Hazim accompanied the security officers to Loryn’s apartment, but when they got there, she had already gone. With her flat undisturbed and nothing missing, it became clear that she had departed the moment Hazim had left, taking nothing with her. The stop-order at the Library lynk came too late. Loryn had already crossed. Lynklane memory showed that she had gone to Valdëmiraën, just as she had told him she would. But at Valdëmiraën, Hazim learned she had crossed again, this time to Mugna. She had lied to him when she had told him her personal flyer waited on Valdëmiraën.
At Mugna, Hazim arrived in time to follow her ice-sled to the ramstat flyer. He reached the lift-pad only minutes after she launched. Standing in the razoring cold, he stared up at the darkness blazing through the stars and wept.
*
Loryn’s broadcast began soon after her departure. Hazim tuned in from Towerbottom Library and listened to her voice and her obscure ideas with a lorn attentiveness. Only the opening phrase came through clearly: “Do you remember how this Earth once looked? Remember how there was once only one sky and how we raised our hands to it in praise of the unknown and the blue flame seared thin tracks on our palms?”
The signal slowly began to stretch and had to be collected over many days: “Remember the lightning-scarred armor, remember the death-smells of panther night-swamps, the lung-blistering journeys across unnamed deserts, the suffering that became the remote blood and pitiless gaze of our children, now our ancestors.” Then weeks: “Their wanderings cross the width of your hand.” And months: “Their memory is your face, and their stamina is the cadence of all things vanishing.” And finally years: “They are solid as the iron-old Earth—and they are empty—because only mystery survives us.”
By then, Hazim had abandoned his post at the Library and taken up residence in a seacliff village on Elphame, where he could avoid the criticisms of his colleagues and devote all his time to collecting the broadcasts from Loryn and the Falling City. He earned his livelihood using his expensive radio equipment as a beacon for fishing vessels that harbored under the mammoth cliffs of the village.
Decades swung by, and he garnered a full story from the Falling City and another passage from Loryn’s endless voyage: “Here in the mansions of nothing, we share a dream called life. The dream rises up within us when we lie down. It enters when we leave. Its name is your tongue—and its message is this: Break the evil of fear or be broken. Discipline madness. Reward the able. And remember the dream that has no reality and whose reality you—for now —are.”
*
Shortly after collecting this message of Loryn’s, Hazim received a bizarre visitor. Alone in his tower station, door locked behind him, he soldered circuitry that the salt air had begun to corrode. A footfall sat him upright. There before him stood a manshaped shadow twice as large as a man.
“You know who I am?” the shadow asked in a voice that rattled the window panes.
Hazim dropped his soldering iron and searched in his lungs for his voice. At last he squeaked, “You are Saor.”
“I am. And I am come to win you as my ally.”
Hazim’s voice fumbled out of him: “I thought—I thought your mind was gone—eaten by a zōtl viral program.”
“Indeed I pretend to have lost my mind to blunt the edge of the Rimstalker’s advantage. I have been silent these many years, waiting for this chance. Now that it is come, I am here to win your support.”
“Me? I—I’m nobody.”
“Soon you will be one of Chalco-Doror’s legends. Unless you are already an ally of the Rimstalker.”
“I never thought about it.”
“Think.”
“I—I don’t know what to say, what to think. I’m just a radio operator.”
“I am willing to win you to my side, Hazim. I believe I can help you in a real way—and in return, then, you will help me.”
“How? How can you help me?”
“Loryn is in my field. I can arrange to return her to you.”
“My God—she must be dead by now. It’s been forty years. Surely she’s struck the event horizon by now.”
“No. Her trajectory is taking her in an infinite spiral down the time-well of my Form. She will fall forever.”
“But forty years have passed! Her flyer could not possibly be equipped to sustain her that long.”
“Forty years have lapsed here in Chalco-Doror. But for her in the whorl of spacetime only days have passed. She can be recovered with my assistance.”
Loryn lives! That thought echoed across forty years of memory, and the anguish of those lost years without her buffeted in Hazim like the beginnings of a heart attack. He rubbed a fist against his chest. Forty years of love—no, not love but obsession, he realized. She had not let him love her. There had been no time. Time—that was what Saor offered him—time to redeem his lifelong obsession with love. Would she not love him at last once he saved her? His face bloated with joy. “What must I do to have her back?”
“Obey me.”
Hazim chewed a knuckle. “You will ask me to stand against the Rimstalker. I know it.”
“Have you qualms about preserving these worlds for human occupation? The Rimstalker will destroy these planets soon.”
“But the zōtl—I could not be the one who brought those monsters back. I could not.”
“You have not that power, mereling. What I want of you is to help me save these worlds. If you refuse me, I will surely find someone else.”
Hazim tugged at his fingers and gnawed his lower lip. The shadowshape began to fade, and he shouted: “Wait! Saor!” Darkness thickened, and Hazim’s small hairs twitched. “I will not be the one who brings the zōtl back? It will not be me? Promise me that.”
“You have not that power, mereling. Will you save these worlds?”
“For Loryn. If you give Loryn back to me, I will obey you—I swear it.”
The shadow vanished.
Hazim, who had been crouching behind his equipment, rose and extended his hands toward the space where Saor had stood. The air tingled coldly. A voice opened in his head: “Now do precisely as I say and soon you will be with your Loryn again.”
Saor directed Hazim to a thorn-down forest on Nabu, which, following the voice in his head, Hazim cut through with a laser torch. Deep within, he came upon an abandoned village, time-scorched buildings overgrown with dense lichen, tiled roofs caved in, walls awry, and the crepuscular, thorn-netted sky above it squeaking with bats.
In a cellar that caved down deeper into the ground than the laser torch could illumine, Hazim located a dizzy flight of stone stairs. Chilly with fright, he descended the blind spiral. At its bottom, a red lynk pulsed with the rhythm of a sleeping heart. Hazim stepped through it into the Overworld.
Gray emptiness extended vacuously in every direction. Only one object hovered in the void—a pod, silvery black and sleek as a dolphin. Hazim touched it, and his body shook violently with cold. Using the straps that Saor’s voice had instructed him to carry, he harnessed the pod and dragged it after him backward one step.
He arrived again in the dark shaft beneath the caved-in cellar of the abandoned village at the black heart of the thorn-down forest on Nabu. With his laser torch, he prepared to cut the seams on the pod—but that was not necessary. The pod cracked open, and an icy green light streamed out.
Hazim knew then what his innermost self had suspected all along: that Saor had lied to him—that Loryn was not in the pod. He backed up a step and ignited the laser torch.
The pod burst apart, and the force of sour air that escaped threw him to his back against the stone steps and knocked the laser torch from his grip. When he sat up, his face fit painfully into the pincer claws of a zōtl, and his last mortal sound was a scream.
Age of Phantoms
Every consciousness is a bundle of waveforms unique to that awareness, a signature of light writ in the vacuum that carries everything. . . . When our bodies are gone, the waveforms remain, forever. . . . You are the light of t
he world.
—Yeshua ben Miriam, from Interviews at the End of Time
In the Seventh Age
Gai woke from her long sleep. Her last memory focused on grappling with Saor, burning with cold where their plasma shapes had locked, and collapsing before the mad noise of the zōtl. Shoved unconscious by rages of pain, she had lost all sense of time. Her Form’s chronometer displayed numerics she needed to orient herself. She had been comatose over three days—almost eight hundred years of local time. Know-Where-to-Go had begun its sixth fly-through of Chalco-Doror. She lived in the Seventh Age.
Buoyantly, Gai recalled Loryn’s poisoning of the zōtl nest world with the O’ode, and she activated her memory log to see what had transpired since. Her view-field showed an off-world perspective of Doror. Lod’s Form blazed whitehot among a cloud of planetesimals and the stately orbs of Ioli, Dreux, and Ras Mentis. The memory clip accelerated, and she watched in horror as the tawny sphere of Dreux sparked with explosions. The nightside of the planet strobed with fiery flashes.
At first, Gai thought the planet suffered nuclear attack. As the clip sped forward, she realized Dreux in fact sustained an attack but far more cataclysmically than she had guessed. The world’s orbit had been warped to steer it into the rock swarms. At an ever-increasing rate, mountains fell out of the sky and impacted Dreux. Years of bombardment compressed to moments, and Gai witnessed a holocaust of spuming fire as the collision of larger asteroids ignited the atmosphere and shattered the planetary crust. The pressurized core vented in a nova of magma, and Dreux blasted apart, sending comets and bright streamers of planetsmoke shooting among the worlds.
The zōtl had finally deciphered Lod’s program codes. There could be no other explanation. The spiders used Lod to crash the system. Already, the blows of Dreux’s cometary shards destabilized the other planets. Soon the entire system would disintegrate. Unless Lod’s control reasserted itself immediately, Gai’s vessel would be damaged too severely to carry her home. She would die in outer space.
Gai determined to use her Form to retrieve her machine mind from captivity. Now that the great swarms of zōtl had been exterminated, she could dare leave the protective grotto, where the Tryl’s lynklock had thwarted the spiders’ efforts to attack her. She could fend off the few zōtl that remained, and her Form’s many functions would empower her to fly unmolested among the worlds, clearing out the last pockets of enemy resistance. She should have used her Form three days ago and would have if she had been reasoning. The elation she had experienced after the O’ode eradicated the zōtl’s home world had inebriated her.
All elation vapored away at the sight of Dreux smashed to cosmic debris. She willed her Form to rise from the grotto where it had lain dormant these past millennia of real time, seventeen days of Form-time—but the Form would not move. She tried again, with all her willful might, and the Form did not budge. Panic whirled up in her.
After checking all her displays and noting nothing awry, she stepped out of her Form and into her plasma shape. She rose, and as she came through the rock wall, she had only a moment to glimpse a complex of black plates hairy with arcs of blue voltage before a spidery shape loomed from the grotto darkness. A bolt of frosty green laser light stabbed her with pain, and she blacked out.
When she came to, she lay in her Form. The time-standard showed that hours had elapsed. Time melted away. She had to act swiftly.
Moving laterally through the rock strata, Gai penetrated the width of the planet and came out not far from where the zōtl had once bored into the crust with a proton drill. The hilt of dawn lifted above the torn landscape, and the sky ignited into a clutter of planets and planetoids and, beyond those luminous spheres, the maelstrom of the galaxy.
From there, Gai explored Know-Where-to-Go invisibly, cautiously. Zōtl bulb-architecture blistered whole tracts of land, and the spiders flew in flocks among their nests. Flying high in the sky, where the ionosphere masked her electrostatic profile, she surveyed Towerbottom Library in ruins. Evidence of a recent battle overlay the scars of ancient conflicts that time had rubbed into the landscape. She glided down toward the crater-pocked hills and the jumble of twisted girders, shattered battlements, and stubby walls of melted plasteel.
Slipping like a trickle of water among collapsed bulwarks and cracked foundation stones, Gai descended toward the grotto where her Form resided, immobilized. Pooling in a cachement of plasteel that had drooled and hardened in the cavern above her Form’s grotto, she spied the zōtl device that she had only glimpsed before: a rickety thing, a precariously stacked tower of black plates standing atop each other and bristling with bluebright voltage. She recognized cables of Tryl coiling and realized that the spiders had rigged this apparatus from lynk components and Tryl relics: a simple but powerful static-generator. Gai’s invisible plasma shape hackled with starpoints of condensed field-potential from the crude generator, and she had to slide through the cavern wall to avoid being seen.
Somehow the zōtl had hooked the static-generator to the lynklock below, creating a jamming signal that paralyzed her Form. Grateful that the spiders had not had the resources to penetrate the lynklock or blow up the planet during her coma, she still cherished a chance of saving herself—and not just herself. Her memory log had informed her that all the Genitrix systems that had preceded hers had failed. None had gotten beyond their fifth stroke. Also, several new Genitrix systems had come on in the galaxy, signifying that her victory over the zōtl in her corner of the cosmos had indeed helped her fellow Rimstalkers.
She had to return to the range to share with her leaders her insights into her victory. Convinced that Tryl artifacts had supplied the deciding factor in her triumph over the zōtl, she prepared to report that, without a sufficiently advanced technology indigenous to outer space, the bait used to lure the spiders could too easily turn against the Rimstalker pilot. Were it not for the Tryl lynks and the lynklock that had protected her Form, the zōtl would have broken her familiar Rimstalker defenses, and her fate would be one with the nightmare of Ylan and the others who had come before her.
Gai needed help, and quickly. She left Know-Where-to-Go at once and flew into the misty suspension of shining planets. She wandered the worlds and determined for herself that the great cities of the previous ages were no more. They had been picked clean by centuries of scavengers. Cendre had reverted to a swamp world, its factories and crystal-faceted capital collapsed into mire, reduced to skeletal girders hung with tattered vegetation. Ras Mentis, again a desert, its extensive irrigation system long ago clogged with silt, the vast fields of harvest had collapsed to salt beds, where dunes migrated and where the wind’s toys—cactus husks, mesquite, and sword-grass—lay bunched in drifts among the ruins of farm cities. Ylem and Sakai once more were jungles, a green rage that had long before vanquished all human settlements. And Ioli’s proud sky-cities, the opulent space palaces built by mining magnates of earlier centuries, had decayed to empty shells, destroyed by pirates, internecine wars, and, finally, the meteor bombardments of Dreux’s death-throes.
On Ren and Vala, Gai found people, but they clustered in shanty-towns lorded over by Saor-priests. They killed distorts on sight and enslaved strangers to labor in the paddies and mines.
In Chalco, despite the propinquity to Saor himself, distort tribes and human settlements that did not tolerate the severe strictures of the Saor-priests populated the worlds. But neither were they receptive to Gai’s pleas for help. They still believed the Saor-priests’ propaganda that Gai was the World Eater, determined to collapse the worlds to fulfill her alien mission. Gai did not report that the zōtl had already assured Chalco-Doror’s doom by using Lod’s program codes to collide the planets.
Though Gai had not been able to contact Genitrix through her Form, the machine intelligence endured intact. Genetrix continued creating a multitude of lifeforms among the Chalco worlds. Huge saurians shambled about the dusky plains of Nabu and swam the twilit seas of Elphame. On Mugna, wooly mammoths and ic
e tigers ranged over snowfields. Rawfaces and longteeth proliferated among the mists of Xappur. Throughout all the worlds of Chalco, people roamed in bands, united against the lethal terrors, both gigantic and microscopic, that Genitrix forged and released with great prolificacy.
At Q’re, while in the depths of her despair, Gai found an enclave of the Ordo Vala. The few, proud survivors of the archaic order, after overcoming their shock, reverently hosted the Rimstalker in their cliffcave sanctuary. Throughout the ages, they had preserved knowledge of the Overworld as well as of Chalco-Doror. From the reports of their sojourners, they had become fully aware of the zōtl’s damnation of Lod and of the coming chaos that would make all life extinct. The entire cadre of sojourners agreed to help Gai, for the Rimstalker assured them that if her Form was freed from the zōtl’s static-generator, she would personally see that every human being, including the distorts, escaped Chalco-Doror before the worlds collapsed.
Once the sojourners had departed, Gai stood under the glitter of heaven and watched the black wind carry comets. The balm of her victory with the O’ode soothed her against the likelihood that she would die out here in the cold. She wondered how the humans who had retrieved the O’ode for her had fared. So many lives, so many pinpoints of awareness, had come and gone against this cosmic backdrop of luminous space. Her death would extinguish just another glint in the dark that colored time.
*
Buie led Chan-ti Beppu and Nappy Groff through the Overworld. Using a palm-sized lynk locator and detailed maps, he guided them safely and without incident through chimerical landscapes haunting the interior spaces between lynks. The passage was the easiest the Foke had known. They still reflexively craned about for distorts, and, where the terrain frayed and became the gray emptiness of a null field, they hesitated. Buie laughed. “You are, indeed, Foke of the past. The zōtl have been broken for well over a thousand years. There are no spiders in the Overworld anymore. Oh, there are some still in Chalco-Doror. Most who remained died of old age long ago. But some have used the lynklanes to travel toward the endtime, to scheme against their nemesis the Rimstalker. I seriously doubt we’ll run into any. I’ve been wandering the Overworld for many years, and I’ve yet to meet a zōtl or anyone else who has.”
The Last Legends of Earth Page 42