The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  The Tryl, translucent and scribbled with heat, stood in the air above their broken idols and watched. Chan-ti tried to communicate with them, but they gave no sign of acknowledgment. Spooner returned with the gun and almost dropped it at the sight of the ghosts.

  “We are further back than I thought,” he said. “The Tryl still have their bodies of light.”

  “Why are they watching us?”

  “They probably watch everybody who comes here. It’s their temple, after all. Let’s get out of here.” He hoisted his jewel-sack and strode to the lynk, firing three rounds from the hip as he approached. The noise of the gunshots folded into echoes across the mesa-land, and gunsmoke lifted and parted like a cloud. He stepped under the arch and disappeared. A moment later, he poked his head out. “Come on,” the head floating above the desert floor said. “It’s clear —and astounding! You have to see it.”

  Moku ambled in. Chan-ti paused at the threshold, glanced back at the Tryl. An abrupt convulsion of wind clacked the palms, broomed the red grass, and swept the Tryl away in a gust of sparks.

  Age of Knives

  For fifty generations, well over a thousand years, humans lived only as prey—not just to the zōtl but to the voracity of the land itself. The madness of Genitrix created as many monsters as people, and oftentimes the only sanctuary available lay in the sideways time of the lynks that the Tryl had left behind. The knives that this age refers to are not just blades of plasteel—though such primitive weapons were the most common arms in this time before cities, when wars between clans and tribes sometimes raged over possession of a single laserbolt pistol. Rather, the age takes its name from the Glyph Astra, The Book of Horizons, first written on Vala during this brutal period, and where it is said: “Unless one’s body has walked the Overworld, one’s mind belongs to the knives.”

  —excerpted from Wulf Bane’s The Wages of Life Is Not-Knowing

  Ras Mentis

  Gai overslept. She knew by the timer in her Form that she had been unconscious far longer than she had authorized. “Genitrix—there’s either something awry with my timer or you’re getting absent-minded.”

  Silence.

  “Genitrix?”

  Gai scanned the Form for her bond with Genitrix, to see what could possibly be so preoccupying that she continued ignoring her commander—but no sign of Genitrix appeared anywhere in the Form. Only the Form’s personal functions—life support and communications—remained active; all channels to Genitrix looked empty.

  Fear whirled in Gai, and she tried to use her viewer to capture an image of any of the fifteen Genitrix components at the cores of the planets. The viewer came up blank each time. Gai had been isolated from her chief machine intelligence.

  “Lod—can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Gai. How may I serve you?”

  “I can’t reach Genitrix. Can you?”

  After a momentary silence, Lod’s voice crackled with apprehension: “Gai—terrible news! Genitrix has been pithed.”

  Gai tightened in her Form. “Clarify.”

  “Pithed—autonomous functions resected—personal identity functions aborted. Gai, her individual will is gone. Her programs are running undirected.”

  “Is the gravity amp affected?”

  “No. That is redundant with my domain. All masses are properly aligned. No problems there. But life programs on all planets are running wild. And there is nothing we can do about it. She is not responding to any of my input. She seems not to be there at all.”

  “Can you find out what happened? Check her peripherals, her ancillary memory—”

  “There it is. Saor! He is running an alien program. It must have happened when he lynked to Genitrix-18.”

  “But you purged him.”

  “So did Genitrix. He looked clean. I am searching my peripherals now. Whatever infected her may also have been passed to me when we effectuated the purge. Ah—there it is. Smaller than I would have thought possible—a viral program triggered by neutrino flux. I probably never would have found it had it not already gone to full bloom in Genitrix. Gai, I am afraid we have lost her and Saor.”

  “No way to purge the zōtl program?”

  “It is pervasive. The whole system would have to be shut down—gravity amps and all. We could purge them then, but we would never get home.”

  “Boils! What’s Saor up to? My viewer reveals only that his plasma shape is on a Chalco world.”

  “Yes. He is assisting the zōtl with their assault on the human colonies of Elphame. He is being most destructive, using his implosive power to raze the colonies’ ramparts. He is the zōtl’s weapon now.”

  “What about you? Can you purge yourself?”

  “Already done, Gai. I am clean. Though, of course, without Genitrix or Saor, there is no way for you to be assured of that.”

  Gai shrunk around the hard thud of her heart and thought for a moment, mind pacing through all the possibilities. Then she said aloud what they both knew: “I have to trust you, Lod. Stay alert. Now that the zōtl have compromised two MIs, they’ll be working on you.”

  “Have no fear for me, Gai. I am aware of the danger and will be here when you need me.”

  Gai shut down her channel to Lod and sat silently in her Form, contemplating her predicament. She felt grateful that she had heeded the Tryl warning about Saor enough to dock her Form in their lynk-secure hangar under the surface of Know-Where-to-Go. The zōtl would not be able to get directly to her until they cracked the Tryl lynk code, and she did not think that was likely anytime soon. Meanwhile, she would continue trapped here. She dared not leave for fear of being overwhelmed by the zōtl and having her Form cut open by their proton guns. At least that would be a fast death, for once they breached the Form, she would explode into outer space.

  Apart from the danger of leaving the grotto, she could not physically depart in any case. The Form had docked with the sleepod, and only Genitrix could disengage it. And that meant that if the zōtl did crack the Tryl lynk code and get into the grotto, they could use Genitrix to open the Form—and then Gai would suffer the fate that had befallen her fellow warrior Ylan. The memory of his pain-harrowed visage swept through her like a cold wind.

  Too terrified to simply sit and wait, Gai stepped out into her plasma shape and rose to the surface of the planet. Daylight shimmered on the plushy swards where humans moored their ramstat fighters. Though over a hundred years had passed since Know-Where-to-Go left the zōtl fastnesses of Doror, many of the fighters had been reduced to shattered and scorched hulks, and half the airfield was a burned tract—evidence that the zōtl raids persisted as the planet retreated into space. Craters pocked the sylvan terrain, and the clave, where the humans had spent five hundred years building their army, had collapsed to a rambling ruin. Tryl Tower, once the largest structure in all the worlds, lay in mounds overgrown with thistle grass and lion-haired willows. The remaining skeletal stump stood girded with scaffoldings from the human camps festering among the ruins.

  Gai wandered away from the clave, toward the cratered fields. A dragonfly big as a human forearm droned by. She entered a forest of gnarly trees, where roots bulged aboveground in crisscrossing cables. Among niches of this rootweave, creatures in various stages of fetal and adult development hung. She identified a horseshape quivering in its yolk, lizardthrash shadows, skeletons and strewn bones, a human child curled up inside the bole of a tree-trunk, a boar using its tusk to break a birthsack among the roots to devour its contents.

  This chaos appalled Gai. She soared through the trees and into the sky. From there, the destructiveness of the zōtl and the profusion of Genitrix’s wild program became even more apparent. Wide swatches of land had been gored out by repeated blasts from proton cannon that the zōtl had used to assail the clave’s extensive underground network. The resultant canyons had filled with jungles of Genitrix’s roisterous vegetation. Disgust twisted in her at the thought of the aberrant lifeforms devouring each other down there, and she climbed higher, in
to purple reaches above the clouds.

  Only two options offered themselves. She could return to the Form, wait, even sleep if she had the nerve. Let the zōtl subdue their human herds and pick at the Tryl lynk code. She would use the time and the surplus power from the second stroke to send Lod’s plasma shape through the lynks in search of the O’ode. But that meant trusting this machine intelligence. Going into the Overworld herself was not an option, because her training forbade her to abandon ship. She had to stay here among the worlds, which were the parts of her ship, her sole way back. She could not risk getting lost among the infinity of lynklanes in the Overworld.

  Gai’s only other option was to keep flying. Her plasma body was strong enough to cross space to Doror, though just barely. She could leave the Form behind and wander through the worlds, helping the humans against the zōtl and recruiting them to search the timelines for the O’ode. The worst that could happen would be the destruction of her plasma body, which meant she would feel pain as the resonance broke with her real body in the Form. Eventually, she would regain consciousness in the Form and could try again.

  The second option promised the most involvement, and she needed to regain some sense of control after the shock of losing Genitrix. She flew higher, beyond billowy auroras and into the black of space. The goldwhite brilliance of Lod’s Form marked the direction to Doror. For a long time, she hurtled through space with no effort at all. Reaching ahead, she could feel the gravity net thrumming with resonance. The calm of her flight admitted her to the silence of the cold, where even the faintest energy fluctuations were apparent. Virtual particles fizzed in and out of the vacuum in paisley fumes. Biokinetic waveforms fanned the planets like auras. In each, she could feel the tiny lives, the linkages of feeding and sex in the festering gases and soil.

  Two of the tiny lives seemed familiar. Concentrating deeper, she recognized the human that Genitrix had once hung before her, the Malay, who had called her back to meet the human from the future, the pilot Ned O’Tennis. He was there, too. They had jumped centuries from the sealynk on Valdëmiraën, where she had helped them escape a cruel distort. Their presence in Chalco-Doror at this dire time offered a boon she immediately recognized.

  The red-haired human had somehow become torqued in time. A chronological inertia directed him back to his own time—a time in which, he had told her, the zōtl were being defeated. She saw how she could use him to save herself now that she was bodiless. He could enter the Overworld for her and use his future-homing to guide her decisions, guaranteeing the outcomes she needed.

  Gai singled out the planet where she sensed Ned O’Tennis and aimed herself toward him. But Know-Where-to-Go had swung farther out of the system than she had assumed, and after she had already flown many times beyond the greatest distance she had ever traveled in her plasma shape, the gel body broke up.

  With wincing pain, Gai heaved back into her Form, exhausted. Her failure spurred her to a greater effort on her second attempt, but that too failed. On her third try, she reached Doror, straining with all her will to hold her plasma shape intact. She splashed into the ion sea in the upper atmosphere of Ras Mentis and bathed in the energy there. Yet, even with that bolster, her gel body, wearied from the strenuous crossing, began dissolving.

  Gai settled to the planet’s surface, where the electric wind did not buffet. A broken terrain of sandstone arches and windworn plateaus stretched to the horizon, bedeviled with dust storms and silent jags of heat lightning. Gai flitted among scarps and grabens, drunk with fatigue, brinking on collapse. She barely had enough consciousness to recognize that she had to find an anchor for her plasma body, a gentle electric field where she could rest without falling apart, an iron bed among the shimmering rocks, or a lifeform.

  A scream ripped the sky. A needlecraft and a ramstat flyer shot overhead, flashing laserbolts at each other. How crude the flyer looked beside the slender zōtl craft. Gai remembered the strohlkraft that she had recovered from the sea with her own Form for Ned O’Tennis, and how ferocious that vessel had seemed. By comparison, the ramstat flyer was a box kite. With its hull scorched, the small ship spurted fire from its tail and coiled a black contrail through the cloudless blue.

  The flyer jerked abruptly upward, and the needlecraft slid underneath it. As the zōtl ship flew past, the flyer pummeled it with laserfire. With a roar that clipped the tops off the nearest sandstone pillars, the needlecraft burst apart and scattered in flaming flechettes across the desert. Overhead, the flyer curled about for a crash landing. It disappeared among coppery green buttes, and a fireball bloomed above the rocks.

  Gai steered her wobbly flight toward the crashed flyer and eventually got there. The ship, a flame-cored husk, had ejected the pilot, and he lay unconscious in his flight-seat on the desert floor. The pink fabric of his parachute ruffled in the dry wind.

  Settling over the helmeted and masked body, Gai sensed that he lived. The quiet current of his nervenet steadied her erratic plasma body, and in moments she had stabilized. She shared her strength with the unconscious pilot. Soon he woke and unstrapped. He removed his helmet and revealed a youthful, dark-skinned face and tightly kinked hair shaved to a crest. He did not sense her consciously, though his body felt stronger for her enveloping presence. He took that for granted and rummaged briefly through the wreck of his ship before returning to his ejection seat and using the radio there to contact his comrades.

  While the pilot waited to be rescued in the shade of an outcropping, Gai looked around. Like Know-Where-to-Go, Ras Mentis was a victim of Genitrix’s rogue creations—though only a few of them could survive the severity of the desert. Scorpion swarms clattered across flaking shale, armor-plated ferrets scooted between burrow holes, and in caves and alcoves of the rock formations, clouds of flies and spurts of gila-skinned rats thrived on embryos and fetuses Genetrix produced from her underground matrix.

  Among the thistly plants and multi-hued cacti that Genitrix had sprouted, Gai was attracted to a white cactus with red thorns. It had a feel, to her plasma body, that rhymed in texture with the human mind she had helped restore. Without her Form to scan it, she could not be sure that the rhyme resulted from a stoichiometric similarity between molecules in the plant and in the human’s brain. She had a hunch that those molecules would enhance the human’s neural performance, and she returned to the pilot with the intent of having him eat it.

  Overshadowing the man proved easier than she had guessed. Though she had never done it before, she found that she comfortably adjusted to the creature’s interiority. She stood the pilot on his feet, and he stretched, believing he had risen to limber himself. He strolled along the skirt of shadow from the rockwall and paused before a red-thorned white cactus. Before he realized what he was doing, he kicked the cactus, splitting it open and revealing its icy green interior.

  Eat it, Gai commanded.

  The pilot knelt, picked up a wedge of the pale green fruit, and put it in his mouth. Gai tasted its mentholated brightness and felt its molecular congruity swiftly admit it to the brain. Even as his hand came away from his mouth, the pilot experienced his mind melling with the landscape. Prismatic rings of light circled the center of his focus—and through that bright tunnel, he felt the heat simmering off the rocks. When he spied a scorpion scuttling over the sand, he received the ripple of its eight legs in his own muscles, the narrowed sight, and the taste of sand bugs in the air, urging him on.

  The cactus had endowed the pilot with a projective power similar to—though many orders of magnitude weaker than—Gai’s ability to step out of her Form and cast a plasma shape with her mind. A wondering sense of power displaced his fear as he realized what was happening to him. He sat in the shadows experimenting with his new ability. When he gazed into the sky, he zoomed out of his body. Clouds unraveled, blue broke into black and a splatter of stars. He nearly blacked out and snapped awake back on the desert floor.

  With eyes closed to keep from flying outside himself, the pilot sensed Gai. He had n
o idea who she was—but he knew she was vastly more sentient than he, and overshadowing him. She pulled away as he began blending into her thoughts. She wanted to know nothing about him, about any of his pitiful fellow creatures, fearing the remorse she had suffered with the Tryl. But the power of his cactus-enhanced brain pressed into her more strongly than she could push back in her weakened state. She merged with the consciousness of the pilot.

  At once Gai sensed minds she recognized, the minds that had drawn her to this planet. The pilot’s body acted as a radio tuned to the human frequency. Through him, she touched all the human minds in the biosphere, seething like bees. Out of that noisy cloud, two motes gleamed with familiarity. She focused on them and recognized Ned O’Tennis and his Malay companion sitting in a pool at the sandy edge of an oasis, where the white cactus grew in clusters.

  As Gai concentrated, their memories became hers. She watched them fly through the sealynk on Valdëmiraën three hundred years earlier, after she had saved them from Squat. The Malay, Pahang, hung from the sling harness like a tree-dweller, legs curled up and arms dangling, while gawking through the visor as starry space burst around them.

  Ned O’Tennis, surprised to find himself off-planet, had expected the undersea lynk to carry them to another submarine location further along the timeline. He had also expected the ramstat cells to die out, drained by the lynk passage. They did, though not entirely. The console lights dimmed as power dipped below propulsion requirements. The scope stayed on, and with it Ned fixed their location within the gravity funnel of Ras Mentis. Above them, near the top of the well, he spied the skylynk they had come through, invisible to human eyes but represented on the rear-tracking screen as a hot blue diminishing zero. The shipboard computer correlated planetary positions and calendars and displayed the apparent date: 1347 PreDoror—the first years in the Age of Knives.