Read Online Muezzinland by Stephen Palmer - Free Book Online Page B

lay hidden amidst a dense forest created by the spirits of the afterlife. As they walked through the forest's chill interior, their heat-dazed minds began to notice ephemeral shapes darting from leaf to leaf, from twig to twig, and from branch to branch in a dance of misty light that seemed like a horde of moths. These shapes were inhuman. All were symbolic, baroque pictsym evolved in those teeming complexes of abstraction that constituted the aether, others simple geometric shapes glowing with unearthly light. These symbols were the exuberant mental effluvia of fetishes left in the forest by the people of Ouagadougou. Many of these fetishes had transputer origin, and because they were left in self-energising statuettes, or in lizard skin pouches retaining their optical strings, and so remaining on-line, they evolved after the deaths of their owners in symbolic unison with the local aether, thickening Ouagadougou's electromagnetic ocean like fowl bones thicken a soup, until a necromantic environment appeared. This environment then acted in a strange loop upon the minds and culture of the town, in order to survive as a dynamic entity.
    Most of these fetishes were born of fear, some of evil, and so all exacted a price for their existence. Usually this price was energy in the form of blood red light, sent in pulses down the matted optical webs of the region, but some fetishes, those more powerful by reason of the exalted intellect or frenetic creativity of their makers, required a higher price. Those made by adulterers demanded precise descriptions of sexual dreams, including accompanying video footage, and these fetishes were especially active at dawn, entering the minds of susceptible men and women in the guise of these victim's real spouses. Some of these victims, however, had made fetishes of their own and deposited them in the forest, and so occasionally a self-reinforcing struggle would arise as if from nowhere, taking the form of an orgy, on one side the symbolic sexual desires of one person, on the other the equally vivid lusts of another. These symbol groups would wheel through the forest like glistening pink storms, until they became exhausted and disintegrated into wisps of cigarette smoke.
    Other symbol hierarchies were of a more exalted nature, reflecting the austere characteristics of their root fetishes. Most of the town's academics were suspicious of the theories of their colleagues, and almost all of them had fetishes made, usually in the form of transputers with animal characteristics. These fetishes engaged in symbolic jousting of a mathematical nature. Occasionally, while strolling through the forest, people would be surprised by flocks of equations, as the source transputers battled it out in search of ultimate wisdom. Some of these symbol hierarchies were dangerous; it was commonplace for traps to be laid in the form of regression codes. An unwary walker with a sufficiently sophisticated outlook could accept these codes into the mind by way of their biograin hierarchies, never then to return from infinite cycling. A few fetishes were so sophisticated they were themselves environments, aethers within the aether, though, without sensory equipment, lacking a self-symbol. Such abstractions achieved personality. They were the first entities to be born after death.
    So as the trio walked in wonder through the forest of Ouagadougou they felt they were being assaulted by an arcane ecology, split into a myriad of sensory forms, blurring reality, flickering in front of it, tinkling behind it. This made movement tricky. Often they tripped over twigs or brushed into branches, but at length they got used to the phantasmagorical display and found themselves able to sift reality out of the chaos.
    It was with surprise that Nshalla discovered a personal element to Ouagadougou. As they walked along the track leading to Chemin du Gourounsi, the road to the centre of town, she felt a presence at her side. At first she thought