WHAT IS REAL

As Piper led me out across the meadow, I asked, “So where are we, really?”

“What?”

“This forest. Are we even outside of the city, or am I still just lying in a service tunnel somewhere, on some mind-control drug, dreaming all of this?”

She looked back at me strangely. “I’m curious: what makes you so sure this isn’t real?”

“Seriously?” I looked at the sky. “You’re right, the light really is lovely here this time of day. Can you tell me where it’s coming from?”

She looked up too then, and blushed. “Oh. …Right. I forgot.”

I ran a few steps to catch up with her. “You guys can maintain all these millions of perfect little details, and forget about the sun? How does that work?”

“No one forgot the sun!” she said, crossly. “They just chose not to put it there—for very good reasons. I’ve gotten used to it, okay? Do you remember air every time you breathe?” She looked back as I came to a halt. “Now what’s wrong?”

The phrase, They just chose not to put it there. Yes, I’d noticed the missing sun hours earlier. And still, my brain had been clinging to the expectation of some more plausible explanation. “So…all this really is just…some illusion?” I asked quietly. “All of it? What kind of mind can even be conscious of this much detail, much less keep track of—?”

“I didn’t say all this was illusion,” she cut in. “You’re still getting it wrong—seeing just one question where there are many, applying just one answer to all of them, instead of—”

“Is this fake or not?” I demanded. “What’s so hard about that question?”

“Nothing,” she said patiently. “It’s a very simple question. The sort conjured up by very simple minds—and the wrong one entirely. We went over this, this morning.” She pointed to the stand of trees we had just come from. “Those are all what you call ‘real.’” She waved her arms around the clearing. “Every plant you see up close here was grown from twigs and roots, spores or seedlings, as in any other garden. Every animal you find here is as ‘real’ as you are. The water here is water. The rain here is rain. The clouds that rain comes from are manufactured—which doesn’t make them ‘fake’ either. They are still clouds. The farther spaces here, however, are almost entirely illusion.” She pointed to a distant, tree-covered ridgeline. “You’ll never reach that hill, however hard you try. But not even ‘illusion’ means ‘fake’ to us. What we’re walking through here is an enormous, priceless work of art, Matthew. Our art. Does art equal fake where you come from?”

I stared at her, then shook my head, feeling vaguely ashamed—yet again.

“So,” she said, “if I wave at all of this, and ask you if this place is fake or real…”

I looked down, defeated. “Yes…and no.”

She nodded. “We recognize many different kinds of ‘real.’ This is how you must learn to think now, Matthew. Not just, ‘What’s the question here?’ but, ‘How many questions are there here? And how many other questions might those be composed of?’ Your life, not to mention ours, may depend on that ability.”

“Then…we’re doomed.” I looked up at her, feeling more hopeless by the moment. “How am I supposed to learn, after a lifetime in some other world, to think that differently?”

Her smile was sympathetic. “Fortunately, you have a very malleable young brain now, as suited to learning as any other child’s. All children learn to ‘think differently.’ Only adults ever stop doing so. You are uniquely equipped, I think, to decide which you’ll be at any given moment.”

I could imagine Rain scowling down at me again. Stop whining, No Name. Did they have any idea what this was like for me? Piper had grown up knowing all about us. I had never heard of her kind, or their realities, until this morning. Was I learning to ‘think differently’ too slowly for her? “So,” I sighed. “What good reason did they have to leave the sun out of this sky?”

“We didn’t want it in our eyes,” she said, setting off again across the meadow. “Ever try to watch a sunset or a lovely dawn without having to blink spots away for minutes afterward? If I wish to follow a hawk in flight here, I need never lose it in the glare.” She shrugged at me. “As I said, Art.” She looked wistfully around the clearing. “And history, and...” She stopped again, and turned to look at me; a long, considering, quite unnerving look. “Come on. There’s something here…I want to show you.”

I hurried to keep up, in silence at first, my mind a-swirl with the implications of all she’d just said. But as we approached the meadow’s far edge, I remembered how little time we had. “Is it all right to ask more questions while we go wherever you’re taking me?”

“Of course,” she replied without looking back or slowing as we headed into the woods. “Though my answers may just bring you further frustration.”

“Right. So, if the sky here is art, then, is the real sky just still there above this one, or…are we inside of something else here?”

She was silent at first as we passed between tree trunks of more and more impressive girth that made me wonder just how long ago this garden had been planted. “I don’t want to keep being evasive,” she said finally, “but I’m really not allowed to tell you anything about where this is.”

“Okay.” If I just kept asking questions, she would surely have to answer one of them. “Then, who keeps this forest…running?”

“It keeps itself,” said Piper. She looked up into the ancient trees, drew a deep breath, and released an even deeper sigh. “We are able to…project illusions in several different ways. We can do so directly, with our minds, as I did this morning in the room where we had breakfast. We have a name for that ability; the closest word in your language is ‘singing.’ Our minds can sing to other minds. But singing anything elaborate requires far too much energy and focus to sustain for long, and can only be done at all where we’re physically present. On many occasions, we need a song to continue even in our absence. The hidden doors you’ve encountered today must remain invisible to any but those meant to see them even when we aren’t there to cast the song. So, we’ve invented ways of investing songs in various objects or materials, to be…played mechanically, I guess you’d say, either upon command, or continuously until removed or stopped. The view you saw through those windows this morning is created that way.” She waved at the woods through which we climbed. “This forest is half made of such devices, added and refined over time, which maintain all its illusory aspects, and some of its tangible ones as well, without anyone’s intervention. The rest is done by gifted gardeners. Very few of us have anything like sufficient power to sing anything like this for more than seconds. And those few have far more urgent things to do with such ability.”

“Unbelievable,” I murmured.

“Why?” she asked. “Your kind makes all sorts of recordings and moving images. Can they not be broadcast over distances or huge surfaces? Don’t they last for years after their creators have gone, playing upon command, or looping endlessly? Our devices are no different.”

“I think they are,” I said under my breath. This place made any virtual reality tech we had yet invented seem like cave painting. “So, is that what your mother did to me this morning?” I asked, timidly. “Sing at me until I forgot to ask my questions?”

“I am certain she had no such intention,” Piper replied softly. “For whatever comfort it may give you, even most of our own kind experience similar effects in her presence. Her ability to sing—the power of her song itself—are so great that they bend everything around her unless she works quite hard to prevent it. She…would have been careful to project The Lady she wanted you to meet, in that moment, but…” Piper fell silent, seeming at a loss for words.

“Does that mean she…isn’t really who she seemed to be?”

Piper shook her head. “My mother is no liar. Ever. …How am I to explain this?” She gazed intently at the ground in thoughtful silence as we passed dappled beds of bluebell and buttercup toward a mossy footbridge over yet another tumbling brook. “Singing is no longer something that my mother merely does,” Piper said at last. “She has become the song. She swims in it—and the separation of swimmer and sea grows ever thinner. She is the definition of her realm. It is an extension of her, the sum of everything she might be, while she is everything that it is. Whoever or whatever you met this morning was true. I’ve no doubt of that. But she…was doubtless careful to make sure you met only the specific truths there was cause for you to meet, at that moment, in this situation.” She looked back at me. “Does that clarify anything?”

I tried to sort it through, and finally shook my head.

Piper nodded in obvious resignation as I followed her across the brook, and we started up a set of steep switchbacks beyond it.  

“At first this morning, I was confused,” I said, “because she didn’t look like the woman I met in that alleyway. So she just stood up and…shook herself off like a coat, then shrugged on the woman I saw last time. …Was either of those what she really looks like?”

Piper responded with a brief, sad, barely audible laugh. “Both of them,” she said. “And whatever countless other forms The Lady’s song requires. They are each as truly her, and she is all of them.” Piper slowed down, and turned to face me again. “But the will inside them all is one, and clear, wise and well intentioned, Matthew.” She looked back to the path and sped up again. “The Lady’s appearance this morning is the one I’ve seen most often since my birth. The one I think of as herself, for whatever good that does you, or me.”

Not a single ‘yes and no’ for quite some time now, and I was only more confused and full of questions than before. “What about you, Piper? Are you choosing what to look like for me?”

“I am not The Lady yet,” she said cryptically, without turning as we reached the ridge top. “If you have other questions, perhaps we should move on.”

“Okay, but first, what about all those things Rain did this morning—down in the tunnels? That can’t all just have been illusion too. I mean, I felt some of those things. Someone even…” I aborted the remark, remembering how painful everyone seemed to find our attacker’s death. “Rain blocked those guys with fire and…I don’t know, lightning or something,” I said instead. “Why would others of your kind have let some…empty mental projection stop them?”

“Some of us are capable of songs that affect more than minds,” said Piper, as we started down the ridge’s other side. “Temperature, humidity, air pressure, electricity, magnetism and a host of other natural fields can be subtly altered, directed, even generated by such songs; with very physical results—as you saw.” A moment later, she said, more quietly, “You witnessed skill this morning that even we hold remarkable. If Rain wished to, he might well succeed my mother, someday.”

“Does that…bother you?” I asked.

“Only that he doesn’t wish to,” she replied.

Huh. I wondered what could be so awful about ruling Fairyland, that neither Rain nor Piper seemed to want the job. But that was a less important question—to me anyway. “So, all that strength and speed,” I said aloud. “Was that some kind of song spell too, or just incredible physical conditioning?”

She groaned. “Do you have any easy questions?”

“Like what?” I asked sarcastically.

“Normal boy questions?” she ventured. “Like, ‘Where’s my dinner?’”

“I already know the answer to that one. How about this: What’s your job at this thing tonight?”

“I will not be there,” Piper replied without a glance in my direction.

“Oh.” Her expression made it seem unwise to ask why.

“Rain’s strength and skill are exceptional, and he’s had extraordinary training,” she said as we reached level ground again. “The speed you’re referring to is…complicated to explain. As your own scientists are discovering, time is largely a product of the observer. Our kind are able to observe time more intentionally than your kind tends to.”

“Would it be irritating if I asked you what that meant?”

“No,” she sighed, “just pointless. But I’ll try to answer, if you’ll forgive another metaphor. As I recall, you hate those.”

I shrugged and smiled. “‘Hate’ seems a little strong.”

“Very well,” said Piper. “The hummingbird has no idea she is moving quickly. The tortoise doesn’t know he’s slow. Rain did not experience his speed the same way you did. Does that help?”

“…Not… really?”

“I didn’t think so.”

“So, can all of you do these things?”

She glanced back at me. “Few of us are like Rain, if that’s what you mean. I am nowhere near as skilled. There is something else you should understand. Stumbling into me was like running into the daughter of your president. If you were somehow scooped up and taken to the White House, it would be a big mistake to assume all Americans were like the people you met there—or that the president’s daughter had the same skill set as her secret service guards or the people on her father’s cabinet. Most of our kind are pretty ordinary folk with little or none of the training, or even the potential, that people here in my mother’s Keep possess. Our abilities have been dwindling for a long time now, and few of us are capable of much anymore beyond what you might call a knack or two.” She paused, then added sadly, “Some of our kind don’t ever even figure out they’re us.”

“Okay,” I said, “so…here’s an easy one, I think. You’ve told me you’re not actually fairies, but you’ve still never told me what you guys are. If I’m Andinol, is it unsafe to tell me what your kind is called—like it is with birth names, or something?”

“No,” she said. “I just…saw no reason to. We call ourselves Memphir Zharro.”

I wasn’t sure I could even repeat it. “What language is that?”

“One not even we speak anymore.”

“So…do you even know what it means then?”

“Our own name?” she scoffed. “Of course we do. It means, ‘the long dream.’”

I wanted to ask her why they were named that, but felt uncomfortably close to the ‘stupid question’ zone again. “Is that the same language Andinol comes from, and…whatever you called that place you took me to this morning?”

“Temanghath?” she said. “Yes. Those are all from the same ancient language.”

“If no one speaks it anymore, then how come you still—”

“English is full of foreign words, you know,” she cut in. “Latin, German, French, and half a dozen others. Do you speak any of those?”

“No.”

“And yet their words are scattered through everything you say. English is one of the biggest lingual mutts ever. Damn hard to learn for those of us who had to. I got off easy, being born here.”

“Are a lot of you from somewhere else?” This had not occurred to me.

“Of course. Many of us were born before this nation even existed.”

I leaned back in surprise, almost losing my footing. “Like who? …How old is Rain?”

“Three times my age, and still extremely young to hold such an important post.”

I had been sprinted through those tunnels on the back of a centenarian? “Is it something in the food you eat?” I asked no one in particular.

“It’s something in millennia of breeding and disciplined lifestyle,” she replied, as we began to scramble down a stony defile lined with moss and huckleberry bushes. “Try eating a little smarter, getting better exercise and sleep, and managing your stress differently—or at all—and maybe even your youth will last longer this time.”

“Right. …I’ll keep that in mind. …Can I ask how old your mother is?”

Piper gave me a sidelong glance. “A gentleman would know better, and The Lady never tells, but I do know she had more than a passing acquaintance with your William Shakespeare. And she was a queen already, even then.”

“Oh… Well…” I was stunned. “She’s looking pretty good, I’d say.”

“As if anyone would really know, including me,” said Piper. “Listen, we’re almost there, and I don’t want you thinking I fiddled with your brain or something to make you forget the other question you asked back at the cottage.”

“Right!” I said. “The problem of me. So, if your mother’s been around since before Elizabeth One, how can I be the biggest problem she’s ever had to deal with?”

“Oh, you’re not, by any stretch of the imagination. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be the one that finally brings her down. It’s the littlest things sometimes…”

“Fine. Size doesn’t matter. I’m okay with that. But why the panic then?”

Piper turned to face me, arms stretched wide. “This entire forest, centuries in the making, took far less power to achieve than turning one middle-aged man back into a real teenage boy would likely require—if such things were possible at all.”

“Well…obviously, it’s possible.” I spread my arms too. “She did this somehow.”

“I still hope she didn’t,” Piper said. “As we all heard this morning, I’m forbidden to speculate about this anymore, for some reason. But you are clearly proof of someone’s extraordinary power, and Anselm would be only too happy to insist that it was my mother’s.”

“Which…would be a problem how? Being accused of working miracles is usually a good thing in my world. The bigger the miracles, the better your rep.”

“You might want to ask your Jesus about that—or any of the ‘witches’ your kind has burned since he was executed. Either way, this is not your world, Matthew. Everything I’ve just been trying to explain to you, about our dwindling ability to sing, this forest and our increasing need of mechanical props and amplifiers to keep such tricks working; none of that is free. It all takes power. Power that’s in shorter and shorter supply these days.”

“Why?” I asked. “What kind of power?”

“That’s a different conversation which we have nothing like time to broach here. All you need to understand is that shortage of this power—which fuels and animates nearly everything we are and do—has become so great that many of our kind have grown resentful at how far their lives—all our lives—have fallen. My mother has imposed stricter and stricter laws—for very good reasons—about how what remains available may be acquired, distributed, and used. Anselm is only one of many who think her measures draconian, and her concern for your kind a misguided obstacle to our people’s freedom to recover what they’ve lost.”

“Wait. What does my kind have to do with it? We don’t even know you guys exist. How can we figure into—”

“We’ll get to that later as well. We’ve less than one hour left before you must be back and ready to meet Mikayl Stbrich, and…I really want you to see something first. So, please, just let me finish answering your question.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“Even if it could be proven somehow that my mother didn’t work this miracle herself, no one would believe that such a mammoth work of power had been granted her for free. If Anselm could find you, and knew what you were—what you’d been—he would use you in an instant to prove that, in this time of painful scarcity, made even harder by my mother’s laws and policies, she had wasted such immense resources at all, much less on behalf of an Andinol man—no matter whose life he had saved. Anselm already accuses her of feeding us to our oppressors. Your existence could seem to prove him right, and bring her down.”

“Oppressors, how?” I pressed. “I keep telling you, we don’t even know—”

“We’ve been over that as well. Your kind drove us into hiding to begin with, and has driven us back there every time we’ve peeked too far into the light. Having been forced to hide so well, for so long, that you’ve forgotten we exist at all will make extremely poor defense on this side of the line.” She gazed at me in silence for a moment. “That your kind has forgotten we exist would do nothing to protect them either, once my mother was overthrown. It would just make Anselm’s use of you that much easier.”

“Use of us? What the hell does that mean? You are intentionally not telling me some very big part of this story, and before we go one step farther, I want to know what it is.”

She looked away and frowned. “You’re right. I am. And with good reason.” She fell silent again, clearly thinking hard. “Matthew, please believe I am your friend—as are The Lady, and Rain, however they may seem to you. We wish you only well. I think you’ll need—and get—the answers to that question before long. But if I tried to explain that part of things to you right now, I am certain nothing good would come of it. You will just misunderstand the answer, to your harm and ours, until you know us better than you do. Which is why I’ve brought you here, to see what is just down this ravine. You’ll either get it, or you won’t. But no amount of further talking will help you understand a fraction of what I hope this will. We have so little time. Will you trust me just a little longer, and set this question down, for now?”

It was not her words, but what I saw in her face that convinced me. I wasn’t happy, but I nodded, hoping that what she was taking me to see would not turn out to be a pit trap full of sharpened stakes and poison spiders. Looking at her face again, I didn’t really think so, and curiosity had me firmly in its grip. “Lead on, Macduff,” I said sullenly.

“That’s wrong, you know,” she said, as we resumed our scramble into the ravine.

“What is?”

“Your quote. It’s ‘lay on,’ not ‘lead on.’ Well chosen, though. Your wit is rather sharp sometimes.”

“Thanks, I guess. If that was a compliment.”

“Not that I’m Macduff,” she added with a smile. “I promise, you’ll live through this.”

“So you have all of Shakespeare memorized as well?” I asked, a little wearily.

“As I mentioned, he’s among my mother’s favorites,” she replied. “She helped him write a number of those plays.”

“Of course she did.”

“You’re doing really well,” said Piper. “With all of this. Don’t take Rain too much to heart. He’s always terribly severe. But he demands most from people he assumes are capable of meeting his expectations, which is a compliment of sorts.” She looked back at me with some mixture of apology and encouragement. “He’s actually kind of impressed with you.”

“Is he, really?” I said, crouched down in nearly an inverted crab-walk now, as our route grew steeper. We were no longer on any visible pathway. “Hides it well, I have to say.”

“With me too,” she said quietly, turning back to the task of navigating our descent.

Our near slide down the gully ended at last at a narrow, shallow streambed lined with pale stones.

“This way. Just around that bend,” said Piper.

There was just enough shoreline between the water and steep ravine walls to allow us passage with dry feet. This did not seem anyplace that people might wander into accidentally. My curiosity grew about what we were here to see.

As we edged around a steep rock cliff face carpeted in ruffled fern and luxuriant moss, little yellow violets, and tiny but luminously green-leaved plants specked with white and lavender star-shaped flowers, the streambed widened suddenly into a deep, glassy green pool. At its far end stood the immense and twisted skeleton of a long-dead tree. Its warmly silver trunk was at least ten feet wide, curling upward, bare and barkless, into a crown of tangled branches arranged as lyrically as some work of arboreal music. I stared, wondering what such a tree must have looked like when it was alive. 

“Is that it?” I asked. “What we’ve come to see?”

Piper offered me an uncertain smile, and nodded as she beckoned me to follow her toward it. The closer we came, the larger it seemed, almost as if it actually expanded with each step we took. As we came to a halt before its gnarled base, Piper reached forward to touch the trunk’s almost polished face, and I knew even before her hand connected what would happen. Sure enough, a door appeared, nearly round. And carved, as always, with another of the ubiquitous tree designs I had seen on so many other doors that day. Was this the tree all those other doors referred to? What waited behind it? The Lady’s crown jewels? The lost ark of Indiana Jones?

“Didn’t Rain tell me not to open any doors?” I asked, not wanting her to get in any more trouble because of me.

“You’re not opening it,” she said; “I am.” She turned to face me. “Mother told you not to leave her chambers.” She waved at everything around us. “This is all her chambers, and what’s behind this door is at the very center of them. There’s no rule against showing you this. But it is sacred to us, and I am trusting you to share it in that manner. No jokes. No mockery. Here…I might find those difficult to forgive. Do you understand?”

I nodded, solemnly, more curious than ever.

She turned back to grip the handle, and pulled the door open.

Over and over, I kept thinking that nothing would surprise me anymore.

“That’s… How can…?” I took a step closer, bent down to peer inside more carefully, my mouth falling open, my mind balking. Then I stepped back, and further back, and several more steps to the side, until I could see far enough behind the tree to be certain I was not mistaken.

“Come in,” Piper said, gently, as if speaking to a timid child, or a frightened animal—both of which I guess I was just then, in a way.

“We can…go into that?” I asked. “It’s real?”

She stepped just inside the doorway, and looked back at me. “Nothing in our world is more real to us than this is, Matthew. This is our soul.”