The damnedest looking “people” running the place, too. A man, you could see he was a man, though shrouded in a robe of sapphire light, tall, slim man, tending the meat that hung by the boiling fire, moving it this way and that, seeing that the flames licked it just right, taking the spits down, slicing up whole roasts into plates, sliding skewers of vegetables, roasted onions and potatoes and whatnot, down beside them.
A very similar woman acting as tavernmaid, woman dressed in ruby mist, tapping gray stone steins full of foamy red beer and carrying them to the customers, bringing them the platters of food that her mate prepared. Mate? Surely, for they looked so right together. Surely, the way they would sometimes pause to look at each other...
Edgar tilted back his stein, drank, rubbed foam from his lips, looked at her. “Their names are Morgan Bluelight and Ariadne Starfire. Their sort are called werefolk, hereabouts.” He seems so familiar, this Squire Edgar, as if...
She said, “You mean like the Wolfman. Lon Cheney, all those old movies my parents used to watch when they couldn’t sleep at night.”
He shrugged, maybe rolled his eyes a bit. “Maybe that’s what it means in your world. Here... They stem from human stock, they begin as human beings, wherever they begin. In the olden days, when the War was fresh in everyone’s memory, when the Magic Order was new, some who aspired to become magi went bad, practiced the dark arts of goëty, were banished for their misdeeds.”
“Goëty?”
“Amateur sorcery. The precursor to necromancy. Hardly ars magica at all.” He said, “They say the werefolk are their descendants, shape changers, capable of some limited magic, relatively harmless magic. I suppose one could manifest as a wolf, if necessary.”
She watched them waiting at table, tending their tavern, commonplace save for the magic light that spun round their handsome bodies. Descendants of magicians, serving meat and beer. She said, “You seem... familiar to me, Edgar...” Just Edgar. Edgar No-Name.
Dark eyes looking at her now. Eyes that seemed to understand, just like those other eyes. He said, “What was his name?”
She felt a pang, almost of shame. Am I so easy to read? “Dale Millikan.”
No recognition in his eyes. Did I imagine it might be him, cast in some other guise? He’s dead. I know he’s dead. Consumed by the Angel of Death, long, long ago. This is just an old woman’s very silly dream. I came out here, back out among the stargates to... run away.
He said, “You don’t seem like the sort of woman to fall helplessly in love. Certainly not the sort to stay in love with a man whose... gone from your side.”
So much for understanding. So much for those dark, penetrating eyes that seemed able to look right into her head. “You don’t know much about women, do you?”
He shook his head, eyes filling with an almost mournful look. “I suppose not.”
You could see it then. This squire, following his lady love, who goes about her own business, assuming him to be merely... her follower. She said, “Who are you, really?”
He shifted uncomfortably on his bench, squeezing his big hands together, big, broad hands, with thick, blunt fingers. On one finger was a plain silver ring, some kind of writing on it. When she looked, leaning forward, she could see it said, in plain block letters, I Will Not. He twirled the ring, watching her watch it, and said, “Someone once told me my hands seemed better suited to wielding a sledge hammer than a typewriter.”
Another faint pang. I remember finding that old, broken typewriter in my grandmother’s attic. Such an incredibly complex machine...
He smiled. “Who am I, really? Just Edgar, squire to her ladyship Amanda Grey, Knight-Errant of the Silver Thread.”
Just that and nothing more? She gestured to the ring. “What’s that mean? ‘I will not.’“
He stared at it, frowning. Finally, he said, “The Priesthood of Ordo Magica keeps the magic at bay, of course. The real magic, the terrible magic, the magic imbued in God’s Machine, the magic which runs the world. This other magic...” A gesture at Morgan Bluelight, at Ariadne Starfire. “Children at play in the beach sand beside an ocean so vast they cannot conceive of its other side.”
“And the ring?”
“Our work holds the world in suspended animation, a suspended animation in which the Machine runs down, in which things fall apart. One day it will end, one day it must end. So we send out Agents of Change, agents to pave the way for that end. As I am imbued with infinite magic, so the ring reminds me that I must not... act.”
Infinite magic. She said, “You’re not from this world, are you?”
That long, penetrating stare. Then he took off the ring and carefully laid it on the table between them. “I know who you are, Astrid Kincaid.”
A third pang, from deep within her heart. “You know me? Then...”
Nothing in his eyes. Not even a hint.
She said, “I know you’re not Dale Millikan, though you seem so... similar. Tell me who you are. Affiliated with the Jug perhaps?” Was that what the pang was all about? Fear. Is this the way it ends, this calm-faced, bald-headed old man. How soon does the Angel burn overhead?
He sighed and shook his head. “So soon forgotten... No, I do not belong to the Space-Time Juggernaut, save in the sense that we may all be its creatures.”
“Do you even know who you are?”
He said, “No. Not any more. Once upon a time, perhaps...”
o0o
Omry Inbar lay on his back, naked atop the heavy, velvety covers of his medieval bed, thinking. Just thinking. Little candles, hanging in sconces from the cold, gray stone walls lit his corner of the room with a wan, warm yellow light, candle flames steady, casting dim, diffuse shadows into the corners of the room. The fire, already low when he came here, was down to crackling red coals now, little snakes of red light showing through masses of black ash.
The light from the noonday sun without was effectively erased by the thick, heavy brown drapes that covered the room’s two narrow windows, but tiny slivers of pale white still glowed at the edges. Looking, he realized, almost the way the incandescent street lighting of big Earth cities looked, when you tried to sleep at night in some hotel, far away from home.
Thinking. Too many years spent away from home? And where is home now? Is it really lost? Or is this all just a dream? Too many wandering thoughts, too many lost-soul thoughts, when I should be dazzled by the wonder of all this. Look! Where am I now? In some splendid, magic, faraway, impossible world! In some cosmos where... everything is possible. Someplace no one ever imagined. Where am I now...
Lying alone in bed, naked; lying alone on my back with this same pointless erection that’s manifested itself over and over again, since I was a boy.
Thinking about all the women I’ve stuck it in?
No, that would be too pleasant a pastime. Too rewarding.
No, thinking about how I lay in the bushes of this absurd inside-out world and stared at the sky and remembered some beloved clutch of ladylike genitalia or another, and jerked off. Jerked off while people hid in the shrubbery and watched and waited for me to come...
What must that have looked like, to Subaïda Rahman? Pathetic, most likely. Pornography remembered. Time spent masturbating to images of beautiful women masturbating while they dream of beautiful men.
Do no women masturbate to images of handsome men masturbating while they dream of handsome women? No. Of course not. Don’t be silly. When women masturbate, it means they’re... sensual. Alive. When men masturbate, it means they’re alone.
Am I alone now?
That God-forsaken prick down there thinks you’re alone.
Go ahead, Omry Inbar. Reach into your head. Pick out any woman at all, or no woman at all. We’ve been remembering Hiba a lot lately, haven’t we? She was a good one. Lively when you wanted her to be lively; quiet, soft, submissive, when that’s what was needed.
o0o
Gray stone castle. Noonday sun. Brilliant sunshine flooding straight down out of the s
ky. Ling Erhshan filled his lungs with fresh, clean air, filled his lungs and thought, It’s... just the way I always imagined it would be. A faint, familiar whiff of something like gunpowder in the air. The way I imagined gunpowder ought to smell. The smell of fireworks on New Year’s Day. Fireworks crackling around the edges of the dancing parade dragon, fireworks hanging above doorways...
Why gunpowder? Gunpowder the smell of excitement, of newness, promise of the future to an orphan boy.
Dark buildings all around, bright streets stretching away into the distance, filled with bustling, metallic crowds. This city is just big enough that I can see the roofs of the more distant buildings, tilted slightly towards me. Curvature. I wanted to say, the curvature of the Earth.
Memory of standing atop Gonggashan, one icy day, under a blue sky so sharp it seemed to cut right through my eyes. Seven thousand five hundred ninety meters. Oxygen masks for the weak. Weak like me. Wutongqiao visible in the distance, far to the east. Tiny city. Like toys on the horizon. Through binoculars, the misty buildings seems to lean strangely, as if they were falling away from me, falling into the east...
Beyond this city, here and now, red landscape rendered indistinct by blowing dust, imaginary horizon line far above the level of the streets, disappearing into pink mist, mist growing weaker and weaker, finally turning blue so very far away.
Out there, somewhere, beyond the blue, was only more land. Would you go home if you could, Ling Erhshan? No. Here I could wear a sword, carry a gun, walk like a man among men. Here I could be everything I’m not...
Image of himself, slack-bellied, flabby-armed, wielding a long sword, wielding it in single combat with a muscleman from the cover of one of those old American paperbacks. Image of a Frazetta hero swinging his shiny blade, blade cleaving Ling Erhshan’s neck. Ling Erhshan’s grimacing head leaping from his shoulders, bouncing off the edge of a wooden table, disappearing with a splash into that famous butt of ale.
It took time, but we finished pissing at last.
Where was that from? The Long Ships. Bengtson. Red Orm and Tokë Gray-Gull’s Son. My Lord Almansur. Thorkel the Tall and Ethelred the Redeless... That’s what would happen to me, if I tried to walk like a man, even here.
But, home? I never had a home. Home was inside the books. Inside the stories. Dale Millikan was my mother and father. I so longed to be Dorian Haldane.
Remember how hard it was for Haldane to adapt to the world he found beyond the nuclear singularity? Seasoned combat veteran, armed with early twenty-first century military weapons. And he almost didn’t survive. Haldane facing his first swordsman, responding with bayonet drill. Then lying on the ground, in shock, by the corpse of his vanquished foe, while laughing warriors sewed and bandaged a huge, terrible cut across his shoulder...
What would I do? Wave a calculator in their faces? Make engineering magic? You are trying to make yourself feel bad, Ling Erhshan. Trying to make yourself be no more than the brave little scientist who went to the Moon.
It isn’t working. The blood is pounding in your veins. Look! See where you are! I’m in Heaven, that’s where I am...
He smiled, squared his shoulders, turned and walked inside. Somewhere, the others would be having breakfast. Time to face the new day, if that’s what it was. New day under a noonday sun.
What will happen next, I wonder? Thin smile, pleased smile, almost a fatuous smile. Doesn’t matter. It will be something. That’s all that matters. I’m in a world where something will happen.
Remember how Dorian Haldane felt? He said, I’ve come to a time and place where it doesn’t matter that I’m fifty-four years old. Suddenly, somehow, I’ve stopped thinking about the day I’ll die.
o0o
All around her, the pale world rose up toward a misty infinity. Subaïda Rahman stood at the rail, holding on, as the cruiser Anotar slid away from the landing stage, slid away from the stone city of Yttria, sliding away into the pale blue Hesperidian sky.
Floating like a soap-bubble, she thought, propellers turning lazily at the stern, driving us upward into nothingness. Somewhere on the other side of the blue... Heart of Darkness. She made it into an Arabic phrase, murmured it to herself. Nothing. Koro’mal’luma had a certain air of menace, but...
The Land of Awful Shadow. That was better. The awe of God Himself; Shadows in Shayol.
A short distance away, Ling Erhshan stood at the rail, peaceful, seeming to smile, if only to himself, looking backward, watching the city fade into distance, reddening with shadows as it grew smaller and smaller still. Edgar at the helm of this somewhat larger ship, watching where they were headed, though up there was nothing but blue sky.
What does he see? Nothing? She could imagine the ship following a long chord across empty space, an ingeodesic terminating on this world’s... what? Gateway to some remote Hell? Oh, Allah... I was never a religious woman, but I’m afraid now. What if it’s all... true? What if I’m not lost in a dream? What if I fall into the fire?
There’d been a popular American VR entertainment released just before the ships had come back from the Moon, just before they’d slammed the door in the world’s face. Inferno. Not quite up to the standard of the Orgasm Hat, but still, that one image, that one burst of crude sensation, as she’d waded out into the Lake of Boiling Blood...
Behind Edgar, Amanda Grey and Astrid Kincaid, one bright with metal, the other merely metal-bright, the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder, not holding onto anything, arms folded across sturdy breasts. Sufficient unto themselves. Complete. Is that the word I’m looking for? Something in Edgar’s eyes, when he looks at his knight-errant. Does she see?
What do we expect to find in the Heart of Darkness? The Gateway home? They say it is lost and gone forever. No one really believes that. If we believed it, we’d simply... stop. Maybe we’d all like to stop. We just can’t say it to each other.
By the aft rail, beyond which the propellers spun, Omry Inbar sat, one arm draped lazily overboard, looking downward through turbulent air, downward at the ground. On his knee... She looks like a little goddess, Aarae does. Like a little naked goddess. Inbar stroking her hair gently. Talking to her. Touching her four tiny wings. Little goddess nuzzling against his hand.
Rahman felt sick for a moment, but... It’s only the stories that we tell that make sex a lovely moment lost in eternity. It’s only the stories that make it... love. A man holds you, warms to you, makes you warm to him, and pleasure, and pleasure... Maybe you waken in the night, when the warmth has grown cold and nasty, cold and sticky between your legs.
Toward the bow, looking outward into the empty sky, Lord Genda Hiroshige, standing handsome and stalwart, one arm around Amaterasu’s back, riding lightly, just above her hips. The robot was saying something, speaking to him, gesturing with one hand, out into the vacant blue. Maybe she can see beyond its veil, see what we cannot. Her other hand was on his back, stroking gently. Knowing. Knowing him.
That faint red fuse of... is it anger or envy? Anger at him for accepting her manufactured servitude? Accepting it as the face of love? Or do I envy her for living the imaginary love the rest of us only long for? How do they feel?
Tarantellula sitting not far away, sitting on the deck, muscular back braced against the cabin wall, little Brucie cradled like a child in her arms, chattering away, waving his arms, this and that, one thing and another, while stolid black Tarantellula merely smiled and nodded like an indulgent mother. With her hand gently resting between his legs. What is that all about?
Jensen and Laing? Standing together. Holding hands. Murmuring to each other, leaning close. I remember him holding the shards of his red ant woman clutched to his breast, sobbing like a man who’d lost... everything. How can he forget so soon? Cold voice from somewhere inside her. These are... imaginary people. Some creature of the night in some faraway thread on some disconnected skein, some creature sitting before a... creation machine, building, building, imagining their souls. Hard to imagine being such a creator, harboring mul
titudes within my head.
Beyond the ship, here and now, they’d flown so high that the ground beneath them grew pale and misty, until it seemed to disappear altogether, leaving them to drift in a void of endless blue, only the spark of the noonday sun to guide them. That and gravity’s implicit... down.
Go down then. Downward to Hesperidia. Downward to the Heart of Darkness. Downward to the Land of Awful Shadow. Downward to the earth below, like the ants we are.
o0o
Standing at the rail behind the root of the flier’s bowsprit, Kincaid watched it grow out of nothingness. First a sense that there was... something, out in the blue void. Something just behind the featureless shield of the sky. Clouds?
There was a description of something like that in one of Dale’s silly damned books. Mariners lost at sea. Lost on the bosom of one of the Moon’s vast oceans, the Sea of Tranquility, perhaps. Sitting downcast on their raft, drifting, drifting for terrestrial days on end beneath a slow-moving, torrid Lunar sun, Earth hanging motionless in the sky while the Sun slid to zenith and beyond.
Dorian Haldane, ever brooding, standing in the center of the raft, faithful, loving Valetta holding onto his leg, shading her eyes with one terribly sunburnt hand. In the distance, they would see something like the shadow of rounded mountains.
There were no rounded mountains on Dorian Haldane’s Moon, a distant relative of old Bonestell’s Moon, a Moon of immense, vertical peaks... I laughed at him about that. Bonestell expected sharp peaks only because he thought, with no wind and water to wear them down...
Dale grinning at her, a hint of anger in his eyes. What difference does it make? It’s tall, angular mountains that are lovely, evocative...
Sliding a hand up her thigh: Like you...
Silly bastard.
Clouds behind the sky now?
No, a patch of... growing detail. Faraway landscape making itself known below them. Something in the middle of it all, bulging up, dark, blue-black, like the shadow of a bruise, rounded now, reaching... Leaning on the rail beside her, Amanda Grey said, “Koro’mal’luma’s moon.”
The Transmigration of Souls Page 26