2150 Doror
There is no center, unless the center is everywhere.
—Glyph Astra
A caravan had gathered on Nabu, but the sojourner responsible for the group had been killed in an avalanche in the ice latitudes. The Ordo Vala selected Buie to take her place.
The caravan consisted of a hundred families of an ecstasy cult whose philosophy followed the Tryl dictum that “Everything is best.”
After Buie had been introduced into the caravan and become familiar with their leaders, he queried their dauntless optimism. “When your children die in senseless accidents, the way the sojourner who preceded me died, how do you accept that as best?”
“It is all attitude, Buie,” he was told. “We all feel grief at those times. But everything passes away in this world, even the long-lives like yourself. When the grief is spent, we go on and harbor no further anguish. The universe is perfect. It is only our understanding that is flawed.”
During the long weeks of preparation for migration into the Overworld, Buie spent as many hours as he could spare from work standing on the ice fields and staring up into the whirlpool stars and perpetual night. The animal sorrow of his loss had exhausted itself on Ren, and he faced into the gelid wind with emptiness rather than grief. But how to fill that emptiness with joy as the families of ecstasy did?
One night, shortly before the exodus into the Overworld, he beheld, in vapors from the lime pit of dreams, his wife’s ghost and his children, already far older than he. He woke sobbing. No one had heard him, or if they had, they had rolled over and gone back to sleep. He got up and stumbled out of the thermal-lock of the big tent into the jangling wind.
Nothing had changed. Glaciers lay herded among the mountains, pines stood like talismans on the ridges, and crayoned shadows of planetesimals smudged the snowfields. Then he understood what the Tryl meant. Though the world encompassed a welter of events and transformations, nothing really changed but the feelings, the moods, the emotions that roiled at the joining place of flesh and spirit. Whatever those feelings were—happiness or grief, wondering or boredom—they filled the emptiness in which everything constantly changed and stayed the same. Whether he believed this was good or bad or indifferent altered nothing at all but him. And he saw then how freedom had always been just a mind’s inch away.
He smiled like a drunk and went back to sleep peacefully.
*
2200 Doror
Want exists for its own sake.
—Glyph Astra
After successfully guiding the latest caravan of families to the Overworld, Buie followed the Ordo Vala’s next assignment to the Ioli Planetesimals. Inside the orbit of Ioli, a massive swarm of asteroids gleamed in the coronal glare from Lod. Ramstat flyers flitted among planetary shards, communing between mining stations erected to extract valuable metals exposed to the stars.
None of the miners harbored interest in The Book of Horizons. They had their own computer network, financed by the rich sums they earned from space mining, and so had no use for the Ordo Vala’s ephemeris. And the offer by Buie to escort caravans into the Overworld evoked laughter from the miners, enriched by constructing opulent sky-cities.
Buie contented himself for a time with enjoying the luxuries that the magnates offered enticing him to stay and share the culture of his long wanderings with their children. He had no qualms about abandoning his sojourning for a long spell of comfortable living. On Nabu, he had learned to tolerate everything, even the exigencies of pleasure.
*
2250 Doror
Fear rots.
—Glyph Astra
Eventually, Buie grew bored of midstim and holoramic pornography consuming more of his time the longer he stayed among the decadent sky-cities of the Ioli Planetesimals. He journeyed to Dreux in preparation for his longest voyage. Long service to the Ordo Vala had wearied his altruism as surely as the indulgences of Ioli had bored his soul. He grew eager for new horizons. Chalco-Doror had emptied of all who wanted to leave, including those ignorant of why they should—except, of course, for the continual influx of Genitrix’s re-creations. Such troubles he left with the Ordo Vala.
Planetlight like milk filled the polar plain of Dreux on Buie’s last night in Chalco-Doror. The titanic lynk, battered by zōtl hundreds of years earlier, seemed corrugated with dents, and depressions and sand lakes marred the plain where proton bolts had exploded. Still, the lynk worked and had seen the largest of the mass migrations. With a look in his eyes harsh and bright as whisky, he gazed up at the cluttered sky, eyed the huge discs of Ren and Vala occluded by tinier worlds and asteroids, sought out Ylem and Sakai, Ras Mentis and Cendre, small coins of light against the star vapors.
Above the horizon, one arm of the galaxy upraised like a luminous swimmer, starfields scythed the night. Would the world he journeyed to be as lovely? No. No other world could be as beautiful as these razed fields of heaven.
At that thought, fear entered him that he would never see such a wonderful sight again. He quelled that despair with what he had learned on Nabu, what he had paid out with the loss of his wife to learn and for which he refused to pay the troll of his doubt a second time—that fear and pain disclosed forsaken mysteries.
Without looking back again, he strolled carefree into the Overworld.
*
Chan-ti Beppu and Nappy Groff whirled through the grayness of a null field into the boil of a snowstorm. A tapestry of icicles shattered, and they fell into a cold drift under a spume of bright flakes. Chan-ti peeked out of the snowbank and viewed an icescape of frozen trees and crystal fields beneath a sky dirty with twilight. Nappy did not rise, and she ducked back into the drift, feeling for him with numbing hands. She found his arm and tugged him out of the snowbank.
Nappy roused slowly. Breath huffed in a smoky gust from his nostrils. “Where are we?”
“The Overworld,” Chan-ti answered, scanning for the lynk where they had entered. She spotted it above them on an escarpment laced with frost, a red rectangle bloodying the ice around it. The trees and the snow had broken their fall. In the eddy of snow scalloped by the wind, she recognized the delicate pattern of timelines. “This must be the Overworld of Mugna. The cold will go on forever. We have to find a lynk out.”
The wind hardened. Neither of them had dressed for weather this harsh. They stood up, hugging themselves. “I’m done, Beppu,” Nappy conceded.
“What are you saying?” She took off her camouflage jacket and tried to drape it over his shivering shoulders, and he pushed it away.
“Warm yourself. Build a fire. You will find a way out of here. But not I. This is my grave. I feel it in my bones. I have felt it since the Witch Maze.”
“Don’t speak like that, Nappy. You frighten me.” She put her jacket about his shoulders, ignoring his angry shrug, and led him toward a brake of ice-tasseled trees.
“I’m sorry we lost your Ned,” Nappy grumbled, feebly kicking ice from a root. “He came for you. I never trusted the Aesirai—but this one is different. He has lucky looks and courage.”
Chan-ti’s eyes reflected on this painfully, and she busied herself breaking twigs from the trees.
“You’ll see him again,” Nappy consoled, stamping his feet. “I doubted it until he came to the Dragon’s Shank for you. If he had the mettle to seek you there, he’ll find you anywhere.”
After clearing a patch of ground where root burls broke the wind, Chan-ti gathered frozen sticks and Nappy used the flint of his belt buckle to spark a fire, cursing all the while that he had lost his utility sack in the Witch Maze. A flame flapped among the twigs.
“Would that Gorlik were here,” Nappy mumbled, rasping his blue hands over the fire. “There’s a Foke who can track. He can read timelines sure as—”
Nappy broke off. Within the moan of the wind, he had heard a velvety sound that struck fear in him sharp as a pain.
“Gorlik died that we might live,” Chan-ti said, mistaking Nappy’s sudden silence for grief. �
�He took the spiders with him, to spare us. He bettered himself in death.”
“Hush, child. Gorlik did not take all the spiders with him.”
From the chatter of wind-clacking branches, a shadow dove at them. The Foke ducked. The zōtl struck Nappy at the back of his head and threw him over the fire, scattering sparks and slush. Chan-ti overrode her revulsion and seized the thrumming black body, its gossamer wings burning like electricity—but she could not pull the creature free from Nappy’s head. Its pincers had dug into the old man’s face. He yanked at them, and they clawed deeper. From the papule under its mad splatter of eyes, its stinger thrust, scoring Nappy’s scalp in a bloody welt. She wanted to let go, to grab a rock, a stick, anything to beat at it, but she dared not. Only her grip kept the spider from puncturing Nappy’s skull. She cried out.
A gruff hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her aside. The bearded man shoving past her brandished a laser pistol, which he slammed against the zōtl. Red stun bolts spun the spider over the ice, and a blue bolt smashed the zōtl to green viscera.
Nappy sat up, fingers touching his gashed face, staring with amazement at the stranger. “Thank you, sojourner,” he spoke in a hush, recognizing the red vest and gray uniform of the Ordo Vala.
Chan-ti bent over Nappy, assured herself that he was intact, and gazed up with gratitude at the sojourner. “You saved our lives.”
“As you’d have done for me.” A compassionate smile glinted in his beard. He spoke a glottal language neither of the Foke understood, while the translator in the brocade of his vest compensated simultaneously. He un-slung his backpack and tugged out a blanket roll. “My name is Buie.” He gave the blanket to Nappy and set his laser pistol to warm the air around them. From a medical kit, he applied antiseptic and astringent to Nappy’s face wounds while listening to their introductions.
“You’ve leaped seven hundred years ahead in time,” Buie calculated, amazed. “I can only wonder where Ned O’Tennis’ torque flung him.” He removed a sheaf of papers from his pack and began scribbling with a red pen. “Addenda to the Utility Manual,” he explained. “Annals of my travels in the Overworld. I must record what you’ve told me. I’ve never heard the likes of such an historic event before. Prisoners of Saor! You’ve actually seen the Face of Night— you’ve seen the capture of Fire.” He shook his head with astonishment.
“That’s an archaic method,” Nappy commented, nodding at the sheaf of scribbled pages.
“Recorders are unreliable out here,” Buie answered. “Lynk passage sometimes scrambles magnetic memory. Better to write—” He broke off to remove a canteen and a carton of dried food. “Forgive me. I’m thinking only of myself. In all my travels, this is surely the most profound encounter I’ve had—far more intriguing than even the Tryl I once spoke with.”
Over a meal of white spinach, snake jerky, and berry wine, Buie told his story. “So, you see, I have no home. I wander for the Ordo Vala.”
“Then you would not mind wandering with us?” Nappy asked. The warmth and the meal had revived him, and his eyes had regained something of their sparkle. “We would return to the Eyelands on Valdëmiraën.”
Chan-ti passed him a questioning glance. Buie asked the question on her mind: “Why return to your past? The Foke you knew then are surely not there.”
“I’m too tired now for a long journey through the Overworld, back to my own time. I would be happy enough to find the place if not the time. There I can die in peace.”
“Nappy—”Chan-ti frowned at him. “Let death find us.”
“It has, my daughter. You are my daughter—though Spooner Yegg sired you, I fathered you. You are Foke as I am. It is time now for us to return to the Foke—or, at least, to their favorite haunt. There my body of light will leave behind the muck of this existence. My wife, my other children have gone ahead of me. They wait for me in the fields of light. For them, as for all migrant Foke, the grave is our only homeland.”
The Ghost That Hatched His Havoc as He Flew
While Gai slept, she dreamed. Back on the range, on her parents’ farm, she watched the opalescent sky shimmer with warmth and loveliness over rambling fields and feather-limbed forests. Alone in the far dell, she played with her imaginary friends under fluttery auroras. A child again in her dream, she had returned to a time before loss, before suffering, before zōtl.
The euphoria of Gai’s dream leaked energy into the near-vacuum of the void around her. Her Rimstalker brain waves resonated at a magnitude so intense, relative to the cold of outer space, that they empowered patterns in the ubiquitous tesseract-field. Waveforms of extinct species glimmered brighter, assuming shapes they had worn during their lives. On Know-Where-to-Go, ghost-forests appeared and wraiths of dinosaurs and herd animals roamed.
Towerbottom Library, a scientific commune during the Rust Age, did not understand the phenomenon. The phantom landscapes that came and went like mirages on the night-held planet baffled the researchers. Among the shades of extinct fern forests, spectral skyscrapers appeared and thatch-roofed villages, teepees, longhouses, hogans, and igloos. Jeweled in ghostly auras, the people of Earth wandered out of their dwellings, bewildered and glittering under the silver cartwheel of the galaxy.
*
Mooker Jee, chief of bio-sciences at Towerbottom Library, had been fund-raising among the sky-cities of the Ioli Planetesimals when the ghosts materialized on Know-Where-to-Go. The message recalling him stated simply: “Mooker: Return at once. Lugar.”
Lugar Descanso, one of the very few military-mode numans who had survived the purge of the Crystal Mind during the Age of Dominion, served as staff director of Towerbottom Library, responsible for coordinating research projects for the 526 technologists who worked and resided in the Library and its environs. From its perch in deep space, the Library compiled data on Chalco-Doror, the Milky Way, and the island galaxies beyond, as well as planning an escape route from the doomed worlds other than through the unstable lynk system.
“We could reach the stars if we would just coordinate,” Lugar had complained to Mooker Jee prior to sending him on his fund-raising mission. “Everyone knows we are just cockroaches on a Rimstalker warship. We’ve got to get out while we can.”
“There are still fifteen centuries to go, Lugar,” Mooker Jee had responded. They had been outside, in the hilly park that surrounded the ivy-covered parapet of the Library. The great structure loomed against the rustling stars like the conning tower of a vast submarine. “In that time, with the progress we’re making on the magravity drive and ramstat, we could build a whole civilization among the stars.”
Lugar shook his head sadly, and in the dark his sad eyes glowed like gray coals. “After all the centuries I have endured in Chalco-Doror, I have less faith in time than in fate,” he admitted, and the cold timbre of his voice pimpled the skin at the back of his confidante’s neck. “Anything can happen here, Mooker. Anything at all.”
To hear a numan speaking of fate had spooked Mooker Jee. Mooker had been a hooper in Dakkar during his life on Earth and had never quite abandoned his faith in qismah, the predetermined destiny of all created beings. As a scientist, he enjoyed exploring the causal roots of phenomena, while in his soul he still felt the tugs of a secret order. Now the terse message he had received seemed so fraught with urgency that he decided against the days-long flight into deep space and dared to enter a lynk on Ras Mentis.
The lynk-maps indicated a possible crossing to Know-Where-to-Go from that particular lynk on Ras Mentis, and though the holoform in the portal drizzled with static, Mooker went through. The next moment, as he came out, his heart jumped at what met him, and he thought he had blundered into the Overworld. Heraldic shimmerings of light patterned the dark terrain. Mooker had to stare a long time before he realized that he was looking at the glowing shapes of terrene landscapes superimposed on the familiar hills of Know-Where-to-Go.
A ramstat flyer conveyed him to Towerbottom Library. The psybot pilot had no information about the ghosts,
and, most spooky of all, there were no humans at the lynk station or in the flyer to fill him in. Below, the land crawled with shapeshifting holograms of phantom cities, cathedrals, wheat fields, and rice paddies. At one point, an Aeroflot jetliner swooped directly at them—and right through them. Mooker shouted with alarm to the pilot, who did not seem to see the apparition.
Spectral images ruffled like auroras in a solar wind, obscuring Towerbottom Library. As the flyer descended, Mooker spotted herds of zebra and caribou, a line of lanky hunters leaning on their spears, and the jeweled hub of Times Square teeming with luminescent crowds on avenues that ran off into jungles where behemoths browsed.
The flyer touched down in the ramstat field behind the Library, and when Mooker Jee disembarked, his father awaited him. Like Mooker, a tall, narrow man with hollowed cheeks, large ears, and stubbly beard—he dressed in the loose, baggy trousers, rush sandals, collarless shirt, and pugaree headscarf that he had worn in life.
“Mooker, why have you come here?” the elderly man asked in the dialect they had shared and that Mooker had not heard in this lifetime.
Mooker froze and gaped at the familiar, tired lineaments of his father, who had died of fever on Earth when Mooker was eleven and his father already over sixty. “Father—is this really you?”
“Yes, Mooker, it is I,” he replied, honest as day, large browngold eyes bright with joy and sadness. “My chest is soaked dark with love for you.”
That expression his father had often used with him. Hearing it again, Mooker’s heart almost exploded with amazement, and he reached out to embrace his father. His arms closed on emptiness—though his father remained standing serenely before him.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 40