Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  Mneseus saw our weapons being set aside, and he grimaced with frustration, and he said to Enoch, “What are you, that can undo my daemon’s inspiration? How did you overcome me?”

  “Everything that is named of Adam’s naming,” Enoch said, “Dominion is given to me, eldest son of his eldest son; for I had the words from my father, and he from his father before him, who is king of all men, eldest, and first: but the words of those things Adam did not name, the older things, sun, moon, stars, trees, waters, light, and the darkness that was before the Lord of the Elu on Oreb spoke His Word: over these things, the sons of Adam have no dominion. In life, I wrote the letters of this speech upon a column of brass and bronze, foreboding what was to come, and I built a city with a tower and a wall near the garden of my grandfather’s exile, by the shore of the river Pison. In times to come an earthquake will bury these pillars, and an age will pass, and then other children of Adam will unearth and read them.”

  He-Sings-Death was looking at Enoch in wonder. “I name you He-Speaks-Words! Use your words, you, to drive back the Dry Things and Cold Ones who follow us. Find for us the way out of this cave of iron to the warm places beneath the sun again!”

  Enoch shook his head. “Even these words of the Elu will grant me no power over the Grigorim, the Watchers: for the Watchers came down from heaven, to watch the work of creation, but, (woe to mankind!) came to love the gardens of creation, and will not depart back to heaven when called. The sons of Elu take the daughters of women to them, yes, as many as they wish, and giants are born from them, mighty men of renown.

  “The giants, the Nephilim, in time to come, one day rule the world, for their strength sweeps all before them. The One of Oreb shall be displeased. He shall open the windows of heaven. The world shall end in a great flood and the elder race of man shall perish. All this shall happen five generations from me, in the time of my grandson’s great-grandson, who is called Jubalcain the Harper. The Grigorim shall perish then but not before.

  “It is as it is. No one, not the Elu and the Lord of all the Elu, no one can destroy the Grigorim without destroying the world.”

  Kitimil barked at him: "Teach me your words!”

  Enoch said disdainfully: "Those who were kings of the earth before Adam have no claim on the Words. You are no child of Adam: they are not for you.”

  137. The Will To Kill Oneself

  The Blue Man puffed on his pipe, and said thoughtfully, “So, Mneseus, were you monkeying with Captain Boom-boom's nervous system? Adjusting glandular levels, triggering parasympathetic responses, and working some such as that, and all to get him to blow his tubes of chemical explosives at me? Was there some point to it?”

  I said, “With respect, Mr. Bliss, were you not paying attention? His Majesty was attempting to have us all join his suicide pact. If any of us live, it aids the enemy, or so he thinks. Knowing that some of us would be too weak, or too Christian, to slay ourselves, he used some sort of hypnosis or mentalism to urge us to kill each other. I suppose he was hoping the survivors would be those who held their lives lightly.”

  Ydmos said, “Child of a happy age, it is not that lives are held too lightly, that we are willing to shed them, but that we dare not allow our lives to be Destroyed. What of man remains after his thoughts are eaten, and twisted, and taken into the dark of the silence-thought, that wounded remnant of him will make his voice will cry out, or what sounds like his voice, and his dreams wing across the Night Lands, making such promises as few ignore, tempting his loved ones to their deaths.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I mean not to disparage your people, and I know not the dangers, spiritual and physical, they face: but surely self-destruction is the very definition of despair. That door opens to Hell, if you will forgive my saying so.”

  Ydmos said, “Our science shows that souls are born again, for the aetheric currents outlast the fleshy vessels, and maintain themselves in standing waves in the magnetosphere of the planet: if they are Destroyed, there is no returning, not in all the thousands and tens of thousands of generations our records reach.”

  Abraxander said, “The people of the Nine Pressurized Cities, us, we were taught that children must not be born aboard the space traveling vessels of which eldest legends spoke, and for such as reason as the men from the time of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss, them, those ones knew well, back in prehistory on the Man-home planet.”

  Crystals-of-Bliss looked at him. “You recall our times, duckling? Good. That means we lived.”

  Abraxander said, “Legends only. The Moon became the haunt of giants, for the children were born without humanity, and none of their coding was right. As for mental essences, our measurements show a partial formation ever present in the timelessness, which is why anticipation and memory, two non-time-specific functions, are addressed by the phenomena of the mental axis, and not by the physical. To restore whole person backwards from the essence, our savants held it to be possible, but no necromancer ever reduced the theory into practice.”

  The Blue Man said, “’Tis but a gravity effect, my ducks. The moon-men were like us once, but meddled with their gene plasm so they could dwell in microgravity without bone decay. Of course they got big. So they lost marriage, and human emotion, and humor, and love, and so they do not blink their big eyes? Brain-chemicals gone wrong, that is all. Deep down, still from human stock, so the old records say. Nothing supernatural about it.” To me he said, “Self-shutdown, what you call suicide, puts you beyond all worry: there is no more you to worry. There is no punishment, no you to punish. And nothing gets saved from some sort of worse-than-death Destruct. There is nothing to save and no one to notice anything might have been. He says its courage to shutdown, you say not: but it neither can be or cannot be. A once-had-been cannot be a coward, not matter what he once was: he cannot be brave. If he be not at all, he cannot be this or that.”

  He spread his blue hands and looked so very smug. He no doubt thought his skeptical belief in no one and nothing was the very pinnacle of wisdom, instead of its absence.

  I said to the Blue Man, “When your loved ones die, do you tell yourself that they are merely meat? Do you say a dead daughter is made up of just as many atoms as a living one, and so therefore any distinction between them is an arbitrary preference?”

  He was taken aback. His cynical mask for a moment had dropped and I saw human grief, plain and clear, on his face. He said softly to himself, “Emerald Laughter.”

  I blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”

  He did not answer me, for Ydmos then spoke up, saying, “Even among your people, Captain Powell of Nantucket, would you not condemn yourself to Hell, if it meant saving your loved one from being taken in your place to Hell?”

  I had no answer for that question. My mother knew the Good Book backward and forward, and knew how riddles like that were answered: I had little use for Bible-learning, back when my world was alive. At that time, I was sure it was some trick made up by priests and hysterical women, to prevent strong men from running things to suit themselves. Now, I was not so sure. I had been a great admirer of pagan virtues, then, who honored strength and boldness, and who were not about to let the meek inherit the earth. Now I was a rat in the hold of a ship crewed by monstrous beings from beyond the cosmos, something out of all human reckoning. You see the virtues of strength and greatness differently, when you are the weak and the hunted, I guess.

  “Forgive me, gentlemen,” I said, “But I am no theologian to puzzle out the implications of your lore and doctrines. The world is full of mysteries.”

  I stopped, for I head a woman’s voice. I could not make out the words, but it sounded familiar.

  138. Voices From The Aleph

  Mneseus grit his teeth, and said in a voice of passion, “Children of my children, posterity, we cannot! We cannot live!” He looked back and forth among us. “Do no other of you hear the voice, tempting, pleading, saying they know all the secrets of the past and things-to-come? I know them: did I not once call them up t
o wreck the ships of enemies who dared the coasts of fair Atlantis? The sirens sing, and tempt, and call out in voices of the ones we lost.”

  Ydmos said, “I hear them. Can you not pay them no heed?” But his face was troubled. I suppose, based on what he had said before, that those among his people who could hear the telepathic lures of the enemy, but could not resist them, had long ago been culled from the gene pool. Ydmos said, “The Watching Things can make shapes in thought that sound like our thoughts, but the Master-Word will silence them.”

  Enoch looked at him. “What word is this? Is it Adam’s word?”

  Ydmos said, “It is the ur-word upon which all human speech is based: it is the fundamental root of human essence. It is prior to language, and no human can misunderstand its import. The things of the Night Land can neither speak nor think it. This is one of many reasons why we know they are not of us.”

  Mneseus held up his hand, “Listen to me, my children! Think! What other cause could these beings have, lamp-eyed children of Echidna, titans and Earth-born and all fashion of monstrous prodigies and ugly wonders, to hale us up from our graves? What can we do that they cannot? What purpose do we serve? For, in the state, each craft has its craftsman; and in the parts of animals, so each part has its work. What is our part? What can we do, we humans, that these dark gods of the infernal realm cannot?”

  139. What Do They Want?

  The Blue Man said, “It hides not for naught. It hears us, aye: it watches us with a pale cool eye. What then? What for? For what? What do its codes tell it to do? Wants it us dead? Nothing to fear, in that. Dead, it cannot want us, for, if so, then why then this restart, this re-incarnal knowledge, life to-be-continued in Part Two? Why this?” He tapped his blue chest lightly with his pipe stem. “This sark, these bio-housing coats, fine and fair, firm flesh and pretty hair? Why bring us up from tape backup if it wants no more than but to off us again? Nor, deem I, this hidden one, would it crave aught he could by fear, or pain, or deconstitution of our brain, cell by cell, get for itself. What else? What else it to be?”

  He-Sings-Death slapped himself on the thigh, and laughed and said, “Song! When the He-Calls-Day blows through the mouth of man, it is as a man who blows through a reed. (Make my song worthy, O He-Makes-Grass!) The good reed sings well, a cracked reed, badly. I have seen it, a cracked reed can be wrapped in wet doeskin leather, and the crack swell shut, and the flute made whole again. (Make me whole, oh He-Brings-Sun!) This, it could be, that the Smotherer is after, eh? The reed knows nothing of what he sings, till the song is breathed in him.”

  Ydmos said, “We were not brought to sing. The enemy knows nothing of song.”

  I said, “Then why?”

  Ydmos said, “Bait. The strength of the House of Silence knows no limit. The Silent Ones would not need human men for something human men can do. Our living souls are but morsels of food to them, orts for their glut. But: something another can do, another who will come for us. But whom? No one will depart from the Last Redoubt to seek one who has fallen in the Night Lands. The Law forbids it.”

  I said. “Bait for whom? For what? No one is coming. Everyone is dead. Even the sun and moon are gone so long ago, that the age of the dinosaurs was yesterday, compared to that. No one is coming.”

  Ydmos said, “You are quick to doubt. Before the Lesser Redoubt fell, Naani thought no one was coming. She did not even know her lover had survived the death of the world of sunlight until she heard him calling her in a dream. Till then, the folk of the Lesser Redoubt thought they were the last of man: how could they have known a Greater Redoubt, destined to stand another ten million years longer, was in the Night Land south away?”

  I said: “But our whole world, all the worlds, the galaxy, all the galaxies, all the stars, everything. I thought you said—“ I nodded toward Abraxander “—that the structure of space and time was breaking down. Reality and unreality are getting mixed. Time is ending.”

  Abraxander said mildly: “Distinction. This one, me, I said the plenum elements were Disassembling. The process is an orderly backward infolding of the cosmogenesis, and return at low energy states of the original unbroken symmetries of fundamental concept-points. Does that one, he, grasp?”

  Kitimil spoke. “Love.”

  His voice seemed louder than before, almost a bark. We turned to look at him, but he was still staring at the round patch of light against the ceiling.

  The Blue Man said, “Oho. The ape-man apes a man, oh, aye, he speaks his speech. I hear with my ear, yet I do not hear. Say your say, Kitimil!”

  Kitimil the shaggy man cocked his head at a strange angle, looking almost like an owl twisting his head backward, and because his head was turned so far, it pulled his mouth askew, and made him squint, so he seemed to be sneering at the Blue Man. “Men do. Men do not know how to do. It comes. It is its own. It is done. Love.”

  I said, “Why would they, the enemy, want us to love?”

  Ydmos said, “What else will bring a man out from the Last Redoubt? For what else will he risk his soul to utter Destruction by the Forces that move in the Night?”

  Kitimil said, “If it does not breathe, it cannot blow on the coal. If it does not love, it cannot mate; not mate, not bear. They need us to remake the All-of-all that is. We are their plant stalks. We are their seed corn. They hate love, but must have it now. They promise much; with both hands, they will give.” And he drew back his lips, and showed us the fangs of his grin.

  And he scampered across the floor away from us, running on all fours.

  140. The Last Of All Suns

  Kitimil fled.

  We all jumped up, startled. I don’t know what the others thought, but I brought my rifle to my shoulder and aimed at the retreated back of the shaggy man. But no: I could not shoot. What if Kitimil were running for some innocent reason? What if he knew who was traitor was and fled from him? (And, yes, the thought did not escape me that I might be the one, and some devil-thing inside me might be urging me to kill my comrade-in-arms.)

  I lowered my barrel, grimacing.

  And yet I remembered that he was the third mind reader in the group, aside from Mneseus and Ydmos. The siren song that Mneseus feared was audible to Kitimil.

  He-Sings-Death, on his long legs, went ahead of us, his long spear held lightly on his shoulder, giving chase to the shaggy man. Mneseus rushed down the staircase aisle between the chairs toward the glass floor below, taking four and five steps at a stride, and his arrows clattered in his quiver on his back. These two were not quick enough, however, to catch up to Kitimil, who leaped from seat back to seat back down the endless ranks of the amphitheater.

  The Blue Man languidly lifted himself to his feet and sauntered at no great pace through the ranks and ranks of seats down the stairs of the amphitheater towards the acre of glass where Kitimil, the Shaggy Man, was bounding. To keep an eye on the Blue Man, I followed; to keep an eye on me, (I presume) Enoch followed.

  Abraxander-the-Threshold and Ydmos stayed behind for a moment or two, talking in low tones. Eventually Ydmos took up his heavy wheel-axe weapon and came down the long stairs behind us. The slippered feet of Abraxander made a slight noise against the soft substance carpeting the stair; somehow, the heavy boots of Ydmos made none.

  Suddenly, all were still again. Kitimil was no longer fleeing; He-Sings-Death and Mneseus no longer pursued.

  Kitimil, He-Sings-Death, and Mneseus were standing on the glass floor. Enoch would not step onto it, but leaned and peered.

  I called, “What do you see?”

  He-Sings-Death looked down. There was reddish light from under his feet; it threw shadows across his shoulders, cheeks and forehead. I could see the whites of his eyes as he stared downward.

  Enoch spoke first. “It is the hell fire. The pit where the Fallen Elohim burn. There seems to be a long black tunnel leading to it.”

  He-Sings-Death said, “May He-Brings-Light reach out his hand and take me up, as I take up the boy-child I love, and the girl-child! C
aptain Powell of Nantucket: it is no tunnel, but the night sky. The sun is under our feet, and the sun is the color of blood from an old wound. The sun is wounded, for I see dark tears and scabs on his face. How can the sun be below my foot? It should be up in the sky, over our head. How can the sun be wounded? Sacred and bright, bright and sacred things are not to be wounded!” There was a tinge of hysteria in his voice.

  I stepped down the last few stairs. The glass floor was less than a yard from me.

  Something made me hesitate.

  From behind me, Ydmos said, “We are in some Redoubt or Tower of the Silent Ones. This must be a shaft leading to a new source of Earth-Current. I sense that the light is holy: but how can the tower of the enemy stand here? The Earth-Current surely must destroy them: they cannot abide the radiance.”

  The Blue Man cocked his head, and looked back toward Ydmos. “Sensed? What sensors, me dainties, what extra eyes, does the man from the sunless world hide? Sense how?”

  Ydmos strode forward, and when he reached the glass floor, he bowed his head and knelt on one knee. Carefully he laid his weapon down, and he removed his left gauntlet.

  He spoke: “My Diskos grows heavy in my hand; I feel the joy in the blade: that means her circuits are drinking of the stored ambient power. That means the power is the Earth-Current, which is hale and salubrious for the children of Man, and hurtful to the Watching Things, the abhumans and Night-Hounds.”

  Reassured by his strange words, despite that I did not understand them, I stepped forward.

  What a sight I saw!

  It was a monstrous sun, and I saw what seemed to be swirls of light wreathing its equator like smoke. As my eyes adjusted to the sight, my mind adjusted to the magnitude, I realized that these wreaths of spiral smoke were hundreds, nay, thousands of spiral and cylindrical galaxies, whole clusters of galaxies, orbiting a sphere of incandescent fire like the rings around Saturn.