Nila appeared in the doorway and admonished the muddy boy. He accepted the fern bundle she handed him and began scraping the muck from his face and arms. Done, he took Ned’s arm and led him to the side of the cottage. There, beside a storage bin, at a tool shed with an antler of antennae, the youth unlatched the door and proudly displayed his workshop: a bench with a handful of drivers, pliers, and coiled wire, a stack of electronic manuals in a language Ned did not recognize, and a crude radio with a crystal rectifier, plate battery, and broadcast mike.
Through an earpiece, Ned listened to a scratchy, incomprehensible female voice. Then the boy offered his tools, and Ned pried open the translator. With a spurt of joy, he confirmed that the microcomponents functioned unimpeded. The slug had only dented the plasteel housing, and the fiber-bundle nerving the dot speakers had been misaligned. With a wire serving as a probe, he nudged the bundle back into its galvanic track. “That should do it,” he tested, and the dot speakers spoke with the modulation of a human voice in the language they had been translating before the interruption.
The boy’s eyes widened. “I understand you!” He peered down into the tiny device, at the salmon-pink speakers fine as pollen on the green gel-tab where the hair-thin fiber-bundle dissolved into plasma circuits. “How does this work?”
“I’ll explain later,” Ned answered, “best I can. I’m not a tech specialist.”
“You’re a sky-fighter,” the boy said. “I recognize your uniform.” He pointed to the Thunderhawk sigil on Ned’s shoulderpad. “I’ve read about the Aesirai since I was a kid—but I didn’t believe any of you were still around.”
“What’s your name, young man?”
“Holub—but everyone calls me Worm. Are you really an Aesirai sky-fighter?”
“I was, till I lost my strohlkraft. Now I’m just a wanderer.” He snapped the housing into place on the translator and inserted it in the breastflap of his suit. “You can call me Ned. Maybe you can tell me where we are.”
“Twenty-one degrees north latitude, Sakai.”
“And the year?”
“Local time probably wouldn’t mean anything to you. It’s twelve years since the rain of centipede-snakes. That’s when I was born and why they call me Worm.”
“You know about Doror Standard?”
“That’s the timescale the observatory on Ren uses. You were just listening to their comet-watch broadcast. Let’s see, my friend Rego would know. He has a larger radio in the next village and can even talk with operators on the far side. I think he told me once. It’s something like 2989 or 2998. That make sense?”
Ned nodded and walked out of the shed. “Where’s Dreux?”
Worm gave him a peculiar look. “The planet inside Ioli’s orbit? That blew up a long time ago. Those comets are all that’s left. One of the smaller ones hit us on the far side last year. That’s why the wells spilled over. Where are you from, anyway?”
“N’ym,” he replied, walking back toward Nila’s cottage.
“The Falling City? How’d you get out of there?”
“I left before it fell.”
“That was ages ago!” Worm almost squealed. “You must be ancient.”
The Free, who had returned to tilling their fields, stopped to watch the stranger walking and talking with Worm. They left their hoes and oxen and sludged through the mud toward the cottage. Soon the entire village gathered before Nila’s cottage. There, with Pahang sitting on the stoop with his helmet in his lap and rifle propped in the doorway, Ned told their story. Much had to be explained, for though Nila and Worm were adequately informed, the illiterate others had until lately been uninterested in affairs beyond their serfdom.
Nila’s husband, Worm’s father, had assisted the steward of the lords and had traveled once through the lynk to Ren. There, in a small colony of survivalists, he had seen a copy of the Utility Manual, visited the observatory that watched for deadly meteor flocks, and returned with a radio kit for his son. The demon-lords had killed him during their raid. In the intervening year, Nila had assumed his role as the Free’s leader.
“You will stay with us?” she asked.
Ned shared a hapless look with Pahang. “We have nowhere else to go without our ship. And if we step through the lynk, we might disappear from Chalco-Doror. We jumped fifteen hundred standard years last time. If this really is the year 3000 Doror, then there’s only five hundred years left before the Rimstalker collapses the worlds.”
“Worlds without end,” one of the men quoted. “The priests of Saor were here in my grandfather’s father’s time, and that’s what they promised.”
“Look for yourself,” Ned told them and pointed to the sky. “Dreux is already gone.”
“These are the endtimes,” an old woman moaned. “The endtimes foretold by the Oracles.”
“What will we do?” Worm asked.
“Same as ever, Holub,” Nila answered. “Five hundred years is the same as five million to us. If we are to eat next season, we must sow now. And the work will go easier with our two new workers.”
With that, the Free cheered; each of them clasped Ned and Pahang by their shoulders and returned to the fields to bring in the oxen. The clouds Ned had seen earlier swelled overhead, and big dollops of rain began to fall. Pahang stripped out of his armor and hurried to help Nila and Worm gather chickens from the grassy roof and lead them to their coop. This familiar work reminded him of the life and the people he had known in his first life, nothing more than a memory.
Ned stood in the doorway and watched the Free guide their oxen into rickety stables. Where was Chan-ti? How could he have let her go when she had been in his arms? Frustration choked off his breath. He lifted his face into the rain and let his tears flow.
Lightning forked over the lynk. Sheets of rain swept the muddy terrain, lifting an odor of earth at once comforting and lonely. Thunder throbbed. Far off, on the flat horizon, a passage of sunlight scrolled out of the sky, and, for a few moments, Ned could read beauty in it.
*
Tully Gunther shared the scyldar Neter Col’s body with a zōtl. The spider’s alien thoughts chimed like insane music in the human’s brain. Tully kept very still. When he thought, the zōtl became angry and dug its pain sharper into his cortex. Silence served as Tully’s mask. Behind it, he watched. He looked out through Neter Col’s healed faceplate as the nongyls stitched a new arm into place. It felt like ticklish stabs when their needleteeth chewed his socket, attaching tendons and nerves. Not breathing but floating in the vats’ nucleic broth felt nearly bodiless Then he boosted out of the buoyancy and stagger-stepped through the cold arteries of the Dragon’s Shank, up long spirals, to the grotesque citadel of Perdur.
Standing before the hell-hole ringed with tormented human heads, under a vault of broken bodies, Tully Gunther existed as the silence inside Neter Col. The zōtl in his chest twitched with unreadable thoughts, then stepped the scyldar into the lynk shaft. The scyldar fell briefly before solid ground thrust it upright. It strode into the seamless night of Mugna’s north pole. Ahead he entered the hamlet where the Brood of Night had dwelled. No distorts stirred there now. Gone or seized by the other zōtl. The renegade spiders had fled Perdur when there were no more humans to mount for sustenance.
Neter Col walked into the thick dark of the hamlet, maneuvering by the red glow of infravision. A finned, asymmetrical sleekness sat in the middle of the street. Tully recognized it as a strohlkraft. Its gullwing hatch opened. The nongyls clustering along its underbelly peeled away and dragged their still-glowing metal torches and plasteel plates after them. They had repaired the vehicle.
The scyldar entered the ship and closed the hatch. Spider thoughts knotted and unknotted as Neter Col surveyed the flight console. He strapped himself into one of the slings and activated the ramstat cells. The console glittered to life, filling the flight pod with its multihued shadows. Outside the visor, the black terrain lit up eerily in blue fireshadows from the ship’s thrusters.
Hands
guided by the zōtl, Neter Col floated the strohlkraft along the street toward the redrock dolmen through which they had come. The ship passed under the massive mantle of rock, and the darkness burst into gray space and rainbow streaks of energy. A moment later, blue sky surrounded them, console lights dimmed, and the ramstat engines whined to silence.
Neter Col glided the strohlkraft over a chain of lakes and into the foothills of a mountain range. They came down on a grassy moraine and rolled to a stop. A bar screen on the console showed their coordinates: 2998 Doror—Sakai, followed by a string of alphanumeric position ciphers.
The scyldar’s black fingers typed a command into the computer: Search and find pilot.
Instantly, the display read, Ned O’Tennis, present within search limits, five hundred kilometers, north, northeast.
Neter Col shut down the flight pod and hung motionless in the sling, waiting for the ramstat cells to charge. Spider thoughts flexed and twitched. And Tully Gunther sat in the silence of the scyldar as in an empty grave.
*
With the help of the Ordo Vala, Gai gathered an army and sent them to attack the remaining zōtl on Know-Where-to-Go. Powered by strohlkraft and proton weaponry that Gai had located with her plasma body in hidden caches among the worlds, the strike force triumphed. They sustained heavy casualties, but they succeeded in destroying almost all the zōtl on Know-Where-to-Go before that planet reached the apogee of its last orbit. Gai directed them from her base on Elphame, and there that she received the sojourner Buie and Foke wanderer Chan-ti Beppu.
Gai’s attack base sat in the caldera of an extinct volcano overlooking a bronze sea, where whales and aquatic saurians breached in smoky arcs. A natural lynk to Know-Where-to-Go shafted the caldera’s back wall in the form of an enormous vent. Below it, the humans that the Ordo Vala had gathered stationed their airfield and covey of attack craft. Chan-ti and Buie came through that lynk and met a group of armored warriors. Buie surrendered his laserbolt pistol and both were thoroughly searched before being led out onto the airstrip.
In the perpetual twilight of Elphame’s southern hemisphere, scarlet tufts of cirrus streaked an orange sky. Briny breezes reared up from the saffron sea, tainted with cankerous odors of engine oil and welders’ fumes. The lynk wanderers followed a footpath under the rim of the crater that curved down to the airfield. The scream of a test-firing thruster unfolded petulant echoes, then whinnied to silence. At the bottom of the long path, a hovercart waited to carry them down the volcano to a coral bay of crisscrossed palms.
The armored driver said they were expected, but he would answer no further questions. After the hovercart deposited them and swung away, they stood alone. Gai watched them silently and invisibly for a while. She recognized Chan-ti Beppu from Ned O’Tennis’ memory of her, when Gai had met the last Aesirai during her one trip into the Overworld to program his strohlkraft’s computer. Ned had visualized her so clearly: a peculiar human (Gai thought), her hair streaked, eyes braced by wire lenses, features not as symmetrical as Gai supposed human beauty required. But Ned loved this woman in a way somehow beyond romance. He had risked, maybe lost, his life for her, for here she was without him. What did The Book of Horizons say? Where love reaches its limit, loyalty begins.
Two ghosts hummed like heat behind Chan-ti. Nappy Groff and Spooner Yegg appeared to the Rimstalker as vaporous plasma shapes with human contours. Gai had seen human plasma forms only rarely, for the effort required to hold together in the cold of space few could maintain very long. Amazingly, these two shivered and anguished before her. Touching them, Gai absorbed their knowing, and her awareness washed back to them.
The ghosts wanted to die. They were utterly worn out. They had become almost as clear as the emptiness holding them. Such small lives, human beings. Smaller than the intellect and compassion of the Tryl. Smaller than the voracious intellect of the zōtl. Small in their minds but huge in their hunger, these humans had come this far for the love of Chan-ti Beppu, their child.
Father-love Gai could understand. She had tasted that as a child herself, and its absence added to the strength that had carried her this far in her war against the spiders. What was it the ghosts wanted for their shared child? The answer came to Gai with their knowing. Ned O’Tennis lived—or had at least until recently. They wanted what Chan-ti wanted—to find the Aesirai.
Spooner and Nappy ached with cold. The Rimstalker appeared to them as a fountain of heat, a thermal cascade washing over them, dissolving them. The warmth made the crystal brightness of the world brighter. In moments, that warmth could make them bleed away entirely, and so they pulled back into the throbbing hurt of the cold, clinging to each other to keep from falling apart. They had achieved what they had come for. Gai’s awareness, which they partially shared, assured them she sympathized. Already they could feel in the shaken air her alien sentience bringing her memory of Ned O’Tennis to bear on the vacuum that permeated all things. Among the brimming energies of Chalco-Doror, they felt Gai’s recall of Ned harmonize with the pulse of a single waveform. The ghosts, satisfied, pulled back deeper into the imperishable cold.
Chan-ti and Buie had sat down on a bench of driftwood and stared mutely out to sea when the Rimstalker materialized. Gai assumed the appearance of a pale woman with black hair that fell to her ankles. Her white raiment ruffled in an unfelt, electric breeze, and where it parted revealed nothing, emptiness. As she came drifting up the beach out of the sea, Chan-ti and Buie leaped to their feet.
“At ease, people.” Gai kept her voice soft and reassuring. She looked at Chan-ti and said, “I know why you are here. The ghosts of your fathers have presented your need.”
“My fathers?” Chan-ti frowned, momentarily confused. The sight of this humanoid apparition with glaring white skin, space-dark hair, and eyes like starpoints startled her. “Spooner and Nappy?”
“I have communed with their ghosts,” Gai confirmed, stopping several paces away. “They are strong in their love, those men. They live on beyond their bodies to assure that you are fulfilled.”
Chan-ti’s heart tripped. “They know the mysteries of the body of light. May I speak with them?”
“Their plasma shapes almost dissolved in my presence,” Gai replied. “I dare not call them close again.”
Buie held his arms out, and his fingertips tufted with blue and green brush discharges of electricity.
“You have come for my help,” Gai understood, “but it is I who need your help.”
“Ned O’Tennis found the O’ode for you,” Chan-ti pointed out.
“He told us that, when he came for me on the Dragon’s Shank—”
“It’s true,” Gai conceded. “The O’ode destroyed the zōtl nest world. Since then, I have been cleaning up the spiders that remained behind. And I have been almost entirely successful. In fact, you’ve arrived at a time when only a few dozen zōtl remain on Know-Where-to-Go.” She told the humans about the static-generator that the zōtl had constructed to imprison her Form. “None of my raids have been able to knock out that generator. You are here at my most desperate moment. I contemplated a personal attack. But now you remind me that Ned O’Tennis is still alive. Perhaps the luck that carried him to the O’ode can take me to the static-generator.”
“Then Ned is alive?” Chan-ti asked in a swell of joy.
“Yes. I have already found him. He is alive and in our time; on Sakai.”
Chan-ti turned to Buie. “Can we go there?”
“I will take you there myself,” Gai added, “if you will convince Ned to help me destroy the static-generator.”
Chan-ti’s jaw pulsed. “I can’t promise that. Ned has already gotten you the O’ode. He’s taken enough risks.”
Buie leaned forward. “I will help you,” he promised, earnestly.
Gai blew a sigh. “Thank you, sojourner. There are many others here who would help me. But as they go through the lynks to Know-Where-to-Go, they are killed by the waiting zōtl. Air attacks are useless. They devastate the su
rface but cannot penetrate the labyrinth that leads to the grotto where the generator sits. I was becoming despondent, until you recalled to me Ned O’Tennis. With his temporal torque, he might be able to leap ahead through time and enter the grotto undetected.”
“It is a worthy strategy,” Buie agreed. To Chan-ti, he said, “We should at least present this to Ned and let him decide.”
“I’m afraid he will do it,” Chan-ti confessed. “I’m just afraid of losing him again.”
Gai nodded compassionately. “Of course, dear. But first, we must find him.”
*
Nappy Groff and Spooner Yegg manifested on Sakai. Though their bodies of light did not have nearly the power of the Rimstalker’s gel body, less encumbered they could travel anywhere at the speed of light. In a short while, they found the crude village in the sludgy terrain where Ned O’Tennis and Pahang lived. Battered with cold, the ghosts floated over the furrowed fields.
Ned and Pahang had used their laser weapons to clear away boulders and tree roots and to plow the ground. The first seedlings glimmered green upon the red loam. In the village, the two men worked with the Free to repair cottages and stables. In a short time, they had become valuable adopted members of the small and struggling society. Pahang and Nila recognized something in each other that drew them closer. The Malay often followed her about the village, helping with her chores, sharing work and laughter with her. No one was surprised when he moved in with her.
At night, Ned slept in Worm’s radio shed and stared up through the window at needles of light from the meteor debris of Dreux. By day, the boy shadowed him, asking endless questions about the Aesirai, N’ym, strohlkraft, and the war with the rebels. Ned answered patiently. His past troubled him only when he thought of Chan-ti. Never far from his mind, she kept him worrying that the zōtl had seized her or that she and Nappy had wound up on some wild world, the victims of distorts.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 45