The Cult of the Ellipse
You will hear the sinners wailing
when the stars begin to fall.
- American spiritual
The clouds below us pixelate the last sliver of the setting sun, just as I watched them do fifty-two years before. Each time the contredanse brings me to face west, I squint; each time I am turned east, I savor the rays on my wizened neck. After the sun sinks, no matter which way I am led, I shiver.
Across the valley and back to our ears echoes the fervent drumbeat guiding our promenade to trace a grand ovoid surrounding the summit. As the do-si-do delivers me from partner to partner, I note which ears are pristine and which, like mine, bear the scars that indicate their wearer is aged enough to recall the previous Sacrament.
Before my ears were cut in ecstasy for the first time, the murder of a relative could be avenged; today this is not possible. I remember from my childhood a supersition prohibiting the use of a favored swimming hole at the new moon; that injunction vanished when I was twenty-nine, and the youth have enjoyed dips in the black of night ever since. Likewise certain manners of fertilizing corn and raising large numbers of livestock were permitted both in the previous and current epochs, but under different circumstances before and after, and with different accompanying customs.
The frenzy immediately following a ceremony of sacrament, which drives us to slit our lobes and drip the blood into the bonfire as we revel through the final night outside time, invariably transmutes into a period of varied experimentation over the succeeding weeks. A brave child roams to a neighboring town; a political coalition extinguished a decade before reassembles for a fresh attempt; the Coyote Lab synthesizes a bacterium and holds it, frozen, till the sabbath to see if the trance blesses its quest to multiply. Once there was a captive whose pursuers, if memory serves, allowed him mercy, each offering a slightly different justification, though of course we never heard what the justifications were. Half were vindicated, half were not; it was years later before the scholarship over the minutia absolving one but not another from dereliction died down, still only partly settled.
It is thanks to the Sacrament that drownings, crime, imprisonment, corruption, espionage, doxxing, rustling, and tooth decay remain rare and grow rarer. Every epoch – fifty-two years, that is – obeys its own set of rules. Then in the five days in between while the clocks pause to let the sun catch up, the laws are upgraded – moral laws, not civil: we have no police nor kings. For the rest of the epoch, every seventh day we come together in groups for the ritual of the Discreet Rhythm: the members of each congregation enter a trance, drumless, built rather on the collective hum of many throats. Each confessor in turn recalls privately her deeds of the week, good and evil, and her web of justifications, anticipating the group's cry, the only intelligible utterance of the rite: Vindícate. Then the confessor sings forth her justification in the language of tongues which is beyond any individual to parse. If it be pure, the hum becomes as honey; if tainted or insufficient, the hum snarls. Thus are the unrighteous exposed. My grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother was told by Kazaguate when he created the world that it should be governed in this way.
Though holy, the process is not supernatural. We believe that our universe is nothing but structure. What is a being but the result of a generative law? What is a law but words? What is a word but a point in space, a star on high? Our custom is thus: At each interval between epochs we undertake the mountaintop ceremony to derive what we know as the Common Reference Sacrament. The sacrament lasts us half a century, till the next epoch. It is not itself secret; any child could recite to you the mantra. What is concealed from us all is the hidden structure linking every note to the whole. This relation is not given to man.
The language of tongues comes from the chanting of the vindication combined with the mantra of the sacrament. In trance, a splinter of the collective intelligence of the Discreet Rhythm exists in each of our minds; in this way the great being of which we are mere shards evaluates the validity of the speaker’s account. In ordinary life, the logic of a liar’s story breaks down when pressed on more than a certain number of points, for it requires inventing an entire false world of internal soundness; likewise, the vindicator whose soliloquy is mingled with the holy mystery of the sacrament cannot forge more than a few coincidentally viable pieces of justification.
I have said that while the sacrament is openly sung, the occult harmony that governs it is unlearnable. You may ask where we find an enigma we are sure we cannot unravel. It is thus: evil is monotone, our elders teach us, yet good is arbitrarily complex. Evil is the shadow a mountain casts on the plain, a projection of good onto the plane. It is flat, limp, staticky. And hence the final mystery is a pure human heart, which not even Coyote’s best simulators can recover.
The drums patter now at an urgent clip. Ears and arms from those I’ve danced with before begin to repeat. It is not long until the first star of the Ellipse constellation appears on the horizon, at which point the drums stop for the dancer nearest the altar at that moment to withdraw.
A heart overtaken by wickedness, our elders tell us as Kazaguate told our ancestors, loses its inscrutability. The Discreet Rhythm tells us whose actions conform to our understanding of ethics as of the most recent Sacrament, implying a threshold of purity for those who are confirmed righteous on the early sabbaths of a epoch, but as the years go on, new capabilities – technical, military, organizational – render many a necessary evil unnecessary, or the reverse, make a former sin acceptable or even compulsory. Compliance with the principles we learn by generalizing across our many sabbaths is understood to be sufficient to maintain civil society, even toward the end of an epoch; but it is not guaranteed to expunge individual vice in those latter years. Thus, several hearts are safer than one.
Likewise, it is considered honorable, if one knows or believes oneself to be in admirable spiritual standing, to volunteer for the Sacrament, so that those one loves may be assured that integrity is represented, and so they do not have to volunteer themselves. In fact, the act of volunteering itself is viewed as a sign of high moral character, with the tidy effect that all those who participate are those best suited to the purpose.
The pace is now frantic. Around the whirling mass of volunteers I spin, dizzied nearly to rapture. Six stars of the Ellipse stand above the horizon now, and six of our number now stand at the altar pyre. When the seventh star rises, the final stage of the ceremony will begin. I am old, but the lean and the push of the dance are like wine. The pale arms of the stranger who holds me have the look of milky quartz, glowing in the dusk. The priest prepares his instruments. The drummers leap and whoop. Maybe I will melt, will sublimate, will fly. I am old.
Our eyes turn to the sky once more and the music ends. The formation dissolves. Seven stand at the summit. The priest ties them to the seven posts.
To perform the Sacrament we must purify ourselves once more. We who danced sit and enter trance, all but the priest, who ignites the fire-drill and begins to perform the final preparations. It is at this point that the events occurred which compel me, as the most senior witness, to pass on to you this account before I am dead and forgotten.
Some minutes into the Discreet Rhythm, Zaparucha of the Coyote Lab speaks. The ululations of the obscured tongue, then a final claim in what we have rarely heard in trance: plain speech. "I spared the hen." And still the chorus’s response is the validating hum of euphony.
Out of turn, which is an anomaly reserved for the most urgent of demonstrations, Galarraga also from Coyote speaks. Every encrypted syllable identical to his colleague's, save for the end: "I did not spare the hen." An experiment, an alfabeta, and one that should never pass. Yet no harshness. Honey until our breath dies.
Then the chant destroys itself into a lamentation as we keen as one for the way of life we might never know again. For we understand then, as a collective before we comprehend it as individuals, that Coyote has achieved simulation's holy grail, has devised clockwork intricate enough to recover the fearful entropy comprising that last mystery, the honest heart. One vindication or the other was forged with the signature of life itself; we cannot know which. And our wail reaches the heavens and the flames on the fire-drill leer.
Only the stranger with the skin of quartz is silent. Rising, he pulls a knife like the priest’s. He strides to the altar posts and cuts the binding ropes from each.
And now the pale one throws up his arm, just as he spun me, just as he spun breath into earth, and plucks the seven stars of the Ellipse from the sky. "From this day you can foretell the machinations of the human soul. Now the dance that began with clay ends with sand. I give you your inheritance." North, south, east and west he slashes his chest. Then the winds blow the dust that was Kazaguate off the mountain as the blaze drinks the unknowable heart of a god.