The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “A rock must be a rock,” Joao quoted from the Analects of the Tryl, “a feather, a feather.”

  “And only the feather shall rise.” 164-97 nodded her approval, and her big yellow eyes glowed warmly as she appraised the youth before her: a strapping lad, big as any of the other young men, bigger than most and clearly capable of all the fighting behaviors so cherished by his species—yet, under his curly black hair and behind his inkpool dark eyes, the peacefulness of Tryl wisdom lived. Storing information in machines turned out well enough but, despite all the Tryl technology, the only true repository for wisdom remained the human heart.

  “I am woolgathering,” Joao admitted, “but why are you here at the crown of the tower, my Teacher? Is this not the hour at day’s end when you lead the still-session?”

  “You were not there, hatchling. You miss only when you are ill.”

  “I thought you would believe I was ill and ignore my absence,” Joao admitted. “I am—I cannot help it—frightened. Soon we will be there, in Chalco-Doror. Hundreds of years of waiting end. I could not sit still.”

  “Now is when you most need to sit still. Calm is all that will distinguish you from the chaos to come.”

  “I thought it would be easier to still my heart here, in sight of our goal.”

  “Has it been easier?”

  “No. For all the scan-clips of those worlds that I’ve seen, they are still a fear-inspiring mystery.”

  “What do you fear the most?”

  “Failing in my mission. The zōtl have been there five hundred years. What hope have we of displacing them?”

  “Abandon hope, hatchling, and in its absence you will be closer to the truth. Yes, the zōtl have infested those worlds for five centuries—but only the Rain and Desert Worlds of Doror. In Chalco, humans live free of zōtl.”

  “If you call that living—hiding in caves with no real technology, children born in hiding under appalling conditions, and all the while Genitrix birthing both whole people and distorts randomly—not to mention the baby-fields, where so many innocents die in their first hours, torn apart by beasts. What a cruel freedom the humans of Chalco enjoy.”

  “Yet, they are free. The zōtl are not so powerful yet that they can dominate all the worlds. And your mission will bring the people the wisdom they need to endure.”

  “It is not wisdom that the people so eagerly anticipate, my Teacher. To them, Know-Where-to-Go is a fortress flying to their salvation. The weapons that we have crafted from your technology are what inspire the sufferers. They will ignore me and consider me foolish for preaching peace.”

  The Tryl extended an arm to the surrounding curve of glass that overlooked the human settlement built in and around the clave. Below, floodlights illuminated fields where delicate-looking fighter craft perched, ready for their assault. Echoes of blue light came and went on the horizon from troops target-practicing in the wilderness.

  “Human blood riddles wars,” the old Tryl said. “Violence is bred in the bone of humans. That is good and perfect, too. When your warriors arrive among the zōtl armed with ramstat fighters and proton cannon, the zōtl at last must face their own shadow.”

  “But what if we fail? What if the zōtl have anticipated that Know-Where-to-Go is a planet converted to a warship?”

  “Believe me, they know that already. They have known it for many years. But what can they do? Human weaponry is now the equivalent of the zōtl’s. A great battle will ensue. And if the humans lose, that must be good and perfect.”

  “If we lose, the horror continues—the zōtl-feeding, the terrorism of distorts, the horror of the baby-fields.” Joao sagged with despair. “How could all this have come to be? The Rimstalkers are perdition itself to have created these worlds for the zōtl.”

  164-97’s throat frills wagged in a gust of humor, and Joao stared at her appalled. “Don’t look so disturbed. I am not laughing at the suffering you describe. I laugh at the irony of this opportunity. You see, I am on my way to meet the Rimstalker. Perhaps you would like to accompany me and tell her yourself just how damnable she and her species are.”

  Joao blinked with disbelief. “You jest!”

  The Tryl shook her head. “No, hatchling. As we speak, the Rimstalker Gai is docking her Form in the deepest of the old Tryl grottoes, where she keeps her sleepod. She, too, fears the conflagration to come—for her own reasons—and she has chosen to hide her body here in the event that the zōtl win.”

  Joao dizzied with the thought of confronting a Rimstalker and sat down on the steps. “What are her reasons for fearing the zōtl?”

  “You well know that Rimstalker strategy is to bait zōtl and then poison them.”

  “But the poison—the, uh, O’ode—she hasn’t found the O’ode, has she? That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Almost. Her searches among the timelines for Rataros have proved fruitless, it is true. She is hiding for another reason. Her trap for the zōtl has been compromised. The Tryl were the first to sense it, and we have been warning her for many years.”

  “Warning her?”

  “About her machine intelligence, Saor. Fifteen hundred years ago, Gai used Saor to tap into another system. That system had already been wholly overcome by zōtl. The zōtl used the lynk with Saor to introduce an electronic virus, too elusive for even Genitrix and Lod—her other machine intelligences—to detect.”

  “But you knew.”

  “Yes, we Tryl knew. And, as I say, we warned Gai. She wants more proof. Her analysis of Saor shows nothing. She is shrewd enough not to entirely discount our warning—and so she is here today, now, to hide her Form.”

  “And I may see her?”

  “I have selected you alone of your people, for you are the only one I trust not to insult your species.”

  Joao shook his head sadly. After generations of training, the human colony on Know-Where-to-Go understood enough of Tryl technology to build and maintain weapons, and now they had lost interest in the Tryl’s passivist philosophy. Most considered it a waste of time to sit still in silence, to listen to the airy music of the Lost Race, or to study peace when too soon they would be fighting for their lives against the spider people. The Tryl, revered for their science, were mocked for their idealism.

  Joao and a handful of others, whose families had traditionally been receptive to Tryl culture, provided 164-97’s only disciples. The others regarded the wizened reptile as a relic. Joao sadly faced his teacher, saw the leatheriness of the old one’s hide, scales thick as coins, original black dulled to gray. She was nearly five hundred years old. Most of the others of her species had simply decided to die when Genitrix stopped reproducing them, and they returned to the Light, to the tesseract range, where all light and all consciousness is preserved. Of the few who had elected to remain behind and teach the belligerent and dimwitted hairy ones, 164-97 was the last.

  “Come,” the Tryl said. “If we are to see the Rimstalker at all, we must go now.”

  Joao followed his teacher to the lift and down through the tower, past the living quarters and ancient catacombs, to a lynk chamber. The chamber glowed green as the interior of an emerald. “The only way into the deepest grotto, where Gai will harbor her Form and sleepod, is through the lynklanes. I am the only one now who knows the entry code.” She rubbed the code onto the palm pad on the far wall of the chamber, and the emerald light dulled and flushed brightly again. When the wall panel sighed open, a smell like walnuts and dried leather rushed by.

  The grotto they found themselves in loomed gigantically, the most immense Joao had ever seen, and he had seen all on the planet, even the huge burrow where the Tryl had built a plasteel factory in one of Genitrix’s empty aquifers. This grotto, lit by lux cables embedded among stalactites, dwindled to a lace of distant lights. They rode for several minutes on a floater platform through a forest of glistening stalagmites before coming into sight of the Form.

  Ten meters tall, an arabesque of coils, curved plates, and black metal bands rose from the c
avern floor—a totem of vipers and insectparts. There was nothing at all familiar about it, nothing Joao could identify as limbs or a head. Blackly behind it reared a tangle of enmeshed tubes pretzel-knotted about a sphere—the sleepod.

  The cavern had been cool, but as they neared the Rimstalker artifacts, a magnetic heat hackled the small hairs on Joao’s body. 164-97 stopped the floater before the looming alien armor and warbled a greeting in her own language.

  Gai had expected to meet the Tryl, the last one of them still in flesh, but the presence of the human surprised her. She stepped out of her Form in a plasma body kept purposely amorphous so as not to frighten the human with her actual shape.

  Joao’s heart knocked loudly when he saw the column of fiery smoke swirl out of the bizarre armor, and he clutched his teacher’s arm.

  “I thought you would come alone, 164-97,” an astonishingly quiet voice said.

  “I have brought my student, Joao. He is as much Tryl as a human can be.”

  The radiant smoke gathered to a pseudo-human form, an eerie, talking manikin: “I am amazed that the Tryl find any merit at all among humans.”

  “Each human is conscious and self-aware as any Tryl—or Rimstalker,” 164-97 said. “Each is a body of light.”

  “You have not brought this one here to shame me into sparing his kind, have you, old soul?”

  “No. The Tryl long ago abandoned that hope. I brought him here that he might, with you, witness the passing of the last of the Tryl.”

  “Teacher!” Joao shouted, and the echoes of his dismay tripped away loudly. “You said nothing – about dying.”

  “What need be said? Everything living dies. Certainly, I am no different.” The Tryl took the human’s hands and squeezed them reassuringly. “Rejoice for me. In a few moments, I will again be only light.”

  “But my mission. How am I to go on without you?”

  “Memory is time’s tenderest mercy. That mercy will guide you as well as I.”

  “What mission have you given this benighted creature, old soul?” the ghostly manikin asked.

  “He is to carry wisdom to the worlds,” the Tryl answered, proudly.

  The manikin’s face cracked apart around a laugh, dissolved, and reassembled. “The humans have taken Tryl science and shaped weapons that match in destructiveness everything the zōtl have, my enlightened lizard. What makes you believe that such minatory creatures are worthy of your wisdom?”

  “Wisdom is not only wise.” The Tryl released the young man’s hands and sat down on the cavern floor. “I am going into the Light now. Before I pass over, I will tell you a thing, Rimstalker. You created these worlds as a deathtrap for zōtl. But you yourself will be the victim—unless you ally with these benighted and sinister creatures you so scorn. That is the prophecy of the last Tryl. Death has come for me—and it is good and perfect that I die.”

  “Teacher!” Joao knelt beside the Tryl. The glow in 164-97’s eyes had gone, and she sat tall in her final stillness. Sobs wracked her student as he pressed his face against the widening chill of her chest.

  *

  Gai felt relieved. The last of them was free of suffering now, and the terrible remorse that had haunted her since she recognized their gentleness softened. She retreated to her Form and waited there the half hour of Form-time it would take for Know-Where-to-Go to enter Chalco-Doror and complete its second stroke.

  While she waited, she reviewed the Tryl’s warning. She agreed that she would, in fact, need an alliance with the humans—but not as the old lizard had intended. The humans had developed into the perfect bait now that they had armed themselves with Tryl tech. They would not be so easily subdued, and that would keep the zōtl continually off-kilter and working hard for the food they prized. The spiders would have little opportunity to interfere with her search for the O’ode. Well-armed bait, she decided, was what the other Genitrix systems had lacked and why they had failed. The feeding had been too easy for the zōtl.

  Using her Form’s viewer for remote scan, Gai watched Know-Where-to-Go enter Chalco. She saw everything in the acceleration of Rimstalker time. Ramstat cargo ships, giant metal insects, flew with colonizing supplies to reinforce the wild humans who lived on the Night Worlds, the planets they had named Valdëmiraën, Xappur, and Mugna. They did the same at the Dusk Worlds—Elphame, Nabu, and Q’re—dropping off planter-harvester combines and components for plasteel and lux factories.

  In Doror, the zōtl waited, and when Know-Where-to-Go crossed the Abyss toward the Rain Worlds the spider people attacked. The humans’ proton cannon held the zōtl needlecraft and battle-islands at bay. No zōtl landed on Know-Where-to-Go, and the humans were successful in mounting assaults against the zōtl planets. Many died, but that seemed only to strengthen the murderous resolve of the surviving humans. Gai was astounded to see the enemy who had defeated Rimstalkers falling back from these stupid but vehement animals.

  On each planet that they conquered—Cendre, Sakai, Ras Mentis—the humans established colonies. Joao, the human who had been the student of the last Tryl, founded a temple on Ras Mentis where the ideals of the Tryl were to be preserved. But when Gai went in her plasma shape to find it, only ruins remained. Statues of the Tryl lay toppled and overgrown with dodder. Nearby, a plasteel factory plumed black smoke and an airfield screamed with fighters.

  Know-Where-to-Go swung past Lod on its millennial journey into the dark of space. The Tryl Tower had collapsed in the fierce fighting. Only a stub of it remained, and now was called Towerbottom Library by the humans. Deep in the planet beneath it, Gai waited in her Form while Genitrix searched for the O’ode. And for the first time since leaving home, Gai allowed herself to feel satisfied with the strategy minted from her pain.

  *

  Pinpoints of bird cries sparked through the rainlight. Chan-ti Beppu listened to them for signs of danger. The cavernous gloom of Saor’s Forest made her feel tiny as an insect. Even Moku the Beast treaded warily among the big roots, where mists whorled in milky pockets and slither shapes lashed at the edge of sight. Only Spooner Yegg seemed confident. He had been in this part of the Overworld before and had promised them an easy detour. From the vaulted canopy, a bludgeoning scream dropped Chan-ti into a crouch, her gun swinging for a target. Moku bellowed back.

  “Easy, friends,” Spooner whispered, hand at his mouth to silence the others. “I know this harpy. She’s working for me. Put that gun away.”

  A glittery shadow descended and lit on a nearby branch. In the caliginous light, the creature looked like a human doll, pale and frilly, cherub-faced. But its jaw unhinged queerly, and the needleteeth and viper tongue of its scream, stiffened Moku’s hackles and jolted Chan-ti. Brazen wings flurried like vibrations, and the harpy shot to the caved-in hulk of a fallen tree.

  “Come on, mates.” Spooner began clearing the leaf litter near the log before the brass-feathered, cream-skinned creature. It hopped talon to talon on the log, kicking up chunks of bark, its jeweled teeth grinning malefically. “She won’t hurt you now that she knows you’re with me. Come on, give me a hand with this, Moku.”

  Moku spit at the harpy, and it shrieked to the far end of the log. The Beast quickly gouged a hole in the forest floor and revealed a gray, temperwoven sack. He hauled it out, and the harpy came squealing.

  “Patience, little monster.” Spooner Yegg unstrapped the sack, defused a wire-rigged charge, and dumped out a cornucopia of jewels. From the heap of bright gems, he selected a fist-sized rock as blue as a star and held it up to the harpy. “As I promised. The Suave Eye of Heaven is yours.”

  The bronze-winged creature seized the blue gem in its harsh jaws. Its black tongue wrapped about the jewel, and it rocketed into the dark canopy.

  “Spooner,” Chan-ti spoke irately, “you promised a short cut. You lied. You brought us out here to retrieve your cache.”

  “You didn’t think a thief advanced in age as I would leave behind a lifetime’s work, did you?”

  “You didn’t have to lie.
We’d have come for it.”

  “I didn’t lie.” Spooner gathered the jewels and reset the charge. “I promised an easy detour. I didn’t say to where.”

  Chan-ti shook her head and took out the directional finder and swung it till the microlights showed her the way to Ned O’Tennis. “We’re way off. I didn’t steal this finder and risk my life for your stupid jewels. Don’t ever lie like that to me again.”

  “When I first came through here,” Spooner said, strapping the sack to his back, “I could talk with that harpy. We understood each other. Of course, I had the glamour then. You can talk with anything when you have the glamour. But I was running out. Too old to go back for more. Anyway, so I say to this harpy, you guard my cache, I’ll give you the Suave Eye of Heaven. Telluric fields are better than sex for harpies. You saw her take off with it. She’ll be nesting with the best of her breed now.”

  Chan-ti looked grim. “Are you really with me, Spooner?”

  The thief looked offended. “You mean, now that I have my treasure, am I going to abandon you?” He blew a disdainful laugh through his nostrils. “I have never lied. That is why I don’t always tell the truth. Silence is not a lie. Neither is misdirection. A person’s got to make these distinctions. Without them, there is no value.” His dapper smile fit snugly. “Chan-ti Beppu, the word of a thief is the best there is. Who is more discriminating? I said I would help you find your mate and return the two of you to the Eyelands of Valdëmiraën, and I will—or die trying. Which seems more likely given my decrepit state. But you knew that all along. Your father warned you.”

  A blur of howls echoed from deeper in the forest. “I don’t think people die of old age out here, Spooner. It’ll be fast and bloody.” She looked for Moku, who sat eating the termites he had found in the log. “Do you want to rest here before we go on?”