by Greg Bear
Olmy glanced at the message sent from the Redoubt. It provided navigation instructions for their flawship’s landing craft; how to disengage from the flawship, descend, undergo examination, and be taken into the pyramid. The message concluded, “We will determine whether you are illusions or aberrations. If you are from our origin, we will welcome you. It is too late to return now. Abandon your flawship before it approaches any closer to the allthing. Whoever sent you has committed you to our own endless imprisonment.”
“Cheerful enough,” Olmy said. The ghastly light cast a fitful, abbatoir glow on their faces.
“We have always gone there,” Rasp said quietly.
“We have to agree,” Plass said. “We have no other place to go.”
They tracted aft to the lander’s hatch and climbed into the small, arrowhead-shaped craft. Its interior welcomed them by fitting to their forms, providing couches, instruments, tailored to their bodies. Plass sat beside Olmy in the cockpit, Rasp and Karn directly behind them.
Olmy disengaged from the flawship and locked the lander onto the pyramid's beacon. They dropped from the flawship. The landscape steadily grew in the broad cockpit window.
Plass’s face crumpled, like a child about to break into tears. “Star, fate and pneuma, be kind. I see the opener’s head. There!” She pointed in helpless dread, equally horrified and fascinated by something so inconceivable.
On a low, broad rise in the shadowed land surrounding the Redoubt, a huge dark head rose like an upright mountain, its skin like gray stone, one eye turned toward the south, the other watching over the territory before the nearest face of the pyramid. This watchful eye was easily a hundred meters wide, and glowed a dismal sea green, throwing a long beam through the thick twisted ropes of mist. Plass’s voice became shrill. “Oh Star and Fate…”
The landscape around the Redoubt rippled beneath the swirling rays of rotating world-lines, spreading like hair from the black center of the lesion, changing the land a little with each pass, moving the bizarre landmarks a few dozen meters this way or that, increasing them in size, reducing them.
Olmy could never have imagined such a place. The Redoubt sat within a child’s nightmare of disembodied human limbs, painted over the hills like trees, their fingers grasping and releasing spasmodically. At the top of one hill stood a kind of castle made of blocks of green glass, with a single huge door and window. Within the door stood a figure—a statue, perhaps—several hundred meters high, vaguely human, nodding its head steadily, idiotically, as the lander passed over. Hundreds of much smaller figures, gigantic nevertheless, milled in a kind of yard before the castle, their red and black shadows flowing like capes in the lee of the constant wind of changing probabilities. Olmy thought they might be huge dogs, or tailless lizards, but Plass pointed and said, “My husband told me about an assistant to Issa Danna named Ram Chako… Duplicated, forced to run on all fours.”
The giant in the castle door slowly raised its huge hand, and the massive lizards scrambled over each other to run from an open portal in the yard. They leaped up as the lander passed overhead, as if they would snap it out of the air with hideous jaws.
Olmy’s head throbbed. He could not bring himself out of a conviction that none of this could be real; indeed, there was no necessity for it to be real in any sense his body understood. For their part, Rasp and Karn had lost all their earlier bravado and clung to each other, their clavicles floating on tethers wrapped around their wrists.
The lurid glare of the halo flowed like blood into the cabin as the lander rotated to present points of contact for traction fields from the Redoubt. Olmy instructed the ship to present a wide-angle view of the Redoubt and the land, and this view revolved slowly around them, filling the lander’s cramped interior.
The perverse variety seemed to never end. Something had dissected not only a human body, or many bodies, and wreaked hideous distortions on its parts, but had done the same with human thoughts and desires, planting the results over the region with no obvious design.
Within the low valley—as described by the female visitant—a large blue-skinned woman, the equal of the figure in the doorway of the castle, crouched near a cradle within which churned hundreds of naked humans. She slowly dropped her hand into the cauldron of flesh and stirred, and her hair sprayed out from her head with a sullen cometary glow, casting everything in a syrupy green luminosity.
“Mother of geometries,” Karn muttered, and hid her eyes.
Olmy could not turn away, but everything in him wanted to go to sleep, to die, rather than to acknowledge what they were seeing.
Plass saw his distress. Somehow she took strength from the incomprehensible view. “It does not need to make sense,” she said with the tone of a chiding schoolteacher. “It’s supported by infinite energy and a monolithic, mindless will. There is nothing new here, nothing—"
“I’m not asking that it make sense,” Olmy said. “I need to know what’s behind it.”
“A sufficient force, channeled properly, can create anything a mind can imagine—" Karn began.
“More than any mind will imagine. Not a mind like our minds,” Rasp restated. “A unity, not a mind at all.”
For a moment, Olmy’s anger lashed and he wanted to shout his frustration, but he took a deep breath, folded his arms where he floated in tracting restraints, and said to Plass, “A mind that has no goals? If there’s pure order here—"
Karn broke in, her voice high and sweet, singing. “Think of the dimensions of order. There is mere arrangement, the lowest form of order, without motive or direction. Next comes self-making, when order can convert resources into more of itself, propagating order. Then comes creation, self-making reshaping matter into something new. But when creation stalls, when there is no mind, just force, it becomes mere elaboration, an endless spiral of rearrangement of what has been created. What do we see down there? Empty elaboration. Nothing new. No understanding.”
“She shows some wisdom,” Plass acknowledged grudgingly. “But the allthing still must exist.”
“And all this… elaboration?” Olmy asked.
“Spoiled by deathlessness,” Plass said, “by never-ending supplies of resources. Never freshened by the new, at its core. Order without death, art without critic or renewal, the final mind of a universe where only riches exist, only joy is possible, never knowing disappointment.”
The lander shuddered again and again as they dropped toward the pyramid. Its inertial control systems could not cope with the sweeping rays of different world-lines.
“Sounds like a spoiled child,” Olmy said.
“Far worse,” Karn said. “We’re like spoiled children, Rasp and I. Willful and maybe a little silly. Humans are silly, childish, always learning, full of failure. Out there—beyond the lesion, reaching through it…”
“Perpetual success,” Rasp mocked. “Ultimate maturity. It cannot learn. Only rearrange.”
“Deirdre Enoch was never content with limitations,” Plass said, looking to Olmy for sympathy. “She went searching for what heaven would really be. Her eyes glittered with her emotion—exaltation brought on by too much fear and dismay.
“Maybe she found it,” Karn said.
5
“I can’t welcome you,” Deirdre Enoch said, walking heavily toward them. Behind Olmy, within a chamber high in the Redoubt, near the tip of the steel pyramid, the lander sighed and settled into its cradle.
Olmy tried to compare this old woman with the portraits of Enoch in the records. Her voice was much the same, though deeper, and almost without emotion.
Rasp, Karn, and Plass stood beside Olmy as Enoch approached. Behind Enoch, in the lambency of soft amber lights spaced around the base of the chamber, wavered a line of ten other men and women, all of them old, all dressed in black, with silver ribbons hanging from the tops of their white-haired heads. “You’ve come to a place of waiting where nothing is resolved. Why come at all?”
Before Olmy could answer, Enoch smiled, her de
eply wrinkled face seeming to crack with the unfamiliar expression. “We assume you are here because you think the Jarts could become involved.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Olmy said, his voice hoarse. “I recognize you, but none of the others…”
“We survived the first night after the lesion. We formed an expedition to make an escape attempt. There were sixty of us that first time. We managed to return to the Redoubt before the Night Land could change us too much, play with us too drastically. We aged. Some of us were taken and… You see them out there. There was no second expedition."
“My husband,” Plass said. “Where is he?”
“Yes… I know you. You are so much the same it hurts. You escaped at the very beginning.”
“I was the only one,” Plass said.
“You called it the Night Land,” Rasp said, holding up her hands, the case with her clavicle. “How appropriate.”
“No sun, no hope, only order,” Enoch said, as if the word were a curse. “Did you send yourselves, or were you sent by other fools?”
“Fools, I’m afraid,” Plass said.
“And you… You came back, knowing what you’d find?”
“It wasn’t like this when I left. My husband sent ghosts to visit me. They told me a little of what’s happened here… or might have happened.”
“Ghosts try to come into the Redoubt and talk,” Enoch said, her many legs shifting restlessly. “We refuse them. Your husband was caught outside that first night. He hasn’t been changed much. He stands near the Watcher, frozen in the eyebeam.”
Plass sobbed and hid her face.
Enoch continued, heedless. “The only thing left in his control—to shed ghosts like dead skin. And never the same.. are they? He’s allowed to take temporary twists of space-time and shape them in his own image. The allthing finds this sufficiently amusing. Needless to say, we don’t let the ghosts bother us. We have too much else to do, just to keep our place secure, and in repair.”
“Repair,” Karn said with a beatific smile, and Olmy turned to her, startled by a reaction similar to his own. Karn did a small dance. “Disorder has its place here, then. You have to work to fix things?”
“Precisely,” Enoch said. “I worship rust and age. But we’re only allowed so much of it and no more. Now that you’re here, perhaps you’ll join us for some tea?” She smiled. “Blessedly, our tea cools quickly in the Redoubt. Our bones grow frail, our skin wrinkles. Tea cools. Hurry!”
“Don’t be deceived by our bodies,” Deirdre Enoch said as she poured steaming tea into cups for all her guests. “They are distorted, but they are sufficient. The allthing can only perfect and elaborate; it knows nothing of real destruction.”
Olmy watched something ripple through the old woman, a shudder of slight change. She seemed not as old and wrinkled now, as if some force had turned back a clock.
“I’m not clear about perfection,” Olmy said, lifting the cup without enthusiasm. “I’m not even clear on how you come to look old.”
“We’re not unhappy,” Enoch said. “That isn’t within our power. We know we can never return to Thistledown. We know we can never escape.”
“You haven’t answered Ser Olmy’s question,” Plass said gently. “Are you independent here?”
“That wasn’t his question, Ser Gena Plass,” Enoch said, an edge in her voice. “What you ask is not a polite question. I said, we were caught trying to escape. Some of us are out there in the Night Land now. Those of us who returned to the pyramid… did not escape the enthusiasm of the allthing. But it’s influence here is limited. To answer one question at least: We have some independence.” Enoch nodded as if falling asleep, her head dropping briefly to an angle with her shoulders… an uncomfortable angle, Olmy would have thought. She raised it again with a jerk. “The universe I discovered… there is nothing else. It is all.”
“The Final Mind of the domain,” Plass said.
“I gather it regards the Way and the humans it finds here as objects of curiosity,” Olmy said. Rasp and Karn fidgeted.
“Objects to be recombined and distorted,” Enoch said. “We are materials for the ultimate in decadent art. The allthing is beyond our knowing.” She leaned forward on her cushion, where she had gracefully folded her legs into an agile lotus, and rubbed her nose reflectively with the back of one hand. “We are allowed to resist, I suspect, because we are antithesis.”
“The allthing has only known thesis,” Rasp said with a small giggle.
“Exa-a-a-ctly,” Enoch said, drawing out the word with pleasure. Struck by another sensation of unreality, Olmy looked around the group sitting with Enoch and himself: Plass, the twins, a small woman with a questing, feline expression behind Enoch who had said nothing. She carried the teapot around again and refilled their cups.
The tea was cold.
Olmy turned on his sitting pillow to observe the other elderly followers, arrayed around the circular room, still, subservient. Their faces had changed since his arrival, yet no one had left, no one had entered.
It had been observed for a dozen generations that Thistledown’s environment and culture bred followers with proportionately fewer leaders, often assigned much greater power. Efforts were being made to remedy that—to reduce the extreme schisms of rogues such as Deirdre Enoch. Too late for these, he thought. Does this allthing want followers?
He could not get his bearings long enough to plan his course of action. He felt drugged, but knew he wasn’t.
“Can it tolerate otherness?” Karn asked, her voice high and sweet once more, like a child’s.
“No,” Enoch said. “Its nature is to absorb and disguise all otherness in mutation, change without goal.”
“Like the Jarts?” Rasp asked, chewing on her thumb with a coyness and insecurity that was at once studied and completely convincing.
“Not like the Jarts. The Jarts met the allthing and it gave them their own Night Land. I fear it won’t be long until ours is merged with theirs, and we are both mingled and subjected to further useless change.”
“How long?” Olmy asked.
“Another few years, perhaps.”
“Not so soon, then,” he said.
“Soon enough,” Enoch said with a sniff. She rubbed her nose again. “We’ve been here already for well over thousand centuries.”
Olmy tried to understand this. “Truly?” he asked, expecting her to break into laughter.
“Truly. I’ve had millions of different followers here. Look around you.” She leaned over the table to whisper to Olmy, “Waves in a sea. I’ve lived a thousand centuries in a thousand infinitesimally different universes. It plays with all world-lines, not just the tracks of individuals. Only I am relatively the same with each tide. I appear to be the real nexus in this part of the Way.”
“Tea cools… skin wrinkles… But you experience such a length of time?”
“Ten thousand lengths cut up and bundled and rotated.” She took a scarf from around her thin neck and stretched it between her firsts. “Twisted. Knotted. You were sent here to correct the reckless madness of a renegade… weren’t you?”
“A Geshel visionary,” Olmy said.
Enoch was not mollified. She drew herself up and returned her scarf to her neck, tying it with a conscious flourish. “I was appointed by the Office of Way Maintenance by Ry Ornis himself. They gave me two of the best gate openers in the guild, and they instructed me, specifically, to find a gate into total order. I wasn’t told why. I can guess now, however.”
“I remember two openers,” Plass said. “They don’t.”
“They hoped you would find me transformed or dead,” Enoch said. “Well, I’m different, but I’ve survived, and after a few thousands of centuries, one’s personality becomes rather rigid. I’ve become more like that Watcher and its huge gaping eye outside. I don’t know how to lie any more. I’ve seen too much. I’ve fought against what I found, and I’ve endured atrocities beyond what any human has ever had to face. Believe me, I
would rather have died before my mission began than see what I’ve seen.”
“Where is the other opener?” Olmy asked.
“In the Night Land,” Enoch said. “Issa Danna was the first to encounter the allthing. He and his partner, master Tolby Kin, took the brunt of its first efforts at elaboration.”
Rasp walked over to Olmy and whispered in his ear. “There never was a master opener named Tolby Kin.”
“Can anybody else confirm your story?” Olmy asked.
“Would you believe anyone here? No,” Enoch said.
“Not that it matters,” Plass said fatalistically. “The end result is the same.”
“Not at all,” Enoch said. “We couldn’t close down the lesion now even if we had it in our power. Ry Ornis was correct. The rift had to be opened. The infection is not finished. If we don’t wait for completion, our universe will never quicken. It’ll be born dead.” Enoch shook her head and laughed softly. “And no human in our history will ever see a ghost. A haunted world is a living world, Ser Olmy.”
Olmy touched his tea cup with his finger. The tea was hot again.
The living quarters made available were spare and cold. Most of the Redoubt’s energy went to keeping the occupants of the Night Land at bay; that energy was derived from the wall of the Way, an ingenious arrangement set up by Issa Danna before he was caught up in the lesion; sufficient, but not a surfeit by any means.
For the first time in days, Olmy had a few moments alone. He cleared a window looking south, toward the lesion and across about fifty kilometers of the Night Land. Enoch had provided him with a pair of ray-tracing binoculars.
Beyond a tracting grid stretched to its limits, and a glowing demarcation of complete nuclear destruction, through which nothing made of matter could hope to cross, less than a thousand meters from the pyramid, lay the peculiar vivid darkness and the fitful nightmare glows of the allthing’s victims.
Olmy swung the lightweight binoculars in a slow steady arc. What looked like hills or low mountains were constructions attended by hundreds of pale figures, human-sized but only vaguely human in shape. They seemed to spend much of their time fighting, waving their limbs about like insect antennae. Others carried loads of glowing dust in baskets, dumping them at the top of a hill, then stumbling and sliding down to begin again.