Galaxies.
Even at this extreme level, attenuated gravity still asserted enough strength to shape energy into colossal macrostructures. Awe damped most of her fear as she studied webbings of galaxies and turbulent shadows of dark matter clouding the vacuum.
Outer space!
Within her amazement at the strange vista, memories began to form. The cold black and silver beauty of the void reminded her by contrast of the brilliant warmth from which she had come.
In her mind’s eye, Gai beheld again the rainbow opals that feathered the day sky on the range. The range. The very name of her home inspired a vivid recall of the ribbon-shaped world where she had grown up—so very different from this gigantic misty emptiness, where everything hurled ever farther apart.
The day sky on the range opalesced with creation fire, the radiant echo of the Big Bang. Existing just outside the threshold of the black hole from which the universe had exploded, the ribbon-world of the range twisted at night to face the cosmic event horizon, the darkness from which all creation had emerged billions of years ago.
In the depths of outer space, the event horizon seemed everywhere and yet nowhere. Space appeared black, like the hole from which it had come. Yet the hole itself had expanded to contain the entire universe, and there was no sign anywhere of the original singularity.
Gai knew where that true night abided, a night whose blackness space simply reflected. The singularity from which the range and All Else had emerged endured, everywhere, only very, very small—far smaller than the atoms that made up the stars and their worlds, smaller even than the electrons that made up electricity.
For a while, Gai marveled that the immensity of outer space existed at all. It was so peculiar, it forced her to wonder where precisely the range resided from here. What direction home? The answer lifted her forward in her seat. The range and the cosmic event horizon existed right in front of her and all around her —and also inside her. The range opened everywhere! Rolled up into a tiny ball around every point of outer space, the range encompassed all of outer space, just like the cosmic event horizon.
Her world and the singularity from which all worlds had come persisted, compacted, segregated from this turmoil of emptiness and dust, partitioned by a gravity shell that only a magravity launcher could pierce. And when her launcher had pierced the shell, the launcher, and she with it, had inflated enormously to fill their space on this larger and colder gravity level. She had expanded a whole universe bigger than the world from which she had come!
But why had she come? Why had she abandoned the beauty of the range for the hostile darkness and cold of outer space? Like a slimly remembered dream, her mission slowly came clear.
She had come out here to find the enemy. That made her a warrior. Yes, of course. But not to find the enemy—rather, to lure them.
The zōtl.
The name of the monsters ravaging the range jolted full-recall into place, and she tightened with rage. War had flung her into space. War with the zōtl. An enemy she had never seen, they did not originate on the range. They had come from outer space to raid her homeworld.
Though Gai had never seen the zōtl, she had suffered by them—and that memory cored her fury.
As a young child on her parents’ farm, far from the sophisticated cities of the range, she had thought very little about outer space. Youngest of nine children, she had yet to start school. Until the horizon began to ball up and the black spheres that ate everything bloomed in the sky, life had been simple, merely appetite, observation, and a few routine chores. She had been happy to feed and play with the animals and to wander the fields, collecting berries and searching for what all children quest, the unjudging and unrivaled playmates of dreams. She had been alone with those dreams when the black spheres opened out of the sky.
Standing in the tall grass, Gai had watched in dumb amazement as the farmhouse, the barn, the coops, and stables dimmed, shadowed by a huge globe of blackness that expanded soundlessly in the sky above. The sphere descended, and the farm and the land around it darkened even more within the glossy blackness, everything curved as if seen in a belled reflection.
Gai had cried out for her mother and sisters, who were in the house, and she ran through the field toward the giant black sphere. Ahead, she witnessed her father, brothers, and uncle running from their tractors, fleeing the black globe advancing toward them, enclosing the farm. They yelled for her to run and hide and waved her back. They kept waving even as the darkness caught up. Their cries stopped suddenly, and they faded to soundlessly shouting figures in the curved and shining blackness.
No noise came from the sphere that had swallowed the farm, and the farm itself looked intact—bent by the dark lens. Closer, Gai could see the wild desperation on the faces of her family as they pressed up against the inside of the sphere and motioned for her to flee. At the sphere’s edge, darkness expanded, and Gai noticed the grass losing color as the orb’s perimeter enveloped it.
Silent screams in the faces of her father and brothers, the stark horror in her uncle’s eyes, drove her back. She turned from them, because they demanded it, and she ran. When she looked back, she spied other black spheres growing on the skyline above the fields. The horizon looked warped where the globes had settled, and the land inside it seemed to curve away forever into darkness.
Gai had huddled among the sheaves of the far field and stared as the eerie globes squatted on her world. Later, when the authorities arrived in a great clatter of airborne vehicles, they found her curled in the grass, blind to them. For a long time afterward, all she could see was the terrified urgency in her father’s face, and her home far back in the darkness, its black windows pouring into her heart.
*
Gai had not spoken for a year after she lost her family. She might not have spoken again but for the therapist who showed her the photo of the black spheres and broke her spell to a scream. From that moment forth, she had become obsessed with learning everything about the enemy. At first, she thought that she could learn enough to save her family. Soon enough, she realized there was no hope for them.
The black spheres occupied pieces of the range that the zōtl had carved out for themselves and then refined into pure energy. At the time that Gai’s farm vanished, the zōtl had not even realized that intelligent beings lived on the range. Wide-spectrum messages broadcast from the range eventually alerted the zōtl, who immediately sent their black spheres into the range cities, hoping to wipe out the contamination of their new energy source.
From the scant communications between the two alien cultures that proved decipherable, Gai’s people had learned that the zōtl called the denizens of the range Rimstalkers, because their ribbon-world existed at the very rim of the cosmic event horizon. The Rimstalkers accepted this name compliantly and in the beginning tried to establish friendly relations with the zōtl, the first sapient beings to drop in on them from outer space. The zōtl had no appreciation whatever of Rimstalker culture, and during the years that Gai grew to adulthood, they ravaged the range wantonly.
The Rimstalkers had lived peacefully from the beginning of time and had no natural enemies. The zōtl’s virulent threat would destroy their culture, unless Gai’s mission, and enough others like hers, succeeded.
In the years since she had lost her family, many families had been lost. Gai had to press back the grief that crushed in as her amnesia faded. She glimpsed cratered cities and lifelessly gouged countrysides. The Rimstalkers had become nearly extinct, and the range, for all its beauty, fast eroded to nothing more than a field of energy for the zōtl to strip. Desperation whirled up in her, and she had to cling to her recollections to steady herself.
Gai had been trained to fly the fighters that the Rimstalkers had created to attack zōtl spheres. The fighters’ weaponry could rupture the spheres’ shields. But when the spheres collapsed, they took part of the range with them. Craters pocked the land, because fighters afforded, for a long time, the only weapon the Rimsta
lkers had.
“We are dying,” Gai’s commander had told her on the day he selected her for this mission. “Fast as we destroy the zōtl swarms, new spheres appear. Each sphere takes back to the zōtls enough energy from the range to power a hundred more like it. At this rate, we will be overcome within months. Our only hope is to strike directly at the zōtl—to hit them in their home worlds.”
Fresh from fighter training, Gai had seen the hopelessness in that strategy. “The zōtl bucket up and down the gravity well—but we’re stuck at the bottom.”
The commander had replied with a wry and almost lugubrious grin. “Perhaps the zōtl have been right calling us Rimstalkers. We must go up. We are not a stupid people. Neither are the zōtl invincible.” His strict smile slid from his face. “We have found a way up the well, Gai. Warriors have already gone into space to find the zōtl. But there are too few with the training and the courage for such a mission.”
“Train me,” Gai volunteered at once. “I will give my life to destroy zōtl.”
The commander nodded with grim approval. “We have launchers sufficiently strong to carry personnel out of the range, but once in outer space, we lack the numbers and the fire power to confront the zōtl directly. We must fight a more cunning war.”
Gai heard the desperation in her leader’s voice. No desktop commander, he had flown numerous missions himself against the black spheres, and scars glossed his body. The despair in his voice came from a genuine assessment, and Gai had to quench the sudden fear in her own heart to continue listening.
“Our first warriors have learned that the zōtl occupy many worlds scattered among the galaxies,” the commander went on. “We could never hope to track down all of them; yet, from any one they can attack us with impunity. Fortunately for us, the zōtl have other enemies. As they feed on the range for energy, irregardless of the suffering and destruction they cause us, so they feed on the beings of other worlds in space. They crave a substance produced only by neurologic creatures subjected to extreme pain. The more advanced the brains that they cause to suffer, the more delectable for them the pain-products.”
Thoughts of her parents haunted Gai closer, and her eyes glared with harsh light.
“Among the worlds they have conquered,” the commander said, “one has eluded them. The culture, the very name, of those beings is lost to us. The zōtl destroyed them, because they were too effective in fighting back, too dangerous to keep alive even for their pain. But before they were destroyed, this nameless species invented a weapon that is lethal to zōtl yet harmless to all other creatures. The weapon is called the O’ode. It exists on the one world where it was invented. The zōtl cannot go there. But they have sent drones to ferret out the weapons and destroy them. And they have been virtually successful.”
“Virtually,” she repeated. “Then we have found this O’ode.”
“No. Not yet.” The wisdom in the commander’s stare glinted more sharply. “As you know from your training, outer space is a manifold, a near infinite complexity of timelines. Somewhere among those timelines, the O’ode still exists. Your mission will be to find it and deliver it to the zōtl.”
Gai began to swear her dedication to such a quest, but before she could speak the commander shook his head with sad irony. “Finding the O’ode, Gai, will be far easier than delivering it. The technology that will launch you out of the range is powerful enough to create lynklanes in space, very like the wormholes you learned about in cosmology. They connect distant regions of space-time. The magravity program will generate a lynk system in outer space through which you will be able to search for the O’ode. But once you find it, you will not be able to use it to attack the zōtl directly. Their defenses are too well adapted for that. Instead, you must allow the zōtl to come to you, set up their own lynk system, and take the O’ode back with them unwittingly.”
Gai gaped.
“Yes, I understand your incredulity.” He smiled with secret knowing and broke the classified seal on the folder he had been carrying. He handed it to her. “Genitrix will allay all doubts. That is the machine mind that will build the zōtl trap in outer space. You see, we must lure the zōtl with what they find most irresistible—food—in this case, the pain-androgens available from neurologically complex creatures. Genitrix is designed to seek out the genetic relics of such lifeforms. When it finds the correct fossils, it will simulate their natural environment, activate their genetic programs, and reproduce the species.”
“You mean, build a whole world out of debris?”
“Genitrix is our most advanced machine intelligence. Impressive, what a culture can do when survival is at stake.”
“But the energy requirements to build worlds—where will Genitrix get that much power?”
“Have we rushed your training so much, Gai, that you’ve forgotten where you are going? Outer space is magnitudes more tenuous and cold than the reality we come from. Out there, the tiniest amount of energy from here goes a very long way indeed. So yes, Genitrix is designed to build worlds—but the cold, ghostly worlds of outer space. And first it must find the relict genetic material of a sufficiently advanced lifeform. That may take some time. Fortunately, time in outer space is very different than it is here on the range. You’ll have thousands of years in space to build a world that the zōtl find irresistible—and yet only a few weeks shall elapse here.”
“How will the zōtl find the bait?”
“The same way they found us—with their lynk technology. They will find you once Genitrix has created a well-stocked world. And they will feed. Let them feed until they are fully absorbed in gorging themselves. Then, when their lynk system is busy distributing their grisly harvest among their nest worlds, slip in the O’ode—and their worlds will die.”
“I will never see their worlds?”
“No, you will not be fighting skull to skull, young warrior. But you will have a precious chance to save your world. And when you succeed, as you must, you will return here and help us rebuild all that has been spoiled.”
“But space is cold. How will I get the energy to come back?”
“Genitrix will construct a world-system in outer space that doubles as a magravity generator. It has a seven-stroke cycle. Each stroke is the equivalent of a millennium in the vacuum, the time it takes light to travel six thousand trillion miles. At the end of the seventh stroke, enough gravitational resonance will have developed to collapse the entire construct, and you will be returned to where you began, only days after you leave.”
Days, Gai thought now, gazing out at the wheeling discs of stars. How she wished those days had already passed, now that she remembered why she was here.
Gai scanned the instruments before her and confirmed that all systems were functioning. Genitrix had already begun its search for fossilized genetic material among the smoky lanes of space. Nothing remained to be done but wait, and for that there was the sleepod.
She typed in the command that would activate the pod and steep her in dreamless sleep until Genitrix was ready for her. Before she activated the program, she scanned surrounding galaxies for the signal beacons of other Genitrix systems that had preceded her.
They showed up strong, her older brothers and sisters—all, like her, alone in outer space. The Rimstalkers had too small a population to send more than one person with each lure, and communication with the range required too much energy. So she would stand alone throughout the mission. Only the faint beeps from the magravity resonance of other systems assured her that her home world, hidden all around her, survived.
*
Genitrix
The dark cold extended as far as the sensors could see. Hydrogen blustered everywhere. Traces of heavier materials laced the black clouds, and sensors duly analyzed and recorded them. None matched the parameters of what Gai sought. For a long time, the sensors simply stared.
Local time, measured by the expansion of distant galaxies relative to the launcher, proceeded steady enough to measure in regular
units, an arbitrary number of which comprised standard years for the launcher. Thousands of such years passed as the sensors searched the immensity of the void.
Twice, the sensors thought they had found relicts, and Genitrix roused. But both times the complex molecules sifted from the icy gases of space turned out deficient. Genitrix surveyed the area where the partial molecules had been recovered and made course adjustments that she thought would increase the probability of finding a complete sequence of genetic material.
Before returning to sleep herself, Genitrix checked Gai’s sleepod. Satisfied that the pod functioned properly and that Gai could remain suspended for as long as needed to find the right culture, Genitrix scanned for gravity signals.
The gravity signatures came in omnidirectional waves from every system like herself that had found lifeforms to bait their traps. She registered eighteen fully operational systems, all of them within the first three of the seven-stroke cycle that would eventually resonate enough gravity to return them to the range.
Her memory informed her that when she had started her search, 2,486 standard years earlier, there had been twenty-two thriving systems. What had happened to the other four? There had not been time for them to complete the full seven strokes. What had shut them down?
Genitrix searched for zōtl. No sign of them turned up the first time she looked. The second time her sensors found an incomplete genetic molecule, another thousand years had passed since the search had begun, and the systems that had preceded her already completed their fourth and fifth strokes. But only fifteen remained.
The search for zōtl came up with sporadic bursts of jangled noise on the neutrino bandwidth that her memory identified as zōtl military code. She lacked sufficient data to interpret the scraps of code, and since the signals originated over a thousand light years away, she simply filed them and went back to sleep.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 7