Beyond the Farthest Suns

by Greg Bear

  Fibers formed curious worms and squirmed closer, lights pulsing.

  “The other deck, now,” I told Dont. She unwrapped the second deck, and there, in fountain pen, was written, Wont.

  “Hand the deck to the person whose name is written on the side,” I said. She passed the deck to Wont.

  “Write on the other side your name and any number,” I told Wont, giving him the pen. “And then, on a card within the deck, write the name of anybody in this room—in big, sloppy, wet letters. Show the card to everybody except me, and put it within the deck and press the deck together firmly.”

  He did this.

  “Now give the deck to Cant.”

  He passed the deck to her. “How many decks do you carry now?” I asked. She reached into her pockets and found two more decks, which she handed to me, keeping Wont’s deck with his name written on it.

  “Now find the card on which Wont has written, and the card immediately next to it, smeared with the wet ink from that card. Write your name on the face of that card, and another number. Show them to everybody but me.”

  She did so.

  “How many decks do we all have now?” I asked.

  I went among them, counting the decks presently in circulation—five. I redistributed the decks one to each of the five Negatives.

  “The cards have told each other all about you, and you have no secrets. But I am the master of the cards—and from me not even the cards have secrets!”

  I reached behind their ears, one by one, and pulled the cards that had been written on, with the names Cant, Musnt, Dont, and Wont. “The gossip of the cards goes full circle,” I said. “Show us your decks!”

  On the top of each deck, the cards bearing the suit and number of the written-on cards—for all had been number cards—appeared, bearing a newly written number, and a new name—Cardino.

  The Negatives seemed befuddled. They showed the cards to each other and to the questing fibers.

  They had forgotten the art of applause, and the fibers were silent, but no applause was necessary.

  “How is this done?” Musnt asked. “You must tell …”

  I pitied them, just as a caveman might pity a city slicker who has lost the art of flint knapping. From the beginning of their lives to the present moment, they had truly fooled nobody. They had lived lives of illusion without wonder, for always they could explain how things were done.

  All their magic was performed by silent, subservient, electronic demiurges.

  “Turn to the last card in your decks,” I said. “Show me who is King.”

  On every one of their decks, the King of Hearts was inscribed with two names. They held the cards out simultaneously. Each Negative carried a card bearing his or her name, and in larger letters, RODERICK ESCHER.

  The fibers seemed to give a mighty heave. Roderick came forward, and I saw the fibers fleeing from his legs, his suit, his face and skin.

  The Negatives turned to each other in confusion. Cant giggled. They compared their decks, searched them. “They’re made of matter,” Wont said. “They aren’t false—”

  “Tricks,” Shant said.

  “Can you do them?” Wont asked.

  “In an instant,” Shant said. Cards fluttered down around him, twisted, formed a tall mannequin and danced around us all. The fibers withdrew from around him as if singed by flames.

  “Not the point,” Roderick said, free of fibers now. “You can do anything you want, but you subscribe. Cardino does these things by himself, alone.”

  The fibers bunched around my feet. Shant made his cards and the mannequin vanish. “How?” he asked, shrugging.

  “Skill,” Roderick said.

  “Skill of the body,” Shant said haughtily. “Who needs that?”

  “Self-discipline, training, years of concentrated effort,” Roderick said. “Isn’t that right, Cardino?”

  “Yes,” I said, the confidence of my performance fading. I was caught in a game whose rules I could not understand. Roderick was using me, and I did not know why.

  “Nothing any of us can experience compares to what this man does all by himself,” Roderick continued.

  The five froze in place for a moment. I could see some change in their structure, a momentary fluctuation in their illusory shapes.

  Roderick lifted his arms and stared at his body. “I’m free!” he said to me in an undertone, as if confiding to a priest.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked.

  “It’s about skill and friendship and death,” Roderick said.

  The five began to move again. The fibers touched my shoes, the hem of my pants. Instinctively, I kicked at them, sending glowing bits scattering like sparks. They recoiled, toughened, pushed in more insistently.

  “My time is ending,” Roderick said. “I’ve done all I can, experienced all I can.”

  The five smiled and circled around me. “They favor you,” Cant said, and she bent to push a wave of growing fibers toward my legs. I backed off, kicked again without effect, shouted to Roderick,

  “What do they want?”

  “You,” Roderick said. “My time is done. Maja is dead; I go to follow her.”

  I turned and ran from the room, sliding on the clumps of fibers, falling. The fibers lightly touched my face, felt at my cheeks, prodded my lips as if to push into my mouth, but I jumped to my feet and ran through the door. Roderick followed, and behind him a surge of fibers clogged the door.

  Wherever I ran in the house, eager fibers grew from the walls, the floor, fell from the ceiling, like webs trying to ensnare me. Cant appeared in a twisted hallway ahead. I fell to my hands and knees, staring as the floor twisted into a corkscrew, afraid I would pitch forward into the architectural madness.

  Dr. Ont appeared, shoulders dipped in failure, hands beseeching to explain. “Roderick, do not—”

  “It is done!” Roderick cried.

  A cold wind flowed down the hall, conveying a low moan of endless agony. Roderick helped me to my feet, his thin fingers cold even through the fabric of my suit.

  “Can you feel it?” he whispered to me. “King Nerve has released me. I’m dying, Robert!” He turned to Dr. Ont. “I’m dying, and there’s nothing you can do! I know all the permutations! I’ve experienced it all, and I am bored. Let me die!”

  Dr. Ont stared at Roderick with an expression of infinite pity. “Your sister—”

  Roderick gripped my shoulders. “We are walled in like prisoners by the laziness of gods, all desires sated, all refinements exhausted. Let them crown the new master!”

  The moaning grew louder. Behind Dr. Ont, Roderick’s sister appeared, even more haggard and pale, the feeblest energy of purpose animating a husk, her dry and shrunken mouth trying to speak.

  Dr. Ont stood aside as Roderick saw her. “Maja!” Roderick cried, holding up his hands to block out sight of her.

  “Still alive,” Dr. Ont said. “I was wrong. She cannot die. We have all forgotten how.”

  The five brushed past Roderick, smiling only at me.

  “The House of Escher loses all support,” Cant said, lightly brushing my arm. “The flow is with you. The world wants you. You will teach them your experience. You will show them what it feels to be skilled and to have fleshly talents, to work and touch in a primal way. Roderick was absolutely correct—you are a marvel!”

  I looked at Roderick, frozen in terror, and then at Maja, her eyes like pits sucking in nothing, as isolated as any corpse—but still alive.

  The walls shuddered around me. The fibers withdrew from the stones, and where they no longer held, cracks appeared, running in crazed patterns over the white and yellow surfaces. The tiles of the floor heaved up, their tessellations disrupted, all order scattered.

  Cant took my hand and led me through the disintegrating corridors, down the shivering and swaying st
airs. Behind me, the stairs buckled and crumbled, and the beams of the ceiling split and jabbed down to the floor like broken elbows. Ahead, a tide of fibers withdrew from the house like sea sucked from a cave, and above the ripping snap of tearing timbers, the rumble and slam of stone blocks falling and shattering, I heard Roderick’s high, chicken-cluck shriek, the cry of an avatar driven past desperation into madness:

  “No death! No Death! King Nerve forever!”

  And his bray of laughter at the final jest revealed, all his plans cocked asunder.

  The antitheticals blew me through the front door like a wind, and down the walk into the ruined garden, among the twisted and fiber-covered trees, until I was away from the house of Roderick Escher. All of his spreading distractions and entertainments, all of his chambers filled with the world’s diversions, the pandering to the commonest denominators of a frozen or disembodied horde … the impossible and convoluted towers leaned, shuddered, and collapsed, blowing dust and splinters through the door and the windows of the first floor.

  The fibers pushed from the ground, binding my feet, rising up my legs toward my trunk, feeling through my suit, probing for secrets, for solutions. I felt voices and demands in my head, petulant, childish:

  Show us.

  Do for us.

  Give us.

  The fibers burrowed into my flesh with thousands of pricks like tiny cold needles.

  Cant took my arm. “You are favored,” she said.

  The voices picked at my thoughts, rudely invaded my memories, making crude and cruel jokes. They seemed to know nothing but expletives, arranged in no sensible order, and they applied them accompanied by demands that went beyond the obscene, demands that echoed again and again; and I saw that this new world was composed not of gods, but of rude, ill-bred children who had never faced responsibility or consequence, and whose lives were all secrecy, all privilege, conducted behind thick and impersonal walls.

  Tingles shot up my hands and feet and along my spine, and I felt sparks at the very basement of my reason.

  Do for us, do everything, live for us, let us feel, all new and all unique, all superlatives and all gladness and joy, and no death no end.

  My hands jerked out, holding a pack of cards, and I felt a will other than mine—a collective will—move my fingers, attempt to spread the cards into a fan. The fingers jerked and spilled the cards into the dirt, across the creeping fibers. “Get them away from me!” I cried in furious panic.

  The blocks and timbers and reduced towers of the House of Escher settled with a final groaning sigh, but I pictured Roderick and Maja buried beneath its timbers, still alive.

  The fibers lanced into my tongue. The voices filling my head hissed and slid and insinuated like snakes, like worms in my living brain, demanding tapeworms, asking numbing questions, prodding, prickling, insatiable.

  Cant said, “You must assert yourself. They demand much, but you have so much to give—”

  The fibers shoved down my throat, piercing and threading through my tissues as if to connect with every cell of my being. I clawed at my mouth, my throat, my body, trying to tug free, but the fibers were strong as steel wires, though thinner than the strands of a spider’s web.

  “Newness is a treasure,” Musnt said, standing beside Cant. Wont and Shant and Dont joined her.

  My legs buckled, but the fibers stiffened and held me like a puppet. I could not speak, could only gag, could hardly hear above the dissonant voices.

  Amuse.

  Give all.

  Share all.

  “Hail to the new and most masterful,” Cant said worshipfully, smiling simply, innocently. Even in my terror and pain that smile seemed angelic.

  “A hundred billion people cannot be wrong,” Shant said, and touched the crown of my head with his outspread hand.

  “We anoint the new Master of King Nerve,” the five said as one, and I could breathe for myself, and speak for myself, no more.

  The Way of All Ghosts

  The Thistledown sequence—Eon, Eternity, and Legacy—began with “The Wind from a Burning Woman.” This most recent story was commissioned by Robert Silverberg for his anthology, Far Horizons.

  I’ve long been fascinated by the visionary novels of William Hope Hodgson, and in particular, his magnum opus, The Night Land, published in 1912. Hodgson died in 1918 at Ypres, ending a very short and very influential career. Today, The Night Land is a difficult­ book to read, for stylistic reasons mostly—Hodgson affected a pseudo-Georgian­ style that doesn’t really work for contemporary readers, though it does create a dreamlike sense of an ornately sentimental alternate reality.

  But more important is the incredible atmosphere of his most fabulous creation, the Night Land itself.

  It seemed to me that a science fictional treatment of this vision, set in the Thistledown sequence, would serve more as a collaborative tribute than a rip-off, and Robert Silverberg agreed. Hence the dedication.

  Later, I wrote a book on themes echoing some of those found in The Night Land and Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, my novel City at the End of Time.

  Check out The Night Land and William Hope Hodgson’s many shorter works. We lost something very special at Ypres.

  A Myth from Thistledown

  For William Hope Hodgson

  Preface:

  Once upon a very long extension, not precisely time nor any space we know, there existed an endless hollow thread of adventure and commerce called the Way, introduced in Eon (Bluejay/Tor, 1985). The Way, an artificial universe fifty kilometers in diameter and infinitely long, was created by the human inhabitants of an asteroid starship called Thistledown. They had become bored with their seemingly endless journey between the stars; the Way, with its potential of openings to other times and other universes, made reaching their destination unnecessary.

  That the Way was destroyed (in Eternity, Warner, 1988) is known; that it never ends in any human space or time is less obvious.

  Even before its creators completed their project, the Way was discovered and invaded by the nonhuman Jarts, who sought to announce themselves to Deity, what they called Descendant Mind, by absorbing and understanding everything, everywhere. The Jarts nearly destroyed the Way’s creators, but were held at bay for a time, and for a price.

  Yet there were stranger encounters. The plexus of universes is beyond the mind of any individual, human or Jart.

  One traveler experienced more of this adventure than any other. His name was Olmy Ap Sennen. In his centuries of life, he lived to see himself become a living myth, be forgotten, rediscovered, and made myth again. So many stories have been told of Olmy that history and myth intertwine.

  This is an early story. Olmy has experienced only one re-incarnation­ (Legacy, Tor, 1995). In fee for his memories, he has been rewarded with a longing to return to death everlasting.

  1

  “Probabilities fluctuated wildly, but always passed through zero. Gate openers, their equipment, and all associated personnel within a few hundred meters of the gate were swallowed by a null that can only be described in terms of mathematics. It became difficult to remember that these individuals had ever existed; records of their histories were corrupted or altered, even though they were stored millions of kilometers from the incident. We had tapped into the geometric blood of the gods. But we knew we had to continue. We were compelled.”

  —Testimony of Master Gate Opener Ry Ornis,

  Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite

  Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability of

  Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”

  The ghost of his last lover found Olmy Ap Sennen in the oldest columbarium of Alexandria, within the second chamber of the Thistledown.

  Olmy stood in the middle of the hall, surrounded by stacked tiers of hundreds of small golden spheres. The spheres were urns. They rose to the gla
ssed-in ceiling, held within columns of gentle yellow suspension fields. Most contained only a sample of ashes.

  He reached out to a blank silver plate on the base of the nearest column. One after another, the names of the dead appeared as if suddenly engraved.

  Olmy pulled back his hand when the names reached Ilmo, Paul Yan. This is where the soldiers from his childhood neighborhood were honored; five names in this column, all familiar to him from days in school, and all killed in a single skirmish with the Jarts near 3 ex 9, three billion kilometers down the Way.

  These urns were empty. His friends had been obliterated without trace. He did not know the details. He did not need to. They had served Thistledown as faithfully as Olmy, but they would never return.

  Olmy had spent seventy-three years stranded on the planet Lamarckia, in the service of the Hexamon, but cut off from the Thistledown and the Way that stretched beyond the asteroid’s seventh chamber. On Lamarckia, he had raised children, loved and buried wives … lived a long and memorable life in primitive conditions on an extraordinary world. His rescue and return to the Way, followed by conversion from an old and dying man to a fresh-bodied youth, had been a shock worse than the return of any real ghost.

  Axis City, slung on the singularity that occupied the geodesic center of the Way, had been completed during those tumultuous years before Olmy’s rescue and resurrection. It had moved four hundred thousand kilometers “north,” down the Way, far from the seventh chamber cap.

  Within the Geshel precincts of Axis City, the mental patterns of many who died were now transferred to City Memory, a technological afterlife not very different from the ancient dream of heaven. Using similar technology, temporary partial personalities could be created to help an individual multi-task. These were sometimes called ghosts, or partials. Olmy had heard of partials being sent to do the bidding of their originals, with most of their mental faculties, but limited power to make decisions. He had never actually met one, however.

  The ghost appeared just to his right and announced its nature by flickering, becoming translucent, and briefly turning negative. This display lasted a few seconds. After, the simulacrum seemed perfectly solid and real.