The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  Nappy Groff was almost right. When Chan-ti Beppu announced her quest that night, at the gathering in the mead grotto to discuss the consequences of N’ym’s annihilation, only two came forward: Spooner Yegg, a thief from no one knew where, who had retired among the Foke when he got too old to ply his trade; and Moku the Beast, a distort whom children had found in the skirts of Saor’s Forest half dead from an infestation of viper-slugs. A mute giant with gray, warty hide, Moku frightened all with red satan-eyes under a serrated browblock. Across the bull-breadth of his back, tufts of mane splotched him like dribbled tar. Within this chest like an oak bole, badged with the black strokes of a tiger’s flank, thumped a heart both powerful and friendly. Since his recovery he had been living in the garden, scaring away most of the other distorts that approached, finding his own food—mostly tree bark, orchids, and large insects—and playing a crude flute notched to fit between his massive fangs.

  Spooner Yegg, a tall silver-haired gentleman with a pencil moustache, had befriended Moku early on by amusing the Beast with sleights of hand and acrobatics while the distort recuperated from the the viper-slugs. Moku had become attached to the old man, and when Spooner decided to go with Chan-ti, the Beast volunteered as well.

  Groff could not believe it when Spooner volunteered himself. “You tired old skeleton,” Nappy said, leveling his most skeptical eye on the tall thief. “Your clown tricks aren’t going to amuse the zōtl. Better you stay out of the Overworld—stay where there are people to take care of you. These are your last days, clown.”

  A slow smile graced Spooner’s sly face. “And don’t you know, Nappy, that’s just why I’m going. You didn’t think I’d burden you and my good friends here with my lifeless bones. Let the zōtl gag on me if they want.”

  “That coot’s only going to slow you down,” Groff muttered darkly to Chan-ti. “You’ll be worse off than if you went alone. If you must do this fool’s errand, at least wait until Gorlik gets back. He’s an able wanderer.”

  Chan-ti’s lip flinched. “Gorlik? How can I ask Gorlik, of all the Foke? He’s on a grief sojourn, for God’s sake, because I refused him. How eagerly will he search for the man I chose over him?” She bent her mouth to the gnome’s strict profile. “Give me your blessing, Nappy. I want to know you’re not angry at me for following my heart.”

  “Blessing? Fah! You’re a child. You think I reared you these nineteen years so you can throw your life away? You’ll never find that damned pilot.”

  Chan-ti resolutely took from her thigh pocket a slender case with a transparent housing that revealed gold circuitry and a series of microlights. “Nappy, now listen. I’m taking this directional finder with me. I can’t go without it. But I’ll return it, I promise.”

  “Then I’m keeping the power chip,” Groff said, holding up an orange cluster-plug no bigger than a pinky nail. His trollish face widened around pursed lips as he dropped the plug into a pocket of his leather apron. “Now, as you said yourself, you can’t go.”

  “Nappy!” Chan-ti whined. “Why are you denying me? I need Ned. He’s as much as I’ve ever known of soul.”

  “Soul! Ha! What does a child know of soul? You are staying here. Maybe after you’ve worked for the Foke a few more years you’ll earn some soul. Then you’ll thank me for keeping you out of the grasp of the zōtl.”

  “Has the thought occurred to you, Nappy Groff,” Spooner said slowly, soberly, “that you’re keeping apart two halves of one soul? Let the girl go. Give her the power chip. I’ll see to it that she and your precious hardware get back to you.”

  “You will see to it!” Groff bit off a harsh laugh. They were standing on time-bellied stone steps under the endless evening of the garden, and the loud laugh frightened a white crow into flight from a nearby cedar. Groff, who by standing two steps up from Spooner could stare him in the eye, jabbed a finger into his chest and almost toppled him. “You, sir, are of no use but as a fool for distorts and children.”

  Moku, squatting on the sward, growled.

  Groff passed him an ameliorative glance and a wave. “Which only Moku has redeemed on your behalf by serving the Foke as a superlative sentinel. I’m glad we’re not losing him to a hopeless quest.”

  Spooner brushed his thin white moustache and smoothed the wrinkles on his black jacket. He always wore black, neck to toe, and a black cap that could be pulled over his face but which he usually kept at his hip with his sable gloves, for he was proud of his white, feathery hair. “Let’s go. This man Ned what’s-his-name needs to be found and we’re not getting any closer standing here.”

  Chan-ti cast the thief a dolorous look. “There’s no point to it now, Spooner. Without the power chip, our finder’s useless. The Overworld will swallow us.”

  Spooner stepped down to the sward and crooked a finger at Chan-ti. She slouched to him. He chucked her chin, and his long fingers produced the cluster-plug.

  Groff’s eyes widened. Slapping his apron, he found the pocket empty. “Spooner Yegg—thief! Give it back at once!”

  Spooner lifted a delicate eyebrow. “I see you’re not amused. Hmm, not a distort or a child.” He smiled at Chan-ti. “Let’s go.”

  “Come back here, Beppu!” Groff shouted. He started to run after them, but Moku’s red stare stopped him. “You’ll be killed. Worse! The zōtl will wear your flesh!”

  Chan-ti called, “I’ll be back, Father,” and followed Spooner and Moku, who had gathered their packs and were already striding into the forest. “Don’t worry for me.” She waved, hoisted her pack, and dashed after her companions into the shining darkness of the treacherous woods.

  COSMOGONY

  Nothing is free.

  Everything is given. But only what is received is known.

  We never see the origin, just its kingdoms.

  In reality’s shadow, the blind see best.

  —proverbs from the Glyph Astra

  The dark planet Mugna’s orbit never departed the black aura of Saor. Its north pole pointed perpetually at the event horizon, a sky forever lightless. At the highest of its north polar mountains, a crag called Dragon’s Shank, boreal winds shrieked in acoustic patterns like psychofrenetic voices.

  The palace of Perdur squatted there, at the tempestuous summit, an immense citadel of metallic glass cast in the grotesque shape of a horseshoe crab’s underside: slick jet walls of convoluted bulges, jointed segments at odd angles, vitreous plates in which enormous insect parts seemed embedded. The zōtl had constructed this horror. They had designed it to terrify their human prey. Webwork of black-green resin wreathed the goliath portals with tortured humanshapes: splayed ribcages, twisted embryos, shattered faces, jawbones ripped loose, eyes screaming with living terror. Corridors huge as runways, mirror-smooth surfaces smeared with delirious acid colors, traversed lithic forests of vipercoil columns and scorpiontail buttresses.

  Lattice hives chambered the distant walls among teratogenic bas-reliefs of skeletal contortions.

  At the core of Perdur loomed an inhuman geometry, an asymmetrical dolmen of encrusted larval shapes above a giant well rimmed with thousands of resin-ambered human heads, each locked in a rictus of extreme pain. Here the Saor-priests came to hear the bidding of the Face of Night, the deity who spoke from the black body of Saor itself.

  Here in the Age of Dominion, the Saor-priest Fra Bathra and the other priests arrived when summoned. Bald and black-robed, as all Saor priests, Fra Bathra stood fearfully before the zōtl’s lynk, the icy breath of the well stealing heat from his body in spidery fumes. Like all the Saor priests, he had been bred in the lattice hives, mothered on dragon’s milk that had bulged his forebrain to a telepathic lobe. Through that cortical growth, he heard commands from the Face of Night. The great Saor witnessed everything among the worlds of Chalco-Doror from his perch above time at the brink of the Overworld, and through him the Saor priests knew all.

  In the minds of the priests, the thunder voice spoke: Today N’ym has fallen—broken free of Valdëmiraën and fall
en into me. I hold the City of the Sky to my dreamless limits. In the clench of my gravity, at the radius of infinity, N’ym falls. Self torn N’ym will fall forever, her Aesirai now the children of my void. All but one. Today that one has fled me through the lynk beneath the Silver Sea. Today that one is no longer of today. He has fallen out of the Age of Dominion, across time, unchaining worldlines. Impure patterns disrupt the millennia. Time is broken. Anything can happen. Little of it good. This last Aesirai must be found. He is the strange attractor in a chaos that dooms our worlds. Find and destroy him.

  The smiting silence that ensued drove Fra Bathra backward over the acid-splotched colors of the nightmare boulevard until he backed into the alcove of broken limbs where the other priests waited. They knew at once what he had experienced. Their sharing already informed them what had to be done. “Who is the creature most able for this killing?” they asked among themselves. An image appeared in their telepathy of a scyldar, a faceless manikin, woven of the reassembled parts of murdered humans.

  “Send us our most able scyldar!” Fra Bathra shouted.

  From the gargoyled shadows, two nongyls—insectile-humanoid dwarves—peeled free from the nutrient-lustered walls and scuttled off, manus-toed legs clacking against the glassy floor, abstract faces mewling as their blind segmented bodies read the chemical trails that led to the vats, where the scyldars cooked.

  Far down in the slime pits of Perdur, in the lightless marrow of the Dragon’s Shank, colossal vats stewed human parts in a lake of amino acids. Nongyls labored within those black, ichorous depths, their needling mouthparts shifting rapidly into multifarious combinations as they stitched human tissue, assembling homunculi required by the Saor priests to fulfill the commands from the Face of Night.

  Out of a steaming vat rose an indigo-skinned manikin with a torso like a wasp’s, jointed narrowly at the waist and powerfully ribbed; neon veins circuited the creature’s massive arms and legs. The long, malformed skull dented oddly, the face featureless as the carapace of a beetle, eyes and other sensors shielded by a chitinous blue shell. Where the thing’s genitals should have been: nothing but shell, not even an excretory sphincter.

  Scyldars neither ate nor eliminated as other animals. Photometabolic with internal energy cells that stored light and could power them for weeks, they only appeared to be machines. Each scyldar needed a human brain, the one component too complex for the nongyls to weave. Into each brain, they installed a mind entrained to the demands encoded in its body.

  This scyldar had the brain of a schoolteacher named Tully Gunther, who had been taken by the zōtl not long ago from a bright world far from Mugna. And though in that short time he had already been used to kill a dozen humans, he could still parse a sentence, distinguish between a simile and a metaphor, solve quadratic equations, and recount in detail the histories of the worlds’ kingdoms—even if none of that mattered now that he was a scyldar and called by a new name, Neter Col.

  While he whimpered within, his suffering remained silent, smothered by the abominable strength grown around him.

  The nongyls hung from him like lampreys as he floated through the slimy pitch of the vats. His liver had been smashed in a firefight on his last assignment, and the nongyls stitched him a new one. He broke the surface in a caul of sticky broth and lumbered heavily onto a lightless rock ledge mollusked with nongyls. The worm-people guided him through sonic showers that blistered away his placental integuments. From there, he strode into the ice-light of lichen-glowing arteries that climbed the Dragon’s Shank to Perdur. Before the resinous webwork of the citadel’s entrance, the nongyls slid off him, leaving behind glossy patches.

  Neter Col stalked forward.

  Fra Bathra waited at the brink of the hell hole, his body heat smoking off him in thick tufts. Neter Col, the Saor priest’s telepathy reached inside the scyldar, behold again your master.

  From the weirdly tilted dolmen that lorded above the hell hole, a shadow zagged, no bigger than a sparrow, black, spidery. It flew on gossamer wings that beat invisible fast. As it descended and hovered before Neter Col’s scarab face, it studied him with inkdrop cluster-eyes in which swirled the no-colors of zōtl thoughts. Crablegs seized the scyldar’s mask, and the zōtl crawl-floated along the cope of the seamed skull to the humanoid’s back, to the cleavage that the nongyls had left for it, and it entered. Deftly from within, it sealed its entry.

  Neter Col straightened with new awareness, arched his back, and gazed up through the dome of space at the larval bunchings that clumped atop the tottering megalith. Exultation muted the silent cries of the schoolteacher. Then the spider’s feeder tube found its place in the scyldar’s brain, and Neter Col knew the immanence of zōtl.

  Fra Bathra telepathically experienced the scyldar’s sudden screech of pain and the zōtl’s gush of pleasure, and his satisfaction unlocked a sigh. The meld had fused. Sometimes—and not infrequently—the homunculus flew apart when the zōtl mounted, the pain was that explosive. The nongyls had built a sturdy scyldar in Neter Col, and even the greedy feeding of his zōtl master could not burst his seams. If he could sustain that internal suffering, no external hurt could faze him.

  Fra Bathra felt the zōtl tempering its host, instructing the schoolteacher in the red limits of agony, preparing him to receive its truth. Simultaneously, the Saor priests received the zōtl’s call for its armor and weapons.

  Fra Bathra signed, and the black-cowled priests hurried from down the mirror length of the corridor with a laserifle, carbon-bladed knife, and a utility pack attached to a plasteel cuirass. Neter Col raised thick arms, and the cuirass was fitted to him; diamond-fiber trousers were fitted, clasped, and tucked into flexskin boots, and a knife strapped to his thigh.

  “I am ready,” Neter Col spoke in a voice of stone.

  Sparks crawled among the crevices of the giant dolmen, and a greasy light came on deep within the well. You are the Son of Darkness, the Face of Night said in the scyldar’s mind, and all the priests gathered before the well heard. From you comes death that the worlds may live. Go forth, Neter Col. Cross the grain of time and find Ned O’Tennis wherever he may hide. Find and destroy this carrier of doom, and you will be remade a Son of Light.

  Neter Col, laserifle raised in both hands, leaped into the hell hole and vanished among eels of flame.

  Age of Light

  Though faith in the supernatural origin of the worlds will always be strong because of the heart’s hunger for the infinite, Rikki Carcam, an exobiologist at Towerbottom Library, and her scientific survey team from the School of Ontics, has convincingly demonstrated that the numerous planets and planetesimals that comprise our system are actually artifacts, shaped and maintained by an intelligence we understand not well enough. . . . What is the nature of this intelligence? From whence has it come—and why? The answers are lost in the glare from the Age of Light.

  —The Ontic Primer: What Is Reality? Crystal Mind File AI 248-v71

  Urgrund

  Zero.

  That was the last word Gai heard before the launcher thrust her into outer space. No jolting vibrations or inertial tug as she hurtled free from gravity. Only a mild wooziness troubled her—and she forgot everything.

  Then she remembered that she would forget: amnesia, the only sign, apart from the readings of the instrument console, that the magravity drive had boosted her into the void. Her gaze darted, reading monitors, trying to recollect everything at once. Panic sparked as she drew a blank. To stay calm, she had to repeat aloud the one phrase from her training that she did remember, the first memory engram coded to fire: Relax! The synaptic lag that blurs memory is the one conscious sign that you’ve jumped gravity levels.

  She itched with excitement where her hair grew. “By the book, Control. I’m up.”

  The speaker that had completed the countdown remained silent. From the black silence, colorless even of static, Gai knew no one had heard her. She soared, utterly alone. The smell of fear mixed with the tangy scent of high voltage
from the engine’s coils. She breathed deeper and listened to the generators groaning as they kicked on.

  Electricity!

  She had jumped levels. She glided now in outer space, where it was so cold that magravity had frozen into several exotic forces, including electricity. Her launcher, designed to propel itself through outer space on the electron flux from the surroundings, accelerated into the stellar wind.

  Memories sifted back gradually. Oddly, she remembered about magravity before she could bring up her own name. “Gravity is quantal,” she had learned at the start of training. “Magravity is the primary force—but only in our world. At colder gravitational quantum levels, space expands almost to a vacuum and magravity chills into a cluster of strange but very predictable forces.” Gai tried to pull her memory forward by speaking aloud. “My name . . . is—”

  She drew a blank. She did not know who she was or why she was here. But she knew where here was—deep space, the void into which the Big Bang had thrown off all the energy that her home world could not hold. In this faraway void, distance spanned light years. Home was farther than light years away—farther than space itself reached. Home existed on a different quantum shell of gravity, a much more energetic and dense world than the nearly absolute zero vacuum around her.

  She tapped a just-remembered code into the fingerpad on her armrest, and the bubble wall surrounding her filled with pinpoints of light. Stars. They had said she would see stars.

  But who were they who had told her—and what had they said again? Cast-off energy from the Big Bang had congealed in the cosmic cold of outer space, phase shifting to a supercold matter called hydrogen. Gravity condensed billows of hydrogen into compact spheres, squashing together icy atoms and fusing them into heavier matter by squeezing out more light and emitting radiation.

  Weird, she thought as she scanned the great openness of outer space.

  Again her fingers responded to returning memories, and she typed a command that amplified the star images around her. Most of them dilated into pinwheels of light, showing not single stars but whirlpool clusters of billions of stars.