The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “I’m a weary Beppunaut. These knobby bones would welcome a rest. Then I can show you the pride of a lifetime’s ambition.”

  Neither night nor day came to Saor’s Forest, which grew beneath the black sun. The sky here was mostly dark. Light came from the horizon, where the galaxy had pooled like curdled milk. A slim, argent glow suffused the nocturnal woods. By that light, Chan-ti foraged for the edible plants she knew, and Spooner set up a lean-to from the equipment pack Moku had carried. The Beast built a fire.

  They ate much as they did in the Eyelands: seared tuber steaks, roothair salad, and a hot moss soup drizzled with sour pollen. Afterward, Moku played his flute and the thief displayed his jewels. Chan-ti seemed attentive, but her heart already ranged the distances she would have to cross to be again with Ned.

  Later, while the others slept, Chan-ti watched coniferous breezes flutter the bromeliads and fern brakes sprouting densely in the elbowcrooks of giant trees. Loneliness cored her, and she gave herself reluctantly to sleep.

  *

  Spooner Yegg traveled slowly with the sack of jewels on his back, but he would not abandon them. Neither could Moku carry them, for the equipment pack already encumbered him. Chan-ti offered to carry half, but Spooner declined. “It’s the burden of a lifetime. Only I can carry it.”

  That was when Chan-ti first wished that she could go on alone. She had grown up on the hem of the forest, and she knew it as well as anyone could. But that was, she understood, wishful thinking; Moku would not go on without Spooner, and without Moku to warn and protect, the Forest would almost certainly eat her. And anyway, the thief had made the quest possible by stealing the power-chip for the finder. She owed him, even if this search was becoming more his journey than hers.

  The finder indicated that Ned had gone far into the Overworld. The signal arrived weak and only vaguely directional. The metrics read infinity. When they came upon lynks among the tall trees, the signal brightened or failed entirely, depending on whether the lynk led toward or away from Ned. They wandered a long time, well over a hundred meals, straight into the forest’s murky depths, deeper than any Foke in memory had gone.

  The first lynk with a strong signal towered above them in a platinum arc, tall as a pine, almost entirely hidden among the shaggy-barked trees. It exited from the Forest into a desert. Sunlight clanged in waves off mesas that sat like anvils on the far horizon. Minutes passed before their eyes adjusted enough to squint out shapes in the glare. Hot dry wind quickly evaporated the dew from their flesh and hair and shriveled the mold that had begun to grow in the seams of their clothes. “Ras Mentis,” the thief observed. “Far back, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been to Ras Mentis. Agritecture everywhere. It’s one of the chief food planets in our time. I don’t see anything like that here.”

  “Maybe we’re on Dreux. That’s a desert planet.”

  “No. Lod’s not bright enough.”

  Chan-ti’s finder pointed strongly southeast, and the metrics flashed a hundred and eight kilometers. “Fock— what’re we going to eat here?” She picked up a stone and winged it at the lynk. It snicked off almost noiselessly.

  “Let’s go back for water,” Spooner said. “We’re going to need it.”

  With four gourds of water apiece and two extra for Ned, the travelers hiked toward the signal source. Heat wavered like heavy draperies, though the wind had died away. The land looked scabrous, ragged and red as a ripped-open heart. They walked through vast arterial ravines and under teetering pinnacle rocks. At nightfall, from a high rill, they spotted other people.

  “It’s some kind of armed group,” Chan-ti observed, passing the binoculars to Spooner. “Shell guns. Combustion-engine trucks. A crude bunch.”

  Spooner adjusted the oil-lenses, keeping his head back under the sandstone lip of the cliffcave on the rill where they had climbed to camp. He watched them for a long time, until the red spokes of twilight rose off the desert floor and the cold closed in with darkness. Moku seemed to enjoy the iciness, and he sat in the cave mouth staring up at contrails of stars. From below, what sounded like rifle shots cracked the desert silence. “Not gunfire,” Spooner muttered from inside his thermal cocoon. “Hot rocks splitting from the cold.”

  Chan-ti fell asleep in her cocoon listening to the popping, and awoke, it seemed the next instant, to thunder. Dawn filled the cave entrance. Black smoke rolled skyward in a widening column. Moku stood on the ledge outside, bouncing with excitement. Spooner was gone.

  On the desert floor, two of the three combustion-engine trucks had exploded. The third plumed dust as it rolled toward their mesa. Chan-ti saw sparks of gunfire from the armed camp and several bodies lying face up in the sand. With steepening outrage, she realized that Spooner Yegg had stolen the truck and killed soldiers to get it. When the tractor-treaded vehicle roared up to their slope, Moku had already packed the equipment, and he leaped and slid down the rusty sand, laughing. Chan-ti ran to Spooner, who was grinning to his molars.

  “What the fock have you done?” she yelled.

  “Get in!” Spooner shouted back and pointed to the swarm of armed men dashing toward them.

  Moku hung from the scaffolding of the truck bed and offered a clawed hand. Chan-ti shoved past and jumped up into the cab. When the door slammed behind her, the engine’s noise dulled. “You stole this truck!”

  “Steady, pilgrim sister.” He yanked the truck into gear and set off down the mesa flank, gathering momentum. “I did better than steal. I fixed it so they can’t take it back. That’s appropriating. A vital distinction. Life and death hinge on that kind of discrimination, you know.”

  “That was wrong, Spooner.” Jolting with the rough terrain, Chan-ti sat sideways in her seat to face the thief and braced herself against the windshield. “That was a stupid move, old man.” She clenched her teeth against her mounting anger.

  “What’s stupid about an exhausted traveler finding a way to ride instead of walk through a desert? I took special care last night to siphon off all the gas the tank would take. We can ride back to the lynk in this after we get Ned. And look, we’ve got an air cooler.” He slapped the dashboard and a chill breeze washed through the cab.

  “It’s stupid to act like a common criminal,” Chan-ti insisted peevishly.

  “Unless you are one, of course.” He winked. “Then it’s second nature.”

  “The Foke don’t steal,” she insisted. “And we don’t murder.”

  The grin dimmed in Spooner’s face. “First, I’m not a Foke.” His brown stare held her while the truck barreled between boulders and kettleholes. He looked back in time to swerve along the edge of a steep ravine and went on coolly, “Second, I steal for pleasure and comfort, and I murder only to stay alive.”

  “It wasn’t necessary. You’ve stranded those men back there. They could die.”

  “They are soldiers. Their business is dying.”

  “We could get there without this truck.”

  “Half-dead, maybe all dead for me. Don’t you see how old I am?” He locked his gaze on hers again, and she looked away to see hexagonal plates of cracked desert flying under them. “I’m seventy-seven years old. If there’s an easy way to take what’s left to me, I’m taking it.”

  “Then why did you volunteer to come along?”

  “Dearest, I want ease, not everything staying the same. In the Eyelands everybody works their tocks off to keep things as they are. They call it survival. To me, it’s stagnation. No one, no thing, is forever. Change is the Law, right? If you’re going to break human laws, you better keep especially good faith with the inhuman ones. I’m not a Foke and don’t want to be. I was grateful to you for having taken me in when I needed a haven. And I’m grateful to you for taking me out, now that I have the strength for one last adventure. Just wait till I get us, me and Moku, to a city. I’ll show you what ease can be.”

  Chan-ti slumped into her seat. To leash in her anger, she pulled out the finder and watche
d the metrics drop as they closed in on Ned. About ten kilometers away, as they rumbled through a saddle among the plateaus, an avalanche crashed in front of them. Spooner stood on the brakes, and Chan-ti heaved up against the windshield. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Moku fly into a dust-fuming gully. Before she could look to see if he were injured, three armed men emerged from the wavery rocks. One of them was talking into a radio.

  Spooner threw the clutch into reverse. Three wide-bore rifles drew a bead on the cab, and the thief killed the engine. “Leave the talking to me, Chan-ti.”

  “You speak their language?”

  “From what I heard last night, it’s a predictable patois.”

  They stepped from the cab. Chan-ti looked for Moku and found his hulk curled face-down in the gully, unconscious or dead. In the settling dust, he mimed the rocks.

  The three armed men wore ragged uniforms. Their harrowed faces stared with abject malice at the girl and the old man who had killed their comrades. They waved the two away from the vehicle, so their bullets would not damage the treads. Spooner attempted to talk to them, but they were too angry to speak. Two of them were wounded. In the distance, their armored car lay on its side, charred. A battle had been fought not far from here.

  Chan-ti realized that she and Spooner were going to be summarily executed. Her first thought, to get her gun out somehow, stalled when she remembered that it lay with the equipment in the truckbed. Within moments, she was going to die. She kicked at the caliche under her boots, a coil of frustration winding tighter in her gut. Spooner’s whiny yammerings to the soldiers irritated her. She wanted silence for this. “Shut up!” she yelled.

  He pointed at her and intensified his babbling. She understood not a word of it, and apparently neither did the soldiers. They stepped closer, to beat the two of them away from the truck. As soon as they advanced, a gray giant reared out of the gully behind them. The soldiers misread the surprise in Chan-ti’s face as fear. Moku pranced up and grabbed two of the soldiers before they sensed him. With gruesome strength, he slammed the two into the third, and they collapsed in a senseless heap.

  Chan-ti looked at her companions, stunned.

  “I was speaking to Moku,” Spooner explained, smugly. “We knew it was a trap, so he leaped off the truck. But I was afraid he was going to show himself too soon, so I shouted to him what he couldn’t see.”

  “You . . . You speak his language?”

  Spooner chuckled. “He doesn’t actually have a language, at least none that I know. We worked out a simple one back in the Eyelands, so we could coordinate our mischief. It saved our lives by keeping us out of trouble in the Overworld, and it has saved our lives today.”

  “He wouldn’t have had to save us if you hadn’t stolen the truck in the first place.”

  “Still singing that song?” The thief tossed his hands up and climbed into the cab. “Let’s get to Ned before the zōtl show up.”

  Chan-ti pulled herself into the cab and stared through the heat-shiver at the tableland. “You think there are zōtl near here?”

  “Who do you think kicked the tocks of those gunboys? We’re back in the Age of Knives, Chan-ti Beppu. Humans and zōtl are fighting for these worlds.”

  They drove on in silence, searching the sky for the infamous dart-blur of needlecraft. By noon, they had reached the source of the signal—an oasis temple of white rock columns and watchful statuary. The pedestal date identified the site as a century-old Tryl sanctuary. Among palms and frondy plants, a spring gurgled, running off through clever, plant-screened aqueducts to irrigate an oasis garden. A battle had raged here some years earlier, cratering the grassy fields and scorching much of the stone.

  Near the center of the oasis stood a lynk and a toppled statue with the chiseled title Carrier of Peace. Busts of Tryl had been lined up near the lynk and smashed. The finder pointed into the lynk and strobed.

  “He’s not here,” Chan-ti sighed. “Not yet.”

  “You mean, he is here,” Spooner said, “but in a different time.”

  “Are we going through?”

  “Let’s rest first,” Spooner suggested. “A lot of lynks are rigged by zōtl to snatch people. If any of us are going to die, we should at least have a full stomach. Seems to be plenty to eat around here.”

  He roamed off with Moku to forage, and Chan-ti sat on a chunk of statuary in the shade, shoved her glasses into her hair, and rested her face in her hands. Finding Ned had become more difficult than she had supposed. She had expected the finder to lead her directly to him. The possibility that she would never find him, and that she would be shot or eaten by zōtl, coursed through her with a realism that sat her upright.

  “Look what we found,” Spooner called out, exultant. He rushed over and knelt before her, his arms full of white cactus. “Glamour!”

  “What is it?”

  “Telempathic cactus. You’ve probably never seen it. In our time, it’s been almost entirely eradicated.”

  She watched the thief knife open the white crowns along their red-thorn seams, exposing a frosty green interior. He sucked at the juice and offered a wedge to her. “Go ahead. It’s not toxic or addictive, no lingering side-effects, nothing like that. It’s just what we need to see our way through the lynks without falling into zōtl traps.”

  Chan-ti kissed the glutinous interior of the cactus, and her lips and tongue brightened with coolness. Hectic colors stunned her vision. She dropped the cactus and nearly fell over.

  “Steady now.” Spooner grabbed her shoulder. “It peaks quickly. But the glamour is long and steady. Four hours at least. Steady. You’re just seeing what’s always been there but suppressed by your retinal dampers.”

  Spooner was right. The air shimmered with dust motes in chiliad shades of gold and vermillion. Her sharply defined hands bleared to a mist of colors.

  “Have a little more, and you’ll see deeper.” He put the cactus pulp to her mouth, and she ate a chill bite.

  A thumbling monkey, tiny, gray, and big-eyed, sat motionless in the red grass, inside a rainbow circle. Chan-ti heard the blur of wind in the grassheads that only his scoop-ears could hear. She felt the watchful energy of his taut muscles in hers. And she saw, overlaid like a reflection, the details he perceived: the postures of vegetation and a giant perspective of Spooner and herself.

  She looked away, and the wreath of rainbowlight followed her line of sight and centered on Moku through a rift in the hedges. Her heart seemed to expand to the limits of her skin, humming with blood and voltage. She watched through Moku’s eyes the yellow berries that the monkey ate, tasted the sour pleasure of them and the sweet variance of the rare ripe ones the animal had not yet found. She heard music, simple as a sentence, playing the story of her life—no, his life, Moku’s memories, images and sounds within the transparency of his perceptions – memories of another shrub, long ago, where the yellow berries had opened into sugary blue cores—

  “Don’t gaze too deep,” Spooner spoke.

  She looked at him, and his seamed face filled the rainbow ring, gray hair swept back precisely over long ears, thin silver moustache lifted in a smile that barely hovered on salt-cracked lips, cinnamon eyes crinkled with laughter. Her own face ghosted over Spooner’s, appearing as he envisioned her: hair streaked with sweat and sand, fanning a startled expression, and crystal-black almond eyes behind dusty lenses. And because he too had eaten the cactus, she felt her startlement in his mind, her surprise leaping like the quaver of a note against the silence of his watchfulness. His tiger-bright eyes captured all the tiny details of her childhood, her life a windowpane filled with the blue darkness of her years on Valdëmiraën.

  “Keep your gaze moving,” Spooner offered. “Get the feel of it before you try to control it. It’s easy to trance. Try to stay alert. The glamour is useful only if you stay alert.”

  She stood up. No vertigo or nausea assailed her as she had feared during the chemical’s initial spike. She strolled through the oasis, capturing the r
ustling sensations of insects, the charmed rapture of the vegetation buzzing with sunlight. For a while, she crawled on the ground, haunted by the profound ambition of ants, feeling the pheromonal trails packed with news of food and home.

  When she looked for Spooner again, he stood before the lynk, shaking his head. “The zōtl have rigged it.”

  From a distance, she could see through the lynk to the desert terrain beyond the oasis. And when she stood beside him, the spectral tunnel of her vision darkened and revealed a shellacked blackness hairy with movements. Distances loomed through her. She fell headlong into an abyss that closed swiftly, hooking her flesh with minute tines cutting each movement with pain. Legs flurried up her back, feelers probed her scalp, found the base of her skull.

  “Careful!” Spooner called and pulled her away from the lynk. “Stare deep enough into there and you’ll go mad. Close your eyes when you don’t want to trance. It breaks the telempathy.”

  Chan-ti gasped a breath, shaken by her hypnotic fall. She rubbed her arms, still feeling the tines under her skin. “What was that?”

  “The zōtl have patched this lynk to one of their nests.” Amusement contoured his features. Inside, she felt his laughter—not at her but vaster, a secret spring of laughter welling up from within, longing for a body, lightening him as it surged beyond, reeling into the outflung motion of the planet.

  “There you go again.” He steadied her, helped her sit on the ground.

  She looked up at him beseechingly through her hair. “Can you make it stop?”

  He bowed, plucked a red thorn from the cactus, and deftly stung her in the vein between her thumb and forefinger. “That’ll do it.” He flicked the thorn into the rubble and strolled off.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Get a gun.”

  The rainbow halo irised smaller and closed. Chan-ti spit on the small wound and massaged the sting. Grains of hot bright light flew weftwise through the air. Over the shards of the Tryl statues, figures appeared, a frieze of lizard people, throat frills throbbing, stunning eyes watching her. She stood up. Moku stopped grazing and jumped to her side.