The figure’s motion down the valley slowed. No time passed. Eternity, endless now. Naked, skinless, fleshless, boneless. Consumed, integrated.
Experiences stillness.
Mark this in an endless column: experiences
Experiences stillness
stillness
stillness
No divisions. A tiny place no bigger than a fist, a womb. Tiny place of infinite peace at the heart of a frozen geometry. All elaboration, variation, permutation, long since exhausted; infinite access to unbounded energy contained in oneness.
You/I/We no difference. See?
See. Vidya. All seeing. Eye of Buddha. Nerveless kalpas of some body. Nerve vanity.
This oneness consumed. Many nows, peace past.
At peace in the past. Loved women, raised children, lived a long life on a world to which there is no returning.
Nothing one at peace in no past all completed no returning.
Point.
One makes possible all.
I see. Buddha, do not leave your student bound.
The eye is shrinking, closing, its gorgeous bloody flare dimming. It is pierced by a white needle visible behind the small dark center.
Small large no matter no time
Do not go. Take us with
Am your father/mother/food
loved raised living longing no return
my own ghost
8
Ry Ornis, the tall insect-thin master, smiled down on him. Olmy saw many of the master opener, like an avatar of an ancient god. All the different masters merged.
They were surrounded by a glassy tent and a slow breeze cooled his face. Ry Ornis had wrapped him in a rescue field where he fell, carrying safe cool air to replenish what his worksuit could no longer provide.
Olmy rediscovered scattered rivers of memory and bathed his ancient feet there. He swallowed once. The eye, the lesion, had shut forever. “It’s gone,” he said.
Ry Ornis nodded. “It’s done.”
“I can never tell anybody,” Olmy realized out loud.
“You can never tell anybody.”
“We robbed and ate to live. To be born.”
Ry Ornis held his fingers to his lips, his face spectral in a new light from the south. A huge grin was spreading around half the Way, a gorgeous brilliant electric light. “The ring gate. A cirque,” the gate opener said, glancing over his shoulder. “Rasp and Karn, my students, have done well. We’ve done what we came here to do, and we saved the Way, as well. Not bad, eh, Ser Olmy?”
Olmy reached up to grab the gate opener, perhaps to strangle him. Ry Ornis had moved, however.
Olmy turned away, swallowed a second time against a competing dryness. There had been no need to complete the ring gate. The unfinished cirque had done its job and drained the final wasted remnants of the lesion, forcing a closure.
As they watched, the cirque shrank. The grin became a smile, became an all-knowing serene curve, then collapsed to a point, and the point dimmed on distant rippled sands.
“I think the twins are a little disappointed they can’t finish the cirque. But it’s wonderful,” Ry Ornis enthused, and performed a small dance on the black obsidian of the valley floor. “They are truly master now! When I am tried and convicted, they will take my place!”
The Way remained. Rolling his head to one side, Olmy could not see the Redoubt.
“Where’s the pyramid?” he asked hoarsely.
“Enoch has her wish,” Ry Ornis said, and shaded his eyes with one hand.
Plass, Enoch, the allthing.
Plass had seen her own ghost.
To east and west, the ruined mountains and their statues remained, rejected, discarded. No dream, no hallucination.
He had been used again. No matter. For an endless instant, like any gate opener, only more so, he had merged with the eye of the Buddha.
9
“The Infinite Hexamon Nexus does not approve of risky experiments that cannot be documented or explained. How many were deceived, Master Ry Ornis?”
“All, myself included.”
“Yet you maintain this was done out of necessity?”
“All of it. The utmost necessity.”
“Will this ever be necessary again? Answer honestly; the trust between us has worn very thin!”
“Never again.”
“How do you explain that one universe, one domain, must feed on another in order to be born?”
“I don’t. We were compelled. That is all I know.”
“Could it have gone badly?”
“Of course. As it is, in our clumsiness and ignorance, we have condemned all our ancestors to live with unexplainable presences, ghosts of past and future. A kind of afterbirth.”
“You are smiling, Master Gate Opener. This is intolerable!”
“It is all I can do, Sers.”
…
“For your disobedience and arrogance, what punishment do you choose, Master Ry Ornis?”
“Sers of the Nexus. This I swear. I will put down my clavicle from this time forward, and never know the grace again.”
—Sentencing Phase of Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”
Tracting through the weightless forest of the Wald in the rebuilt Axis Nader, reaching out to the trees to push or grab roots and branches, half-flying and half-climbing, in his mind’s river-wide eye, Olmy Ap Sennen returned to Lamarckia, where he had once nearly died of old age, and retrieved a package he had left there, tied in neat pieces of mat-paper. His wives and children had kept it safe for him, and now they returned it. There was much smiling and laughter, then saying of farewells, last of all a farewell to his sons, whom he had left behind Occupants of a different land, another life.
As they faded, in his mind’s eye, he opened the package they had given to him and greedily swallowed the wonderful contents.
His soul.
COPYRIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Old Music and the Slave Women,” copyright © 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“A Separate War,” copyright © 1999 by Joe Haldeman.
“Investment Counselor,” copyright © 1999 by Orson Scott Card.
“Temptation,” copyright © 1999 by David Brin.
“Getting to Know the Dragon,” copyright © 1999 by Agberg, Ltd.
“Orphans of the Helix,” copyright © 1999 by Dan Simmons.
“Sleeping Dogs,” copyright © 1999 by Nancy Kress.
“The Boy Who Would Live Forever,” copyright © 1999 by Frederik Pohl.
“A Hunger for the Infinite,” copyright © 1999 by Abbenford Associates.
“The Ship Who Returned,” copyright © 1999 by Anne McCaffrey.
“The Way of All Ghosts,” copyright © 1999 by Greg Bear.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this Avon Eos book. As part of our mission to give readers the best science fiction and fantasy being written today, the following pages contain a glimpse into the fascinating worlds of a select group of Avon Eos authors.
In the following pages experience the latest in cutting-edge sf from Dennis Danvers, the wondrous fantasy realm of Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold, as well as thrilling passages from the works of Sheri S. Tepper, Ian Douglas, and Robert Silverberg.
END OF DAYS
by Dennis Danvers
Donovan Carroll sat under the striped awning of a sidewalk cafe and watched the rain. It drummed the taut canvas overhead, and a fine, cool mist settled on his face and hands. Dangling from the awning, a whirling wind chime emitted a high melodic clatter. He took a deep breath. The rain smell left a tang at the back of his throat and made him feel a little high.
Every year some misguided senator introduced a bill to control the weather, arguing, as required for any innovation, that it was both scientifically possible and socially desirable. Donovan didn’t know about the possible part. He was no scientist. But any random occurrence was desirable as far as he was
concerned. It was bad enough contemplating eternity without the prospect of an endless succession of sunny days. Apparently, most people agreed with him: The rain was still falling when and where it liked.
Donovan checked his watch. He was waiting to meet Freddie—late as usual, like most people. Donovan’s anachronistic devotion to timeliness—including his affectation of carrying a watch, for goodness’ sake—was a sure sign of his eccentricity. An image he sometimes cursed and sometimes nurtured. He caught the waiter’s attention and pointed at his coffee cup. He watched the waiter pour.
When he was a kid, there hadn’t been any waiters. You pushed a button or a glowing icon. The world was a huge free-of-charge vending machine. But these days jobs were making a comeback. Anything to fill the time. With Donovan’s coffee poured, the waiter tidied up the other tables, none of which needed any tidying. Then he stood by the door, a towel draped over his arm, a crisp white apron from his waist to his shins, staring past Donovan at the rain-swept streets, looking, Donovan decided, vaguely military.
Donovan wondered how old the waiter might be, wondered whether he’d been a waiter in the real world, whether he’d ever lived in the real world at all, for that matter. Maybe he was a newbie like Donovan himself, a virtual life formed from the dance of his parents’ genetic uploads, choreographed by the strictest laws of biological science, pure life without the muss and fuss of flesh and blood.
He wondered all those things, but he couldn’t ask the waiter. It was rude to ask questions about life before the Bin, especially if, like Donovan, you didn’t have one. “Born in the Bin with no body to burn” was the phrase that Donovan had grown up hearing, just as, he imagined, the young of a couple of centuries earlier had gritted their teeth to “footloose and fancy-free.” Both were licenses for a certain eccentricity tinged with misplaced envy.
Donovan was about to turn forty, an age when men used to start feeling old, calculating their lives were half over, lamenting they were halfway to nowhere, crying out, “Is this all there is?” Donovan envied them. It’d taken him only forty years to decide his life was pointless. Now he had eternity to figure out what to do about it.
He sipped on his coffee and opened up the newspaper he’d brought with him. He usually didn’t read newspapers, though they were all the rage. A nice fat paper could last you all day. The lead story was about the upcoming centennial of the Bin, still months away. There were numerous expert opinions as to “what this incredible milestone might have to say to the human race.” Donovan read that part over. The writer had indeed created a talking milestone. And no matter which expert made it talk, it seemed to say pretty much the same thing as far as Donovan could tell: It’s only been a hundred years, and already immortality is getting old.
LORD DEMON
by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
Giving way to a small desire to celebrate, I found my way—“outward” I guess you’d call it—through a small, perpetually misty and twilit region of mountains calculated to resemble a Taoist painting. For me, this is a kind of Faerie, where a man could hide himself and beautifully sleep the sleep of a Rip Van Winkle, where a lady could become a Sleeping Beauty in a rosetangled castle and cave grown into a jade mountainside.
I heard a hearty howl from my left and another from my right. I walked on. Always good to let the boss know you’re on the job.
After a time, an orange fu dog the size of a Shetland pony appeared to the left, a green one to the right. They seated themselves close to me, their great, fluffy tails curved over their backs.
“Hello,” I said softly. “How’s the frontier?”
“Nothing unnatural,” growled Shiriki, the green one. “We passed The O’Keefe recently on his way out, but that is all.”
Chamballa merely studied me with those great round eyes set in a flat face above a wide mouth. I have said that she was orange in color, but her coat was no garish citrus hue. It was closer to the ruddy glow of a coal that has not yet become fringed with ash.
I nodded.
“Good.”
I had found them some nine and three-quarter centuries ago, half-starved, dying of thirst—for even some more and less than natural creatures have their needs. Their forgotten temple had fallen apart, and they were a pair of unemployed temple dogs nobody wanted, roaming the Gobi. I gave them water and food and permitted them to come back to my bottle with me, though I was a creature such as they had been cautioned about. I had always avoided contact with temple dogs if I possibly could. Me and my like, they’d been trained to rend into tiny pieces, to be carried off to a variety of uncomfortable places, with a mess of dog-magic for company and security.
So we never talked employment. I just told them that if they cared to live in the abandoned dragon’s cave in my Twilight Lands, there was fresh water nearby, and I would see that there was food. And I would like if they would keep an eye on things for me. And if there was anybody nearby that they needed, simply to howl.
After a few centuries details were forgotten and only the fact of their residency remains. They call me Lord Kai and I call them Shiriki and Chamballa.
I walked on. Where I’d no need whatsoever to go outside what with O’Keefe tending to everything, there was that small desire to celebrate, to walk and to breathe the night air.
Coming to the edge of the worlds, I considered my appearance. Within my bottle I wore my natural shape: humanlike in that it possessed two arms, two legs, a recognizable torso and head, the usual number of eyes and suchlike. However, I stood eight feet tall on my taloned feet (these possessed of five toes) and my skin was a deep blue without a trace of purple. Around my eyes were angular segments of black. Some have supposed these are cosmetic (indeed, at one point a thousand years ago there was a fashion for such), but they are natural. They make my pupil-less dark eyes seem to glow and give my countenance a forbidding cast, even when I might not wish it.
Yes, this would not do for the world of humans. Quickly, I slipped into the human guise I use for my infrequent journeys without: a Chinese male of mature years, glossy black hair untouched by gray, average tall, but with an aura of command. I shaped my clothes into the dull fashions of the American city in which we now dwelled, sighing inwardly for the elegant robes of bygone China.
These preparations a matter of desire, I manifested outside the bottle with barely a pause in my stride. As I had wished, I was in a garage belonging to the son of the late lady who’d formerly kept the bottle on a parlor table. Either location was an easy one for our comings and goings. The son has not yet decided whether to give the bottle to his wife or to keep it on the table, where he enjoys looking at it. I had no opinion at the moment, and so stayed out of the matter.
Letting myself out of the garage’s side door, I strolled off in the direction—several blocks away—of Tony’s Pizza Heaven.
It was a starry but moonless night, crisp and breezy. I knew that something was wrong when, as I passed one of the town’s small parks, I scented blood and pizza in the air. And demon.
I faded. I moved with absolute silence. All of the ways I have learned to inflict death and pain over the years rose up and came with me. At that moment, I was one of the most dangerous things on the planet.
…And I saw the tree and them.
SINGER FROM THE SEA
by Sheri S. Tepper
In Genevieve’s dream, the old woman lunged up the stairs, hands clutching like claws from beneath her ragtag robe. “Lady. They’re coming to kill you, now!”
She dreamed herself responding, too slowly at first, for she was startled and confused by the old woman’s agitation. “Who? Awhero, what are you talking about?”
“Your father’s taken. The Shah has him. Now his men come for your blood! Yours and the child’s. They’re coming.”
The smell of blood was all around her, choking her. So much blood. Her husband, gone; now her father, taken! Dovidi, only a baby, and never outside these walls!
Genevieve dreamed herself crying, “They
’re coming after Dovidi? How did the Shah know about the baby?”
“Your father tell him.”
Endanger his grandson in that way? surely not. Oh, surely, surely not. “I’ll get him. We’ll go…”
“If you take baby, you both be killed.” The old woman reached forward and shook her by the shoulders, so vehement as to forget the prohibitions of caste. “I take him. I smutch his face and say he one of us. They scared to look and they never doubt…”
“Take me, too…”
“No. You too tall. Too strange looking. They know you!”
“Where? Where shall I go?”
“I sing you Tenopia. Go like Tenopia. By door, your man’s cloak with his sunhelmet, with his needfuls still there, in pockets.” She pulled at the rags that hung from her shoulders, shreds tied together to make a tattered wrapping. “Take this! You tall for woman, so you walk past like man. Malghaste man. Go now!”
In her dream, she babbled something about getting word to the ship, then she went, thrust hard by Awhero’s arms, strong for a woman her age. She fled to the courtyard, to the door through the city wall, a door that stood ajar! She could see directly into the guardpost outside—empty. Never empty except now! It smelled of a trap!
Beside the door hung the outer robe with its sunhelmet hood lining, behind the door half a dozen staves stood below a pendant cluster of water bottles, like flaccid grapes. She shut and bolted the inviting door, snatched the cloak, a staff, a waterbottle, and fled back through the house to the kitchen wing, calling to someone as she went past the kitchens to the twisting stairs that only the malghaste used. Awhero had shown her the hatchway below, and she went directly to it, struggling into the robe as she fled, draping the rags around her shoulders to make it look as if she were clad only in tatters. As she slipped through the hatchway she heard voices shouting and fists thundering at the door she had barred.
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