by Robert Reed
Suddenly the reef was above, left behind.
The man in the dream had told him to bring everyone.
But if Diamond couldn’t . . . ?
What might have been the moorings of the sun passed on all sides—a washed-out gray scaffolding, without weakness and without beauty, looking cobbled together by gigantic but ordinary workman hands.
The cylinder beneath was the same slick gray as the ball.
A steel pipe would have more character than this.
Nobody spoke.
Elata set her purse on top of her own foot, and she reached for the gray ball, for the tubes that had held the trap.
King said, “No.”
She nearly tried anyway.
Diamond said, “No.”
She picked up her purse, and after turning it once in her hands, she threw it aside, in that way people use when they will never pick an object up again.
Then with a quick flat voice, Quest said, “I see Them.”
“The Eight?” asked Seldom.
“And everyone else in the world, too.”
A long study of rockets and momentum had inspired this body. This was the opportunity to learn if the lessons and Quest’s plans were any good. She told her passengers, particularly the human three, to lie flat on their backs and do nothing until they were safe or they were dead. There was no room to spare. One swollen stomach beneath them was full of freshly built perchlorates and metabolic rubber and aluminum, and she set that mess on fire. And nozzle made of corona scales dilated, the largest rocket in existence trying it best to remake the missing sun.
Karlan and the human children briefly lost consciousness.
Every refugee beneath them looked up and then looked down, and every bone, living and dead, shook with the roaring.
In the end, Quest managed to hover above a plain covered with battered aircraft and refugees and a thousand ugly fires. There was enough oxygen for easy breathing, but the world was still draining through some undiscovered vent. Quest hovered and then lifted, edging closer to her target, and as the last of the fuel was burnt, she pulled herself free from the huge body. Wearing nothing but a new carapace and strong little body, she lay across her brothers as the ship ended its descent.
The three of them held hands, just for a moment.
The humans were sick to their stomachs, bruised. Even Karlan let his pain show. But after the fleshy rocket was down, the six of them cut their way free and came out together. Tree-walker blimps and forester blimps and one papio airship were covered with lights, and they were parked around one body that had been repeatedly shot and chopped and then drenched with alcohol that still stank in the air long after the fire went out.
The Eight saw their siblings.
Mournful words came from a broken mouth.
“When it all can’t be worse, it is.”
There was no war here. The papio and tree-walkers had been united in one clear task, delivering endless pain to an entity that couldn’t die. And suddenly three more guilty monsters had stumbled into their midst—a parade of bodies and potential delivered by the best Fates.
One of the foresters was a big man carrying a little papio in his blood. He instantly ran forwards to take away Karlan’s rifle.
In reflex, the warrior aimed at the attacker.
Faster than any human, King grabbed the barrel and wrenched it from the hands, and then he tossed the rifle so far that only his ears could hear it hit and slide away.
But that gesture won only moments without violence. Revenge was left to float, waiting for the next opportunity.
Every sort of human followed after them.
The Eight were burnt and bleeding, several colors brightening skin that refused to look human.
“All of them,” said someone. “Make all of them . . . feel . . . ”
Several papio repeated the verdict, and the world stood together.
Karlan cursed, and Seldom whimpered.
Elata did both. This day began with her wanting to die. Death or something far worse was about to claim all of them, and she hated the idea and despised herself for ever walking so close to darkness. She was standing between King and Diamond. The alien wasn’t as huge as before, but he was still taller than any monkey, standing with his feet apart, holding the dangerous ball with one hand. King was probably deciding which of these little necks to break first. And Diamond was even worse, staring ahead and breathing fast out of nervous energy, probably thinking about what to say or what to do that would defuse the situation. But that too-smart brain was generating a thousand more ideas than the one good answer that she had already offered him.
“Put me on top of you,” she told King.
Her voice wasn’t loud, but of course he heard her. And like his brother, he didn’t immediately understand what was obvious and right.
The brave strong and endlessly impulsive girl grabbed those spines and dragged herself on top of the giant. King didn’t try to stop her. His hands were filled with the precious ball, and he assumed that she would feel safer above. Elata put her feet on the alien shoulders, her balance barely surviving the next moment. But she righted herself and grabbed the spines on his head, and she glanced back at Quest and the battered Eight, and then she stared ahead at what seemed like all of the faces left in the world.
“Do you know what these creatures are?” the girl cried out. “Do you understand their nature?”
Curiosity and fatigue kept every gun from firing.
“I know what they are,” she lied. “They are not leftovers from the Creation, and I promise you, promise you that they are not monsters. No. What they are and have always been is simple simple simple, and you are idiots not to see it, and maybe they are right. What they said. What they said when we were coming here to put the world back together again. They talked about letting all of you ungrateful, unthinking excuses for monkey shit die. Letting you die in the way you were made, which was in the dark and stupid as can be.”
Papio who understood now whispered rough translations to the others.
Then silence took hold, but not for long.
A voice in the back called out. A tree-walker tongue said, “All right then, what are they?”
One hand gesturing, she announced to the world, “These are the Creators themselves.”
Her words rushed across the gray plain.
Whispers chased after her voice.
She needed to be believed. Elata needed to believe herself. And that’s when she spoke again, crafting the finest lie of her life, shaping a universe and the greatness of gods while inventing all of the sterling reasons why even the lowliest life, particularly the lowliest life, should give their Creators some measure of help, or at least stop trying to murder what simply could not die.
In the orange-headed tongue, his name was The-Man-Who-Stood-Tall. But a long while had passed since he stood that way.
The old woman and man/boy left him, taking the others away too. Alone inside the big rooms, he could nap where he wished and eat whatever he found for himself, and this seemed like the best kind of day. Even when the sun died, he was happy. There were no windows to scare him. The electric lights remained strong, and he was accustomed to the sirens and banging of cannons. But then the panicked monsters flew high, attacking the palace, and the power failed, and two soldiers ran through the darkened hallways, arguing about foolish human matters. One man or the other had done something wrong. Who would wear the shame remained undecided, but an important door was left open, and The-Man-Who-Stood-Tall was brave enough to walk where he wasn’t allowed, finding a window and jumping up on the sill long enough to see the unexpected night and a thousand giants trying to kill him and nobody else.
The little man with the gray beard hid where he felt safest.
He was in the man/boy’s bed, inside a fortress made of pillows and blankets. Eyes closed tight, he saw nothing except for what he imagined, which was terrible enough. Cannons fired and wood burned and fuel was spilled nearby and then
set ablaze. Great pieces of the palace were torn away. He felt the bed jump and the floor tilt. He fully expected to die. Then a human came into the room to sit on the edge of the bed. The hiding man didn’t recognize the newcomer’s scent. He was a stranger who talked to himself and to the Creators. Suddenly a nearby portion of the palace fell away, and the stranger fell silent for a moment, and then he sobbed, and then he shot himself with one bullet. But it took a very long time for him to bleed to death.
After that, the world fell silent.
Soon the hiding man felt a chill, and despite his fine big lungs, he felt as if he couldn’t breathe fast enough.
Death was everywhere.
Even under the blankets, the world appeared doomed.
Then after a very long wait, after no sleep and no food and one ugly moment where he peed in the corner of his fortress, a light came on somewhere. The light passed through the heavy blankets, and the man heard a voice calling. He knew that voice, and he crawled out slowly, cautiously, ready for quite a lot but not for a bird with a blue head and green body—an usher bird that had wandered far from home.
The bird flew away.
Avoiding the corpse, the orange-headed man gave chase.
Haddi’s room had been stolen. The far side of the hallway was gone. But he stood on the last of the floor, gazing down at a brilliant sun that seemed wrong and felt lovely, and he smelled moisture in the wind, and after more time passed, he smelled at least one human that he knew and loved.
Elata demanded a ride to the world’s edge, and the papio from the slayer ship volunteered, out of respect as well as simple terror.
Diamond told the lady captain to let the wind pick her direction.
Every hallway in the ship was wide, every room huge. The papio never stopped watching their bizarre guests. The Creators and their tree-walking attendants were led inside the cargo hold where they could watch the gray floor sliding beneath them. Time passed, and the Eight healed completely. More time was crossed, and the airship stopped where the giant cylinder ended. A towering gray wall stood before them. But the wall never reached the floor. There was a gap at the bottom, and the spotlights couldn’t find any end to the gap. Perhaps it went all the way around the world’s bottom. The gap looked large enough to let the ship to pass, but the captain refused to try. So the passengers embarked, and Elata thanked the papio for the kindness, and Seldom thought to ask the captain to wait for them. “We might be back soon,” he said hopefully.
Seven bodies walked with the wind. King carried the gray ball. Their only lights were handheld torches, and nothing changed. Even the humans sensed that time was running out. The Eight offered various opinions about Diamond’s guidance and the trustworthiness of old memories and dreams. But what worried the boy was when the Eight stopped talking, and his friends didn’t say a word to defend him.
That’s when Diamond ran as fast as he could, alone and happy enough. And that was why he came first to the room at the end of every possible route.
The room was small and very dark until he stepped inside, and then it was smaller and quite plain, round and brightly lit and made of the same mysterious gray material. There were no furnishings. A simple fire pit waited in the middle of the round room, empty of ashes or logs or old coals. Diamond was standing beside the far wall when the others arrived. He was hunting for a door that didn’t exist. King asked some question that Diamond didn’t quite hear. Then one of the Eight said that this felt like the right place, although she wasn’t certain why.
Then Karlan said, “Hey, have a look.”
The fire pit was smooth before. But now there was a hemispherical depression in its middle, and at the bottom were fourteen holes.
“Say something,” King said, nudging his brother.
“Like what?” Diamond asked.
“This is a great moment, a historic moment,” King said. “Give us some important words.”
But the boy couldn’t think of anything to say, except, “I was waiting for something stranger.”
King handed him the key.
Diamond climbed into the ring, setting it inside the locking mechanism. And time passed without passing, and everybody was left naked, and everybody was weak, lying on a different floor.
Far above was a smooth gray ceiling.
The ceiling fell away on all sides, vanishing behind ground that also fell away in the distance. They seemed to have been dropped on top of an enormous hill, and the land was black and glassy, dotted with great pools of water and the occasional pool of molten red rock, and strange creatures flew and screamed, and trees stood strong beneath the sky that had no sun yet couldn’t be brighter.
Walking towards them, wary but curious, were too many children to count.
Each child wore clothes made from leather and hair and bone, and each carried some little machine that made light and made noise. Those noises were words, Diamond sensed. The machines were talking to each other, and the new world was full of sound. But not the children. The children were silent and a little cautious and very curious, marching barefoot across the sharp volcanic rock, every foot being cut and every cut healing in an instant.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Reed has published twelve novels. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over two hundred shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Collections include The Dragons of Springplace, Chrysalis, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and The Greatship. Reed’s stories have appeared in at least one of the annual year’s best anthologies in every year since 1992, and he has received nominations for the Nebula and the Hugo Awards, as well as numerous other literary awards. He won a Hugo Award for his novella “A Billion Eves.”