The Last Legends of Earth

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The Last Legends of Earth Page 20

by A. A. Attanasio


  “You’re my father,” she said in a hush.

  “Yes.” He nodded matter-of-factly. “I struggled, and the zōtl dropped me. I fled, ran wildly, spraying blood. As chance would have it, I stumbled through a lynk. It was seventeen years before I found my way back.”

  “You are my father.” Chan-ti felt breathless, numb at the core of her chest. “Why didn’t you tell me in the Eyelands?”

  “I intended to, but I wanted to see you as you were among the Foke. I wanted to know you first. Then, Ned arrived. And the Aesirai’s war. This is the first quiet time that seemed right to me since we entered the Overworld. I’ve had to make my own peace with your mother’s ghost first. Have I shocked you?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure what I feel.”

  “Not much, I’d think. I’m still little more than a stranger, with little to distinguish me from the genetic ferment throughout Chalco-Doror.”

  “Who was my mother?”

  “A woman from Earth. A tall, elegant woman. She had grand stories to tell of the first world. She was from a land named Burma in an age she called the twenty-first century. She had been some kind of agricultural planner and was always marveling at the great and strange profusion of plants in our worlds. In this life, she had been a vassal in an Aesirai household. I met her while fleecing her master’s house.”

  Chan-ti’s face looked glazed. “I never imagined it like this.”

  “I’m sorry. This is my last best chance to tell you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His smile appeared shy or sly or both. “After I lost your mother, I devoted myself to learning about the Overworld, in every way I could, because I knew you were somewhere in here and I wanted to find you. Very few people in the cities know anything about the Overworld. I wound up lynk-wandering, supporting myself with my craft, and finding out about the Overworld firsthand. I befriended voors. For a while I even joined the Ordo Vala and learned about ku, the emptiness that carries our bodies of light. But they found out about my past, and I had to flee. One has to travel pretty deep into the Overworld to get away from the Ordo Vala. I’m surprised we haven’t met any of those zealots out here ourselves.” He cut another wedge of kakta. “The voors taught me about the glamour. That’s what they call it.”

  “You really wandered with voors? I thought they tranced people and used them in grotesque ways for their rites.”

  “Sometimes. The turtlehead voors are the worst. They’re malevolent as distorts. Bestial. But voors in human bodies are not unlike us, only haunted by their ancestral memories. They’re homesick for their bodies of light.” He handed her the kakta. “Take it.”

  “No. Certainly not now, after all this.”

  “Because of all this.” He insisted until she took the wedge. “Without glamour, you wander the Overworld blind. Eat it and take a look where you are. When you see, you’ll understand why this was my last best chance to tell you who I am.”

  “Look, Spooner—” His name caught. “Look, just tell me.”

  He shrugged his eyebrows. “Fine. I will, then. Listen to Moku.”

  The Beast’s wavery music, childlike in its simplicity, sounded lovely.

  “That is the song he was playing when you and Ned were together. Ned’s nearby. The Beast senses him. You would, too, if you ate the kakta.”

  She shook her head. The memory of the kakta’s intensity mixed poorly with the shock of learning that Spooner was her father. She could not bear to face him in the grip of that boundless drug, no separation between them at all— not yet, not until she had fit herself more securely into this new truth.

  She looked to the gray giant sitting among the flowers under the vertical face of the great hanging vines. “How does Moku know?”

  “I can’t say. He’s a strange one. But I recognized his music right away. It’s the same music the voors play. They explained once to me that all music is a special kind of noise. They called it fractal, not quite whole. They said their music mimed the fractal structure of the Overworld, where every small piece mirrors the shape of a larger piece. They use it as a map. I think Moku plays that kind of music.”

  Chan-ti handed back the wedge of kakta. “I can’t. Not now. I have to feel this one through.” She stood up and traipsed across the path to a blue grove of tangled trees, where she knelt and watched coins of light flickering in a stream.

  Spooner Yegg sighed and cleaned his knife in the grass. He was glad he had waited to tell her; he only wished he could have waited longer. He had been enjoying watching her without her knowing who he really was. She reminded him, more than he had expected, of her mother; not so much in her looks, though she was tall and almond-eyed, but in her small gestures, her way of hooking her hair with her thumb, of tilting her head to the side when she laughed. Yet, she obviously was Foke. She built and handled fire with ease, drank water from her hands, knew the succulent plants and ate them with gusto. He was surprised and somewhat relieved that she could not read lynklane sign. She turned out to be not much of a tracker and relied too heavily on her finder. Which was good—or else she would see the lynklane sign that was all around them now, the striations of windblown sand beneath low-lying leafblades, the glisteny snailpaths along the riprap of stones, all so much clearer in the spectral light of kakta.

  All the beings that entered the Overworld could find their own timelines impressed in the landscape, if they knew how to look. The voors had taught him. In the Overworld, random patterns—such as moss patches, dewdrop displays, cracks in a rock—reflected the timelines of all the objects in the timebound worlds of Chalco-Doror. Chaos in the Overworld opened a window into the causal destinies of everything and everybody. Among the dead and scattered leaves blowing across the sandy trail, he recognized his daughter’s lifeline and Moku’s curling about his. And he had seen before and saw again now that her timeline continued and his and Moku’s ended.

  Death approached like young rain for Spooner, soothing, promising, beautiful in its own way. He was not afraid to die. The ailments of his age almost made the end seem a relief: His prostate pressured him continually to urinate and then permitted only drops; the scars of the twenty-year-old wounds from the blast that had killed his wife nagged him with dull throbs and unexpected needlings; and, worse of all, his joints ached so that his spry, surreptitious craft became virtually impossible for him to ply now. He’d be happy to shuck this form—and soon, too, if the sign of his timeline were to be trusted, which it was, for it simply reflected what is.

  At least the Tryl had kept their promise. For years, he had been haunted by the memory of his wife’s death and their child left with strangers in the Overworld. For years, he had searched for her. Not until he befriended the voors did he find his chance. They used their trances and voorish talismans to contact the ghosts of lizard angels. The Tryl agreed to help—but only on the condition that Spooner obey all their signs in the Overworld. He was old, and they offered his only chance to find his daughter. He agreed, and through the voors’ trances he learned of the Eyelands and how to reach them. Since then, he had simply followed his instincts. Only recently had the Tryl appeared at the periphery of his glamorous sight. They had come to collect their promise.

  Spooner had no idea what the lizard angels wanted with his daughter. He cared but saw by the brevity of his own timeline patterned in the landscape all around him that his caring did not matter. He would be dead soon. Only one more matter needed to be clarified with his girl. He waited awhile for her to get used to the idea of who he was; then, he ambled over to where she sat and eased his bruised bones beside her.

  “Still not sure what you’re feeling?” he asked.

  “No.” She passed him a soft smile and put her hand on his. “Thank you for coming back for me. I always wondered who you were. I never thought I’d really find out.”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “With a father brave enough to walk the Overworld to find me? How could I be disappointed?” She hugged him.

&nb
sp; The bone-aches binding Spooner in time eased a little with the joy he felt at that moment. “There is a thing I must ask you,” he said as they unclasped. “Do you know about the bodies of light?”

  “Only what the Foke taught me—that all life is an expression of light and that consciousness is a special form of light.”

  “Yes. Consciousness is a lightform like no other. When we die, our light continues in its own reality, outside the limits of time. I don’t understand how. Your mother did, though. When her body was re-created, she told me everything. I’ve forgotten most of it. But I remember, she tried to teach me. I was a miserable student. It was hard enough for me to grasp the fact that these worlds were made by inhuman powers for an inhuman purpose. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand this has always been so, even in her time. Creation is impersonal. We must make the distinctions and choose our values. No one is watching. After your mother died, I was alone with my grief. It became important for me to remember that only her body had died—as it had before on Earth. Her consciousness lives as light—somewhere.”

  “Right here, Father,” Chan-ti said with conviction. “The bodies of light are all around us. Nappy’s always talking about that. He became intent on that knowledge, too, when his Velma died.”

  “Yes, it takes absence to fill in our understanding. When you find your Ned, you must tell him about the bodies of light.” He held up the wedge of kakta he had cut earlier. “And if you’re going to find him, you’d best use this.”

  Chan-ti bit into the kakta and received its bright juice with a wince. The rainbow ring opened before her, and the surface of everything became flame-lit. Star-color shadows with vaguely human shapes stood on the sand path.

  “They’ve been following us since Ras Mentis,” Spooner said.

  The Tryl. Chan-ti could just distinguish their reptilian features in hazy outlines. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “No reason until they stopped and Moku started playing that voorish tune.”

  Moku’s music oxidized in the air before her, smoldering into fire’s breath, shifting transparencies, spindrift shadows. The Tryl ghosts drifted toward the visible music. They pointed to an eddy of energy in the air, a whirlpool diapason. Then they pointed in unison down a sandy path that curled obscurely among thin, felted trees.

  The music stopped—and the Tryl vanished. In the rainbow ring, vegetation buzzed under Lod’s sliding light, small creatures lustered in their willfulness, packing her body with their intense reality. She narrowed her gaze and diminished the telempathy enough to see things from inside herself again. Spooner had left her side. He and Moku had picked up their packs and started down the path. She followed and took out her finder. Its microlights strobed in a circle.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “You saw the lizard angels,” Spooner answered. “Without them, we would have missed this slender path.”

  They hiked a long while, past disconsolate dunes of charred briar and along the green sand shores of a fathomless lake with water clear as air. Along the way, Chan-ti asked Spooner why he had become a thief.

  “I told you already: for a laugh. My father was an actuarial officer in an insurance company—very serious man. Our blood needed a laugh after that, so I followed my laughter—good times, easy pickings—and that led me to my craft. No more to it than that, kid.”

  At one point, predatory shadows flitted among the briar tangles, and roars pummeled them. When Chan-ti turned her kakta sight on them, she felt turbid hunger and an erotic eagerness to rip flesh. Moku bellowed back. But the roaring mounted, until Spooner fired several rounds at the slinky silhouettes. The shadows dispersed, and the wanderers hurried along.

  As Lod’s rhomb settled into the palm crowns, the Beppunauts came to a gravel pit under the silver trajectory of a lynk. In the bottom of the pit, at the lynk’s threshold, a fluted column lay among busted statuary. “It’s the same pale gray diorite we saw on Ras Mentis,” Spooner noted.

  “The Tryl temple,” Chan-ti acknowledged in a small breath.

  “We never left there,” Spooner understood. “The whirlpool path the Tryl showed us—that’s our lynklane. This is the only way out—unless you want to go back and face those distorts at night.”

  The finder pointed into the lynk. “Ned’s in there.” Chan-ti started down the slope, and Spooner stopped her with a warning touch.

  “The lizard angels are far from their time,” he said, while scanning among the rainbow curves of his telempathy for threats. “Why would they be here with us?”

  “This is their temple. We entered it during the Tryl Age. Perhaps they escort anyone intrepid enough to visit them in their time.”

  “Or maybe they are here to witness. Perhaps we have found our way to them.”

  “I’ll go through the lynk first this time.”

  “No. This time, we go together.” Spooner took Chan-ti’s hand. She tucked away her finder and with her free hand clutched Moku’s claw. They skidded down the gravel declivity, past the misery of shattered temple stones, and strode together through the Tryl lynk.

  *

  On a raffish island of dune thistle and thorny palms in the monsoon latitudes of Ioli, a strohlkraft glided out of a seacave and splashed across the shallows of a green lagoon. It came to a stop with a soft lurch. Inside the flightpod, Ned O’Tennis used the ship’s dwindling energy to read the planetary positions. And though Lod’s glaring disc rode high among long-legged clouds, the tracery of planetoids above the ocean horizon remained visible. After comparing the planetesimal positions with a calendar, the visor displayed in blue numerics: 731 PD.

  “We jumped six hundred years on that one.” Ned pointed to the flight deck monitor, where he raised the graph comparing the strohlkraft’s three timejumps. “I don’t see any scalar relationships ...”

  His voice trailed off as the graph broke into static. The snowy motes congealed into the outline of a human face, a curly-haired, seraphic face that resembled the fallen statue they had seen in the ruins on Ras Mentis. Pahang was certain of it. “Temple countenance!” he shouted and swiveled away in his sling.

  “I am the Carrier of Peace,” a static-broken voice said. “I am come to tell you—” The image bloated. “I am come—” The screen blanked out.

  Pahang screamed. Standing at the hatch beside him, an arm’s reach away, a wraith vapored. The bleached features of the Carrier of Peace shadowed the ghost’s head. “Come to the lynk— Come speak with Joao.”

  The ghost bled away, its voice distending to a moan.

  Ned unslung from his harness and snatched a laserbolt pistol. Through the blackglass bubble at the back of the flightpod, he could see the seacave from where they had glided. A blurred cloudshape waved to him from the dark mouth. “I’m going out,” Ned told the Malay. “That may be Gai or one of her messengers.”

  “Better you stay, Hawk.” Pahang put on his blackgloss helmet. “Maybe this is some distort trick. Stay.”

  “No.” Ned holstered the pistol in the flightsuit’s breast sheath. “That’s the lynk we came through. It belongs to the Rimstalker. I’d better go see what it is.”

  “It is a ghost.” Pahang gave an astounded moan. “He cannot come all the way.”

  Ned lifted the starboard wing hatch, admitting a honey breeze, and warned, “Don’t touch anything.” He strode purposely across the firm sand at the sea’s margin until he was close enough to call, “Gai?”

  The shade beckoned him nearer. He unsheathed his pistol and climbed the sand scarp to the lip of the cave. As he approached, the ghost condensed to a pastel image of a black-tressed, sloe-eyed youth. “I salute your courage in coming, Ned O’Tennis,” he greeted in a voice fleecy with small echoes. “I am the Carrier of Peace, Joao. I have employed all my wiles and intent to intersect with your timeline. I cannot speak long. Listen well. Chan-ti Beppu roams the Overworld searching for you. The sender chip she gave you guides her.”

  Ned jolted at the sound of Chan-ti�
�s name. She had been living beneath the most precious stone of his heart since he had left her. Under Squat’s tyranny, she had been his undefiled life, his secret verge away from the slime and the remorseless exhaustion. Since escaping, he had not dared hope to hold her again. Far easier to dream of saving N’ym, huge in its gold-domed dignity, than of finding his way back to her slight body. Now hearing that she was coming for him, he stood stunned.

  “To find her,” Joao said, “you must enter the Tryl lynk on the island’s south shore. Go there now, before Gai comes for you.”

  “I can’t do that. I promised the Rimstalker I would enter only her lynks.”

  Joao’s vaporous face darkened. “You must get away from Gai. She is using you to throw off her bondage. But the freedom she gains constrains you, and dangerously. If you stay with her, you will never see Chan-ti Beppu again.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Joao, last of the Tryl disciples. I was human once. I am now a body of light, who can meet you only here in the magravity field of Gai’s lynk, only now, this once among the boiling vectors of time.”

  “How do I know you’re not a distort?”

  “Believe what you will.” Joao faded in and out. “We are each of us caged in our freedom. Either you stay and serve the Rimstalker or you go and serve a higher being.”

  “What being is that?”

  “Love. You forgot how to love when your mother died in spite of your prayers. The emptiness that opened in you after that would have been more than large enough to hold your whole life. But then you met Chan-ti—and in days, the years of emptiness filled with heavy evidences of something more, something creative in you that had been missing, something that could make: Make use. Make time. Make believe.”

  Ned flustered. “You are a distort.” He backed away.

  “I know about you, about everything that has happened in time, for it is all here in the fields of light. Everyone who has lived is here. But we are whole, all of us that have become light. I cannot stay apart much longer.”

  “Why do you tell me this?”

 

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