Du Vide II: The Chiasm
Part 2 of the Du Vide Cycle
What is, never came into being, nor is anything going to come into being in the future. — Parmenides of Elea, Fragment 8
VII. The Spacemate
The tallest of the Ostrogoths, the one who had accepted, sat across from Avidius with the alabaster pieces arranged before him on levels A and B. He did not know why he sat there, only that the old man’s eyes held a command deeper than fear. The others milled about the chamber, pawing at scrolls and vessels, their grunts echoing off the cistern walls. Avidius took the amethyst army — the pieces of the upper boards, the pieces he had played against Du Vide, the pieces of the doomed — and arranged them upon D and E with a deliberation that was itself a kind of prayer.
“You move first,” Avidius said, though the barbarian did not understand the grammar of invitation. The Ostrogoth moved a pawn forward too far in a straight line, violating the spatial rules, and Avidius corrected him not with words but by example, sliding his own amethyst pawn not along a rank but through the invisible third dimension, descending from the violet depths of level D to the neutral air of the middle board. The barbarian squinted. He moved again, and Avidius, with the patience of a man already dead, guided the game toward its necessary terminus.
He did not play to win. He played to be consumed. Each sacrifice was a syllogism whose conclusion was the Void. He gave his knights to diagonal blades, his bishops to triagonal traps, his rooks to the geometry of annihilation. The barbarian, sensing only the animal pleasure of capture, took everything offered, his alabaster fingers closing around amethyst throats with the same idiotic greed that had closed around Roman necks in the streets above.
Jupiter observed everything from atop his companion’s thigh, his light and dark orange striations of fur catching the lamplight, his hooked tail waving as if it could capture the air. And Pluto remained hidden above the armarium like a familiar watching over its subject. They knew what Avidius was doing. They had always known.
On the eleventh move, time had begun to loosen its hold upon the chamber, the barbarian’s queen, that pale idol of alabaster, completed a triagonal passage through the middle board that Avidius had practically guided her hand to make, descending from her starting veil upon level B to close upon the amethyst king from directions that the mind struggled to hold simultaneously.
The sense of the notation hung in the air like a frozen note. The lamp flame turned that nameless color. The air grew thick. And where the barbarian expected triumph, there came instead a sound like the tearing of silk — Jupiter interrupted his hiss, this time not from warning but a recognition, to dismount, to distance himself.
The rift did not open in Avidius. It opened before him, as a door opens for a man who has already turned the key in his own heart. It was larger than before, shaped not like an asp but like a welcome. The edges were still ragged, still gnawed, but the blackness within was not hungry. It was expectant.
Avidius stood. The barbarians froze, their minds too simple to compass what they saw. One of them, the shortest, reached out to grab the old man’s cloak, and his hand passed through Avidius’s shoulder as though through smoke — and finding no purchase on the man, his fingers closed instead upon the widening edge of the rift itself. He did not cry out. There was no sound for what happened to him, only a brief foreshortening, as though he had been a figure painted upon cloth and the cloth had been folded once, sharply, upon itself. The other Ostrogoths, dull with wine and terror, did not see him go. They were not in the same dimension anymore. Avidius had already begun to translate, and he did not look back to count the barbarians who remained.
“I thank you for the game,” he said to the tall barbarian, and stepped into the rift.
There was no cold. There was no falling. There was only the rotation of perspective, as though a mirror had been turned to show not its silvered face but the space behind the glass.
VIII. The Chiasm
He drifted, if drifted was the word, in a medium that was not space but the perfume of murdered geometries. There was no up, no down, no Tiber, no Rome, no stone, no flesh. There was only relation, and relation here was not the bloodless abstraction of the Peripatetics but a coruscant necropolis of poisoned jewels — angles of cinnabar and sardonyx, fulgurant with a light that illuminated nothing because there was nothing to illuminate. The relations were obvious here: vast, predatory, gorgeous. They hung in the non-air like chandeliers in a palace built for the blind, dripping a radiance that was simultaneously opal and arsenic.
At first he perceived them as veils — luminous, interwoven, rotting with their own excessive beauty. Each veil was a connection between… but between what? There were no termini. No nodes. No corporeal actors to serve as the subjects and objects of these connections. There was only the between-ness itself, the pure act of relating, stretched across a non-distance that was somehow more real than any marble forum, more saturated than any sunset over the Palatine. And because there were no referents, the relations were absolute, tyrannical, perfect in a way that made Avidius want to weep and retch at once.
And from the crossing of these veils, a pattern emerged. Not a voice. A resonance. A geometry of recognition.
“Old friend,” said Du Vide, though Du Vide was not there. He was everywhere. He was the nexus where a thousand poisonous veils converged, a constellation of violet smoke and baleful emerald, a theorem woven from the expired light of stars that had never existed in the cosmos. What Avidius perceived was not a man but a grammar — a syntax of connections so complex that it implied a speaker without ever presenting one, the way a perfume implies a flower that has already turned to dust.
“Du Vide,” Avidius said, or thought, or related. “I have entered the Void.”
“You have entered the Chiasm,” the resonance corrected, and the words were not heard but tasted, like honey mixed with alum. “The Void is not a place. It is a seeing. Look around you. What do you perceive?”
“I perceive… veils. Coruscations. A jeweled necropolis of connections without corpses.”
“Exactly so. Here, relation is obvious and referents are hidden. In the cosmos you left, referents parade before you — stones, stars, emperors, cats — and relations must be inferred, guessed at, deduced by syllogism. You see a man and infer that he is a slave because of his relation to a master. You see a cat and infer affection from its proximity. But you are worshipping hollow masks, Avidius. The cosmos is a leprous pageant of empty nouns. The things you called beautiful were merely the shadows of relations you could not see, cast by a light that does not shine in your dimension.”
Avidius tried to turn, but turning required a body, and he had none. He was a nexus of relations himself now, a tangle of filaments that remembered being Avidius. “Then the cosmos and the chiasm are different?”
“They are the same Whole, viewed from opposite angles. The cosmos is the Chiasm seen from the node. The Chiasm is the cosmos seen from the thread. In your world, substance appears primary and relation derivative. Here, relation is primary and substance derivative. But neither view is complete. The truth is the fold between them — the place where node and thread, thing and connection, being and between-ness, are inseparable. That fold is the Void. Not absence, but the pure medium of relation.”
Avidius felt a strange sensation, or rather, he felt the relation of strangeness — a silver cord connecting what had been his heart to what had been his mind. He was dissolving into the web. He was becoming pure relation, losing the last traces of Avidius, of Rome, of the Peripatetic. And then the horror began to bloom.
“If this is the truth,” he related, “then the world I left is a lie. Every stone of Rome is a hollow puppet. Every face is a mask of meat animated by relations it cannot perceive. Beauty is exiled from the cosmos. It festers here, in the Chiasm, where relation is naked and terrible in its perfection. We do not live here, Du Vide. We live in the necropolis. We live among the dead.”
“Yes,” the resonance whispered, and there was something almost like sorrow in the algebra of its voice. “You have seen the truth. The referents are not merely hidden here — they are revealed as the phantoms they always were. Substance is a disease. The body is a prison of false boundaries. The emperor, the slave, the cat upon your thigh: in the cosmos they seem solid, sovereign, beautiful. But they are not. They are the shadows cast by relations that despise them. The beauty you loved in Rome was a rumor carried by madmen. True beauty is here, in the relation itself — and it is predatory, absolute, and utterly inhuman.”
Avidius perceived it now, the full ontological nausea of the revelation. The cosmos was not a syllogism. It was a carcass. The Peripatetic logic he had served all his life was a system of taxidermy, stuffing the dead skins of referents with sawdust and calling it wisdom. The barbarians burning Rome were not destroying civilization; they were merely accelerating the entropy that exposed the hollowness of all things. And yet — he was not in the Chiasm. He was a trespasser. The true natives of this place were the relations themselves, and they did not love him. They tolerated him as a corpse tolerates the maggot, as a necessary stage in their own exquisite decay.
“Spacemate,” Du Vide’s resonance continued. “It is the hinge. It is the fold made explicit. When the geometry of the game achieves its perfect closure in three dimensions, it performs a rotation upon the fabric of the Whole. It turns the node-view into the thread-view. It is a change in perspective that alters not what is seen, but how seeing itself is constituted. You did not die, Avidius. You were turned inside out, like a glove. Your relations became visible and your substances became hidden. But you cannot stay. You are not a relation. You are a memory of a man who once believed in substances.”
Avidius grasped at the veils, but they slipped through his non-fingers like light through water. He was dispersing. He was becoming a grammar without a speaker, a syllogism without a mind. The Chiasm was digesting him. And he wanted it. He wanted to dissolve into the jeweled necropolis, to become one with the predatory beauty that was the only truth.
Something in him — the last habit of the last Peripatetic, the reflex of a mind that had spent sixty years refusing to surrender an argument unfinished — would not let go without first attempting the proof he had failed to complete on the night the rift first opened, when the words would not come. He gathered what remained of himself, a nexus constructing its final fortress from filaments instead of stone, and he spoke it, or related it, or became it, into the coruscant dark.
The proof did not banish the Chiasm, as the six proofs of that first night had failed to banish Du Vide. But neither did the Chiasm devour it whole. The syllogism hung there a moment, a fortress built of the last stone Avidius owned, and the jeweled veils drew back from it as from a thing merely indigestible, gnawing at its edges without swallowing its form. It was not victory. It was a foothold. He let go of everything else, and held only to that.
And then he felt it.
IX. The Threads
A warmth. Not heat, but the relation of warmth — a sanguine filament of icterine gold that touched what had been his thigh and what had been his memory. It was orange. Not the color orange, but the relation of orangeness, a specific frequency in the web that connected him across the fold to something that was not him, something that purred, something that weighed upon his leg with the gravity of trust and the absolute demand of possession.
Jupiter.
He fixated upon it. The filament brightened, and as he followed it, he saw that it was not alone. It was braided with other cords: the peace he had felt when stroking that imperial fur; the unique beauty of Jupiter to him, a singularity of relation that could not be substituted or generalized; the curve of a tail around his calf while Jupiter stood by him and placed a rear paw upon his foot; the golden eyes evaluating his soul. Each was a living cord, a bond that refused to dissolve into the anonymous Whole. They were strong. Stronger than the rift. Stronger than the fold. They were the very relata his last proof had insisted must exist, and here, threaded gold and warm, was their demonstration.
And nearby, a bundle of black filaments, twitching, alive, dense with a darkness that was not absence but the superabundance of relation — a tenebrous bouquet of obsidian relations that pulsed with the black light of Pluto’s watchfulness. The black cat was not a hole here. He was a knot, a vortex of connections so intense that they bent the surrounding veils into a spiral. Avidius perceived the relation of Pluto’s silence, the relation of his back arching in warning, the relation of his tail erect and surging with his need for attention, and the relation of his predation as he returned so often with something squirming in his mouth.
The cats. They were not in the Chiasm, yet their relations were. The bond between Avidius and his felines was a thread that spanned the fold, a filament of cinnabar and onyx that existed in both perspectives simultaneously — in the cosmos as a cat upon a thigh, in the Chiasm as a golden and black cord that anchored a dissolving soul to the lie of the world.
“You see,” Du Vide’s resonance whispered, not without a terrible tenderness. “Even here, relation implies relatum. The bond implies the bonded. You cannot sever yourself from the cosmos entirely, for you are woven into it by love, which is the strongest geometry — and the most tragic. Your little proof was not wrong, old friend. It was only unfinished, as all your proofs against me have always been unfinished, and always answered. The Void is not severance. It is the recognition that even severance is a relation. But you must choose, Avidius. Remain here, and become a beautiful theorem in the necropolis. Or follow the threads, and return to the carcass.”
Avidius grasped the golden thread. He pulled, or was pulled. The perspective rotated again. The jeweled veils dimmed, the nodes brightened with a sickly, leprous light. He was folding back, turning right-side-out, following the orange warmth toward a body, a thigh, a weight, a purr. He felt the descent like a fall from a poisonous paradise into a coffin.
He stepped through the rift.
X. The School
The chamber was cold in the ordinary way. The lamp had gone out. The five boards stood upon the stone table, the alabaster and amethyst pieces scattered as though by a gust of wind. Of the Ostrogoths there was no sign. Where the shortest of them had stood, grasping at a cloak that was no longer cloth, there remained only a single gold arm-ring, half-melted and fused into the stone floor as though it had passed too close to a geometry that did not tolerate ornament; of the man who had worn it, not so much as ash. The others were simply absent, the way a held breath is absent once released — no blood, no bodies, the room swept clean of them as a tide erases footprints, leaving the sand smoother than before the foot ever touched it.
Jupiter sat upon the table, his tail curled around his feet, his eyes half-closed in the posture of a monarch who has waited patiently for his subject to return. Pluto emerged from atop the armarium, his black fur drinking the darkness, and leapt to Avidius’s left thigh the moment the old man sat down. The weight was real. The warmth was real. The relation was real.
But the referents were hollow.
Avidius looked unto Jupiter, and he saw the cat — the orange fur, the golden eyes, the imperial bearing — and beneath that familiar mask, he saw the husk. He saw the empty node around which the golden relations clustered. The cat was not beautiful. The cat was a prison. The beauty was in the relation, and the relation was exiled from the thing itself. He stroked the orange crown, and he felt the filament of connection, but he knew now that the fur beneath his fingers was a lie, a necrotic boundary pretending to be a creature.
He looked at his own hands. They were meat. They were the leprous referents of a geometry he could no longer unsee. Rome was burning above, and he understood now that the flames were not destroying something real. They were merely illuminating the hollowness that had always been there. The empire, the Senate, the syllogisms, the Prime Mover — all of it was a pageant of empty nouns, a taxidermy of the real.
And yet he would teach.
He would teach that the Void is not the enemy of being but its ground. He would teach that spacemate is not death but translation, a rotation into the truth that lies behind the carcass of the world. He would train students in the five-board game, in the proofs of relation, in the art of seeing the filaments that bind all things. He would teach them that beauty is not in the stone, but in the shadow the stone casts upon the void. And when they were ready, when they had learned to see the hollowness of all things, he would show them the rift.
He was Avidius Du Vide, the last Peripatetic and the first Voidist. The school would rise not as a garden but as a tumor, growing in the dark places of the dying world, feeding on the entropy that was the only honest thing in the cosmos. He would teach them to love the darkness not as a medium of connection, but as the truth that exposes the lie of the light.
Jupiter kneaded his leg, and his rear claws were surprisingly sharp and precise. Pluto pressed his black cheek against Avidius’s palm. And in the space between the orange warmth and the black purr, in the fold where affection and void were the same fabric viewed from different angles, Avidius began to plan the lessons of the first day. He would teach them to see the necropolis. He would teach them to mourn the beauty they could never possess. And he would teach them, above all, that the only true move was to lose — to be spacemated, to be turned inside out, to step willingly into the rift that gnaws at the edge of every thing.
He looked at the boards. The middle board, Level C, was still empty. The demilitarized zone. The buffer. The stage.
“Next time,” he whispered to the cats, “we play for the Chiasm.”
* * *
Proceed to
Du Vide III: Voidism