The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  The sequence completed its warning trills and lights, and the map chamber and con-bubble broke away from the ship and fell toward Know-Where-to-Go. From the bridge, Rikki watched the module ignite in the atmosphere and streak away, a falling star. Before it burned out, she turned away and, with suddenly calm fingers, amplified the ramstat drive. Her body went loose in freefall, and the Alan Guth veered toward Chalco.

  *

  The Brood of Night existed as a hamlet of cowled distorts: Two faces stared from one hood; dogs with human foreheads and eyes chivvied friskily through crowds of robes and sniffed at Chan-ti Beppu’s legs and crotch. In the ivory glow of the paper lanterns they carried, the faces gazed avidly, each starkly unique, some silver as fishskin, some feathery, others bony as insects. One of the villagers had no more countenance than a tree, eyes and mouth hidden in brown fissures of crusted flesh, a leafless dwarf-oak with a woman’s shape. Another—pale, squat, and smudged as a mushroom with two tiny mouths where her eyes should have been and in the place of her mouth an optic-bud like a starfish’s red eye—greeted Chan-ti Beppu enthusiastically. All seemed glad for someone new to show around and share their stories.

  The hamlet consisted of low cottages with agate-tile roofs and round, rose-paned windows. Each also served as a shop where artisans prepared specialty food for export to Perdur: mushroom wine, lichen cakes, glazed slugs, larval pudding, all with lyrical foreign names and unexpected flavors. The Brood offered her samples at each shop and welcomed her to the hamlet. Several of the grotesque lot spoke her idiom. For those who did not, a boyish head on kingcrab-legs—the Knower—interpreted telepathically.

  The Brood were distorts who, each in their way, had served Saor well. The hamlet had been created by the Saor-priests as a distort paradise, where those who had earned the favor of the Face of Night could live out their days happily. Before coming to this paradise, most had served as missionaries among the distort tribes—promulgating the Dark One’s creed, “Worlds Without End.” They believed that Gai fostered evil as a World-Eater and that Saor, her enemy, would preserve Chalco-Doror from extinction.

  Others had defended Saor-priests from persecution by numans and people allied with Lod, who promulgated the heresy that Saor acted as a zōtl puppet. One of these defenders, a numan with a glossed, fire-melted face, had been taken long ago by zōtl and used for many years to subvert humans. He introduced himself as Hadre Az and told her the story of the zōtls’ attempt to break open Know-Where-to-Go and—this whispered with pride—his glorious role in thwarting them before they made him an ally. Everyone had a story to share. She listened to each patiently.

  Though a prisoner, Chan-ti found herself treated as a new member of the community. She received a capacious room above the vintner’s shop, with a window that faced out the back, over the vinery, across mushroom fields, to mist-torn gorges in the Witch Maze. She performed her given chores efficiently—weeding the garden, sweeping flagstone walkways, helping with the harvest.

  Grateful for the Brood’s civility after the horror of losing her father to the scyldar, Chan-ti fulfilled her tasks without complaint. No one had any knowledge of what had befallen her, and they left her to ponder for herself the apparently meaningless deaths of Spooner Yegg and Moku the Beast. Escape was unthinkable. Legendary malignancies infested the Dragon’s Shank, and she knew that if she wandered into that abyss looking for a lynk she would become some abomination’s meal.

  Days passed. The blurry stars set, leaving the sky bereft of all light. Quilts of bioluminesence breathed across the fields and down into the foggy depths. Lamps and lanterns carved small scenes out of the thick darkness, eerie images of distorts bent in the fields, sitting on their stoops, cooking among wreathing steam in their wood-fired kitchens.

  When not working, Chan-ti roamed the far dells, lantern in hand, trying to learn something of the hostile land below. Somewhere out there awaited a lynk that could lead her back to the Overworld and from there to anywhere. Though the only place she wanted to go was wherever Ned O’Tennis roamed, if he was yet alive. And if not, she would travel to one of the Tryl temples deep in the Overworld, where they had devices that could speak with the bodies of light. She had never wanted to speak with the dead before, but she would with him. And she would speak with Spooner, too, and make a late peace with her father.

  She cherished those ambitions among the Brood of Night, ambitions that kept her from despair when she stared into their wrong flesh. None harmed her, most treated her graciously; yet, she could sense their withheld dudgeon at her comparative wholeness. They had been ordered to accept her. Otherwise, she noticed in their vacillation between keen interest and sudden remoteness while questioning her about the Foke, she would have ended up their victim. She let her hair grow wild and wore her clothes frumpily, trying to blend.

  A bulbous, strut-winged flyer arrived. The Brood laded their ox-drawn wagon with crates of their goods and drove out to the field where the Saor-priests had alighted. From the flight pod, a portly, bald figure descended the gangway to the muddy field and paused. He signed to the two priests behind him, and they formed a chair by locking their arms and carried the Cenobite to the wagon.

  An hour earlier, Fra Bathra’s midstim trance had been interrupted by the ponderous telepathic voice of the Face of Night. “Go down to my Brood, priest, and live among them so you may better assure that my prisoner is not absconded by my enemies.”

  “I will dispatch my own lieutenants,” Fra Bathra had promised.

  “No. You go. Leave your lieutenants to attend Perdur. Go alone, for the hamlet is too small, my Brood too sensitive of their difference, to sustain more. See that Chan-ti Beppu is kept secure.”

  Now arrived in the hamlet, Fra Bathra popped a gly-tab into his mouth and rubbed his temples to uncramp the stink of raw fields in his sinuses. Then, he waved the flyer away. With the last crates hurried aboard, the air hummed, magnetically chilled by the ramstat drive as the ship lifted away. Clutching the sides of the wagon, the Cenobite signed with a nod, and the oxen jolted forward, one distort at the reins, another holding a pole strung with gourd lanterns against the resolute darkness.

  Simian-dogs had run ahead and alerted the telepathic head, who organized a formal greeting party for the dignitary. Chan-ti stood among the gaggle of distorts that welcomed the Cenobite. His sharkhole eyes fixed on her at once, and he did not disguise his ire at the woman who had caused him to dwell among the Brood. “This woman is a prisoner. She will be confined at all times. At all times, I say!”

  Chan-ti did not wait for the distorts to seize her. She went to her room and lay in the dark until one of the fishskinned people brought her a lit waxfern. By that wispy light, she watched the shadowplay among the rafters blear with her tears of anger at not knowing why Saor had selected her for these cruelties.

  Deep in the night, long after Fra Bathra’s shrill commands had died away and he had droned into a deep sleep on a pillow-packed cot before a wood-stove in the hamlet’s best shop, a quiet voice began in her mind. It was the Knower, the head with crab-legs, speaking to her:

  Saor holds you to bait Ned O’Tennis. You cannot escape, so why should you not know this? Too long have I troubled with your ignorance as you wander and wonder why you were taken here, why your father was killed. I will tell you. I have that right in my own village. You and Ned O’Tennis have fallen back in time from a future that the Face of Night will not have. Ned and you must die. Neter Col would have slain both of you on Ras Mentis but for Moku, the Beast of Genitrix. Now you know. Saor and the other gods war!

  Chan-ti already knew about that war, and she trembled to see that she and Ned had fallen into it. Now there could surely be no escape. No matter if she found her way free to a lynk and the Overworld. She could never elude the Face of Night and the Eater of Worlds. She snuffed the waxfern taper, abruptly glad in the midst of her dread. That she lived meant Ned survived, too. Their nightmare bound them.

  Age of Dominion

  Perhap
s neo-sapiens, the melange of races and genera from across the history of simian sentience, are more a memory of humanity than human in themselves. During the Age of Dominion, the belief was commonly held that Genitrix served as an amanuensis, copying the dictations of the past from the genetic memory of life retained in the detritus of earth, but that she never got it just right. Neo-sapiens’ brief dominance in Chalco-Doror at this time instanced a period of intense nostalgia for the original Earth, whose most vital lesson, if we have any remembrance at all, is that the power that conquers surrenders everything to its victory.

  —Rigo Phu Than, from Declensions of Time

  Fruit of the Storm-Tree

  Nappy Groff and Gorlik descended the Dragon’s Shank with fear-nimble alertness. Without the klivoth kakta and the useful tools in the sojourn packs they wore at their hips, they would have perished in the first hour of their trespass. They wore gloves and goggles. Even so, the mists of dragon breath scalded exposed flesh at their wrists and cheeks. The rims of their nostrils blistered around soaked plugs of cotton grass through which they drew air. Bleating razorjaws slithered among the underbrush from all sides in the darkness. The kakta’s telempathic blessing let the Foke feel the voracious beasts they could not see, and the sap they smeared in their hair and on their clothes masked their fleshy odors.

  Long they traveled and silent, the kakta allowing them to find food in the dark and to communicate without alerting the greedy forest with their speech. But soon the kakta was gone. The acid mist had rotted it. The Foke, already exhausted from climbing up and down blind ravines and eating only pulpy mushrooms, had to carry on more intently. Both grimly committed, they picked their way with assiduous care over the mulchy ground and around soft trees. When they spoke now, their whispers stung the silence, and bleats closed in. Twice Nappy had to use the pistol to fend off rampaging razorjaws. Both times, the explosive gunshots had alerted every beast in the woods, and they had to flee through the treetops, gilled branches puffing spore clouds that caught in their garments and later sprouted tendrils.

  So hairy with fungal growths that the spaces between their fingers webbed, the Foke finally desponded. The blurry stars had set beneath an unreverberate night, and only glowworms hinted at the perfidious gorges in the dark. Gorlik wanted to turn back. But Nappy knew they could not make it back. If they were going to die, they would die moving forward. On their hands and knees they crept, reserving only enough strength at the end of a trek to climb into a tree to sleep.

  During one rest period, Gorlik roused to a cold hand touching his face. He started alert before the lux-lit facepan of a psybot and almost toppled from his perch. A psybot’s featureless head attached to mechanical arms and a small ramstat unit floated before him, outlined in lux-tubes.

  Be calm, a resonant voice shook through his bones. I am Saor, the Face of Night.

  Gorlik turned a frantic look to Nappy.

  I have spelled him, the oceanic voice said. He will not wake. You alone shall hear me.

  “We are just Foke—”

  Silence, Bram Gorlik. I am come to spare your life. You will die here in the Witch Maze unless you agree to do as I say. Nappy Groff would bid me leave you die in peace, and so I leave him to sleep. You have the stronger drive to live. I can feel that. You will do as I say.

  “Whatever I can—”

  This you can do easily. Do you know what these are? The mechanical arms lifted into the light two thick black cables with chrome undersides. These are the phanes. They can hold a body of light in place. These are to be put on the body of Lod.

  “Lod? The god Fire? How— I— We are just Foke—”

  I will lead you to Lod. You will put the phanes on him. And then you shall be free to go back to your life among the Foke.

  “My life is to be spared?”

  If you do as I say.

  “And Nappy Groff?”

  He will live or die as you say.

  For an instant, Gorlik was glad to think of Nappy Groff dead, for then there would be no witness to his cowardice with the scyldar—but the next moment he loathed himself for the thought and said in a strong whisper, “I say he live. We are just Foke, looking for—”

  Do as I say, and the two of you will live. Take the phanes.

  Gorlik grabbed the thick cables, and they curled in his hands like eels.

  Empty your sojourn pack and place them there.

  Gorlik did as he was told, and the psybot took the meager contents of his pack, a moldy blanket, dented canteen, handfuls of blackening mushrooms, and a Glyph Astra.

  Do not tell Nappy Groff of your mission or what is in your pack. If you break faith with me, Bram Gorlik, you will suffer long before you die.

  The psybot whisked out of sight, leaving Gorlik shivering around the hot hope of survival.

  *

  Egil Grimson remembered dying. He remembered that very clearly. An arrow-slain comrade falling from the mast of their ship during battle had struck him unconscious, and the enemy captured him alive. They stripped him and hung him by one ankle from a huge ash tree overlooking the seacliffs. The enemy knew this was how the god of his fathers had hung to attain the vision needed to save the human race, and they did this to him in mockery of his faith, of the very life of his soul. He hung there a night, a day, and another night, and he remembered the suffering and how the agony and laughter of his enemies had twisted howls from him—but not broken him, because he believed his god would avenge him. Dawn, filthy green, and the shrieks of gulls waiting for him to die occupied his last memories—then nothing—

  Until the Voice and the radiance from the inside of a pearl awakened him, he had slept in the bosom of oblivion. The Voice explained everything with a suavity that made it impossible for him not to believe. She embodied the voice of Earth herself, remembering him as he was, recounting all his glories, from his seacave birth in the tradition of his raider ancestors, through his proud childhood with the other sons of warriors, to his battles and victories in the foreign lands, to his death on the storm-tree. She remembered it all, and by that he knew she spoke the truth when she told him, “Egil Grimson, you are to live again on another Earth, a very different Earth than where you lived before.”

  For a long time, Egil tried in the old way to understand what she had told him, believing that since he had died at the hands of his enemies he had been reborn in Valhalla. He wanted very much to believe this truth, for what she had so patiently explained to him sounded far too strange to his Viking mind. Before he could begin to grasp the truth of his predicament, he had to reforge his whole comprehension of time and creation. He resisted a long while—but time was Genitrix’s wealth. While Egil Grimson’s body lay in her bio-matrix under the rootweave of a cedar forest on Q’re, the supercoiling of his DNA being precisely adjusted to prevent aging, his mind took in nourishment from Genitrix. In time, he understood everything from the viewpoint of the machine intelligence.

  Like millions before him, Egil Grimson emerged from Genitrix into a wild world, naked and weaponless but for the knowledge his re-creator had bestowed. For many, that knowledge had been useless against the ferocity of beasts and distorts. But Egil had lived as a warrior from birth, and he survived. Eventually, he found his way to a tribe and lived among them as a hunter, befuddled and angered by the cruelty of the wilderness and the zōtl. His anger steepened whenever he met others like himself who had been revived, informed, and then abandoned in the wilderness. He wanted to kill the Rimstalker who had done this to humankind. But there was no hope of that, it seemed, for survival among the giant trees of Q’re, where fangfaced bears and zōtl hunters abounded, required all his devotion. Then, one day when he was alone in the forest, having lost his hunting party to a pack of needle-toothed wolves, he met Gai.

  During the zōtl attack on Know-Where-to-Go, when the spiders had attempted to get at her Form by blowing apart the planet, Gai had been in Doror. From Ioli she had watched the blue star of the zōtls’ proton drill, helpless to stop them. Wea
ring a human shape she had grown in the loam, the better to communicate with her numan hosts on Ioli, she traveled with the ramstat fleet to counter the zōtl attack. Her relief at finding the zōtl lynk and proton drill destroyed inspired tears, and she determined that she would never be that vulnerable again.

  The Foundation of Doror had done their best to find Rataros and the O’ode in the Overworld, but the numans were too methodical and conservative—and now, with their incursions into Chalco, they threatened to drive the zōtl entirely away before the O’ode could be found. With less zōtl lynking into Chalco-Doror, the timelines in the Overworld associated with the zōtl dwindled, and so finding Rataros became that much harder. Gai’s hope that Ned O’Tennis could locate the O’ode tarnished, and she decided that the Crystal Mind worked too efficiently. She would have to replace the numans. She searched Chalco for a human strong enough to build a new empire—and she found Egil Grimson.

  Bloodied by his narrow escape from needletoothed wolves, Egil knelt over a stream and was cleansing himself when he met Gai’s reflection standing over him. She arrived in her plasma shape, human-looking, but just barely. Her iridescent flesh wavered green and blue, her eyes mirror-disks, long hair shifting over her nakedness like the electric vapors of the borealis. The secret smile of an archaic Greek statue touched her face as she assessed the man before her. Short and powerfully built, with a roisterous blond beard, he shouted at her from where he crouched and drew a chipped knife.

  “Rise, Egil Grimson,” she spoke in a voice like wind across a cave’s mouth. “Gai would speak with you.”

  Egil stood before the shimmery apparition, the knife that he had reflexively drawn held limply at his side. “You are Gai? The Rimstalker?”

  “I am the one you would kill—if you could.”