When they finished, Gorlik remained motionless, his squat, bigboned shape humming internally with amazement and unexpected anger. An ugly man, wide as he was tall, pikejawed and slantbrowed, with an undignified hairline a thumb’s width above bristly black eyebrows, he crossed his impious eyes, green veins bulging at the bole of his neck, and howled the shock of a man whose desperate ignorance had suddenly relented: “Beppu!”
Five men had to restrain Gorlik from returning at once to the Overworld to find the woman he screamed that he loved, while blowing snot and spitting bile. “Calm down, you garbled imitation of a Foke!” Nappy Groff shouted at the thrashing man. When Gorlik, wrung face glossy with spit and mucus, could stand unrestrained, Groff said, “You utter fool—you sojourned to forget her.”
“I did forget her,” Gorlik grumbled, staring hard at the puddle of saliva on the floor. “I forgot her. But I did not hope never to see her again.” In truth, he had assumed she would stay with the Foke and tend the children and elders, and he had taken a vow, secret even from himself until now, never to marry another but to watch and protect her from afar. “I did not think she would leave us.”
“She is gone,” Nappy asserted, bitterly. “And no one among the careful Foke will risk their fragile lives in the Overworld to help me find her.” Face lit like a lantern, he stared deep into Gorlik’s tiny, black, and wrinkled eyes. “You are the best tracker among us, Bram Gorlik. Once you loved my daughter. Will you leave her now to the voors and the zōtl?”
Gorlik would have gone into Saor’s Forest then and there, but Nappy Groff convinced him to wait until he had gathered his sojourner’s kit and fresh clothes. Then, hesitating not even for a meal in the mead grotto, which amazed all the Foke more than his seizure of love for Beppu, Gorlik led Groff into the forest.
Fortunately for the older man, Gorlik, wearied from his long travels, set a glum pace and Groff was just able to match it. Like a rooting pig, the square man hurried among forest coves, studying chipped bark and leaf litter. Stopping only to scrounge a meal from a hive or a berry patch, the two Foke scurried relentlessly deeper into the forest. Gorlik read Chan-ti’s sign readily in the chaos of torn leaf-patterns and knotted grass. He could see from the design of her sign where she had exited the forest, and they avoided Spooner’s detour and the Beppunauts’ long search for the correct lynk to Ned. After only a few wearying days, they reached the Ras Mentis lynklanes.
Gorlik would go no farther. “Look at the grief of that sign.”
Nappy read circuit boards and electron-tunneling arrays far better than the organic profusion of lynklane sign, though in the last few days he had learned to read Chan-ti’s timeline more easily than his own. He descried it now in a tangle of grass, but he had trouble separating the thief’s and the Beast’s from the welter of other destinies around Chan-ti.
“Here, Groff! Here! Don’t you see it?” With a black-nailed finger, Gorlik traced in a grass nest the whirlpool coil of Chan-ti’s timeline. At the center flourished a confusion of knots. Gorlik’s stubbed finger blocked the minute black trace, the shadowy grass vein that he could see slamming head-on into Beppu’s timeline. “Something evil will take her.”
“What do you mean, Gorlik?” Nappy looked up from where he had gotten on his hands and knees to press a bulging eye to the detail that Gorlik had read standing.
“I mean, Beppu’s line stops.”
He shrunk where he sat. “She’s dead.”
“No. It becomes another line, an evil line.”
“Evil? What’s evil about it?” Nappy popped to his feet. “Stop staring like that, Gorlik, and tell me what you see.”
“The Aesirai is being stalked,” Gorlik said softly, reading the sign aloud as he traced it with his vision. “Something large and inhuman stalks him. It finds Beppu. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Nappy’s eyes shrilled, but he kept his voice steady. “Where is she?”
“In Ras Mentis.”
“Where in Ras Mentis? What lynk? Think clearly now, man.”
Gorlik’s stare hardened. “I am clear. And what I see is not good. We should turn back.”
“You who threw a tantrum of love for my daughter after a grief sojourn to forget her—you want to turn back?”
“Mugna has sent its own for her,” Gorlik replied with a hook of futility in his voice. “She belongs to the Face of Night now.”
“Fock the Face of Night!” Nappy yelled, and monkeys screeched and something winged lifted heavily above the canopy. “You save her from this evil, Bram Gorlik, and I will give her to you.”
“She will not have me,” Gorlik knew, and his broad nostrils winged with remembered hurt. “Let the Face of Night have her. We will go back.”
“I will not.” Nappy clenched his body in a stance rigid with determination. “Chan-ti Beppu is all that’s left me of family. I let her go to find a mate. I will not let her go to die. You will help me find her or the Foke will know you are a coward.”
Gorlik gnawed his lip. “I will take you to the lynk, brave Nappy. But I cannot face this thing.”
“This thing! This thing! What is this dreadful thing you see?”
Gorlik’s big face shivered. “It comes from Mugna. It sits in the temple. And it waits. Like death.”
Ordo Vala
An indomitable fatigue descended on Gai. Her plasma shape, mortally depleted from the long time spent in Lod’s Form, wavered, and not even the best of the human scientists could keep the glow in the vacuum cylinder from dimming out. After her plasma body died, she woke in her Form in the deepest grotto of Know-Where-to-Go, renewed, flushed with power from her bio-support system. A chronoptic display showed that three days had passed since she had last left her Form—her plasma body had lived 763 years in Chalco-Doror.
She hung heavier on her bones, weighted with memories of shapeshifting among humans. She had done well simply to survive—a survival that had used up nearly half her permitted time in outer space, and she had yet to find the O’ode. Without Ned O’Tennis to lead her to his future, where the zōtl were defeated, she could not be certain of success. A querulous discomfort with her mission soured her relief to be back in her own Form. Was there not some more direct way to strike at the zōtl than to build these elaborate worlds and stock them with sentient creatures she could not help but care for?
The ancillary memory in her Form began to formulate an answer, and she angrily shut it off. She could not bear to hear again how outer space unfurled into a manifold of timelines, the zōtl nest-worlds hidden among them. Grueling frustration gnashed through her, and she whirled the arms of her Form, rocking it vehemently, hoping to jar it loose from the sleepod.
Warning lights winced on and a shrill alarm. She stopped herself and stood seething in her locked-up Form. She refused to step back into her plasma shape and return to the slow flow of time where she had been a slave to following Ned O’Tennis’ timeshadow among those slovenly worlds. She had had enough of being a fugitive, of watching humans and zōtl kill each other, and especially of occupying human bodies and sharing their harsh and violent lives. She determined to take a day off and wait for the third stroke. Perhaps by then, with the additional power, she and Lod could find some way to free her Form—or, at least, find a way among the lynklanes to Rataros and the O’ode.
While she waited, she dozed and used Lod to monitor the war of humans and zōtl. Now that she intimately knew the fifteen planets and their lifeforms, the brief memory-clips that Lod offered wove a poignant narrative. She witnessed human shanty settlements burning, the Dreux lynk strewn with corpses slain by nerve gas, the t-field monitor on Vala gone entirely and a crater of radioactive mist in its place. The zōtl no longer hunted humans—they had decided to exterminate them.
Gai stopped dozing and waited anxiously for Lod’s terse reports. Each new clip revealed the same ruthless pattern—neurotoxins in the lynks, fusion bomb and particle beam massacres of the large human colonies, and a phage assault on Ras Mentis with virus
es designed to infect and kill humans and klivoth kakta. Clearly, the zōtl had determined to break all resistance among their prey. Resistance: a human arrogance that had been mounting since Know-Where-to-Go swept through the worlds seeding armies. The spider people dealt efficiently, as well, with human camps too small to merit fusion blasts: They pummeled the camps from a distance with proton cannon fire, then dropped needlecraft on strafing runs that picked out survivors among the still-fuming craters. The zōtl spared no one.
Gai requested reports on Reena Patai, but Lod, still busy rectifying orbit deviances that had developed during his time in the Overworld, had only rare opportunities to seek her out. Still, Gai watched from afar as Reena struggled to unify the clans. No longer the limpid-eyed young woman who had arrived on Dreux from Earth, Reena had transformed to a wise elder. Though the being who had brought her here had adjusted her DNA to keep her ageless, the woman had weathered from cosmic radiation. Her wrinkled skin glowed soft sepia, and the hay-nest of her hair had faded to white. She still wore the gray burnoose with an embroidered open hand over her heart, as she had in the kakta clan that had adopted her, but that once humble garment was now a revered emblem of the Strong Mother. The knowledge loaded into her brain by Lod had fused with a compassion rare in this species. Perhaps that was the memory of Insideout, of touching the infinite, or of the madness that had once isolated her from everyone. Wherever that informed compassion had come from, it was outbound, carrying Reena with it, using her to unite the clans, tribes, and wanderers into a society that could flourish against the predation of the zōtl and the disorder of Genitrix.
The great diversity of histories and cultural preferences among the population made full integration and a united resistance against these threats impossible. Reena had finally accepted this after the zōtl destroyed the settlement around the Dreux lynk and forced her and the other survivors to flee in the remaining ramstat flyers to Vala.
The humans would not be led, except in small clan groupings, each group with its own provincial leader. On Vala, Reena had decided to found her own group, adhering to the principles necessary for survival—including exploration of the Overworld, which many of the other more wary leaders could not accept.
Reena believed that the great diversity of human cultures would come together if unified by a metaculture of practical adaptation—and to that she devoted herself. Like-minded people gathered around her on Vala and created a clan dedicated to compiling the folklore and useful wisdom of all the settlements, on all the planets, applying the klivoth kakta to pierce cultural barriers. To reach every world, her kakta clan ignored the risks of the Overworld and used lynks to travel among planets, garnering the data they needed. They called themselves the Ordo Vala—though, shortly after their founding, they retreated from Vala under a furious zōtl offensive.
The Ordo Vala sent a decoy armada of ramstat flyers to Q’re, hotly pursued by needlecraft, while the nucleus of the clan used lynklanes to wander through Chalco-Doror, throwing the zōtl off their trail, before finally settling on Know-Where-to-Go. The exodus virtually wiped out the clan—but those few who survived had compiled an enormous amount of information, not only about diverse human settlements but also mapping the internal coordinates of the lynk system. These lynk-maps became the core of the metaculture that Reena had envisioned. She put the maps in the center of the survival manual that her clan had collated during its bloody wanderings, printed copies in the predominant language of each major settlement, and sent out the Ordo Vala to distribute them.
Among the worlds, the Ordo Vala Utility Manual, OVUM, became known as the Glyph Astra because of its detailed ephemeris, useful to pilots and farmers of every settlement. The manual, enthusiastically welcomed by even the most divergent clans, provided information as a weapon against the zōtl, describing proven battle strategies as well as escape patterns among the lynks. Soon, the Glyph Astra became so widely relied upon that it had to be continually updated to stay abreast of territorial changes among the worlds and lynks of the zōtl empire. Perennial deliveries of the manual across Chalco-Doror developed the Ordo Vala into expert lynk wanderers, the most trusted of guides through the Overworld, and, because of this, brokers of power among the clans.
Gai’s interest in humans intensified as she recognized the usefulness of the Ordo Vala for her needs. She stepped into her plasma shape and rose to the surface of Know-Where-to-Go. The zōtl had been so preoccupied with regaining control of Doror that they had launched few raids on this planet as it swung through its dark trajectory outside the system. The formerly devastated landscape had grown over in the intervening centuries. Blast craters had eroded to kettle-basins of night-blooming vegetation, or ponds reflecting galactic light and the bright discs of companion planets.
Towerbottom Library rose above this hummocky nocturnal terrain, a crypt stained black by time. Lux-tubes outlined paths webbing the communities around the Library, and hamlets glimmered like spilled jewels among the dark hills. Those scattered lights and the occasional flitting spark of a ramstat flyer displayed the only artificial illumination in the darkness. Lod shone no brighter than a star, and above the tenebrous horizon a comet left an icy green trail.
Gai found Reena in the print shop of the Library, supervising the latest edition of the Glyph Astra. She looked old now, her face heavily lined and mottled, nearly three centuries old.
Using her memory of life in human form, Gai appeared in the print shop as a mature, dark-haired female. Reena recognized her at once by the inhuman brilliance of her eyes and edges blurring into pinpricks of hot light.
“Have you come to help us collate and label?” Reena asked, stepping away from the paste-up boards. “I haven’t seen you since the first days of my new life here. I must say, you’re looking much better.”
“The zōtl are still trying to pick the lynklock that leads to my Form. I’m okay until then. But I’m getting nervous as time goes by.”
“I know. I have little time left myself and so very much to do.”
“I must talk with you,” Gai said, glancing around at the gathering crowd of gawking humans. “Alone.”
Reena thought that over and nodded. “Meet me in the Library’s top gallery. I’ll have it cleared.”
Gai vanished in a dazzle of shrinking sparks.
“Get everybody out of the sky gallery,” she commanded the brawny, bristle-bearded chief groomed to take her place when she died. “And put all sensors there on record. Gai is going to strike some kind of deal or she wouldn’t be here mixing with us beasties. So let’s try to get a record of what happens, something we can share with the people.”
The sky gallery had once been a lower storey of Tryl Tower, and the jaggedly ripped girders were still evident, though a glass geodesic domed the circle of broken wall. The humans had no way of cutting the girders, whose metal tested harder than plasteel. Gai blamed herself for the incomplete preservation of Tryl knowledge. All Tryl data had been stored in Genitrix. Because Gai had been more attentive to her deathtrap than to her bait during the Tryl Age, she had not truly known the Tryl— not in the intimate way she had come to know humans. So much lost…
“Because so much is given,” Reena responded, stepping from the lift shaft. “Our brains are simply blind to most of the universe, the better to focus on what we need to survive. Survival defines us. Not compassion or love. At least, not historically. One must choose to love. Like the Tryl.”
“You heard my thought.”
“Anyone could. Your energy is so much vaster than ours, your thoughts boom in us. I prefer the voice you use with your ghosts.”
Gai shaped herself again as a dark-haired woman, a woman she had known on Ylem, who had forgone children of her own to tend her clan’s orphans—before the zōtl abducted her. “I will speak to you as a human, from what I have learned of the human heart, from having lived and suffered with you.”
“If you wish.” Reena sat down in one of the flexforms, a mushroom-shaped chair that molded to h
er narrow body. “I know you’re not human. I know all about you, remember? Lod imprinted it here.” She pressed a finger to her temple. “You haven’t forgotten what you said to me on Dreux about friendship, have you?”
“You said life was a dream and we are dreaming each other. Well then, I will be frank with you, Reena Patai. I must find the O’ode—soon.”
“Your survival demands it—yet, you want us to do the dangerous lynk-wandering for you. That’s why you are telling me this, isn’t it?”
“Yes. If my plasma shape is lost in the Overworld, I do not know that I—my consciousness—can return to my Form, even if I die.”
“If your plasma shape is destroyed in a parallel universe, perhaps your Form here will generate a new consciousness and you will return as you did when you died on Dreux.”
“And maybe not. I dare not take that chance. The range is counting on me.”
“Yes—for their survival.” Reena’s wizened eyes glittered with knowing behind cobwebs of white hair. “Survival defines us, doesn’t it?”
Gai stepped closer and knelt before Reena. “I take your point to be—all of us want to survive, Rimstalkers and humans alike.”
“You take my point justly, my friend. If my people risk their lives for Rimstalkers, what will you do for us?”
“What can I do? This is outer space. I don’t live here. Chalco-Doror is my ship, and I need it to take me home.”
“Only light is forever. And when you leave, we will all become light and know its mysteries. But that is at least four thousand human years from now. What will you do for our survival during those years if we search for what you need?”
Gai looked baffled. “What can I do for your people that I haven’t done? I found the klivoth kakta for you. I’ve shared what I remember of Tryl tech. I have even worn your flesh and lived among you.”
“Because you had to—and we accepted you. Though, by your own admission, you are using us. We need practical help, Gai, not just sympathy.”
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