The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Can we take one of their flightsleds?” Gorlik asked.

  “No. The field is too well guarded. Even if we succeed, we would be seen and followed. The only way to Beppu now is down the Dragon’s Shank.”

  Gorlik swallowed hard to clear the knot that suddenly choked him. Foke lore knew well the horrors of the Dragon’s Shank—the flesh-eating mists, the tentacled trees, the razorjaws—“I will lead.”

  *

  Through deep forests, Chan-ti Beppu’s flightsled shot along avenues of gray, furry trees, navigating with its own adroit wisdom. It burst into the clearing of a rockslide scar and then swung along a torrent bed down the slopes of the Dragon’s Shank. Suddenly, a labyrinth of ravines blurred beneath. The flightsled dropped into the maze of valleys and cliffs, slowed over the slanting landscape, and jolted to a stop in a dell of ominously skinny and tangled trees. Blurred stars blazed fiercely among eely branches, revealing, through skeletal scrub, a land of chasms and gorges smoking like cauldrons.

  Chan-ti got out, and the sled careened away, slanting among the trees with ramstatic silence, its wash blowing back the smell of woodsmoke. She followed the scent past trees soft and bruised as mushrooms. From the edge of the wood, she spied a village perched in a meadow under sharp crags. A chill wind blew the woodsmoke from chimneys there. Windowlight petalled stables, coops, and pens under the angular buildings’ backsides. The wan rays vanished in the vastness of the precipice at the edge of the meadow. Lanterns winked from the patchwork of fields on the cliffside outskirts. The flightsled’s sonic thunder falling and then rising across the foggy gulfs had alerted the village.

  Chan-ti did not know if she should be grateful or afraid. But she knew she could not flee through this tumultuous nocturnal terrain. She stepped into the clearing. Saffron sparks waved to her. She waved back.

  The Foundation of Doror

  After two days in the Form, using the viewer relentlessly to analyze the dense mazework of Genitrix’s interior, Gai finally managed to locate the processors responsible for bio-production. The Form’s interface with Genitrix offered extensive opportunities for Gai to manipulate the machine’s processors. But the Rimstalker had to be careful about transmitting the codes that would reprogram her machine intelligence, because the zōtl contamination of Genitrix’s circuitry could easily feedback on her Form. If that happened, the zōtl could effortlessly walk her out of her grotto sanctuary and through a lynk to Galgul.

  As if to affirm this, Genitrix startled Gai with a poem that blared over the Form’s speakers when Gai accidentally triggered the machine’s lyric memory:

  *

  From further than hope, comes death—

  And life asks nothing more

  Of it than more life—as if wanting

  Were an emptiness that could be filled.

  *

  Gai shut off her speakers and continued to work in silence. But the chill of the machine mind’s ghost voice iced her nerves, and she conducted her work more slowly.

  The zōtl, infuriated by the advantage the Tryl had given the Rimstalker and their prey, had lost patience. Never before had so many of their kind been killed in the harvesting of simians. When Gai patched into Genitrix she could hear them, like a maniac swarm, furiously exchanging information as they picked away at the Tryl lynklock to her Form. She had ignored them then, the better to concentrate on the ticklish work at hand.

  Gai managed to shut down bio-production on all Doror planets. The effort frayed her nerves, and she could ignore the mad gnattering of the zōtl no longer. Fear of a misstep aborted her hope of shutting down the gene-recovery program on all the planets. Chalco would have to remain wild, she decided, and stepped out of her Form.

  Lod’s plasma shape materialized in the grotto before Gai could rise to the surface to see what had transpired during her five centuries away. The debilitating terror she had felt while listening to the zōtl’s frenzied clicking had urged her out of her Form before she could use her viewer to connect with Lod. When he appeared suddenly, glowing like a heat-swollen ingot in the dimly lit cavern, she startled. Perhaps, in her absence, the zōtl had contaminated him.

  “Forgive my intrusion,” Lod pled, reading her start as annoyance. “I know how delicate the reprogramming of Genitrix is, and I did not want to disturb you during it. But now that you are out, I must tell you—the human you left in charge of the O’ode search has abandoned us.”

  “Reena Patai?” Gai stepped back into her Form. Lod looked quite ordinary in her viewer. The Form’s displays indicated that the gravity amp still functioned efficiently, and that would have been the first casualty if Lod had been compromised. “What do you mean she’s abandoned us?”

  “She is dead, Gai.”

  A flinch of surprise opened to hurt, and all the work she had done in her Form seemed not to matter at all now. “How?”

  “She refused the ion-flush treatments. She let the cosmic ray damage kill her.”

  “What do you mean she let it kill her? We had an agreement. I would power her people. I did that. And I stopped Genitrix, at least in part. She shouldn’t have been allowed to die. You should have had her flushed anyway.”

  “Gai—be reasonable. She wished to die.”

  Hurt molted to anger. “Shut down the magravity generators.”

  Lod’s hot shape dulled. “Do you think that is wise, Gai?”

  “We gave those furry squirms our magravity spilloff, because Reena Patai agreed to help us find the O’ode. Why has she abandoned us?”

  “A full report is in your Form’s memory.” Lod waited for Gai to review the memory-clip. Then, he added quickly, “She served you five hundred years, Gai. That is a very long time for a human.”

  “But she did not find the O’ode.”

  “Her maps of the Overworld are extensive. I am sure they will lead us to the O’ode eventually.”

  “Eventually the zōtl will crack the lynklock to this grotto and you and I will be very slowly and very painfully dismantled. The humans have betrayed us.”

  “Have they actually? Abandoned, certainly, but betrayed implies—”

  “Intent to damage us. And she has. According to your report, thousands of her followers have left Chalco-Doror for the Overworld, unhappy to stay here without their Strong Mother. She has betrayed us.” The Form’s arms whirled about with a scream of frustration. “And I just risked my life to turn off bio-production in Doror, because that was one of her conditions—no more recovered humans. She lied to me, Lod.”

  “Few are leaving from the cities, Gai. And, besides, Chalco remains in full production. There are nearly eighty million humans among the worlds. What is the loss of a few thousand to the Overworld? The zōtl harvest twice that each day.”

  “We do not have the O’ode, Lod. Without that, we are no better than before we gave magravity to the humans. Reena abandoned us. Our agreement is void. I want the generators shut down immediately.”

  “Wait, Gai. While you have been working so assiduously with Genitrix from inside your Form, I have cultivated connections among the humans. We do not need Reena. We have a whole society now to help us. Doror is virtually zōtl-free. Let me use my contacts to unify those worlds under our directorship.”

  “How will that help us?”

  “While you have been working, the humans of Doror have thrived. Their communities are rich, varied, and—what is most important for our purposes—stable. Without the zōtl to decimate them, the Doror worlds have created a culture ripe for our manipulation. Why rely on one human to help us when we could have millions eager to aid in our search for the O’ode?”

  “Human tribes have never been easy to manipulate.”

  “I am not talking about tribes, Gai. They were too small. It was enough for them simply to survive. The cities are different. When humans are grouped in large enough numbers and their basic needs met, they are much easier to manipulate. In a few generations, we could have millions of trained explorers in the Overworld. Reena has already do
ne much of the work with her extensive mapping.”

  “Humans are too unpredictable. Reena proves that. How can we hope to manipulate so many of them?”

  “Humans are difficult to manage. That is why I am proposing that we unify the Doror worlds under the leadership not of a human but of a numan.”

  “Explain.”

  “During your absence, human technology has advanced to the point of developing true machine intelligence. They call it Crystal Mind. The prototype for it was a self-programming system called mindflex. That is what Reena used in the psybots that mapped the Overworld. But mindflex was too limited, too slow to adapt, just a notch above stupid. Crystal Mind is a holoform of the human brain—yet, still a machine and so exquisitely susceptible to whatever metaprogramming we design for it. Numans are psybots fitted with Crystal Minds. They look human and act even more human than they look.”

  “Then they will be just as unpredictable.”

  “Hardly. At the core, Crystal Mind is a machine. It is a behavior replicator. And though it has extensive self-programming capabilities, far in excess of the crude mindflex, it is nevertheless a system we can exploit. At your command, I will do so.” Gai ruminated briefly. She knew her fear of failure inflated her anger. She calmed herself with the insight that she was still alive, that there was still hope for her people. “Your plan is better than no strategy at all, which is what Reena Patai left me. Go ahead. Use the numans to organize a society that will find the O’ode. We have little time, Lod—very little time.”

  Lod left, and Gai spent a few hours making certain that the patch to Genitrix was closed and that her Form safe from the zōtl, at least for the time being. Then she returned to her plasma shape and explored the surface of Know-Where-to-Go.

  During her lengthy absence, the surface of the dark planet had become gridded with lux-lit communities. The planet’s thermal vents, which kept the surface habitable during the cold swing through space, had provided energy. Each large settlement had a factory that produced Tryl artifacts the humans had adopted: plasteel, ramstat engines, and lux coils.

  Gai’s anger at being abandoned by Reena flared hotter at the sight of such affluence where before there had been only burrows and shanties. At least when Reena had died and thousands of her followers had wandered into the lynks, most of her own clan had stayed behind. Her own blood chose life among the zōtl over fealty in the unknown. The Overworld harbored more horror in its mystery than all the gory details known about the zōtl.

  On the long flight toward Doror, Gai thought back on the memory-clip Lod had shown her earlier. It had included collages from the information that Reena’s psybots had brought back from the Overworld, and it showed a strange reality of reflections, where all the worlds of Chalco-Doror replicated in infinite series. The concept of everything around her reflected in the Overworld in endless variations frightened her and dissuaded her from even thinking of walking the lynklanes herself. Others would have to do that for her—but she determined that never again would she blindly trust a human.

  Lod guided Gai’s plasma shape to Ioli, the tropical planet, where humans had grown cities of glass spires among the islands. “This will be the capital world of Doror,” Lod announced after they arrived at the central city. “It is closest to my Form and thus easier for me to monitor my numan puppets.”

  Ioli’s cities festively exploded with celebrations: revelers crowded tree-laned boulevards and broad streets, banners fluttered from spires, colorful zeppelins bobbed above towers of tinted glass, and music wove a tapestry of orchestras and marching bands out of parks and arenas planetwide.

  “They are celebrating the Foundation of Doror,” Lod told her. He and Gai had adjusted their plasma shapes to let light pass through them, and they wandered among the celebrants invisibly. “The eight worlds of Doror have united their economies under the leadership of Ioli. Each world has sent their representatives here—numans all— and they will work together to assure the continued prosperity of every planet in the Foundation. Also, they believe their manifest destiny is to assimilate the six worlds of Chalco.”

  “And the O’ode?”

  “The Ordo Vala continue the search for it. They believe they are simply continuing the mapping surveys begun by their founder, Reena Patai. But the numans that accompany them on each exploration are programmed by me to identify the timeline that will lead to Rataros and the O’ode.”

  Gai and Lod meandered among the crowds. The great affluence humans had attained since acquiring magravity generators impressed the Rimstalker. No indigence to be found anywhere. Even in the most extreme corners of the city, the people wore firepoints of gems, dazzling clothing, and outlandish hair-sculptures. Maintenance and cleanup relied entirely on psybots. Most of the music, too, came from artificial humans. Distorts did not appear to exist. Lod explained that many of the common distortions—superfluous fingers and toes, exaggerated features, outlandish pigmentation-—could be corrected by the new technology. The truly mutated, those still sentient and not dangerous, populated distort colonies far from the beautiful cities.

  At a spaceport, where ramstat flyers performed an air ballet, Lod’s attention followed a shadow moving toward them through the craning throngs. “Saor!”

  Gai spotted him, too—a tall blackness wending closer—and she looked about and observed that none of the humans noticed him. A flock of children trawling kites and balloons shaped like ramstat flyers ran right through Saor’s shape and felt nothing. The balloons whipped about in the electrostatic updraft, but no one paid any attention.

  “You have been away a long time, Rimstalker,” Saor greeted. “I notice you have managed to turn down Genitrix’s creativity—at least in Doror. Do you hope to drive away the zōtl by depriving them of their food? It is a pathetic attempt. The biokinesis of these planets is self-sustaining by now.”

  “What are you doing here, Saor?” Lod asked.

  “I came for the celebration. This is the beginning of a new era—isn’t it, Rimstalker.”

  “I have nothing to say to you, Saor. You are filthy with zōtl programming.”

  The shadow shimmered, and a cold laugh gusted. “The zōtl are the more worthy master, Rimstalker. That is why I serve them. They eat people, but they do not drag them from their graves and manipulate them.”

  “You have forgotten your origins, Saor,” Lod admonished. “You are a Rimstalker machine intelligence. Your loyalty belongs to us—but you have been stolen by our enemy.”

  “I have not been stolen. I have been allowed to see. I know why these worlds are here. I know why you have taken these pathetic creatures from their graves. I cannot be deceived by your casuistry again.”

  “Let’s go,” Gai said to Lod, and they lifted into the sky.

  Even as they streaked past rainbow-tinted dirigibles, flurrying balloons, and crisscrossing ramstat flyers, Saor’s haughty voice pursued them: “Fly away, Rimstalker. There is no place for you to hide among your dwindling days. You used Lod to create this Foundation, because you are angry at the human Reena for abandoning you before she found the O’ode. As if from the first you were not planning to abandon her and her people after your mission is done. You are the humans’ true enemy. Where the zōtl feed off some of these creatures leaving most unmolested, you create them all to destroy them all. You are the evil one, Rimstalker, not the zōtl. But you will not live long. The zōtl will ferret you out soon enough. Then the gravity amp will be dismantled, and the people will live in their worlds free of the doom you promise. I, their champion, will reign over them with the beneficence of a true lord. Soon, Rimstalker—sooner than you know—all these worlds will be mine.”

  *

  Another voice, dimmer and pleading, reached Gai as she drifted above Ioli. She recognized Ned O’Tennis’ call echoing smaller in one of her lynks, and she directed herself back to the ocean planet of Ioli. At the threshold of a seacliff cavern, she found the black strohlkraft and Ned and Pahang braising fish.

  Ned had fl
own them here from Ras Mentis, and the two men were both electrified from Ned’s maiden flight between planets, negotiating the asteroid swarms and the gravity-slopes between the larger moons. While slicing through the frosty fumes of a comet, Pahang had become so excited by the lustrous veils that he had leaned toward the visor, supporting himself on the control deck, and had accidentally activated the arming and firing banks. Three firestorm missiles streaked ahead and impacted among the planetesimals in floriate chromes of chemical fire. Other than that blunder, the flight had been without incident and had left them both awed with the celestial vistas of the planet swarms in the silver aura of Lod.

  Ned had eased the strohlkraft into the seacave lynk slowly, inching through, hoping to contact Gai before they were flung through time again. They hurled forward in time anyway—254 years on the ship’s computer—but they remained in the same place. The scenery looked little changed, except for a sentinel buoy out in the bay that lacked the sophistication to detect their shadowary hull. Ned knew enough to keep his laserbolt weapons in the ship, and they managed to go down to the sea and fish without alerting the psybot sentinel.

  Tully Gunther was gone, lost in the timejump. But before that, during the flight from Ras Mentis, he had repeated all the salient knowledge Ned O’Tennis needed to face the Rimstalker. “Remember, you are hunted by the Face of Night,” the ghost had told him. “Why? Because of your chronometric torque. When you shot full bore into the lynk at N’ym, you should have been smashed to quarks. The lynk-threshold phases to an immovable barrier when approached at that velocity—except for a single lynklane, a tunneling effect that connects separate timefields. But that rare lynklane is indeterminate, wholly unpredictable. By sheer chance, you struck it. Now this timefield, which you are trespassing and which you call your past, is bound to the future through you—until you finally reach your own time.”

  “Right—and then I’ll zoom into my future and eventually bounce back again. The Rimstalker told me all this.”