Becoming The Full Butterfly

by Brian W. Aldiss


The Great Dream was a  wild success, far beyond anyone's  imagining. Afterwards,
no one  recalled exactly  who had  chosen Monument  Valley for  its staging. The
organisers claimed most of the credit. No one mentioned Casper Trestle.  Trestle
had disappeared again.

So had much else.


Trestle was always disappearing. Three  years earlier, he had been  wandering in
Rajasthan. In that bleak and beautiful territory, where once deer had lain  down
with rajahs, he came through a rainless area where the land was denuded of trees
and animals; here, huts  were collapsing and the  people were dying of  drought.
Men, aged at thirty, stood motionless as scarecrows of bone, watching with  sick
disinterest as Casper trudged by; but Casper was accustomed to disinterest. Only
termites flourished, termites and the scavenger birds wheeling overhead.

Afflicted by the  parched land, Casper  found his way  through to a  mountainous
area  where, miraculously,  trees still  grew and  rivers flowed.  He  continued
onwards, where the rugged countryside began to rise to meet the distant grandeur
of the Himalayas.  Plants blossomed with  pendulous mauve and  pink flowers like
Victorian lampshades. There he met the mysterious Leigh; Leigh Tireno. Leigh was
watching goats and lounging on a rock under the dappled shade of a baobab, while
the bees made a low song that seemed to fill the little valley with sleep.

'Hi,' Casper said.

'Likewise,' Leigh said. He  lay back on his  rock, one hand stretched  above his
forehead shading his eyes, which were as brown as fresh honey. The nearest  goat
was a cloudy white like milk, and carried a little battered bell about its neck.
The bell clattered in B flat  as the animal rubbed its haunches  against Leigh's
rock.

That was all that was said. It was a hot day.

But that night, Casper dreamed a  delicious dream. He found a magic  guava fruit
and took it into his hand. The fruit opened for him and he plunged his face into
it, seeking with his tongue, sucking the seeds into his mouth, swallowing them.

Casper found a place to doss in Kameredi. Casper was lost, really a lost urchin,
snub-nosed, pasty  of face,  with hair  growing out  in straggly  fashion from a
neglected crew-cut.  Although he  had never  learnt manners,  he maintained  the
docility of the defeated. And he  instinctively liked Kameredi. It was a  humble
version of paradise. After a few days, he began to see it was orderly and sane.

Kameredi was  what some  of the  villagers called  the Place  of the Law. Others
denied it had  or needed a  name: it was  simply where they  lived. Their houses
stood on either side of a paved street which ended as it began, in earth.  Other
huts stood further up the hill, their decrease in size being more than a  matter
of perspective. A stream ran nearby, a little gossipy flow of water which chased
among boulders on its way to the valley. Watercress grew in its side pools.

The  children of  Kameredi were  surprisingly few  in number.  They flew  kites,
wrestled with each other, caught small silver fish in the stream, tried to  ride
the placid goats.

The  women  of  Kameredi  washed  their  clothes  in  the  stream,  beating them
mercilessly against rocks. The children  bathed beside them, screaming with  the
delight of being children. Dogs  roamed the area like down-and-outs,  pausing to
scratch or looking up at the kite-hawks which soared above the thatched roofs.

Not much work was done in Kameredi,  at least as far as the men  were concerned.
They squatted together in their dhotis, smoking and talking, gesticulating  with
their slender brown arms. Where they usually met, by V.K. Bannerji's house,  the
ground was stained red by betel juice.

Mr Bannerji was a kind of headman of  the village. Once a month, he and his  two
daughters walked down into the valley to trade. They went loaded with honeycombs
and cheeses and returned with kerosene and sticking plaster. Casper stayed at Mr
Bannerji's house,  sleeping on  a battered  charpoy beneath  the colourful  clay
figure of Shiva, god of destruction and personal salvation.

Casper was a dead-beat. He was now off drugs. All he wanted at present was to be
left alone and sit in the sun. Every day he sat on an outcropping rock,  looking
down along  the village  street, past  the lingam  carved from  stone, into  the
distance, shimmering with Indian heat. It  suited him that he had found  a place
where  men were  not expected  to do  anything much.  Boys tended  goats,  women
fetched water.

At first, an old nervousness attended him. Wherever he walked, people smiled  at
him. He could not understand why.

Nor did he understand why there was no drought, no starvation in Kameredi.

He  had a  sort of  hankering for  Mr Bannerji's  daughters, both  of whom  were
beautiful. He relied on their cunctative services for food. They tittered at him
behind  their spread  fingers, showing  their white  teeth. Since  he could  not
decide which young lady he would most like to embrace upon his rope charpoy,  he
made no advances to either. It was easier that way.

His thoughts  tended towards  Leigh Tireno.  When Casper  got round  to thinking
about it, he told himself that a kind of magic hung over Kameredi. And over  the
barelegged Leigh. He watched from his rock the bare-legged Leigh going about his
day. Not that Leigh was much  more active than anyone else; but  occasionally he
would climb up into  the tree-clad heights above  the village and disappear  for
several days. Or he  would sit in the  lotus position on his  favourite boulder,
holding the pose  for hours at  a time, eyes  staring sightlessly ahead.  In the
evening, he would remove his dhoti and swim naked in one of the pools fed by the
stream.

As it happened, Casper took it into  his head to stroll along by the  pool where
Leigh swam.

'Hi,' he called as he passed.

'Likewise,' replied Leigh, perfecting his  breast stroke. Casper could not  help
noticing that Leigh had  a white behind, and  was otherwise burnt as  dark as an
Indian. The daughters of Mr  Bannerji moulded with their slender  fingers goat's
cheeses  as  white  as Leigh's  behind.  It  was very  mysterious  and  a little
discomfiting.

Mr Bannerji had visited the outside world. Twice in his life he had been as  far
as Delhi. He was the only person  in Kameredi who spoke any English, apart  from
Casper and Leigh. Casper picked up a few words of Urdu, mainly those to do  with
eating and drinking. He learned from Mr Bannerji that Leigh Tireno had lived for
three years in the village. He came,  said Mr Bannerji, from Europe, but was  of
no nation. He was a magical person and must not be touched.

'You are  not to  be touching,'  repeated Mr  Bannerji, studying Casper intently
with his short-sighted eyes. 'Novhere.'

The two young Bannerji ladies giggled  and peeled back their skins of  plantains
in very slinky ways before inserting the tips into their red mouths.

A magical person. In what way could Leigh be magical? Casper asked. Mr  Bannerji
wobbled his head wisely, but could not or would not explain.


The people who flocked  to Monument Valley, who  had booked seats on  the top of
mesas or stood with  camcorders on the roofs  of coaches, had some  doubts about
Leigh Tireno's magical properties. It was  the publicity that got to them.  They
had been infected by the hype  from New York and California. They  believed that
Leigh was a messiah.

Or else they didn't care either way.

They went to Monument Valley because the notion of a sex change turned them on.

Or because the neighbours were going. 'Hell of a place to go,' they said.


When the sun went down, darkness embraced Kameredi like an old friend, with that
particular mountain darkness which  is a rare variant  of light. The lizards  go
in, the geckos come out. The  night-jar trills of ancient romance. The  huts and
houses hold  in their  strawy palms  the dizzy  golden smell  of kerosene lamps.
There are roti  smells too, matched  with the scent  of boiled rice  teased with
strands of curried goat. The perfumes of the night are warm and chill by  turns,
registering  on the  skin like  moist fingertips.  The tiny  world of   Kameredi
becomes for an hour  a place of sensuality,  secret from the sun.  Then everyone
falls asleep: to exist in another world until cock crow.

In that hidden hour, Leigh came to Casper Trestle.

Casper  could  hardly  speak. He  was  half  reclining on  his  charpoy,  a hand
supporting his untidy head. There stood Leigh looking down at him, with a  smile
as enigmatic as the most abstruse Buddha.

'Hi,' Casper said.

Leigh said, 'Likewise.'

Casper struggled into a sitting position.  He clutched his toes and gazed  up at
his beautiful visitor, unable to produce a further word.

Without preliminary, Leigh said, 'You have  been in the universe long enough  to
understand a little of its workings.'

Supposing this to be a question, Casper nodded his head.

'You  have been  in this  village long  enough to  understand a  little of   its
workings.' Pause. 'So I shall tell you something about it.'

This seemed to Casper  very strange, despite the  fact that his life  had passed
mainly surrounded by strange people.

'You mustn't be touched? Why not?'

When Leigh's mouth moved, it had its own kind of music, separate from the sounds
it uttered. 'Because I am a dream. I may be your dream. If you touch me, you may
awaken from  it. Then  - then  where would  you be?'  He gave  a tiny cold sound
almost like a human laugh.

'Ummm,' said Casper, 'New Jersey, I guess...'

Whereupon Leigh continued with what he  had intended to say. He said  the people
in Kameredi and a few villages nearby were a special sort of Rajput people. They
had a special  story. They had  been set apart  from ordinary folk  by a special
dream. The  dream had  happened four  centuries ago.  It was  still revered, and
known as the Great Law Dream.

'As a  man of  Kameredi respects  his father,'  said Leigh,  'so he respects the
Great Law Dream even more.'

Four centuries  ago in  past time,  a certain  sadhu, a  holy man,  was dying in
Kameredi. In the hours before his death,  he dreamed a series of laws. These  he
was relating to his  daughter when Death arrived,  dressed in a deep  shadow, to
carry him away  to Vishnu. Because  of her purity,  the holy man's  daughter had
special powers, and was able to bargain with Death.

The holy man's spirit left him. Death  stood over them both as the woman  coaxed
her dead father to speak, and to  continue speaking until he had related to  her
all the laws  of his dream.  Then a vapour  issued from his  mouth. He had cried
out. His  lips had  become sealed  with the  pale seal  of Death.  He was buried
within the hour: yet even before the prayers were chanted and the body interred,
it began to decompose. So the people knew a miracle had happened in their midst.

But the laws remained for the daughter to recite.

Her head  changed to  the head  of an  elephant. In  this guise  of wisdom,  she
summoned the  entire village  before her.  All abased  themselves and fasted for
seven days while she recited to them the laws of the Great Law Dream.

The people had followed the laws of the Great Law Dream ever since.

The laws guided their conduct. The laws concerned worldly things, not spiritual,
for, if  the worldly  matters were  properly observed,  then the spiritual would
follow.

The laws taught  the people how  to live contentedly  within their families  and
peacefully with each other.  The laws taught them  to be kind to  strangers. The
laws taught them to  despise worldly goods of  which they had no  need. The laws
taught them how to survive.

Those survival laws had, of all the laws, been most rigorously followed for four
centuries, ever since the sadhu was taken by Death. For instance, the laws spoke
of breath and water. Breath, the spirit  of human life, water the spirit of  all
life. They taught how  to conserve water, and  how a little should  be set aside
for human use every day, so much spared for the animals, so much for plants  and
trees. The laws taught how to cook with the best conservation of fuel and  rice,
and how to eat healthily, and how to drink moderately and enjoyably.

Speaking  of moderation,  the laws  declared that  happiness often  lay in   the
silence of  human tongues.  Happiness was  important to  health. Health was most
important to women, who had charge of the family cooking pot.

The laws spoke  of the dangers  of women bearing  too many children,  and of too
many mouths to be fed in consequence.  They told of certain pebbles to be  found
in the  bed of  the river,  which the  women could  insert into  their yonis  to
prevent fertilisation. The smoothness of the stones, brought down from the snows
of the Himalayas, and their dimensions, were minutely described.

Nakedness was no crime; before the gods, all humans went naked.

Behaviour  too  was  described.  Two virtues,  said  the  laws,  made for  human
happiness, and should  be inculcated even  into small children:  self-abnegation
and forgiveness.

'Love those near you and those distant,'  said the laws. 'Then you will be  able
to love  yourself. Love  the gods.  Never pretend  to them,  or you will deceive
yourself.'

So much for-the spiritual part. Instructions on the way to bake chapatis took up
more time.

Finally, the Great Law Dream was clear about the trees. Trees must be conserved.
Goats must not  eat of trees  or saplings, or  be permitted to  eat the smallest
seedling. No tree  less than a  hundred years old  must be cut  down for fuel or
building material. Only the  tops of trees, when  they grew over six  feet high,
might be used  for this: in  that way, Kameredi  and surrounding villages  would
have  shade and  a good  climate. Birds  and beasts  would survive  which  would
otherwise perish. The countryside would not be denuded and become a desert.

If the people looked to these laws of nature, then nature would look to them.

So spoke the sadhu in his hour of departure from this world. So said the head of
the elephant, echoing him.

As Leigh  Tireno spoke  concerning these  matters, he  seemed to  become, as  he
claimed he was, a dream. His eyes  became large, his eyelashes like the tips  of
thorn bushes, his simple face grave, his lips a musical instrument through which
issued musics of wisdom.

He said that ever since the holy  man's daughter gave forth the Great Law  Dream
through her  blue elephant's  head, the  people of  Kameredi had  followed those
precepts scrupulously. Nearby villages, having heard the laws, had not  bothered
with  them. They  had denuded  their woods,  eaten too  greedily, begotten  many
children with greedy mouths. So the people of Kameredi lived happily, while less
disciplined people perished, and passed  away, and were forgotten on  the stream
of time.

'What about sex?' Casper asked.

And Leigh answered calmly, 'Sex and reproduction are Shiva's gift. They are  our
fortification against decay. Like Shiva, they can also destroy.' He gave  Casper
a smile of  sorrowful beauty and  left the Bannerji  house, walking out  lightly
into the dark. The night-jar  sang to him as he  went his way. The night  itself
nestled on his slender shoulder.


'You  want to  promote an  event where  two crazy  people sleep  together?'  The
question was asked incredulously in a publicity office in New York. Fifth Avenue
in the high thirties. Sale time again in Macy's.

'Are we talking hetero, gay, lesbian or what here?'

'Have they figgered out a new way of doing it? A short cut or something?'

'Forget it, you can see people screwing back home every night, in the safety  of
your own apartment.'

'They don't only screw, these two. They plan to have a very basic dream.'

'Dream, did you say? You want us to rent Monument Valley for some fucking queers
to have a dream? Get the fuck out of here!'


Leigh was climbing naked  from the pool. Little  rivulets of water ran  from the
watershed of his back down the length of his long legs. His pubic hair  twinkled
like a spider's web loaded with  morning dew. Casper could hardly bear  to look.
He trembled,  unable to  make out  what was  wrong with  him. When  did he  ever
experience such desire?

Looking in the grass to check no  leeches were about, Leigh folded himself on  a
rock. He squeezed water from his  hair with one hand. Sighing with  contentment,
he closed his  eyes. He turned  his faultless face  up to the  Sun, as though to
return its rays.

'Really, you are a  mess, Casper. This place  should help you to  get better, to
mend - to be at peace inwardly with yourself.'

It was the first time he had spoken in this fashion.

"Those dream laws,' Casper said, to change the subject. 'They're a lot of Indian
hokum really, yep?'

'We all have  a sense at  the back of  our minds that  there was once  a golden,
primal time, when all was well with us - maybe in infancy.'

'Not me.'

'The Great Law Dream represents such a time for a whole community. You and I, my
sad  Casper, come  from a  culture where   all -  almost all  - has  been  lost.
Consumption  instead  of communication.  Commercialism  instead of  contentment.
Isn't that so?'

Standing on the spot, looking  sulky and secretly contemplating Leigh's  exposed
body, Casper said, 'I never had nothing to consume.'

'But you want it.  You're all grab at  heart, Casper!' He sat  up suddenly, lids
still shielding his honeyed eyes. 'Don't  you remember back home, how they  ate,
how everyone ate and yet hardly breathed? The breath of life! How there was this
sentimental cult of  childhood, yet all  the while kids  were neglected, beaten,
taught only negatives?'

Casper nodded. 'I sure remember that.' He fingered the scar on his shoulder.

'People don't know themselves back there, Casper. They cannot take a deep breath
and know themselves. Knowledge they have - facts. Wisdom, not so. Most are  hung
up on sex.  Women are trapped  in male bodies,  thousands of gay  men long to be
hetero... Humanity has fallen into a bad dream, rejecting spirituality, clinging
to self-to lowly biological origins.'

He opened his  eyes then, to  scrutinise Casper. In  the branches of  the banyan
nearby, pigeons cooed as if in mockery.

'I'm not so freaked out as I was.' Casper found nothing else to say.

'I came here to develop what was in me... If you travel far enough, you discover
what you originally were.'

'That's true. Like I've put on a bit of weight.'

Leigh appeared to ignore  the remark. 'As our  breathing is automatic, so  there
are archetypes, I've  come to believe,  which guide our  behaviour, if we  allow
them. A kind of automatic response.'

'This is over my head, Leigh. Sorry. Talk sense, will you?'

The gentle  smile. 'You  do understand.  You do  understand, and  reject what is
unfamiliar. Try thinking of archetypes as master - and mistress - figures,  such
as you encounter in fairy tales. The Beauty and the Beast, for instance. Guiding
our behaviour like very basic programming in a computer.'

'Grow up, Leigh! Fairy tales!'

'Archetypes have been set at nothing  in our Western culture. So they're  at war
with our superficiality. We need them. Archetypes reach upwards to the  rarefied
heights of great music. And down into the soil of our being, down to the obscure
realms beyond language, where only our dreaming selves can reach them.'

Casper scratched his crotch. He was embarrassed at being talked to as if he  was
an intelligent man. It had happened so rarely.

'I've never heard of archetypes.'

'But you meet them in  your sleep - those personages  who are you, yet not  you.
The strangers you are familiar with.'

He  scratched  his  chin instead  of  his  crotch. 'You  think  dreams  are that
important?'

Leigh's was a gentle laugh, not as mocking as the doves'. 'This village is proof
of it. If only... if only there were some way you and I could dream a Great  Law
Dream together. For the benefit of all humanity.'

'Sleep together, you mean? Hey! You won't allow that! You're tabu.'

'Perhaps only to a carnal touch...'  He slid down and confronted Casper  face to
face. 'Casper, try! Save yourself. Release yourself. Let everything be  changed.
It's not impossible. It's  easier than you think.  Don't cling to the  chrysalis
state - be the full butterfly!'


Casper Trestle took dried meat and fruit and climbed up into the mountains above
Kameredi. There  he remained  and thought  and experienced  what some would call
visions.

Some days, he fasted.  Then it seemed to  him that someone walked  beside him in
the forest. Someone wiser than he. Someone he knew intimately yet was unable  to
recognise. His thoughts that were not thoughts streamed from him like water.

He saw  himself in  a still  pool. His  hair grew  to his  shoulders and he went
barefoot.

This is what he  said to himself, scooping  together fragments of reflection  in
the cloth of his mind:

'He's so beautiful. He must be Truth  itself. Me, I'm a sham. I've cocked  up my
entire life. I've had it  cocked up for me. No,  at last I must grab  a slice of
the blame. That way, I take control. I won't enjoy being a victim. Not no  more.
I'm going to change. I too can be beautiful, someone else's dream.'..

'I've been in the  wrong dream. The stupid  indulgent dream of time.  The abject
dream of wealth beyond dreams. Spiritual destitution.

'Something's happened to me. From today, from now, I will be different.

'Okay, I'm going crackers, but I  will be different. I will change.  Already I'm
changing. I'm becoming the full butterfly.'

After a few nights, when  the new moon rose, he  went to look at his  reflection
again.

For the first  time he saw  - though in  tatters - beauty.  He wrapped his  arms
around himself. In the pool, from  tiny throats, frogs cried out that  there was
no night.

He danced  by the  pool. 'Change,  you froggies!'  he called.  'If I  can do it,
anyone can do it.' They had done it.

Somewhere distantly, when the Moon sank into the welcoming maw of the mountains,
he heard dismal roaring, as if creatures fought to the death in desolate swamps.


From the hoarse throats of machines, diesel fumes spewed. Genman Timber PLC  was
getting into action for another day. Guys in hard hats and jeans issued from the
canteen.  They tossed  their cigarette  butts into  the mud,  heading for  their
tractors and chainsaws. The previous day they had cleared four square kilometres
of forest in the mountain some distance above Kameredi.

The Genman camp was a half formed circle of portable cabins. Generators  roared,
pumping electricity and air-conditioning round the site. Immense mobile  cranes,
brought to this remote area at great expense, loaded felled trees on to a string
of lorries.

There were many more trees to go.  The trees stood silent, awaiting the bite  of
metal teeth. In times to come, far from the Himalayas, they would form  elements
in furniture sold from showrooms in wasteland outside Rouen or Atlanta or Munich
or Madrid. Or they would become crates containing oranges from Tel-Aviv,  grapes
from Cape Province,  tea from  Guangzhou. They  would form  scaffolding on  high
rises in  Osaka, Beijing,  Budapest, Manila.  Or fake  tourist figurines sold in
Bali, Berlin, London, Aberdeen, Buenos Aires.

It was early yet at  the Genman site. The sun  came grumbling up into layers  of
mist. Loudspeakers played rock music over the area. Overseers were cursing.  Men
were tense  as they  gunned their  engines into  life, or  joked to postpone the
moments when they had to exert themselves in the forests.

Bloated fuel carriers started up. Genman bulldozers turned like animals in  pain
on  their  caterpillar  tracks,  to  throw up  muck  as  they  headed  for their
designated tasks.

The whole camp was a sea of mud.

Soon the trees would come  crashing down, exposing ancient lateritic  soils. And
someone would be making a profit, back in Calcutta, California, Japan, Honolulu,
Adelaide, England, Bermuda, Bombay, Zimbabwe, you name it...

Action started. Then the rain began, blowing  ahead in full sail from the  south
west.

'Shit,' said the men, but carried on. They had their bonuses to think of.


The new Casper slept. And had a  terrible dream. It was like no other  dream. As
life is like a dream, this dream was like life.

His brain burned with it. He rose before dawn and stumbled through the aisles of
the forest. His path lay downward. For two days and nights he travelled  without
food. He saw many old palaces sinking down into the mud, like great  illuminated
liners into an  arctic sea. He  saw things running  and gigantic lizards  giving
birth. Eyes of amber, eyes of azure, breasts of bronze, adorned his track. So he
returned to Kameredi and found it all despoiled.

What had been a harmonious village, with people and animals living together - he
knew now how rare  and precious this was  - was no more.  All had gone. Men  and
women, animals, hens, buildings, the little stream - all gone.

It was as if Kameredi had never been.

The rains had not fallen on Kameredi. The rains. had fallen at higher altitudes.
With  the forests  felled, upper  streams had  overflowed. Tides  of mud  flowed
downhill. Before that chilly lava flow, everything gave way.

The people of Kameredi had been unprepared. The Great Law Dream had said nothing
of this inundation. They were carried away, breathing dirt, drowned,  submerged,
finished.

And Casper saw himself walking over the desecrated ground, looking at the bodies
growing like uncouth tubers from the sticky mess. He saw himself fall in a swoon
to the ground.


In  Monument  Valley,  gigantic  stadia were  being  constructed  at  top speed.
Bookings were being taken for seats as yet not fabricated. Emergency roads  were
being built.  Notices, signs,  public restrooms,  were going  up. Washington was
becoming concerned. All kinds of large-scale scams were being set in motion. The
League of Indigenous American Peoples was holding protest meetings.

A  well-known Italian  artist was  wrapping up  one of  the mesas  in pale  blue
plastic.


When Casper awoke, all knowledge seemed  to have left him. He looked  about. The
room was dark. Everything  was obscure except for  Leigh Tireno. Leigh stood  by
the char-poy, seeming to glow.

'Hi,' Casper whispered.

'Likewise,' said Leigh. They gazed upon each other as if upon summer  landscapes
choked with corn.

'Er, how about sex?' Casper asked.

'Our fortification against decay.'

Casper lay back, wondering what had happened. As if reading his thoughts,  Leigh
said, 'We knew you were  in the mountains. I knew  you were having a strong  and
terrible dream.  I came  with four  women. They  carried you  back here. You are
safe.'

'Safe!' Casper screamed. Suddenly his mind was clear. He staggered from the  bed
and made for the door. He was  in Mr Bannerji's house and it was  not destroyed,
and Mr Bannerji's daughters lived.

Outside,  the  sun reigned  over  its peaceful  village.  Hens strutted  between
buildings.  Children played  with a  puppy, men  spat betel  juice, women  stood
statuesque by the dhobi place.

Mud did not exist.

No corpses tried to swim down a choked street.

'Leigh, I had a dream  as real as life itself.  As life is a dream,  so my dream
was life. I  must tell Mr  Bannerji. It is  a warning. Everyone  must take their
livestock and move to a safer place to live. But will they believe me?'


A month passed away for ever before  they found a new place. It was  three days'
journey from the old place, facing south  from the top of a fertile valley.  The
women complained at its  steepness. But here it  would be safe. There  was water
and  shade. Trees  grew. Mr  Bannerji and  others went  into a  town and  traded
livestock  for  cement.  They  rebuilt Kameredi  in  the  new  place. The  women
complained at the  depth of the  new watercourse. Goats  ate the cement  and got
sick.

An ancient hag with a diamond at her nostril recited the Great Law Dream for all
to hear, one evening when the stars resembled more diamonds and a moon above the
new Kameredi swelled and became pregnant with light. Slowly the new place became
their familiar Kameredi.  Small boys with  a dog sent  to inspect the  old place
returned and  reported it  destroyed by  a great  mud flow,  as if the earth had
regurgitated itself.

Casper was embraced by all. He had dreamed truthfully. The villagers  celebrated
their escape from death. The  village enjoyed twenty-four hours of  drinking and
rejoicing, during which time  Casper lay with both  of the Bannerji ladies,  his
limbs entwined  with theirs,  his warmth  mingled with  theirs, his  juices with
theirs.

In their  yonis the  ladies had  placed smooth  stones, as  decreed in the laws.
Casper  kept  the  stones  afterwards,  as  souvenirs,  as  trophies,  as sacred
memorials of blessed events.


Leigh Tireno disappeared. Nobody knew his whereabouts. He was gone so long  that
even Casper found he could live without him.

After another moon had waxed and waned, Leigh returned. His hair had grown long,
and was tied by  ribbon over one shoulder.  He had decorated his  face. His lips
were reddened. He wore a sari. Under the sari, breasts swelled.

'Hi,' Leigh said.

'Likewise,' said Casper,  holding out his  arms. 'Life in  New Kameredi is  made
new. All's changed.  I've changed. It's  the full butterfly.  And you look  more
beautiful than ever.'

'I've changed.  I am  a woman.  That is  the discovery  I had  to make. I merely
dreamed I was a man. It was the wrong dream for me, and I have at last  awakened
from it.'

To Casper's  surprise, he  was not  as surprised  as he  might have been. He was
becoming accustomed to the miraculous life.

'You have a yoni?'

Leigh lifted his - her - sari and demonstrated. She had a yoni, ripe as guavas.

'It's beautiful. How about sex now?'

'It's  fortification against  decay. Shiva's  gift. It  can also  destroy.'  She
smiled. Her voice was softer than before. 'As I have told you. Be patient.'

'What became of your lingam? Did it drop off?'

'It crawled  away into  the undergrowth.  In the  forest, I  menstruated for the
first time. The moon was full. Where the blood fell, there a guava tree grew.'

'If I found the tree and ate of its fruit...'

He tried to touch her but  she backed away. 'Casper, forget your  little private
business for  a while.  If you  have really  changed, you  can look  beyond your
personal horizons to something wider, grander.'

Casper felt ashamed. He  dropped his gaze to  the floor, where ants  crawled, as
they had done even before the gods awoke and painted their faces blue.

'I'm sorry. Instruct me. Be my sadhu.'

She arranged herself among the ants  in the lotus position. 'The logging  in the
hills. It is based more on greed than necessity. It needs to stop. Not just  the
logging, but all it stands for in the mercenary world. Contempt for the  dignity
of nature.'

It sounded like  a tall order  to Casper. But  when he complained,  Leigh coolly
said that logging was very minor and nature was vast. 'We must dream together.'

'How do you manage that?'

'A powerful  dream, in  order to  change more  than little  Kameredi, more  than
ourselves.  A  healing  dream,  together.  As  we  have  dreamed  separately and
succeeded. As all  men and women  dream separately -  always separately. But  we
will dream together.'

'Touching?'

She smiled. 'You still must change. Change is a continuity. There are no comfort
stations on the road to perfection.'

Within his breast, his heart jumped  for fear and hope at 'the  wonderful words.
'The things you understand... I worship you.'

'One day, I may worship you.'


Special units of the National Guard  had been drafted in to control  the crowds.
Half of  Utah and  Arizona was  cordoned off  by razor  wire. Counter-insurgency
posts had been established; Washington was wary of dream-makers. Tanks,  trucks,
armed personnel carriers, patrolled  everywhere. Special elevated ways  had been
erected. Armed police  bikers roared along  them, licensed to  fire down on  the
crowds  if  trouble was  brewing.  Heligunships circled  overhead,  cracking the
eardrums of Monument Valley with spiteful noise.

They supervised a sprawling site bearing the hallmarks of an interior  landscape
of manic depression.

Someone  said, 'Seems  like they  are shooting  the war  movie to  end all   war
movies.'

Private automobiles had been  banned. They were corralled  in huge parks as  far
north as Blanding, Utah; at Shiprock, New Mexico, in the east; and at Tuba City,
Arizona, to the south.  The Hopis and Navajos  were making a killing.  A slew of
cafes, bars and restaurants had sprung up from nowhere. Along authorised routes,
lurid entertainments  of various  kinds sprang  forth like  paintboxes bursting.
Many carried giant effigies of Leigh  Tireno, looking at her best, above  booths
with such come-ons as 'Change Your Sex By Hypnosis - PAINLESS!' No one mentioned
Casper Trestle.

How the  good folk  jostled on  their way  to the  spectacle! It  was mighty hot
there, in the crowded desolation; sweat  rose like a mist, an illness  above the
heaving shoulders.  Bacteria were  having a  great time.  Countless city people,
unaccustomed to walking more  than a block, found  the quarter mile from  a Park
and Ride bus drop more than they  could take, and collapsed into the many  field
ambulance units.  Rest was  charged at  $25 an  hour. Some  walked on singing or
sobbing, according to  taste. Pickpockets  moved among  the crowd,  elbowing hot
gospellers of many  kinds. The preachers  preached their tunes  of damnation. It
was not difficult for  the unprivileged, as blisters  formed on their heels,  to
believe that the end of the world was nigh - or at least heaving into sight from
the seas of misery, a kind of 'Jaws' from the nether regions - or that the whole
universe might sizzle down into a little white dot, like when you turned off the
TV at two  in the sullen  Bronx morning. Could  be, ending was  best. Maybe with
this possibility in  mind, a fair  percentage of the  adults stomped along  like
cattle, pressing  fast food  to their  mouths or  slurping sweet  liquids. A fat
woman, hemmed  in by  heated bodies,  was hit  simultaneously by  congestion and
digestion; her cries as she cartwheeled among the marching legs were drowned  by
sporadic ghetto music from a multitude of receivers. Every orifice was  stuffed.
It was the law. At least no one was smoking.' Varieties of bobbing caps amid the
throng indicated children, big and  little hobbledehoys fighting to get  through
first, yelling, screaming, gobbling popcorn  as they went. Underfoot, all  kinds
of coloured cartons and wrappers of non-biodegradable material were trampled  in
the dust, along with  the tumbling bodies, the  gobs of pink gum,  the discarded
items of  clothing, the  ejected tampons,  the lost  soles. It  was a real media
event, as much a crowd-puller as the World Series.


Casper had set the whole vast scheme in motion. Now he was responsible only  for
himself and Leigh. Human nature was  beyond his control. He stood in  the middle
of a mile-wide arena where John Wayne had once ridden hell-for-leather. Mr  V.K.
Bannerji was with him, terrified by the sheer blast of public attention.

'Vill it vork?' he asked Casper. 'Otherwise ve shall have wiolence.'

But at six in the evening, when  the shadows of the giant mesas grew  like long,
blunt, black teeth over the land, a bell rang and silence fell. A slight  breeze
arose,  mitigating the  heat, cooling  many a  feverish armpit.  The pale   blue
plastic in which one of the mesas had been wrapped, crackled slightly. Otherwise
all was at last still - still as  it had been in the millennia before the  human
race existed.

A king-size bed  stood raised in  the middle of  the arena. Leigh  waited by the
side of the bed. She removed her clothes without coquetry, turning about once in
a full circle, so that all could see  she was now a woman. She climbed into  the
bed.

Casper removed his clothes, also turned about to demonstrate that he was a  man,
and climbed in beside Leigh. He touched her.

They put their arms about each other and fell asleep.

Gently,  music arose  from the  assembled Boston  Pops Orchestra.  Tchaikovsky's
waltz  from 'The  Sleeping Beauty'.  The organisers  felt this  composition  was
particularly appropriate on this occasion. In the million-strong audience  women
wept, kids threw up as quietly as possible. Before their television screens  all
round the world, people were weeping and throwing up into plastic bowls.

It was an ancient dream they dreamed, welling from the brain's ancient core. The
beings that paraded across a primal tapestry of fields wore stiff antique  garb.
In these  personages was  vested an  untroubled power  over human  behaviour. An
untroubled archetypal power.

Before sex was  life, aspiring upwards  like spring water.  After the advent  of
sexual  reproduction  came consciousness.  Before  consciousness dawned,  dreams
prevailed. Such dreams form the language of the archetypes.

In the espousal  of a technological  civilisation, those ancient  personages had
been neglected, despised.  Hero, warrior, matron,  maiden true, wizard,  mother,
wise-man too - finally their paths were  bent to sow in human lives dissent.  In
disarray a billion lives were spent: war, rapine, mental torment, dismay...  But
LeighCas in the tongue of dream vowed to these forces to redeem the time,  asked
in return - it seems - that male and female might be free of crime... to live in
better dreams...

Casper  struggled  up through  layers  of blanketing  sleep.  He lay  unsure  of
himself,  or  where he  was.  Much had  transpired,  that he  knew:  a shift  in
consciousness. The dark head of the  woman Leigh lay on his breast.  Opening his
eyes, he saw that above  him flared an Impressionist sky,  encompassing cinnamon
and  maroon  banners of  sunset  waving at  feverish  rate from  horizon  to far
horizon.

Prompted by deep instinct,  he felt down between  his legs. He dug  into a furry
nest and found lips there. What they told him wordlessly was strange and new. He
wondered for a  while if, soggy  from the miracle  sleep, he was  feeling her by
mistake.  Gently, he  stirred her  away from  his breast...  his breasts...  her
breasts.

When Leigh opened  her eyes and  looked honey-coloured at  Casper, her gaze  was
remote. Slowly her lips curved into a smile.

'Likewise,' she  remarked, slipping  a finger  into Casper's  yoni. 'How about a
fortification against decay?'


The  multitudes were  leaving the  auditorium. The  aircraft were  heading  like
eagles back to their nests. The  tanks were pulling out. The Italian  artist was
unwrapping his mesa. Imagining he heard tree-cutting machines falling silent  in
distant forests, Mr  Bannerji sat  on the  side of  the bed,  to cover his short
sighted eyes and weep with joy - the joy that survives in the midst of sorrow.

Immersed  in  their  thoughts,  the  short-sighted  multitudes  went  away.  The
different dream was taking effect. No  one jostled. Something in their unity  of
posture, the bent shoulders, the bowed  heads, was reminiscent of figures in  an
ancient frieze.

Here or there,  a cheek, an  eyeball, a bald  head, reflected back  the imperial
colours of the  sky, arbitrary yellows  denoting happiness or  pain, red meaning
fire or passion, the blues of  nullity or reflection. Nothing remained but  land
and sky - for ever  at odds, for ever a  unity. The mesas were standing  up into
the velvet, ancient citadels built without hands to commemorate distant time.

Although the multitude was silent as it departed, its multiple jaws not  moving,
a kind of murmur rose from its ranks.

The still, sad music of humanity.

The day's death flew its colours,  increasingly sombre. It was sunset: the  dawn
of a new age.

