“Is that true?” the Tryl repeated. “We sense that you have divorced yourself from the truth.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Tryl conferred again briefly before continuing. “You feel that the zōtl’s hostility has usurped your free will. That is your feeling—but it is not true. You have a choice. You do not have to resist the zōtl.”
“What?” Gai shouted, and the Tryl images wavered and almost vanished. “Why would I choose that?”
“Because that is the enlightened choice.”
“To let my people become extinct is enlightened?”
“Yes—enlightened—illuminated. Extinction means that your people will shed their physical forms and become pure light—as we have.” The Tryl nodded their heads in unison. “How can you still fear extinction? You are talking to us, who have been extinct well over five billion years.”
“Talking to you may be possible here in outer space, but on the range we have no means of talking with the dead. It’s different on the range. Survival is our only choice.”
“The truth is everywhere the same. Survival perpetuates suffering. To survive, you must kill zōtl. To kill zōtl, you must offer them bait—living, sentient beings, who must suffer a great deal before you can hope to poison the zōtl with the O’ode.”
“I agree, our plan involves much suffering. But it is the zōtl who began this atrocity. We are struggling to conclude it for all time.”
“All time?” An annulate laughter chimed among the Tryl. “In time, there is always suffering—zōtl or no. Far better to leave time behind and become light. You are becoming light anyway. As individuals all Rimstalkers must die. And what happens when you die is no different on the range than what happens when life dies out here in the vacuum. Your waveforms persist forever in the tesseract—and that is where the mystery reveals itself.”
“The mystery?”
“Of being. Of light. Of consciousness. Mind is not matter. Mind is energy and belongs to the mystery of energy. Mind is the light of this dark creation. Mind’s destiny lies outside time.”
“The destiny of mind may be outside time, but the destiny of the Rimstalkers is made or broken right here. My people have not endured their history so that the zōtl can devour them.”
“Yet, they are being devoured—and you alone cannot hope to save your whole world.”
“I can try. I will do all that I can do—with or without your help.”
“What is, is. Everything is best. The universe is precisely what it should be, down to its smallest and most energetic photon.”
“You, obviously, have not seen the zōtl. They are not what is best for the Rimstalkers. Everything is not best. The zōtl are evil. They raid our homes, they kill innocents—and I will give my life, if I must, to stop them.”
“Then that, too, is best, young soul. You must be what you are. As we, also, must be what we are. Long ago, we transcended the polarity of this dark and cold creation. There is no good or evil for us. There simply is.”
“So what will you do when Genitrix begins reproducing your bodies and feeding them to the zōtl?”
“You would do that, knowing what we have told you?”
Gai paused only a moment. “Yes, I will. This is war. You are a casualty. Whether you cooperate or not, the zōtl won’t care. And, as you say, everything is best.”
The Tryl conferred silently. Gai listened for their thoughts and heard nothing. When they faced her again, the light in their large eyes had dulled. “Resistance only tightens the trap. We will not resist you. We could overcome you in many subtle ways that would sabotage your mission—but then you, or others like you, would find another species to mire in flesh and subject to the cruelties of the zōtl. Do you think by doing this for your people you are any better than the zōtl? No, we shall not have others suffer in our places. We will take the pain upon ourselves—though under protest, Rimstalker. We will not for a moment cease trying to convince you that survival is not worth fighting for. Do not give your life to the dark. Do not keep your people enslaved to the genetic programs that keep them in the dark. You are a conscious being. You are not just a body. You are a mind. You are the light of the world.”
The Tryl plasma bodies dissolved in a flurry of sparks.
“Well,” Genitrix spoke from the Form, “what do you think of the Tryl?”
Gai stared at the space where they had disappeared. “I think,” she said slowly, “we should send them to talk with the zōtl. Then we’ll see how deep their enlightenment runs.”
“They are pure light, Gai. They are but traces of what they once were. Perhaps their philosophy will become more pragmatic when they are made to live – and feel again.”
“Do we have any other options? Have you found other lifeforms that we can use to bait the zōtl?”
“There is a plethora of genetic material at hand, Gai, most of which I have not finished sorting through. The Tryl are clearly the most advanced of what we’ve found, though I may be able to come up with something less sophisticated in this jumble that will still appeal to the zōtl.
“Look into it. Maybe we should conduct interviews with other dead species. There must be a less noble lifeform for this sacrifice.”
“That would take time, Gai. Meanwhile, Chalco-Doror is gearing up to produce Tryl.”
“Then I say, produce them. Everything is best, after all.”
Primeval Worlds
Gai, weary from the arduous work of keeping the paths of the planets on track, stood her Form in a field of lichenous boulders on one of the warm worlds of Doror and dozed for a few hours. When she awoke, the world around her had changed. Trees had sprouted during her nap and surrounded her in a forest of club moss and fern.
She rose into the strobe of day and night and registered through her viewer that new lifeforms covered the entire planet. Besides vegetation, which had overgrown all the rocky expanses, animals proliferated. Herds milled on the plains, birds rode rings of wind, lemurs and monkeys dangled among lianas, and fish flurried in the seas.
Gai looked for the Tryl and found them huddled in villages of adobe mazes and catacombs that teetered into the sky like immense ant hives.
“They are called claves,” Genitrix said after Gai tuned her in. “The Tryl are colonial creatures. They are never found individually.”
Each planet, Gai noted as she swung her Form in a lazy arc through Chalco-Doror, displayed its own distinctly adapted flora and fauna. On the darker worlds of Chalco, jungles flitted with bats and scurrying voles stalked by nocturnal creatures with luminous eyes. On the bright worlds, cactus ranges furnished niches for solar-shelled armadillos and glittery-skinned pythons. Immense beasts lumbered through fern holts and swamps and breached the seas in loud, explosive splashes. Also, the tiniest of insects, the lightest of wind-borne bacteria, rode the winds.
“With this first flush,” Genitrix proudly explained, “I took no special care to sequence lifeforms chronologically. Those hulking beasts you see are called saurians, and their genetic code is far more ancient than the horses over there or those wolf-cats, which didn’t appear in their own world until after the time of the Tryl.”
“I see the Tryl have wasted no time making themselves at home. Their claves are everywhere, on all the planets. Have they no environmental preferences?”
“The Tryl control their own climate. Their technology, actually, is comparable with our own. Even in the short time you slept, they have thoroughly organized themselves and have begun a program of reconstructing their culture. Those adobe claves are precursors for much grander structures that will follow once they complete their underground factories. From what I have seen in the tesseract, they are most ingenious. In an hour or so, you will see what I mean. By then, they will be setting up their lynk system.”
“A wormhole technology in an hour?”
“Well, of course, an hour of Form time, almost eleven years planet time.”
“If they develop lynks, the zōtl can’t he
lp but notice them.”
“The gravity pulse emitted yesterday at the end of the first stroke is all the signal the zōtl need.”
“That’s only now reaching the nearest other Genitrix systems. I thought, maybe, we might have another day or two.”
“I am afraid not. We should see zōtl today.”
“Now, what about the O’ode? The last time I looked, our search for that had gone nowhere.”
“That status has not changed. We have more energy to work with since the gravity stroke but not enough power to locate an open timeline to where the O’ode exists. I will refer to that legendary planet as Rataros.”
“You mean after the name of the Rimstalker outpost at the very fringe of the range?”
“The same. It seems poetically correct to call this planet Rataros, because the Rataros we know exists at the crossroads of worlds. There our ancestors first met other intelligences like the voors and the eld skyles.”
“Let the O’ode planet be known as Rataros, then. It’s as far away from here certainly as the first Rataros is from the range—and as alien. I hope that we can get to it before the zōtl get to us.”
“Most unlikely, Gai. All our probes have failed to find any sign of it. We just do not have the power to reach that far, yet.”
“How much longer before we do?”
“Two or three more gravity strokes should do it.”
“That’s another week or ten days. We’ll be swarming with zōtl by then.”
“Indeed. But that is as we have planned, yes? We are to host the zōtl, let them establish their own lynklanes and feeding habits.”
“Yes, but you seem to have forgotten Genitrix-18. The zōtl overcame our defenses there.”
“I have not forgotten. What alternative do we have? In fact, I just completed an analysis of the data Saor returned from Genitrix-18. With our limited energy and all this work to do making the Tryl comfortable, it took me two days. And all I can honestly tell you is that Genitrix-18 was overpowered by zōtl technology. I don’t know how exactly. Saor’s data clearly show that the gravity amps failed and the entire system converted to pastureland for the zōtl to cultivate the unfortunate species whose pain they so very much relish.”
“That will not happen to us,” Gai determined and swung into a polar orbit around one of the Doror planets. She watched the Tryl claves there opening like blossoms.
“You are seeing only the rooftops, Gai. The Tryl do all their important work underground.”
“What do they eat?”
“At first, they ate lichen from the surface. Now I see they’ve constructed hydroponic gardens among the subterranean pools that I had used to fuse water for the oceans. They even have a nutri-pump, similar to the one in your Form, that is portable enough for them to wear so they can work without having to eat.”
The clusters of adobe towers collapsed suddenly and, in their places, parabolic arcs of shining metal appeared.
“Ah, their forge-factories are on line,” Genitrix observed. “Growth will proceed rapidly from here.”
A high-pitched whistle soared beyond audial range. “What was that?”
“Tryl lynk system. It just came on.”
“I’m going down—in plasma body.”
“Better take the Form.”
“Too bulky and too crazy with the time differential. I’ll park here.”
“Better park on the surface. The Tryl already have something they call ramstat—a propulsion system that utilizes the parallel parameters of gravity and magnetism. The field lines from their boosters are interfering with my communications outside the Form.”
To make her point, Genitrix directed Gai’s viewer to a fleet of silver discs slashing out of the atmosphere and into space through a jangle of lightning.
“What are those?” she asked; then, fearing Genitrix would launch into one of her lectures, said, “Forget it. I’m going down anyway.”
“Ramstat flyers,” Genitrix responded. “The Tryl use them to convey whatever they do not want to lynk. That swarm is loaded with crystal components for factories they are building in space. They use the gravity-free, deep space cold for running superconducting computers. They are finishing up . . .”
Gai cut her off and dropped her Form into a field of red flowers just outside one of the claves. When she stepped out into her plasma body, the strobe stopped near midday. Sunlight smashed off the giant parabolic arcs of the clave, and the heathery Tryl music that she had first heard yesterday lilted in the air. With a sizzling whoosh, a ramstat flyer lifted from beyond the clave’s skyline and swiftly dwindled into the blue. Moments later, the thunder of its exit from the atmosphere mumbled overhead.
Gai strode through the flower field toward the clave, looking for Tryl.
“They see you,” Genitrix said, voice muted by interference from the ramstat field lines around the gleaming city. “You have permission to enter, if you want to look around a clave.”
Gai followed a ribbon-road of white stone through a grove of club moss to the base of an arch. She touched it, and it rippled with magnetism.
“A lynk arch,” Genitrix said from far away. “Do not walk under it or you may wind up on the other side of Chalco.”
Beyond the arch, the clave’s elegant towers rose, thin pinkstone obelisks with chrome-bright trim and slender silverglass windows. Expansive courtyards of trellised blossoms, tapered trees, and rainbow-hung glass sculptures graced the grounds around the buildings.
A door slid silently aside in the nearest tower, and a Tryl in colorful shimmer-fabric garments approached Gai.
“Welcome to our clave.” The Tryl spoke in a voice remote as Genitrix’s, because the Form translated. “I am 102-22—and I will show you around, if you like.”
“102-22? That sounds like a name for an artifact. Are you man or woman?”
“The Tryl have decided to hold no individual names during our time in Chalco-Doror. We are here as a species. We are the Tryl. I am male, though that hardly matters, for we are not reproducing. Each clave has a population of several thousand, numbered as we are recreated by your Genitrix system. I am the twenty-second Tryl produced by the one-hundred-and-second flush. Come inside, and I will show you.”
102-22 led Gai to the door that the Tryl had come through, and they entered a dark foyer tapestried with what looked like woven glass. A quaver of energy passed through them, and Gai’s plasma shape ruffled.
“I’m sorry. That’s our ultrasonic cleanser. We must keep the interior of the clave absolutely clean. Your Genitrix program is producing some virulent viruses and bacteria from ages of our planet’s history we’re unfamiliar with. Come, let me show you our living quarters.”
Lux-tubes illuminated a corridor that led to a series of magnetic lifts, spotlit open shafts where Tryl rose and fell gracefully.
“You knew I was coming?” Gai asked, surprised by 102-22’s lack of surprise.
“Not at this moment, but all of us have been hoping that you would visit one of the claves. We need to talk with you about why you are bringing us back from the Light.”
102-22 invited Gai to step into one of the shafts, and they floated downward past the dark-red light of catacombs bored into the rock crust of the planet. “Those are individual sleeping slots,” the Tryl said. “And here is where your gene-recovery program is presently regenerating us.”
The surrounding rock walls gave way to a massive grotto brightly illuminated with lux sheets. Scaffolds and derricks loomed in the peripheral shadows around a floodlit center encased in a transparent geodesic sphere. The lift lowered them beside the sphere, and Gai could see the exposed matrix of the planet’s interior, where the lifeforms grew.
The interior glistened a fleshy pink, exposing the shapes of Tryl in a full sequence of constructive stages. Tryl in clear, sanitary face masks and gloves removed the bodies that had fully developed and placed them on hovering stretchers. Occupied stretchers whisked out of the sphere to the lifts, where they floated up and out o
f sight.
“All our claves are built on the sites where your Genitrix program is growing Tryl. The recovery was hardest for the first of us, because there was no one to help. Many suffered needlessly. Now we are taken to an orientation area until we are functional.”
After Gai had watched a dozen new Tryl removed from the viscous matrix, dripping with the ichor of creation, 102-22 guided her among a maze of corridors through the heart of the clave. Gai toured chrome-armature factory pits, oddly canted quarries worked by robots, and red-gout, spark-whirling machine-depths of fiery kilns.
Beyond the cold blue bubbles of ramstat hangars and their disc flyers suspended in magnetic harnesses, the living quarters began. Tryl mingled among glass sculptures and breezy music in spacious communal areas. All stared at Gai with their large eyes but none spoke. Past feeding halls fragrant with pollen and beyond more burgundy-tinted catacombs, they came to the lifts again and rode up into the towers.
They entered a capacious suite of flexform furniture, more glassy sculpture, and quiet music and gazed through tinted glass at fern dells and swamps. Ramstat flyers slipped in and out of hangar tunnels brisk as bees.
“Your culture is enormously sophisticated,” Gai admitted.
“Did you expect less?”
“Frankly, yes. Though the zōtl have grown strong out here, I had not been prepared to meet a species in outer space equal to my own. The energy deficit is so great, mastering your environment is no mean feat. I’m awed by your achievement.”
“Has that changed your mind about using us as bait for the zōtl?”
Gai looked for anger in the Tryl’s face and found only attentiveness. “It is the zōtl I wish to destroy, not the Tryl. I need your help—but not as bait. I had no idea how advanced you were—and are. Help me, so that the Tryl need not suffer at all.”
“How can we help you?”
“There is a weapon called the O’ode that kills only zōtl. I lack the power to reach it yet. Maybe your lynk system could augment mine.”
“Our lynklanes are closed. They connect points only within Chalco-Doror, so that the claves may commune directly. We would not use our lynks to leave the system— nor would we use them to recover a weapon of any kind.”
The Last Legends of Earth Page 11