The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  Her new body appeared in a baby field in a polar latitude on Xappur, where the chill air set the fog to frost and where death would have been less painful in the anesthetizing cold. That was Genitrix’s last gift to this human who had forgiven her. Forgiveness from a human was a rare event for Genitrix, since most humans railed at her when confronted with a second death. Lorraine felt too joyful to scold the alien archeologist who had unearthed her and steeped her in the pleasure of the opal light and the mothering voice.

  Lorraine, birthed with a flush of thirteen others in a baby field more remote than most, avoided becoming food for animals and insects. The last of the flush, she survived until a pilgrimage of tribesfolk happened upon the baby field and found her whimpering among small frozen corpses. For the next twelve years, she lived with the Twisted Root Tribe; Koo and Waltho, a grotesquely ugly distort couple, reared her as their daughter. The Twisted Root Tribe thrived, because their distortions adapted to the obscuring mists of Xappur. Many of these warty, hunchbacked distorts had a crude infravision that enabled them to find their way through fog and to hunt and forage.

  The Twisted Root Tribe had another adaptive mutation that had helped them survive zōtl attacks in olden times, and the Aesirai raids now: They could disjoint themselves and squeeze into crannies and crevices impossible for other humans. Because Lorraine, whom they called Warm Night for her dark skin and irrepressible cheer, could not follow them when they hid, they took pains to warn her of the Aesirai oppressors, who perpetually raided their world to purge it of distorts and to cull whole humans like Lorraine for the zōtl lynk on Ren.

  In her twelfth year, the memories began. She sat spellbound for hours in the tribe’s burrow, entranced by recall of her former life. She remembered her first parents, a pediatrician and a schoolteacher in Idaho Falls, who had reared her as a Christian, until she lost faith in her teen years when her mother died after a series of strokes. Her father had become depressive after that. Always her mother had been the joyful strength of the family, and it was from her that Lorraine and her brothers had learned to take pleasure from life. She thought a long time about her first family and her first childhood, fascinated by the strange disparity between then and now.

  Her soulful reminiscence brutally paused in her fifteenth year with the Aesirai raid that exterminated the Twisted Root Clan. Koo and Waltho had taken her with them on their annual pilgrimage to the polar caves, where the tribe kept their death masks. She saw again the baby field that had birthed her, reduced now to a scattering of bones among snow-splotched boulders. During the evening firecircle-stories, she told her adoptive parents about Earth. The potato-faced distorts listened in giddy disbelief to tales of a world where machines burned fossils for fuel, where the sky ranged empty but for clouds, dim stars, and a single moon, and where no one ever saw the galaxy’s spiral, rawfaces, tiger-scorpions, or longteeth.

  On their return to the tribe, they found carnage and no survivors. A banner with the Emirate’s Thunderhawk hung limply before the burrow entrance among sprawled and decomposing bodies. Koo dropped dead on the spot, when she disturbed a neurotox cannister hidden among the corpses. Waltho survived his grief only long enough to help Warm Night cast the tribe’s death masks and carry them to the polar cave of their ancestors. He died there, and Lorraine left him among the masks, clutching his own death cast.

  For a while, Lorraine tried to contact Genitrix, to connect again with the opal of great peace and the mothering voice, but that proved futile. Genitrix existed as a machine intelligence, not a god or a spirit she could invoke. Without the Twisted Root Tribe, she roamed Xappur alone and well knew that everyone now was her enemy: Most likely, other distort tribes would kill her on sight, and certainly the Emirate had only one use for her—as vassal, to be fed to the zōtl.

  Her vain effort to reconnect with Genitrix at least served the purpose of reminding her of all that the machine intelligence had taught her. Knowledge provided her only weapon but for the one plasteel knife that the tribe had cherished since finding it on a dead Saor-priest two centuries earlier. She decided then that she would leave Chalco-Doror, and she made her way on the fogroads to the nearest lynk.

  The Ordo Vala had visited the Twisted Root Tribe in ancient times long before Fech the Betrayer made Xappur famous by hatching there his treachery of the fugitive lords. Lorraine had seen the clay-inscribed copy of The Book of Horizons given to the tribe by the Ordo Vala. From that relic, she learned that travel in the Overworld was indeed possible, though Genitrix had warned her never to enter a lynk for fear of getting lost among the lynklanes.

  After the deaths of her tribe, the great loss of Koo and Waltho, and the vivid memories of suffering on Earth, Lorraine was not afraid to lose herself. She stood before the lynk, which glowed a fiery blue in the fog, a neon parabola, and took a last look at Xappur: dark, lit wanly from above the dense clouds by the galactic arms. In the radiance from the lynk, the nearby rocks pared to mist. She stepped under the shining arch, and the brilliance of the Overworld torched her vision.

  For fifteen years, she had lived in obscure darkness, and minutes passed before her aching eyes adjusted. When she could see clearly, she did not understand at first what she observed. In front of her, a holoform image showed part of the hemisphere of a vast globe. Strung like pearls north to south around the globe looped a series of planets. Looking closer, she discerned that they were all the same planet—the fog-muted face of Xappur.

  She was looking at a parallel series of timelines of the world she had just left. She knew this from what Genitrix had told her about the Overworld, it seemed only yesterday. She had not really heeded the data on the Overworld that the machine mind had imprinted in her brain, because it had not related to anything she had ever experienced. But now, confronted by this vivid holoform, she remembered Genitrix had told her that during the Age of the Crystal Mind, six hundred years earlier, Ieuanc 751 had endowed the Ordo Vala with the technology to erect holoforms in the mouths of all the Tryl lynks. Each holoform offered a kind of map, displaying the world where the lynk originated, multiply reflected in parallel timelines. The string of Xappurs vanished over the horizon of a massive gray globe laced and looped with chrome-brilliant colors. Genitrix had said that, in Lorraine Poole’s time on Earth, that pattern was known as a Mandelbrot set, a fractal pattern of whorls and tendrils, like the edges of a snowflake, where each tiny part mimicked the curlicue shape of the whole.

  The globe of filigree patterns represented the Overworld, the complex of all possible universes. Each filigree and curlicue mapped a timeline arcing through the gray emptiness of the vacuum in which all universes expanded and contracted. Close scrutiny revealed that each flamelike whorl consisted of similar but smaller vortices and coils, and that each of those tiny swirls too composed a tinier filigree, which, in turn, made patterns like the larger ones. Genitrix had said that the regression only appeared infinite, though in fact every possible world of this universe existed there.

  The absolute blackness that loomed above the horizon of the flame-laced globe corresponded to the cosmic event horizon from which the vacuum of the universe had separated at the Big Bang. Somewhere under that utter nothingness, somewhere in the riot of colorful whorls and filaments abided the Earth from whence she had come. Somewhere in that infinity of frightfully beautiful shapes her home endured.

  To step forward would carry her to the connecting lynk at some point in Chalco-Doror. She moved sideways. The holoform vanished, replaced by a gray vista streaked with multihued mares’ tails, brushstrokes, and cirrus threads, all of them far, far off like stratospheric clouds, enclosing her on all sides. She knelt down and touched the ground: smooth and cool as polished marble. She could see nothing but the gray void and far below more rainbow threads. She hovered in a null field.

  Genitrix had informed her that the Overworld existed apart from real time, and while she wandered, she ruminated on what she had heard from the machine mind, though she did not really understand any
of it. The ground she felt and the air she breathed unfolded to an infinite extension of the point in spacetime from where she had originated. She had entered a relativistic frame outside spacetime, where all points existed coterminously. That was why the universe and all its timelines could be mapped as a globe-shaped Mandelbrot set: The universe was whole and only apparently divided into parts when one viewed it from the inside. Here in the Overworld, she was potentially everywhere—though actually nowhere. This cosmic contradiction existed all around her: She felt herself distinct and apart from the gray void and its chromatic striations of distant timelines—yet, she knew that if she could pull back and see herself in context, she would appear as a tiny part of one such colorful timeline that connected with all the others and on a grand scale even imitated their patterns. She belonged here, she reminded herself, no matter how strange it looked. But without klivoth kakta to extend her consciousness into the timelines she saw threaded in the far-off void, she could not know where she was going. And without ramstat propulsion, she had little hope of trespassing any other region in the Overworld but that nearest where she had originated. Even so, she determined never to return to Chalco-Doror and its evil Aesirai and zōtl denizens. So, she walked.

  Whenever exhaustion whelmed up in her, she curled up and dozed. Her life as a tribeswoman had given her the foresight to carry a gourd of water and a sack of dried meat and breadroot, enough to last her for several days. And before her food ran out, she reached the nearest visible timeline. It looked to her like a glass tube a hundred meters tall and stretching forever left and right of her.

  Inside the timeline, she viewed Xappur and realized that she had journeyed not much farther in the Overworld than she would have if she had flown an hour or so in a small flyer. But a lynk waited about sixty meters below her—a blue oval shining brightly against the fog-color of Xapper’s landscape. How to go down? She crawled along the ground and soon discovered that she could maneuver up or down by pointing herself in those directions. There really was no up or down, only distance, omniradiant distance, which, she could almost hear Genitrix defining not really as distance at all but connection.

  She reached the lynk and stepped through. She did not know where on Xappur she turned up. But the terrain looked similar to where she had lived as a child, and she had no difficulty foraging food and filling her gourd with fresh water. Then she returned to the lynk and passed through again. This time, she scrutinized more closely the holoform map of the Overworld that appeared before her. She noticed that her timeline appeared subtly highlighted by a golden sheen beneath the positions of the nearest and the largest of the string of Xappur images. Xappur threaded the tiniest filament among a furry filigree of timelines that she figured had to be Chalco-Doror.

  She remembered hearing from Genitrix about the Strong Mother and how thousands of her followers had abandoned Chalco-Doror at her death. Genitrix had told her that many of the Strong Mother’s exodus had reached a fabulous corner of creation near the end of time called the Werld. No one had been able to find their way there since—though few quested, for those with ramstat propulsion worked for the Emirate, which, Genitrix had informed her, fronted for Gai, the Rimstalker responsible for creating Chalco-Doror.

  From the filament of Xappur, Lorraine traced a path on the holoform that led inward along the spiral of the nearest shepherd’s-crook pattern, a timeline that snailed in on itself. She departed the lynklane and, following her memory of the map, located a faraway timeline among a bundle of others across a null field that seemed to curve gently in the direction she desired—though it dwindled too far away to tell for sure. She walked toward it. Days later, long after exhausting her food and water, she reached that prismal timeline, and, indeed, it appeared nothing like Chalco-Doror or anyplace humanly habitable. Chromatic magmas blinded her, and she moved on as quickly as her depleted body would allow.

  By then she was dying. Her march staggered. She reeled like a drunk and soon collapsed. She prepared to die a second time. She stared into the Overworld’s exhausted distances, the miles wearied by emptiness.

  *

  Time broke into huge chunks suspended in a gray void. Each irregular chunk drifted as an icefloe, chromebright and slithery with reflections. The strohlkraft carrying Ned and Pahang streaked through the vast corridors of gray space, a mote among these giant floes. Autopilot followed the maps Gai had installed in the ship’s computer, and the men hung from their slings in the flight pod transfixed by the enigmatic vista.

  “The houses of the gods,” Pahang murmured.

  Ned swelled with awe. The beauty of the enormous floating shapes transfixed him—but only momentarily. He turned his attention to the flight console. Since the fall of N’ym and the obscenities of Squat, beauty had wearied for Ned. He found no stamina in it anymore. All experience seemed fleeting. Death surrounded everything in its black aura. And where before, as a ferryman in N’ym, this ephemerality had been a welcome contrast to the eternal routines of his work and he had enjoyed being a part of the flaring twilight, now it damned him. Nothing was certain anymore, not even the most fundamental boundaries of time and place. His heart craved something constant in this turbulent flight through time, and he tried to provide it by using the ship’s computer to interpolate from the data of previous timejumps where they would appear next.

  “You worry too much,” Pahang chided, face amber in the glow from the slick floes. “We live and die at the pleasure of the gods. Behold their majesty.”

  “It’s not majesty I’m looking for right now, Pahang. We passed the edge of our map twenty minutes ago. According to spectral readings of those time-floes, we are millions of light years from where we started.”

  “If we have no map, how are we flying?”

  “The computer is guessing. The ships they sent out here before didn’t have the range of a strohlkraft. These hadn’t been invented yet.”

  “I forget you are from the future.”

  “Not for long. If the computer’s right and we survive wherever we’re going, we’ll return to Chalco-Doror in my own time—and with the weapon that will doom the city I come from—the doom that started my journey back in time.”

  “You make my head dizzy.”

  “I don’t understand, either. Will N’ym survive if we don’t find the O’ode? Or what if we find it and decide not to deliver it?”

  “Those are the tricks of the gods. You cannot outwit them. Do what you must to find your Chan-ti. She is why you left Gai to follow the ghost of Joao. And she is why you have returned to Gai. She is all you must understand.”

  Ned frowned and looked out again at the silver buttes suspended in the gray void. Tully Gunther had said that the scyldar that abducted Chan-ti wanted to kill him and would use her as a lure, so there was a chance that he would find her alive—but how alive? Squat had nearly broken Ned’s mind and had left a warp of fearfulness he would carry always. What terror was Chan-ti suffering under the scyldar and the spiders?

  “You worry too much,” Pahang repeated, wanting Hawk to bolster him with some of the enthusiasm they had shared after escaping Squat. Ned’s grim demeanor and the supernatural view of the gods’ glossed houses troubled Pahang. Early he had learned from his third brother that those who see the gods must die. He had to remind himself that he had already died. All the same, he had hoped for more camaraderie from Hawk. Their mission was too dangerous for doubt. “We must remember our pledge.” He offered his hand as he had on Ras Mentis. “To freedom.”

  Ned recognized the bright need in Pahang’s stare and took his hand in a strong clasp. “Freedom is something one must make, Pahang. That is what the Aesirai believe. I have not forgotten. We will make ourselves and Chan-ti free with the O’ode. You are a good man to come with me.”

  “Where else would I be? My third brother, the soul-catcher, was forever telling me—”

  The strohlkraft steepened to an ascent, and inertia tightened through the two men in their slings. Ahead, a time-floe loomed an
d rushed closer. Other floes reflected in its watery surface, and iridescent currents crawled there, simmering through the reflections. For an instant, they glimpsed themselves, the trim black shadow of a strohlkraft flying directly at them. Pahang’s hands jerked to his face at the instant of impact.

  The pearlescent shine of the Overworld had vanished, and they drifted in space outside a bluegreen planet. The flightpod lights dimmed as power faded in the ramstat cells, then flushed brighter with energy from the backup generator. Ned dulled the cabin lights and regarded the glaucous planet, noting a hint of rings glinting around it. The Rimstalker program in the computer confirmed the sighting on the range-finder with a matrix display of zeroes. They had reached their objective.

  “Rataros,” Hawk knew and began entering the commands for a surface scan. “We are the first humans to get here. Maybe the last.”

  In moments, the computer analyzed the scan data and located several thousand sites where O’odes thrived. The strohlkraft slid down the planet’s gravity slope.

  “Zōtl!” Pahang cried and pointed to the console screen where six red squares flashed.

  “They haven’t spotted us yet,” Ned observed and angled their descent to slim the profile the strohlkraft presented to the zōtl. “They’ve probably never had to deal with a shadowary hull.”

  A jolting impact rocked the ship. The strohlkraft flipped out of control, twisting the men in their slings. Ned fought the yoke and swung the vessel into a fast but stable dive. The tops of the planet’s gray clouds swept over them and fogged the visor.

  “What happened?” Pahang shrilled.

  “The spiders have some kind of camouflage, makes it look like they’re not locked on. That was a direct hit. Some kind of proton bolt. Cut right through our deflectors and sheared off our ventral thruster.”