The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Listen to his thoughts, old man,” Spooner said to Nappy when they came up on the Aesirai digging post holes in a far field. “He’s worried about you.”

  “Let’s show ourselves.” Nappy trembled more violently at the thought of the effort it would take. “He should know.”

  “You go ahead,” Spooner said. “I’m too tired. It would be my last act.”

  Nappy decided to wait. Their bodies of light drifted, silky with sheer weariness. Even the effort of talking between themselves smudged their already withered strength and set the cold clanging in them.

  Ned straightened above the hole he had dug, sweat dewed on his naked shoulders and streamed over his chest. Worm had never seen a man so pale-skinned before, and while Ned caught his breath they talked about the preferred genotypes of Emir Egil Grimson’s selective breeding program. Ned laughed at Worm’s incredulity that anyone could find such a ludicrous skintone desirable, when thunder trundled out of the south, where no clouds were. Moments later, a plume of black smoke lifted over the horizon from the direction of the nearest village.

  Worm ran for his radio shed and Ned followed. The receiver burred with static as Worm dialed out the Ren observatory and scanned for local broadcasts. “I know an operator in that village,” Worm said. “A meteor must have hit them. They’ll need help.”

  An excited voice jabbered over the receiver, and Ned placed his translator near the earpiece. “... confirm! We are not armed! Stop at once! This is a farm village. We have no weapons. You are killing innocents!”

  Worm switched to broadcast. “Rego! Come in, Rego! What’s happening?”

  “Worm? Worm, it’s horrible! A fighter is strafing us! Laserbolts! Just like in the storybooks. I can’t believe ...” An explosion smothered Rego’s voice and the broadcast ended in a splat of static.

  A strong, horrifying suspicion heaved up in Ned, and he plucked his translator from the radio and barged out of the shed. The zōtl had come for their revenge. He knew his strohlkraft had a pilot-search program keyed to his brainwave-profile, and he understood that it was not precise enough to pinpoint him. If this was his strohlkraft whose temporal torque the zōtl had used to follow him through time, the search program would guide them to this area. They would destroy every village until they killed him.

  As Ned ran to the cottage holding the laser guns, a strohlkraft screamed along the horizon, climbing into the sky above the village. The Malay came charging out of the cottage with the laserifle in his hands and Ned bumped into him, knocking him over,

  Worm dashed up to them. “That’s a strohlkraft!” he shouted, almost with glee. “I’ve seen them in the history albums. Look how fast it’s flying!”

  “Keep everybody low and out of sight,” Ned told Pahang. He dropped the translator in the Malay’s pocket.

  “What are you going to do?” Pahang asked, rising and grabbing Ned’s arm.

  “It’s coming for me,” Ned answered. “If I stay here, we all die.”

  Ned moved to run, and Pahang held him firmly. “Hawk!” Pahang’s stare tightened. “We go together. As we won our freedom. Together, lah.”

  “No, my friend. Here we part.”

  “I will go with you. You cannot stop me.”

  “Goodbye, Pahang.” He shoved the smaller man aside, and when the Malay came at him, determined to follow, Ned leveled the rifle and fired a red bolt. The shot kicked Pahang to the ground, senseless.

  Worm hollered, “What are you doing?” Nila, who had been watching from the doorway, grabbed the boy and locked him in her embrace.

  “It’s all right,” Ned assured them. “He’ll come around in a few minutes.”

  The drone of the strohlkraft silvered closer, and Ned dashed away from the village and startled workers in the gardens, highstepping hard through the muck of the fields, laserifle held before him in both hands. This had all happened so swiftly, he had no time to be afraid. He doubted he could have faced death so readily if he had any time at all to anticipate it.

  The strohlkraft’s raven-shadow rose higher, preparing for a strafing run. He had to get as far away from the village as possible, and he drove himself hard along the ridge of the furrows toward the far fields.

  In the near distance, the lynk gleamed above the grove of scaly trees, where he and Pahang had first arrived. Briefly, he considered sprinting for it—not just for himself but for the hope that he might yet find Chan-ti. That hope rose in a salty mouthful with the exertion of his mad run. Behind him, Worm screamed his name, and the hurt in that voice carried the pain of all broken hopes.

  Nappy’s and Spooner’s ghosts paced Ned. Spooner tried to materialize, to tell the Aesirai that he should break for the lynk, make for the long ways of time, where anything was possible. But his body of light just blurred in the streaming sunlight, and the grueling cold wore him down to a motion-smear. Stricken with helplessness, the wraiths watched the strohlkraft hit the motionless peak of its dive.

  At the moment when Ned was sure the strohlkraft could see him, he stopped running, took aim, and fired. No hope here, either. Even the hottest starblue bolts of the rifle could not pierce the strohlkraft’s visor or hull. All he could expect was that the zōtl would see him, recognize him, kill him, and spare the others. Bravery fit poorly on his disappointed heart. This death he had not foreseen for himself. But then, this life neither.

  Ned got off seven shots, proudly amazed each won their mark. He had not been a bad warrior, he consoled himself. His Viking ancestors would celebrate this death—and he prayed to them, underbreath, with each squeezed shot, to watch after his Chan-ti.

  The strohlkraft fired once. The lightning flash hit Ned and threw him aflame into the mud, a pyre-sprawl of incinerating flesh. In an instant, the blue flames shriveled him to a spark-crawling husk of cindered ribs and charred skull. The fighter craft slashed overhead and arrowed toward the horizon, engine-scream dwindling into blue emptiness.

  Chan-ti and Buie came through the Tryl lynk to the Free’s village a few hours before Gai, who flew in from Elphame. They arrived in the night, after Ned O’Tennis had been buried at the spot where he had fallen. The funeral rites over, incense pots empty, Pahang, Worm, and Nila sat on mourning mats before the scorched laserifle that served as grave marker.

  Pahang recognized Chan-ti from the Dragon’s Shank and knelt weeping before her. He still clutched the directional finder and the attached sender chip that Ned had carried with him during his long travels. When Pahang handed them to her, scorched but intact, Chan-ti knew without being told what had happened and dropped herself onto the mud of the grave. With one hand she pushed her sender chip into the grave, and with the other she pressed the directional finder to her heart.

  Ghost Worlds

  When Rividius stepped out onto the verandah, he came across the ragheads eating an angel, a small one. It had most likely got caught in the razor-tree during the night, and when the ragheads came back from foraging, they must have torn it free: There were still some feathers up in the tree. The ragheads had obviously foraged very little, for they went at it with great gusto, chomping through feathers and hair and crunching bones like gristle.

  Rividius knew better than to disturb hungry ragheads. He edged along the verandah, rifle crooked in his arm and pointed away so they would not get the wrong idea. He had not fired that rifle in twelve years, and he feared it might blow up in his hands. He used it as a walking stick, and to bat away dragonbirds, poke into honeyworm holes, and knock down wind-apples and plums too high for him to reach.

  At the end of the verandah, he straddled the rail and paused to study the balmy sky. Valdëmiraën and Mugna high and Elphame just rising, snagged in the arms of the galaxy. The light from the planetoids and the gold dust of shattered Dreux illuminated sheets of rain in the wind. Dawn came slowly on Nabu, and one could almost count the stars in the spirals as they rose before the brilliant hub broke over the horizon. This time of year, Lod rolled low to the north and provided only a wan red glow.
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br />   Convinced that the night rains dwindled, Rividius bent and hit the cottongrass a few times with his rifle to scare off any cobras or fang-lizards before swinging over the rail. His joints ached as his boots hit the ground and he stagger-stepped almost on tiptoe down the cottongrass incline into the gravelly walkway. He tried to move softly over the gravel as he came around to the front of the frame-lumber house so as not to crunch too loudly and wake his wife Leaf and their young girl, Kaina—as if the ragheads were not making enough noise to wake the whole hamlet. But that was them and not him. He did not want to be the one to wake his family prematurely on larding day. They needed all the rest they could get.

  The night before, Leaf had asked him to gather some rainbowberries and custardroot for breakfast so they would all have the extra energy they would need for the larding. He headed off down the main street of the hamlet, a red slate avenue with murmurs of grass in its numerous cracks. The milk wagon had already trundled into one of the alleys among the mammocked trees that separated the lanes. Not having to discuss the weather and hunting prospects with Pao, the dairy-crone—who ruled the hamlet with the gossip she collected and who disliked Rividius for having so little—would save him many minutes and practically ensure that he reached the rainbowberry patch before the flesh-eating gullets woke.

  At the well, where the slate avenue ended and the land rose into terraced fields, Rividius climbed the stile to the forest path that led to the blackwater tarn. He kept ears perked for dragonbirds, who would be roosting at this hour and irascible enough from the rains to claw at his scalp. He used to wear a hat, an orange derby he had won at quoits from a traveling boot-smith, but it had gotten so old it had begun to grow mushrooms along its brim and Leaf had burned it. Now, when it rained, he covered his sandy hair with waxcloth folded to drain the water away from his face. He kept a square of it tucked in his hip-bag, which went everywhere with him.

  Frogs sobbed from the direction of the tarn, where it was still night, and bright ribbons of bird songs tasseled the forest canopy, where morning descended. The beauty of the immixed opposites stirred Rividius to song, and he hummed and scatted a jaunty tune, following a slender path among gnarly, fungal-gilled trees. Two angels watched him from a high bough near where a hornet hive moaned like an electric engine. Their piscine faces gazed mutely, intrigued by his song, and the amber feathers of their wings twitched as if they contemplated gliding closer. But he did not want their pollen spoor all over him, attracting dart-wasps and glow-puffs that the angels ate, so he stopped singing until he got past them.

  The dirt path rose steadily and occasionally brinked to the ridge overlooking the forest valley and the chain of surrounding hills. From that height, talismans of mist hung from the biggest trees, a scrim to the hub of the galaxy, a blue fire. Rividius did not linger to enjoy the dawn. Soon the gullets would awaken. He trotted the last steep curve of the path though his joints ached and his muscles felt like drying glue. Each morning he had to work hard for a full hour or more before his body woke up. Old, over three hundred years old, he had begun to feel his age. All his strength he focused on seeing his girl grown and married. He did not care if he lived to see her children since he had already witnessed the passing of eight generations of children from his earlier marriages. Pao, the dairy-crone, who must have been a hundred years older yet and who had lost most of her children and theirs during the distort wars, constantly ribbed him for not knowing better at his advanced age than to bring more innocents into these ghost worlds.

  The tarn appeared beyond the knotted boles of the woods. Rividius paused to check that no giant carnivorous saurians lurked about. On the far bank, a triceratops browsed and did not even bother glancing at him. Seraphs, the ethereal, bioluminescent cousins of the insectivorous angels, bobbled complacently in the treetops. He began lifting broad, furry fronds of the rainbowberry plants looking for the prismatic clusters of fruit. When he found them, he used a hook knife from his hip-bag to cut them free of their thorny vines. He had dropped a dozen thick bunches into his bag when he lifted a broad leaf to find a man lying there.

  The man, beardless, dark-skinned, and young, seemed either dead or asleep. In either case, Rividius decided to leave him be. As he began to lower the covering leaf, the man’s eyes opened, and Rividius discerned at once that this was not a man. Dark, lucent eyes gazed up at him with searchless focus—not vapid or vague but vividly gazing directly through him into some more stark reality. He recognized the eyes of a voor and yelped his surprise. Before his tired muscles could jerk him away, the voor whispered, “Help me, man—please. Help me.”

  Rividius had not survived three centuries on Nabu being helpful to strange humans, let alone voors. Voors introduced a new phenomenon among the worlds. They had appeared about a century ago right in the midst of the human population. In that sense, they qualified as distorts—but, in fact, they arrived as aliens from a world called Unchala. They had evolved into energy patterns in the parallel cosmos of Unchala, and they wandered among universes as radiation, usurping physical forms from whatever creatures they met. Most voors showed up in the vicinity of lynks, where energy from the Overworld leaked. Since arriving, they had been warning people to get out of Chalco-Doror. They served as the only trustworthy guides in the Overworld now that the Ordo Vala had faded to no more than a blurry legend. Saor-priests, who had regained prominence as world leaders after collapse of the tech-culture in Doror, hated the voors. They warned that the voors would depopulate Chalco-Doror so that they could make the worlds their own—which never made much sense to Rividius since the voors seemed pretty eager to get out themselves. At least, those that lived to maturity did. Voors prevalently died as infants the very day their parents realized what they had birthed. Those who survived lived among people who loved life in all its human forms more than they feared the Saor-priests. Whole families got massacred for rearing or harboring voors. Yet numerous families harbored more love than fear of voors, and the creatures proliferated. Even in Rividius’ secluded burg, voors had turned up in the lanes and wynds secretly counseling families to come with them into the Overworld. Some families had gone. But most had gone directly to the Saor temple in the next valley and brought back with them the bald, black-robed priests, who searched brusquely through all the houses. By then, the voors had usually moved on.

  Rividius met his own face staring at him wide-eyed, a suede face, soft and red-whiskered—and he yelped again even as he realized that he was seeing himself through the voor’s telepathic eyes. His cry broke the bond, and he saw again the voor below him. He looked to be in pain. Sweatdrops like roe beaded his brow.

  “Where’re you hurt, son?” he heard himself asking and surprised at his own voice, because he was not a man to take chances. He had a young girl to rear and would never think of doing anything to jeopardize her well-being. Foolishly, here he was stooped over a voor. Was this some alien trick?

  “I’ve been snake-bitten,” the voor reported. “My right ankle. Can’t move.”

  Rividius let the frond fall back in place, stood up, and walked over to the tarn. He wanted to put some distance between himself and the alien and see if he still felt the same compassion he had experienced while staring into the young man’s hurt face. He had to know he listened to his heart and not some telepathic command. But even as he had stood up, he knew the truth. He cleared the slick surface of algae and soaked a bandana in the night-cooled water. Then he went back to the voor and with his hook knife cut away the fronds hiding him.

  “When’d the snake get you?” he asked, rolling up the man’s pant leg and frowning at the purple-glossed swelling above the ankle. The man wore rope sandals. “Land o’ night! What kind of fool are you to walk these woods without boots?”

  “A dying fool,” the voor answered. “I feel like a boulder’s on my chest. A white snake struck me during the night, when I came through this patch to get water to drink. I saw it crawl away, glowing like a lux-tube.”

  “A what?”

>   “It was shining in the dark.”

  “Fire snake,” Rividius acknowledged, rummaging in his hip-bag. “You’re lucky the ragheads didn’t find you here helpless like this. You’d be halfway to scat by now.” He removed a knob of brown root from his bag and wrapped it in the wet bandana. “Suck on this. It’ll loosen the hold on your lungs a bit. You’re damn lucky the fire snake was alight. She was too interested in breeding to pump too much venom into you. If she had been dull and not at all eager to find a mate, she’d have taken the extra second or two to kill you.”

  The voor rooted at the medicinal nub and vivid strength penetrated the flesh of his mouth and throat. While he worked at it, Rividius roamed the edge of the tarn until he found two saplings of the correct size for a litter. He cut the saplings down, stripped them, and lashed them with bines and creeper rope.

  A scream came from the rainbowberry patch. Rividius grabbed his rifle and dashed back to the voor. The patch swarmed with gullets, big-mawed, frog-skinned, legless amphibians that usually ate rodents and giant waterbugs but were not averse to chewing off toes, fingers, ears, or whatever fleshy human parts their needletoothed jaws could fasten about. Rividius smashed several of them with the stock of his rifle, and the others fled.

  Before they could return, Rividius brought over the litter he had made. “The ride down is a bumpy one, but the medicines you need I have at home.”

  “Leave me here. You will endanger yourself if others see you with me.”

  “Just keep your eyes closed and nobody will think you’re anything but a snake-bit man. By the way, my name is Riv. What’s yours, son?”

  “Jess.”

  “All right, Jess. Hold on tight now—and when we get into town, for Mugna’s sake, don’t stare nobody in the face.”