Footwizard

by Terry Mancour

  “I’ll check in on him personally before I go off shift. But I won’t linger too long – I have a date with a CalDef pilot after work. He’s going to take me up in his aircar over the bay for, uh, an extended picnic in the air,” she related, with a knowing look. That scandalized Umank.

  “You are mating with the humani?” he asked in Karshak, shocked. The physician smiled.

  “That depends entirely on how impressive they are,” she answered in the same tongue. “You should take advantage of such opportunities when they present themselves. You may find a humani woman could bring you comfort you didn’t know you needed.”

  “Is that even possible?” he asked, skeptically, as he glanced at the pretty nurse fussing over his injection. It was hard to keep his eyes open, now, as the drug began to drag him into unconsciousness. “That is, physically possible?”

  “You’ve only been here a short time,” the physician soothed. “You’ll soon learn that the humani are highly adaptable. And their women? They stretch. You should have no worries if you decide to pursue one. Save that she learns to prefer Karshak companionship to that of her own species and become obsessed with your greater endowment. Get some sleep, and feel better,” she urged, switching back to the humani language. “I’ll check on you when I do my rounds in the morning. Cindy? You have this under control?” she asked the nurse, in her own tongue.

  “I believe so,” she nodded. “I’ll take his dinner order, and then in four hours I’ll conduct vitals and do his sponge bath. Then another round of analgesics. The autografts should be affixed well enough by then to keep it from being too painful.”

  “Yes, I think our friend here might need a sponge bath,” the Alka Alon healer agreed, a twinkle in her eye. “He’s been through a lot, this week. Do be thorough,” she instructed, as she shut off her scanning device and gave Umank a nod. “I’ve got a few calls to make before my shift ends, but let me know if there’s any change in his condition after-hours, will you?”

  “Of course, Dr. Lilastien,” Nurse England assured. “I will take the very best care of him.”

  Confused and drugged, Umank began to drift off to sleep, a fugue of confusion overtaking his mind.

  I, however, was far less confused. I recognized Lilastien, of course – you cannot mistake a personality that distinctive, and age had done nothing to dull her humor. But seeing her as a younger Alkan was fascinating. As were the revelations about the Inundation and Avital.

  But I’d never heard of Umank, before now. I had no idea that there were complications involved in Perwyn’s demise, purposeful sabotage, at that. It gave me a whole new reason to hate the Enshadowed.

  I was pondering that very thing when Szal ripped me once again out of the Karshak’s mind . . . and into a hellish memory that made everything I’d gone through thus far relatively easy to bear. Being human, even from thousands of years in the past, was easy enough to bear. Being Alon had taken some adaptation on my part, to understand their perspective.

  But now Szal sent me into a mind beyond mere Alon or human. Or at least radically different. And hellishly maddening. When next I was aware, my conscious was locked into the memories of Aza’methet the Old.

  And that’s when my madness was assured.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Madness and Death

  Sometimes insanity is the only proper response to the universe. Sometimes death is no escape.

  From the Book of the Anghysbel Expedition

  By Minalan the Spellmonger

  The other memories had been a trial to absorb. Aza’methet was impossible.

  I was suddenly in a place where gravity pulled so relentlessly on my new body that every attempt to move was fraught with struggle and pain. The world I found myself in seemed comprised of two vast plains, a rocky one below me and one overhead that seemed liquid, as if I were upside down over an ocean. In between was a layer of dense, acrid fog or mist that seemed to writhe and cling to every imperfection in the plain I was laying upon.

  For there was no standing in this realm, there was only crawling. Endless crawling. Nor was my body even remotely human. To my horror I found myself lurching forward on four stumpy little legs that strained to bear my great weight. Every breath in that hellish environment was torturous, burning my lungs – or what I perceived to be lungs – while I struggled ahead. A vast metallic shell was on my back, and as I turned my head painfully to regard the endless plain behind me, I could see that its great weight had gouged a track in the surface that appeared to be the only mark of nature in this otherwise sterile environment.

  Aza’methet was old, far older than any other host I’d encountered. So old that merely calculating in years was impractical. Aza’methet measured time by the rotation of the galaxy, and even by that standard it was impossibly ancient. Neither male nor female, Aza’methet’s memories stretched back to a time and place far different than this horrid realm. This was not its native world – that had been destroyed countless eons before. This was Aza’methet’s prison, its refuge, a crack in reality where it could hide from those that pursued it.

  For that was foremost in Aza’methet’s minds – yes, minds, for there were two, and they were in a constant state of war against each other. While one desperately wanted release from this prison, a release from this life; the other was relentless in its willingness to endure here, if it meant safety. Rarely did the two sides of its consciousness meet in accord. But it was the differences in the two that allowed Aza’methet to experience the world in a far different way than any human or Alon could.

  Aza’methet could perceive and manipulate the very dimensions, the primal energies that comprised the universe. Time, space, physical dimension, energy, gravity, order, entropy, and other components of reality were as apparent to the ancient creature as sunlight and raindrops were to me. Infinity and eternity were its tools and its torment. And in this place, even those measures of reality were suspect, skewed by the nature of this unique prison. Tendrils of power and fields of radiant energy were scattered everywhere. Time, itself, was merely one more force to be used in Aza’methet’s minds.

  The manifold “eyes” in its stumpy head perceived more than just light and shadow. They saw past and future as colors or sounds, gravity as a feeling of balance, mere electromagnetic forces as incidental to the underlying reality it traversed. They detected notes of probability and perceived dimensions in ways I do not have the words to describe. Magic? Magic was just one more part of the spectrum of reality, a minor variation on the flawed physics that built reality into its shaky form.

  I knew that with a thought and an effort, Aza’methet could escape this place through dimensional portals that could instantly release the creature. But that would require consensus between its two minds. As the one mind was possessed with an obsessive self-loathing and the other was consumed with a relentless compulsion for survival, consensus was rare.

  But it did happen. Aza’methet was here of its own volition, the result of a compromise by the two sides. After a long life of being used as a slave and worshipped as a god – its name had been given to it by its first cult -- it had fled to this unknown place. To leave here was to invite destruction. To stay was to endure an existence that was tortuous every moment, a suffering that Aza’methet not only accepted, but embraced, as a punishment for the crime of existence.

  Because of its nature, Aza’methet knew that not even death was an escape; for in the scope of time, once it existed, it could not release itself from that through merely ending its existence. The dead never truly left the true universe. Just as the living never truly manifested in the true universe.

  Yet that didn’t stop Aza’methet from living. Nor did it keep those who hunted for it from desiring Aza’methet’s death.

  The prison that Aza’methet had condemned itself to was its compromise. Here, in this nameless crack in reality, it was safe, for a time. But even this place was temporary. Eventually, the hunters would penetrate the defenses it had constructed
millions of years ago. It had happened before. Here, Aza’methet could protect itself. Here, Aza’methet could survive in obscurity while entropy drove the rest of the universe toward its inevitable conclusion.

  But the hunters always came. And today – this moment – the next iteration of the universe’s quest to extinguish Aza’methet would arrive.

  Due to its perceptions and abilities, Aza’methet’s nameless race had all been hunted over the eons. There had never been too many of them to begin with – they had been spawned in the fourth great generation of being, when the perceptions of the oldest living things had already begun to scar the pristine nature of the universe. The physical laws had been much different, back then. The dimensions had not begun to split widely yet, and the energies involved were simple and primal. Conscious thought carved through the cosmos like a knife, leaving reality in tatters.

  Only after more than three hundred generations of stars forming, igniting, and dying had that critical moment arrived. When the dust and soot from supernovas had begun to litter the universe, producing the higher elements, their accretion and reaction to the naked forces of natural law had produced in its darkest pockets the first stirrings of Life.

  And once that Life could perceive the universe, it had begun to change it as a natural result of essential law. The first entity who regarded the pristine expanse of reality had, in that flawed perception, begun to change it; to pollute it. For, Aza’methet knew, to regard the universe and become aware of it, an entity had ruined the perfection of the very reality it attempted to know. It changed the rules before it even understood them. By its own self-awareness, it contaminated the primal order in ways that were unknowable, but undeniable.

  That was the burden of Life, Aza’methet knew. Life was a sin, a stain on the cosmos, an unfortunate aberration in the laws of nature. And Death was no escape.

  But the beings who spawned Aza’methet’s ancient race had had no concern about that. They had been creatures of pure impulse, with no memory, thus they were unencumbered by foresight. To know that your existence was an accident was one thing; to know that it was the consequence of pure, forgettable whim was another.

  Whatever purpose Aza’methet’s people were created for was unknown, and worse, unknowable. But his kind had memory, and they had power, even if they had no purpose. The younger races made use of them, though, when they were captured and compelled to bend reality to their childish whim. Power without purpose breeds corruption, and the younger races had no compunctions about imposing their will on the universe with Aza’methet as their tool.

  But the universe continued to inflict itself on the aberration of life; while it seemed to persist beyond all reason in the crevices of the universe, the universe was continuously trying to extinguish it.

  Aza’methet’s people were scattered and used by the lesser races, and occasionally killed. Their shades still roamed existence in one dimension or another. Death was, perhaps, inevitable, but it was no escape.

  So Aza’methet had fled and constructed this place to imprison itself and resist the hunters. Until there were no more hunters left. Until Life, itself, was eventually gone from the universe.

  But they always came. As this one did.

  It appeared as a black blot on the liquid sky, forming first a puddle on the surface before it attempted three dimensions. There was a burst of electromagnetic energy that sent arcs of plasma across the rocky plain, along with a cloud of probability and a warp in the arc of time. Aza’methet noticed it at once. It halted its great body and prepared for the inevitable battle and philosophical discussion ahead.

  The malignant disc soon lost its original shape as it bulged into Aza’methet’s realm like an overfull bladder, producing the same urgency and expectancy. When the loathsome meniscus of the intruder finally forced its way into existence, the dimensional traps Aza’methet had set began slicing the hunter into thin gobbets of reality.

  Impressively, the hunter countered the attack with a similar play with dimensions, limiting the damage. The moment that it broke through, the shiny black droplet shattered into a cloud of dust that drifted chaotically into the fog.

  Aza’methet was satisfied with his defense but knew it had not stopped the hunter. It reared itself on its back legs and stood, every atom struggling against the great gravity of the place, as the hunter began reforming itself. A brief rainstorm of greasy black droplets soon coalesced into a pool, which then raised itself up to regard Aza’methet.

  “Begone,” Aza’methet demanded. It wasn’t speech. It wasn’t even quite telepathy. But, here, Aza’methet could make itself understood.

  “I have come for you,” the hunter said.

  “You will fail,” Aza’methet insisted, its two minds screaming as one. “I will not serve you.”

  “I will force you,” the invader said, as it began writhing. “We are without form. We will use you to remake the universe.”

  “You will fail,” Aza’methet repeated, as it drew energy to itself from the place. “You will be destroyed.”

  “We are without form. We cannot be destroyed,” it replied, cockily. “You will be our servant. The rewards will be great if you comply. The punishments will be severe if you resist.”

  “There are no rewards,” Aza’methet insisted. “All life is punishment for the sin of our existence. You cannot punish me more to motivate me. You will be destroyed.”

  “We are without form. Our servants are legion. Even the oldest ones fear us.” The viscous liquid began bubbling, each new bubble bulging out with bursts of probability and electromagnetic energy. Clearly, a preparation for an attack, Aza’methet perceived.

  “How do you propose to compel me?” Aza’methet asked. It did not ready its own defenses. It didn’t need to.

  “By removing your memory,” the one without form proposed. “When your memory is gone, so, too, will the story of the early universe. For you are the last of your kind, Aza’methet. Only you have knowledge of what transpired before the ninth great generation. Before the singularities began their assault on the pure flow of the arcane energies. You know what occurred in the most ancient of days. Once that knowledge is stricken from the universe, we will reign supreme,” it said, self-assuredly.

  “You have already failed,” Aza’methet declared. “For I am not the last of my kind, fool. And my memory has already been shared by the Yith. Unless you slew every one of them and banished their shades to oblivion, your purpose will not be achieved.”

  “Those who hunt the Yith to destruction are our allies,” assured the one without form. “Who do you think sent us here? Your neutronium armor will not protect you, Aza’methet. Your endurance will not stand against my power. Your spells and sorceries will not let you escape.”

  “They will betray you, but it doesn’t matter. If you wish your supremacy to be established, you will be a mere insignificant notation in the annals of the universe, transitory and forgettable. And it will not be with my assistance. Begone, or I will defend myself.”

  “Then let us begin,” the murky black pool agreed.

  And they fought.

  I cannot hope to describe the struggle; there are no words for some of the things I witnessed, and those that I could use are woefully inadequate. The contest involved time and space, order and chaos, and matter and energy. It was a mad mixture of the magical and mundane.

  It lasted but a moment but also for eternity. It crossed dimensional lines and disrupted the greater universe as part of the force of its fury. It passed into the subtle realms of quantum physics and telepathic assault. At one point the hunter sprayed Aza’methet with salt. At another, the ancient creature constructed a lure of snowstone before bludgeoning the intruder with an impossibly black length of magical obsidian, producing a catastrophic blast that intruded into other realities. I saw the secrets of their construction as he conjured them into existence.

  But there was never, ever any doubt in Aza’methet’s mind as to whom would be the victor. He would pre
vail. And, after an eternity, he did. At last, it captured the hunter and consumed it, destroying it utterly. And then it continued on its way.

  But in the meantime, I went mad, truly mad. When your ego is trapped in a room with two insane drunks, fighting each other with spacetime and dimensional magic, using divine and necromantic energies with equal facility, you want to get out of the way. And there was no way for me to. Madness was the only means of surviving that hellish existence.

  At some point, I’d given up hope of survival – me, Minalan, that is; Aza’methet never wavered. There is a point beyond despair where even hopelessness is no remedy. Your ego begins to dissolve in the acidic bath of experience.

  I had to have something to cling to, something that could give me bearing, like the Triangle does in the north. I needed a constant to keep myself from fading away.

  A constant. Alya.

  With the thought of the three stars of the Triad and the face and spirit of my wife in mind, even when there was nothing else coherent, I endure. I did endure. I will endure.

  It might seem silly, to say it now, but after the breadth of the universe and the ocean of experience that the Yith had inflicted upon me, clinging to the simple, pure joy I associated with Alya was what held me together, literally. The constellation of my being settled into a pattern around those three stars and the thought of my love kept it intact when all the universe conspired to end me. I had been shown the futility of existence, itself, and given the certainty that the universe not only doesn’t revere life of any sort, but also considers it an unfortunate and lamentable byproduct of stellar explosions and would just as soon see it done with.

  Perhaps I am capitulating to my primitive nature, but that primal love for Alya was my lifeline, my constant, while I was mad in Aza’methet’s insane brains. Perhaps if I was more developed, more advanced, more strong-minded I could have persisted in some other manner, but I will gladly argue that nothing else could have done it.