise with his mouth that reminded Dean of a rattlesnake, except starting out low and slow, reaching a speedy crescendo, then falling back down to the slow, popping vibration it had begun with. Clearly it was a form of applause particular to Sid’s species.
“Excellent,” Sid assured his student. “You’ve given your new instrument a fine breaking in.”
“Mine? You’re kidding, right? No, you never kid. I’m . . . astonished.”
“Don’t be. You will need this where you’re going.”
“Which is?”
“Going to come all too soon,” Sid revealed. “Now, you will play it with the Indigo’s assistance. You know what to do.”
Certainly, he did. The girl’s face materialized easily in his mind’s eye, and he concentrated on it as he began to play a strange and unfamiliar song, but one that came naturally to him. A wave of ecstasy reverberated through his body, giving him a massive erection and making him drop the guitar, where it bounced against his feet, unharmed. It seethed and steamed with billowing drifts of Indigo in the warmest pink hues.
“Holy shit,” Dean muttered. “I-I feel like . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . .”
“There is no need. I’ve felt its equivalent, though my medium is not sound but light and space. I’m a holo-sculptor.”
“That sounds pretty cool. Would you mind doing a demonstration?”
“Another time. We must focus all of our energies on preparing you to meet the girl. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut your lessons short, in fact, though I hate to do it. You aren’t nearly ready. But there is a pressing urgency now. We have eight days before you depart for Josagra. Your training will be completed there, under the tutelage of Stel Gorveer, captain of the guard in Sorkeed.”
A troublesome realization hit Dean. “You won’t be coming with me, will you?”
“No, I won’t.”
Dean bowed his head and fought back tears. He and Sid embraced.
“Don’t worry. We will see each other again soon enough,” Sid assured him. “Now, let’s see what you can really do with that guitar.”