The Last Legends of Earth
A. A. Attanasio
Phoenix Pick
An Imprint of Arc Manor
The Last Legends of Earth copyright © 1989, 2009 A. A. Attanasio. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Manufactured in the United States of America.
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ISBN (Smashwords Edition): 978-1-60450-420-0
ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-421-7
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Second Edition
Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor
P. O. Box 10339
Rockville, MD 20849-0339
www.ArcManor.com
*******************
for those who will be
***
"Of the great things which are to be found among us,
the
Being of Nothingness is the greatest."
—Leonardo
da Vinci
***
Contents
Foreword to the Second Edition
Tractate of a Timefree, Spacelike Domain
If Zero Could Shut Its Mouth [1492 Doror]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 4000 Pre-Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
COSMOGONY
Age of Light
Urgrund
Genitrix
Lod and Saor
ZŌtl
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2500 Pre-Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Tryl Age
Traces
Primeval Worlds
Pages from the Book of Nothing
THE ORACLES
The Body of Light
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1500 Pre-Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Age of Knives
Ras Mentis
Cage of Freedom
Echoes in the Time-Well
Ordo Vala
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 500 Pre-Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Age of the Crystal Mind
The Magus of Cendre
The Mask Is Strange, However Like
THE SAGAS
The Foundation of Doror
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1 Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ieuanc 751
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 500 Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Age of Dominion
Fruit of the Storm-Tree
The Fugitive Lords of Hell
Loryn
Torso Before the Cave of Riddles
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1500 Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Rust Age
Sword’s Wanderings in Chalco
NIGHT OF TIME
Glyph Astra (Annals of the Overworld)
The Ghost That Hatched His
Havoc as
He Flew
Dream Is the Transparency of Death
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2500 Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Age of Phantoms
In the Seventh Age
Fire’s Cold Thoughts
Ghost Worlds
Valdëmiraën
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 3500 Doror ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Home in the Nightmare
###################
Foreword to the Second Edition
Word and world—legends and Earth. The title began there, six words scrawled on a dream pad in high school, developed into a literary theory in college, and shaped around a narrative strategy that has since sustained my way as a writer:
The word is precise, the world a majestic mystery—and writers straddle the space between.
In this sense, creative writing is threshold power. The precision of word confronting the mystery of world marks the brink beyond which we need wings.
But the angels of writers have no wings. They have shoulders, and they put them into budging us toward a tar pit of dreams.
Stories rise like fumes from that black pit. Writers breathe them in and write them down—or fall into the pit trying. Down there, writing is just a sticky mess.
Tar is black—but it’s not ink. We wrestle angels to stay out of that pit. When we fall, no one hears our cries. Creative writing is an encounter with huge silence.
This deeper silence is the imaginary, the not-there. Kafka (in Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and The True Way) says about the art of fiction, “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.”
We share a covenant with silence—and as readers and writers, we agree to accomplish the negative. The Last Legends of Earth keeps faith with this covenant, presenting our human drama as an artifact of an alien archeological dig two billion years after our sun has burned out. Chapters span epochs, posing humanity—full of self-importance and energetic explanations—skittering atop silence adroit as a water bug.
Individual character, culture and human identity flatten before the inexorable change that we call time. Sun and moon, calipers of eternity, measure out our days and months. Looking back over eons of evolution, recognizing that an astonishing 99% of species that formerly existed are extinct, all existence feels like negligence. The Last Legends of Earth matches this obliterating reality to the destruction and salvation we find inside ourselves.
We evolved to manipulate the facticity of the world. Yet, the word goes beyond human possibilities. Reader and writer come together to accomplish the negative, to occupy an alternative to the present. In this threshold instant called reading, we bridge the gap of now and never. The neverness of fiction, what never happened, happens now.
A. A. Attanasio
Kohelepelepe, Hawai’i
2008
The Last Legends of Earth
Tractate of a Timefree,
Spacelike Domain
Originally titled simply Utility Manual, The Book of Horizons, popularly known as the Glyph Astra, received its vulgar title from references to the “star carvings” (Greek: astron, glyphe) allegedly revealed to the Strong Mother in kakta trance. These “carvings” in actuality offer eidetic images of probability patterns in the Overworld, that timefree, spacelike domain inside lynks (hypertubes). The Book of Horizons exists to orient people to the complexities of the Overworld—but first, the people must find themselves within the worlds. The anonymous tractate that opens Utility Manual is meant to place us among the horizons not only of the worlds but of the Overworld. It can be found in most early editions from the Age of Knives and is traditionally assumed to have been written by the Strong Mother herself.
*
This chapter is for those people who remember Earth. The first thing you have to know is that your memories are real. Your certainty that you have lived before in a very different place than where you are now is not a delusion.
Earth actually did exist, long ago. The swirl of stars that fills the night sky is the galaxy where we lived. Remember the Sun? It was a star in that galaxy. Two billion years ago, it died and incinerated the Earth. This happened long after human life had become extinct. The Sun’s convulsive death cast the hot debris of the Earth into the void’s cold darkness, where it drifted, mixing with the gas clouds of space.
A few thousand years ago, an intelligent being from a reality we had never suspected found our dust. For its own alien purposes and by its own strange science, that intelligent being read in our dust the cryptarch of our lives (the fossilized DNA sealed in pebbles of the shattered Earth by the heat of the exploding Sun). From our cryptarch, the alien created us again. And not just our bodies. You remember Earth, because this alien intelligence retrieved your consciousness from the vacuum, where the wavepattern of light emitted by your brain had been expanding at the speed of light since you died.
The alien that regenerated you is not God, nor even a god. The experience of being reborn in adult form out of the ground, cauled in a birthsack that grew with us in the loam, seems miraculous—but only until you understand that this has been accomplished with sophisticated and impersonal machinery. All the forests and jungles, all the multitudes of animals from every era of life on Earth, all the dinosaur herds, whales, and even bacteria and viruses, are products of a machine. The alien that operates this vast machine is a mortal being, albeit one whose timespan is enormously longer than ours. It is known variously as Gai, the Rimstalker, World Maker, and World Eater. By whatever name you call it, this being is an alien, inhuman and indifferent to human affairs. It is not interested in you, though you may think that it is, because – as you will find – you do not age as quickly here as you did on Earth or as quickly as your fellow humans who were born of parents in these worlds. This is not because the alien favors you; it is a side effect of the regeneration process. The alien is not a spiritual being. Many lives have been lost disputing this issue. The truth is, this entity regenerated you to serve as bait for yet another alien intelligence, its enemy, a species of sapient, winged spiders called zōtl. Zōtl eat people. See “Tactics” under zōtl in the index for effective ways of avoiding and defending yourself against these cunning, lethal creatures.
Your life belongs to you. You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect this being to guide you or benefit you in any way. It will not. You must find your own way now. This manual is designed to help you understand and survive any of the fifteen worlds as well as the Overworld itself, wherever you may find yourself.
Unlike the Earth, which evolved out of cosmic gases by natural processes over billions of years, these worlds are artificial and constructed swiftly. The being that regenerated you made these planets, the swarms of planetesimals, asteroids, and comets, and our two suns: the black hole Saor and the radiant star Lod, which is really not a star but a machine.
Eight of the worlds orbit Lod, six orbit Saor, and one orbits both.
The group of Lod planets is called Doror; they are bright, temperate, and tropical worlds.
The Saor planetary group is called Chalco; these are twilit and nocturnal worlds, most warmed by thermal vents.
The lone planet that orbits both Doror and Chalco is called Know-Where-to-Go, and is mostly a night world except for its brief transit of Doror once every thousand years. Each complete circuit of Know-Where-to-Go defines an age. There have been four ages as of this edition. We are in the Fifth Age, commonly called the Age of Dominion.
Two more ages are anticipated before Chalco-Doror completes its alien mission and the being that created these worlds then destroys them.
That these worlds will collapse is true and not at all the apocalyptic madness the Saor-priests decry. Those who would have you believe that these worlds are eternal serve the spiders, who, indeed, desire to preserve Chalco-Doror that they may feed on us indefinitely. Do not despair that this bounty of new Earths is doomed; rather, rejoice that humanity’s suffering, caught between two feuding alien powers, will end.
About time measurement: All the major planets have spin-rates of twenty-three to twenty-five hours, but only the orbit of Nabu in Chalco approximates the 365-day orbit of Earth during the human epoch. Nabu-years, which this manual uses to measure time, are constant enough for calendrical purposes. The other planets have varying orbit times. Refer to the ephemerides in the appendix for the local time standards of the planet where you are located. The ephemerides also provide data and stellar sighting techniques to help you determine which planet you are on.
The animals and plants that you do not recognize are from areas and times of Earth other than those you knew— or they are distortions. For unknown reasons, the alien mind that reads the cryptarch of Earthlife often takes liberties when expressing physical forms. Mutations and variations are common, new species more rare. A partial catalogue of the most common distorts is listed in the appendix.
All fifteen planets and forty of the largest planetesimals are connected to each other and to the Overworld by lynks. We never had lynks on Earth; more about them can be found in the appendix marked Overworld. Briefly, what you need to know is that a lynk is a portal that joins two distant regions in a way that allows a traveler to go from one to the other instantly, even across large interplanetary distances.
There are three different kinds of lynks. Those created by the being who made these worlds are called natural lynks and are indistinguishable from apparently natural formations like rock fissures, caves, and sinkholes; few of these lynks have been mapped.
Those that belong to the zōtl are rectangular structures about ten meters high and twenty wide, seemingly made of scarlet stone and sometimes referred to as redrock dolmens; these connect with the kingdom of the spiders and should never be entered, since the zōtl will consume you in the most horrific way.
The third variety of lynks is the most prevalent: The tall silver arches (five to twenty-five meters high) that exist on all the planets are the functional remains of the Tryl, creatures of superior intellect originally regenerated by Gai now extinct. The Tryl lynks are sometimes rigged by the spiders to convey travelers to the zōtl’s nest worlds; so do not enter any lynk until its destination has been confirmed by trained lynk wanderers (notably the Ordo Vala, who have produced this manual and whose nearest enclaves are listed at the front and in the index).
The lynk danger of which you should be most aware is that lynks are continuously active and can be entered inadvertently. Many lynks are hidden by the landscape, overgrown by vegetation, embedded in the ground. At various times in history, the zōtl have hidden lynks on all planets to trap people. Many such traps remain active. Never enter an unknown cave or crawlhole without first tossing an object ahead to see or hear whether the portal is a lynk.
In each of the Tryl lynks there is a globe, a map of the Overworld. Often in the past the globe has been erroneously identified as a spirit being to be worshipped. The image of a brightly mottled sphere suspended in a field of total blackness seems holy to many of us, and all the more so since the object cannot be touched or even approached, only beheld. Movement toward the map sends one through the lynk. Movement to either side delivers one to the Overworld.
Read “The Practical Guide to Travel in the Overworld” affixed to this manual before attempting to enter a lynk.
*
[Appended to the Year 2000 Edition, 1492 Doror:]
It is quite possible to live in Chalco-Doror without concerning ourselves with [lynks], especially if we live in one of the many communities that purposely place themselves in regions remote from lynks and their dangers. Most of us who live far from the Overworld prefer to shun this seemingly supernatural aspect of our new reality. We cherish our memories of Earth. We grieve for those of the first life whom we will never see again. And, when we can, we seek out others like ourselves, from our own times and races. But that is a mistake.
During the history of Chalco-Doror, among the many millions who have lived on Earth and lived again here in the worlds, only one such tribal fantasy has been realized and with sad results. The Aesirai, who currently dominate all of Doror and parts of Chalco, are humans selectively bred to imitate the tribe of their founder, Egil Grimson, a man who had lived and died on Earth as a Viking, a sea rover in the third millennium before human extinction.
Only humans who have Viking genetic characteristics are empowered in Aesirai society. Only Vikings are allowed to dwell in the cities unmolested by the spiders, for the Aesirai have a pact with the zōtl. All other human types have been relegated to the role of laborers or are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness, where the spiders are free to harvest them.
The Ordo Vala abhor this separatist society for having abandoned the vast majority of humanity to the ravages of the spiders and the dangers of Chalco-Doror. This Utility Manual, banned by the Aesirai, is offered for the benefit of all humans.
If Zero Could Shut Its Mouth
The air was so dense, it read as water. Looking down into it, down past the riven cliffs and shining clouds, Chan-ti Beppu felt giddy. She had never before journeyed below the clouds. Just visible among the flying vapors and the thermal jellies of air, her destination sparkled, the sea-mountain city of N’ym. There, if anywhere among the worlds, love waited to join space, memory, and the blue light of northern weather into a man whose story would complete hers.
“I can see from that silly look in your eyes,” Nappy Groff said, “that you really think he’s going to care.”
“Of course he’ll care.” Chan-ti did not remove her gaze from the mountainous clouds and the gaunt cliffs. “He’s an exceptional man.”
“That means exceptional trouble.” Nappy Groff, short and wizened, with a cuff of frizzy white hair collaring his bald pate, regarded Chan-ti Beppu through his usual glum frown. “Beppu, I have cared for you these nineteen years that you might be fulfilled. But never—never, I say to you now—did I think you would choose to leave us.”
Chan-ti sat in the grasp of a brambly tree that reached out over the precipice and afforded her a wide vista of the purple lowlands. When she turned toward the old man, her broad, pallid face shone with the world’s underlight. “My fulfillment is not here—not yet.”
Nappy Groff scowled with an understanding he had come to hate. The girl he had reared to womanhood had not been wooed in the three years since she had reached the age of consent—at least not by anyone who pleased her. Slack-jawed Gorlik had proposed, but she could barely eat across the same table from him without getting ill. Tradition decreed that she leave and not return until she found her mate. She was not ugly, not in Nappy’s eyes, but neither did she look like the other women. After all, she was not of them. Nappy had found her as an infant, and she had grown into a gangly, wide-faced woman with brindled hair and slanted black eyes so weak she needed to wear lenses. She was clever, intrepid, and playful, though few of the men—who were mostly humorless, stolid workers— found that desirable; and of those who did, none would marry a woman a head taller than the tallest of them— except, of course, Gorlik, who had grown fond of her some seasons ago when she had removed a hook from his lip and did not tell the others he had been eating the fish bait.
“You do not need to leave,” Nappy told her. “In time, our wanderings will find the right man for you. You’ve wit if not lucky looks. Trust that and time.”
“In time, I will be a crone.” She climbed out of the tree and dropped into the shaggy grass of the cliff’s edge. She wore a sojourner’s outfit—hiking boots, leaf-pattern jacket, and brown denim trousers that hugged her blithe form, emphasizing her femininity yet not diminishing her rangy bearing. “Don’t worry for me, Father.” She kissed his wrinkled brow. “I remember everything you’ve taught me, and by that memory—your greatest gift to me —I will make my way through the lowlands and return with my mate.”
Nappy Groff nodded and frowned with doubt. “The road to N’ym is long. But the road to the heart is without end and tireless as a circle. Be wary. And remember everything I’ve told you. Don’t speak with voors. No matter what they promise you, don’t speak with voors. Avoid the fogroads even if they seem shorter. Refuse anything to eat that the Weed Woman offers you at the Back Gates, but be sure to give her your gun. And when you get to N’ym, go directly to Rence Walla’s shop. He alone in N’ym is one of us and can help you. By now my letter has reached him and he has gathered the information you need.”
Chan-ti’s smile gleamed in the stars’ cold light, and she kissed Nappy Groff again. “I’ll do as you say, Father. I’ll be back in a few days.”
Groff hummed skeptically and tugged a narrow yet thick volume from under his utility vest. “If the man refuses you, you can sell this to Rence Walla.”
She took the book of tawed leather in both hands, an ancient edition. “The Glyph Astra.” She identified the famous Book of Horizons by its ritual name, it seemed that old. “I can’t accept this.”
“You must.” He denied her returning it with the back of his hand. “If the man refuses you, how will you live? Sell this book to Rence Walla. It is one of the early editions and will bring a noble sum, enough to live for many years—even in N’ym.”
“I doubt N’ym will last even one more year, Father. The war—”
“Let’s not speak of war. Departure is grief enough. Read me a farewell phrase, instead.”
Chan-ti opened the book and turned its rugged pages to a favorite passage. By starlight and memory, she read: “‘We are nameless. In each hand we hold a story. Between them, between the right story and what’s left, our hearts are the wedge. You know this is true.’”
Tears lit Nappy Groff’s creased face, and the parting with this found child wracked him almost as miserably as the deaths of his own children under the Forest’s talon and fang, long ago, before his mate had shriveled around her cancer and died, before pain came to mean not what was lost but what remained.
Chan-ti Beppu traveled quickly down the cliff paths above the amethyst gulf of the abyss, under thorny groves hung with a perfume that smelled of the green sea and clung to her like smoke. Where the fogroads switchbacked among clouds, she detoured and descended the longer way along mulestairs and rootsteps. N’ym glimmered brighter, and she could see the glass spires and amber towers, their topmost windows catching the early rays of dawn and burning like stars.
Many before her had come this way, disappearing into the melting clouds on their way down to the Back Gates. Some had returned, a few again and again, with marvelous accounts of the journey and of the city at its end. She knew well what to expect; even so, she advanced anxiously, fraught with uncertainty. The man she had chosen for her own was a stranger; she knew only enough of his story to believe he might love her.
Behind her, she left harder choices: Gorlik or a solitary life. She doubted she would have had the resolve to leave all that was familiar if, the season before, Velma, her adoptive mother and Nappy’s wife, had not died. Velma, a voluminous woman, larger and more fair-skinned than most of the others, expansive with laughter and industry, had remained brave and calm through most of her illness. At the end of it, though, when she had shriveled to a mad hag, violent with those who tried to care for her, her death became excruciating and ugly. “Will I die?” her last words stammered.
Since then Chan-ti had been asking that of herself and had become determined to do what she dreamed. In the brisk air of the cliffside, with astounding glimpses of the star-whisked sky through rushing clouds, her resolve felt holy. The cliff roads, in good repair, maintained by the monks who lived in black rock chapels and cave shrines, made travel down the narrow paths easy. Along the precipices, dwarf forests sheltered lemurs and winged lizards and dangled boughs of berries and fruits. At night, she slept under a slanted outcrop that shielded her from the soft rain. She returned to the path with first light and ate a breakfast of cane almonds and plums while walking.
Darkness still eddied at the bottom of the gulf when Chan-ti reached the foot of the cliffs. She paused there briefly and ate the root bread and waxed berries her women friends had packed for her. As the dim sun rose higher, the plateau glinted like flint, throwing off light from the crystal-stemmed shrubs abounding there. Except for the humanlike face screaming at her from inside a boulder, and a diving attack of red bats angry that she approached their hanging tree, the crossing continued without incident. She slept that night under a mane of tasseled cane and early the next day reached the Back Gates.
Here the fogroads came down the cliffs to the plateau, unfurling from the clouds along the mountain flanks and converging into a majestic boulevard cloistered with ponderous trees and blossom-belled lianas. The broad avenue curved along the western edge of N’ym in a long crescent and disappeared among hazes of mountain forests. On one side of the stone avenue, the land rose toward the valley ridge, wild, gloomy with moldering oak and swales of heather. On the other side stood the Back Gates, a seemingly endless corridor of city buildings fronting on colonnades and buttresses draped in ivy. Untrammeled grass and flocks of red flowers banked the back walls of the buildings, stonegray bulwarks, windowless, and scrawled with vines. Copper doors, green and black with the stains of centuries, loomed under lintels graven of weathered runes she did not understand. Above the peristyles bracing the backs of the buildings, the towers of N’ym reared. A few chimneypots were also visible and spears of radio antennae.
Chan-ti hiked for another hour before finding the Weed Woman. True to Nappy’s prediction, she had spotted Chan-ti coming across the plateau and was waiting for her in one of the flower banks that filled the alcoves between the stone buttresses. She stood among globular flower-heads and waist-high tufts of grass, her spiderweb hair strung with weed feathers, thistle burrs, and dead leaves. From the basket under her arm, she offered breadfingers, groat cakes, fruit necklaces. Chan-ti remembered Nappy’s warning and declined.
The Weed Woman only looked human. She had been created by one of the many powers—the spiders, lizard angels, Fire, the Face of Night, or maybe even the World Eater. She was already there when the first people arrived. Over the generations, as people explored the Back Gates, they learned that only she knew which of the endless gates entered N’ym. Other doors, forced open, enter barren expanses and provide no way back, becoming barriers of transparency impenetrable as a reflection. The Weed Woman always opened the one Gate into the city, for all except those who accepted food from her. She led them giddily away, laughing and singing, through another door to a glimpse of yolky sunlight, birch and willows. None ever returned.
Without a word spoken between them, Chan-ti followed the Weed Woman, who smelled acrid as burnt tar. On a green metal door twice the height of a tall man, the crone pressed her fingertips, and the pylon shoved inward with a rusty scream.
Before entering, Chan-ti relinquished her pistol. Nappy had warned her many times that the only way past the old woman at the Back Gates was without guns. According to lore, the Builders of the Gates had put her there to guard against firearms. Anyone could see from the ravenous stare in her gray face that the Builders had chosen well. When the Weed Woman had Chan-ti’s wide-muzzle revolver in her crablike hands, her stare went flat, and she stood aside.
Chan-ti Beppu cast a proud look back the way she had come. Between the flinty sparks of the plateau and the large stars, the cliff of fogroads stood luminous as a dream of distance and spectral mists. There was her old life, all nineteen years of it, compact enough to hold in her sight. She had been loved and well educated by Velma and Nappy Groff; she had experienced friendship among the other women, and passion with a few rowdy boys too turgid to care about her height or her odd features; and she had known belonging, communal kinship, at the nightly fire dances. Yet she did not belong there anymore—at least, not until she found her mate.
Chan-ti turned and strode through the narrowly open door into a tight alley. She had to walk sideways between lichenous brick walls that turned sharply several times before squeezing out onto a yew lane. Black hedges with gold underleaves walled in monumental dwellings. For as far as she could see, the backs of sepulchral houses lined the lane, their skinny backlots enclosed in hedgerow trellises and yews dark as amulets.
She hurried along. Nappy Groff had instructed her to leave behind the yew lane and the black hedges immediately, to take the first byway with a slate sidewalk that offered itself. At every second house, the yew lane crossed a cobbled alley that climbed hills past skinny buildings with boxed windows and mullioned galleries. She had to walk eight blocks before she found a slate sidewalk. As instructed, she turned left and continued to bear left among wending roads and tall, skinny, crooked buildings that made her dizzy to look at until she came to a shopfront whose bay window had an octopus and a squid set in stained glass.
The door to the shop opened with a ting of bells. Among bins of many-colored corals and display cases of pearls and exquisite shells, Rence Walla sat in a wicker chair: a pink-whiskered gnome, watching a diminutive television set propped in the lips of a giant conch. Chan-ti recalled seeing him before, among visitors at home in the mead grotto. He recognized her at once, and while tiny laughter and applause pattered from the TV, he asked about Nappy and the others. Amenities over, he stroked his pink stubble and appraised her unabashedly, “You’re too ugly to be wooed at home and you come here? Dear dreamer, the people of N’ym are animals of perfection. They are true human pedigrees.”
“Odd as I look, I too can love,” she replied with an even smile.
“But here? Wanderer, this is the City of the Sky, where eyes are blue and hair the color of the sun. Look at you. Dark elfish eyes. Streaky brown hair. Face starved as a wastrel’s. And spectacles! No one in N’ym wears them. Chan-ti Beppu—go back home. So you’re excluded from the fire dance because you’re too old. That’s just a formality. You can make a life for yourself teaching the children, tending the old ones.”
“That was my ambition, Rence Walla—until I met my hope of true love. He is the one man whose story could include me.”
“His story?” The gnome’s thin lips hooked a mocking grin, and he darted a glance at the volume peeking from her jacket pocket. “You have given too much of yourself to The Book of Horizons, Chan-ti Beppu. Is that the edition Groff gifted you?”
She took out the book and let the shopkeeper hold it. He ran stubby, freckled fingers over the blue leather cover and the soft spine. An iridescent script dull with age tooled the edges. “Ah—the lurid seventh edition—over fifteen centuries old and yet paper and binding still sturdy. For sure this came through a timeshaft. For sure. A lifetime’s luck for Groff to find this on his stravaging.”
Chan-ti opened the book in his hands and turned to the Oracles. “Here, Rence Walla—this is what I am about. ‘When the lorn Foke marries the gentle warrior of the Aesirai, the last legends fulfill themselves.’”
The shopkeeper flicked an incredulous stare at the young woman, and when he saw that she was serious, laughter jolted through him. “What has Groff done to let such a child abroad?” He slapped the book closed and rubbed away a tear with his wrist. “You believe the Glyph Astra talks to you?”
“It talks to all of us,” she answered, with an edge of annoyance. “But only those who listen hear it.”
“For sure. That was the deepest laugh I’ve had in a while, young sibyl. So you’ve come to N’ym to marry a gentle warrior, have you? Shall we have a look at him then?” From a desk scattered with invoices and starfish, he plucked a thumbnail-size photo of a square-faced man in an officer’s uniform whose open stare and boylike smile contradicted the threat of his dragonish brow. On the back, his address appeared in minute script.
To her amazed smile, he said, “Not hard to get at all. He’s in the City’s Sky Guard. Their publicity brochure had all seventy-eight of them. Getting his address—that took a black pearl in the palm of the Guard garage attendant.”
“I will find a way to repay you.”
“Nappy and Velma paid me long ago, when they hid me from the voors. I had inadvertently sold some of the voors’ talismans. Those zombies would have dismembered me, but your folks kept me out of sight while they tracked down and returned most of the talismans. I owe them more than a black pearl and a photograph. If I can talk you into returning home, I will have repaid them.”
Chan-ti tucked the photo into her jacket pocket. “I will return home—but only with my mate, or I’ll have to wed Gorlik.”
“And if your gentle warrior is already married and the sire of a brood?”
“He’s not. I did think to ask him that, sly-whiskers.”
Rence Walla shrugged. “Not I to thwart an oracle from The Book of Horizons. Supper before you go?”
Chan-ti stayed with Rence Walla long enough to bathe and launder, and to share a meal of braised scallops and seaweed soup. Then she unfurled the rain hood rolled into the collar of her denim jacket and sat deep in the seat of the battered car that the gnome had arranged to transport her. Through web-cracked windows, she watched several city districts float by—slender spires, brass-domed vaults, hillside brownstones. The bootjawed driver, who wore a fishmonger’s cap and apron and said not a word during the entire drive, stopped before a tower of gray-tinted glass. As Chan-ti stepped from the car, it pulled away to wait for her on a sidestreet in case no one was in.
At the reception desk under pillars of crystalline light, the house guard scrutinized the hooded visitor. A matronly woman in braids, the guard announced Chan-ti Beppu’s arrival over the intercom without budging her eyes from the cowled figure. A long pause followed in which Chan-ti counted twelve heartbeats before a man’s voice said to send her up.
*
Nothing in all the worlds offered as much beauty as the city of N’ym. Built atop the eaglebrow cliffs overlooking the Silver Sea, the glassy minarets of the city were the first to catch the red rays of daylight and the last to let them go. The day never got brighter than twilight in N’ym, even at noon, when the distant sun, Lod, cast the slender silkstone buildings and their pedestals of plazas in a wan auburn glow. The city towers glowed like coral and the hanging gardens among the hillside houses blazed with flagrant colors. By night, the boulevards and the adjoining mazes of avenues, wynds, and alleys tinkled with the light of sparkfly lanterns hung from streetside windows by each household. Seen from afar, the glimmery lantern fires of the domed houses and the arc lights among the downtown spires limned the ideogram for Sky. N’ym, the City of the Sky, perched at the very brink of land’s end, its opaline towers lifting high above the clouds that fogged the lower slopes and trawled the sea. Overhead, both by day and night, the sky swarmed with planets, stardust, and the icy green feathers of comets.
On the steep hills, in their glass and brickwork tier-level houses, lived the Aesirai, lords of Valdëmiraën. The most powerful of them had whole hills to themselves, crowned with columned manors and stands of tapered trees above mirror ponds. But even the least of the Aesirai lived well in chalets behind willow tresses and under terraced gardens. For those who preferred simpler lodgings, mirrorglass towers in centercity provided suites overlooking plaza-groves of hickory and oak and arbored canals reflecting starlight and planetshadows.
In the lowlands below the cliffs and the threading cascades, hamlets huddled, hundreds of clustered bungalows, some square-roofed, some thatched, all on stilts, with rude vegetable plots cut from the grass verges. Behind the crooked walls that separated the broken pavements of the hamlets’ asphalt streets from the sunken fields and the fallen boulders of the cliffs, the workers of N’ym dwelled: the laborers, janitors, refuse collectors, and harvest hands of N’ym. Below them, among sedgy tracts and weed-trammeled dunes, fishing shanties dotted the crescent coast.
Ned O’Tennis loved N’ym. As a boy, while other children frolicked in the playgrounds and swimming ponds, he had stolen away from the school groups and wandered the lanes that laced the steep hills so that he could admire the cobblestone houses—no two alike with their flagstone paths, kitchen gardens, and stone embankments carved with trolls and dragons beneath red ivy and the boughs of aged trees. From the high lanes, he gazed down at the chimney pots and blue tile gables of the houses; he stared into the crystal heart of the city, where the gold dirigibles docked after drifting up from the seaside villages and cliffbottom hamlets. He had been punished by his school and his parents for each time that he had wandered off. But the chores and deprivations had not stopped him, for he was enthralled with the wild mosaic of aimless streets, tumbling gardens, knoll houses, and opal towers—all beneath the clutter of planets and the silver wheel of the galaxy.
In early manhood, Ned had fulfilled his earliest ambition and worked as a dirigible pilot, ferrying workers between the hamlets and N’ym. The work, routinely slow, afforded him plenty of time and vantage to gaze down at the city’s depths and the rambling countryside. N’ym had never looked more ethereal to him than it did during his ferry years, when he had drifted over the city four times each day: In the night, he had left the sleeping city for the torch-lit hamlets to bring in the workers under the first slash of dawn; and at sunset, he had carried them back to the country and returned alone with the night. In the intervals, he dallied with pretty women, which was his favorite pastime; he sported with his buddies when his girlfriends were busy, and, when he found himself alone, wandered the lyric streets and pondered what he had heard that day from the workers he conveyed—ferine men and women fated to live beyond the palisades of N’ym yet near enough to visit the city every day as street cleaners, vendors, maids, and construction workers. They were the lucky ones. Many more gold dirigibles carried laborers to mines, fields, and factories outside the city. Ned had heard about their exhausted lives from their kin, who rode his balloon to their inner-city jobs. Every night, on his empty flight back to N’ym after returning the workers to their rick-roofed settlements, he had contemplated the hardships of the lives that sustained the beauty of the city he loved. He felt troubled by the dolor he saw in the workers’ faces each dawn and the exhaustion that replaced it at night. Exploiting them simply because they did not have the right antecedents— long-headed, copper-haired, pale-skinned Aesirai ancestors—offended him, but what could he do? N’ym was over five hundred years old, and the workers had been riding the gold dirigibles from the beginning. Most were grateful, for there were millions more who lived wild in the continental forests. Only some of the workers complained of injustice and enslavement. The same brash critics also spoke of human sacrifice. By that they meant the alliance between the Aesirai and the zōtl, the sapient spiders who hived on a distant planet and, since earliest times, had been coming to Valdëmiraën and her sister worlds to eat people. The Aesirai, the one human tribe too fierce to be dominated by the spiders, had agreed not to kill zōtl but to let them feed freely in the wildwoods in exchange for technological gifts and freedom from attacks. That was the story in the schools. But the boldest workers sneered at the Aesirai’s purported fierceness and spoke of human farms, where the Aesirai bred people like cattle and offered them regularly as tribute to the zōtl. They even said that the Aesirai’s Viking monoculture persisted as a zōtl genetic experiment. Ned offered them a tolerant ear and gained their confidence by not laughing and, occasionally, sharing his own egalitarian visions. The peace he found for himself in this camaraderie and in his active life with his lovers and friends had until the past few years assuaged all concern.
For most of his life, Ned had listened to this talk of insurrection with only one ear, oblivious to politics though he had come from a military family. Then the military drafted him. More than half of N’ym’s fighter force had been called away from Valdëmiraën to defend the central planets of the Emirate, and every citizen with flying experience was recruited to replace them. Though uneasy in the sling harness of a flying gunship after years of walking the bridge of a dirigible, Ned O’Tennis had reluctantly learned the ways of the sleek black strohlkraft.
Now, thirty-seven years old, after twelve years as a dirigible pilot, he lived as a sky-fighter charged with defending N’ym from both the wilderness hordes and rebel ramjets. Distort tribes who lived hunter-gatherer lives in the vast forests of Valdëmiraën and who united to raid the fisherfolk, the hamlets, and the Aesirai’s outlying farms, had always plagued N’ym. In times past, these hordes had been kept at bay by mercenaries hired from the outlying tribes. The rebels, however, were new. They were neither distorts nor primitives but well-armed warriors from the sunny worlds of Doror, who revolted against Aesirai rule with weapons won in battle or stolen. Ned had first heard about the rebels eight years ago from the workers he ferried. The rebels claimed that the Emirate of the Aesirai was collapsing from the inside out—a Storm-Tree rotten at the pith—and that all the people excluded from the elegant cities of the Emirate had allied with distort hordes to overthrow the 750-year-old tyrant, Emir Egil Grimson. The rebels believed that they were close to acquiring a new weapon to help them kill zōtl. Soon, rumors said, the proud City of the Sky would fall to them.
Ned believed they were right. Since becoming a sky-fighter, he had heard much of the rebels’ victories and little of the Aesirai’s. Worse, he knew the Aesirai had wrongly won their benefits by oppressing others. But for him there could be no escape. He had descended from too ancient an Aesirai lineage to refuse military service without disgracing his family, as well as the reproach of his fellow citizens.
At first, everyone fully expected the rebellion to be crushed in a few months and the Aesirai warriors to return triumphant to their families. There had been no dearth of volunteers. As months had stretched to years, Ned O’Tennis compliantly flew the combat maneuvers of war games, practiced strafing fleeing targets with the laserbolt cannon in his ship’s prow and engaging rebel ramjets in air battles. Only once, during leave, did he go back to visit the derrick where his old carrier had moored. A retired cop piloted his dirigible now, and well-armed guards patrolled the docks and escorted each flight. When workers he knew saw him, they looked away. No one wanted to be accused by the rebels, who had sympathizers everywhere, of collusion with the oppressors.
During his two years as a fighter pilot, Ned did his best to avoid actually confronting the enemy. He was not a warrior, that much he knew certainly. His father and his two older brothers had died in military service before the war —murdered in a skirmish with a distort tribe when he was still a boy—and he remembered well the grief that had harrowed his mother and eventually killed her. He never forgot his unanswered prayers and the rueful insight into the pointlessness of his petitions to God when he accompanied his mother’s corpse to the crematorium and watched her sit up ablaze and fall back to ash. From that early age— he was nine when she died—he knew intuitively that N’ym was doomed, that the powers of chaos would triumph just as they had in the myths and in his family. Each day would have to be taken on its own, a gift with no promise for a future. No family, no career seemed plausible in this foredoomed life. So he lived for whatever pleasure his lovers and playful friends afforded him day by day.
Ned accepted himself as a dreamer, enraptured since childhood with the prospects of planets and comets, the winding lanes, the terraced houses and cascading gardens. But the war closed in, just as the personal tragedies of his childhood had presaged. Mercenaries had been deserting, and the job of holding back the marauding distort hordes devolved to the sky-fighters. His daily mission never varied: cruise the outlying wildwoods and harry the rovers.
Unlike most of the other pilots, who followed orders and burned the gangs they found, Ned could not kill the forest people. They had only spears and arrows, and though they terrorized the hamlets where the city’s workers lived and had murdered some of the people he knew, he could not burn them. His years of conversing with the workers made him wonder if he would act any differently if he had been a tribesman. So he peeled off from the other fighters to minimize witnesses to his mercy, and when he found the wild people, he shot into the treetops above them and frightened them off. His superiors were none the wiser, and he continued glad to be a warrior who had never taken a life.
N’ym’s sky-fighters could choose their own missions so long as the city remained untroubled. Ned chose to fly alone, away from the usual policing runs over the coast villages. He flew inland, ostensibly on patrol but actually seeking a refuge where he could think. His grandmother and his uncles—his only living relatives— and his two favorite lovers wanted him to volunteer for a battle post. Waves of wounded and dead returned to N’ym from battlefields on the other fourteen planets—and many did not return at all. A few defected to the rebels, but the majority who were not seen again had been killed in territory lost to the enemy. An enraged and patriotic fervor seized N’ym. But Ned did not partake in the battle frenzy.
Ned sympathized with the rebels, but he did not identify with them. Defection was unthinkable to him. An Aesirai, he would, when the time came, die as an Aesirai. But he was in no hurry. So he ignored his grandmother’s jingoistic pleas, flew in the city’s Sky Guard, and tried to stay out of trouble.
He
often came to his favorite sanctuary, a bluff in the Eyelands high
above N’ym, where Caer, the first great city of Valdëmiraën, had
been built five centuries earlier. Caer had been ruins from the
start, because it had never been finished. When the Aesirai first
arrived on Valdëmiraën, they had selected the Eyelands for their
capital, since the vast cliffs and sprawling plateaus commanded a
supernal view. The Eyelands ranged so high in the atmosphere that
radiation from Saor, the black sun, changed people. Within months of
beginning the construction of Caer, the first residents transformed.
Their jaws began to glow. The flesh of their chins and jawlines
became translucent and light shone from the bottoms of their faces as
through lampskins. The change proved irreversible and progressive.
From the jaw, the bonelight spread across the skull and down the
spine. In time, the skin became oily parchment and the entire
skeleton appeared visible, shining like neon. Limbs withered to wiry
appendages and torsos flattened and unfurled. Like kites, these
luminous lenses of viscera bobbled on the mountain winds, their human
faces transfigured into bone-
broad visages with inhuman
caricatures whose only truly recognizable feature expressed luminous
eyes, retinal-red and fiery. Thus, the high plateaus of Caer became
the Eyelands to the first Aesirai. Those who had caught the bonelight
and been changed they called seraphs. The seraphs did not speak or
make any effort to communicate and so the Aesirai learned little
about them. None was observed eating or eliminating. Nor did they
mate. They simply hovered in the ruins or soared on thermal drafts
off the cliffs. If they died natural deaths, no carcasses ever turned
up. Those shot down decomposed quickly, and the ones the Aesirai
caged withered away within hours.
Ned O’Tennis’ willingness to fly to the Eyelands and land his strohlkraft among the ruins of Caer projected his indifference to life as the war drew nearer. It was of no consequence to him if he caught the bonelight and became a seraph. That, he thought to himself, could be no more horrible than the war spreading cancerously in the world below.
One day, roaming among the weathered walls and weed-cracked avenues, he pondered his options. If he stayed in N’ym, he would have to fight. That he would do if the rebels attacked his city. He feared being sent out to destroy guerrillas among the hamlets, where the people he had once ferried and befriended lived in tacit alliance with the rebels. If he refused to destroy them, he would be executed.
Sometimes he thought death appealing. Shirking his war duty and damned to impuissance, he felt filthy being an Aesirai. But he was no nineteen-year-old. He knew himself well enough to understand that death—whether he doled it out or received it—arrived without glory. Life was mad. Men killed each other, and their women cheered them on. Even away from war—where people wove their own meanings of love and peace as they grew old and withered on their bones—life, in its beautiful rags, appeared cruel. Yet death offered no recourse. Life, with all its elaborate pain and for all its senseless trials, lay in his hands. He would not use it to kill wantonly. And he would not let them execute him. Flight remained his only other option. But to where could he flee? All the worlds raged with war. The Storm-Tree was toppling.
A voice intruded: “You look troubled, pilot.”
Ned jumped about so quickly that the seraphs dangling among the broken walls shot high into the starry sky. A woman stood on the talus of a torn building, a slim silhouette against the foamy light of the galaxy. She stepped down, and he noticed that she wore a silvery shift that rippled with starlight along her slender contours. He backed away, and she called: “Wait. Don’t go. I want to talk with you.”
She hurried toward him, arms open at her sides to show she carried no weapon, dark hair scattering in the wind from the cliffs. Her face, thin as a cat’s, defined for him ‘farouche.’ But the look in her eyes fixed him, spiked with light like an angel’s. In a moment, he saw that she wore gold wire-frame lenses over her eyes. N’ym corrected all eye problems surgically, and he had never seen eyeglasses except in drawings.
“You’re the pilot who lets the rebels escape. I recognize your ship.”
She spoke a language similar to his own; even so, he was grateful for the tiny translator in his shoulder braid. The coinlike machine was intended to facilitate interrogations of rebels who did not speak Aesirai, and it worked reciprocally, translating for all voices in its range. The sound of the dot-speakers whispered a tinny but accurate timbre, faithful to nuances and accents.
“Who are you?” he asked, suspiciously.
“My name is Chan-ti Beppu. Stay, please. I have no weapons. I’m not a rebel.” She stopped an arm’s length away. Through the lenses, there seemed to be lightning in her eyes. “You’re Ned. I’ve heard your name on the military frequencies during your flights. Ned O’Tennis.”
She smelled cool as pine, and he became conscious of the lactic sourness of his flightsuit. He backed off a step and scanned for others. “How do you know about me?”
Her chip-toothed smile opened casual and quick. “I’ve watched you. The end for N’ym is coming swiftly. Everyone up here is watching.”
“Everyone? Who is up here?” The shadow-wrung terrain could have been hiding a platoon, though he saw no sign of anyone else.
“We call ourselves the Foke. We’ve been here since before these ruins were built.”
“How can that be? The bonelight—”
“The bonelight changes only those who stay still, as your ancestors did by daring to build a city here. We’re not so bold. We live simply—I’d like to think elegantly—and we never stop moving. We wander the highlands. We have no cities. But we come back to our favorite places, and this is one of them. From here we can stare down into N’ym and see how the Aesirai live.”
Ned looked beyond her, searching again for others. The seraphs had settled back, and their stoic lights blinked among the girders. No one else moved in sight. The strohlkraft sat in the lanky grass, its reflective black hull a mime of the star-whorled sky.
“There have been patrols up here before,” he said. “No one’s ever reported finding any people.”
“We’ve never been found. Nor will we be. We know how to hide. And Saor helps us. Instrumentation is unreliable under the black sun. So we have been left alone.”
Ned found that he understood her dialect without the translator. He left it on for her benefit, though he doubted she needed it. The dark eyes behind her lenses shone with pellucid intelligence.
“Where are you from?” he asked, feeling suddenly at ease with this stranger. That made him nervous, and he shifted his weight to stare beyond her for the deception she fronted. Under the glow of the seraphs and the stars, the shattered city ranged empty. Ferns in the streets shifted blowsily with the wind.
“Where is anyone from? One way or another, we are all travelers in the Overworld.”
Ned looked closer at Chan-ti Beppu and made sure she was not joking. “The space inside lynks? People can’t live there.”
She returned his stare. “Have you tried?”
He studied her face more closely, noting the salt-blond streaks in her shadowy hair, her full bottom lip, the tilt of her black eyes in the pale breadth of her cheeks. “Why are you speaking with me?”
Her slope-lidded eyes widened slightly. “I want to meet the Aesirai who does not kill rebels. Why do you let them escape? They will kill you if they can.”
Ned’s chin lifted in a movement of obvious wariness. Common sense demanded he get away, quickly. A filament of fear burned dully in his chest, which he relished after the numbness of sitting here contemplating the doom of the Aesirai. If this was a rebel ploy, at least it intrigued him.
“Reasons of the heart, I suspect,” Chan-ti answered for him. “I doubt your superiors would approve.” Her chip-toothed smile flashed again at the apprehension that sparked in his gaze. “Don’t be concerned. I’m hardly in a position to report you. Besides, I’m here now against the counsel of my own people. I understand reasons of the heart.”
He edged away, unhappy with the turn of their encounter. She was reading him too closely, too accurately. He wanted to get away to prove to himself that this was no trap.
“Don’t go.”
“I’m on patrol.”
“No one will know.”
“You shouldn’t be walking up on strangers,” he added, pacing backward. “You could get killed.”
“You didn’t kill your enemy when they were under your guns, why would you kill an unarmed woman?”
He stopped walking. No one had emerged from the shadows to stop his retreat. The only danger here lurked in his heart. So long as he did not allow this fascinating person to lead him away from his ship, he was safe. “You look more girl than woman,” he said, easing up enough to smile at her flash of hurt.
“I am not. I’m old enough for all the rites.”
“Sure. But you’re twenty years too young to be talking to me.”
“Are you married, Ned O’Tennis?”
He gave a sleepy laugh. So she did not know everything about him. “No. I’m not married. The times are too parlous for families. Goodbye, Chan-ti Beppu.”
“Wait,” she called, striding after him. “Don’t leave yet.” She beckoned with a hand callused and capable. “Before you go, tell me why you’ve come here.”
Ned opened his arms to the broken city under the galaxy. “It’s beautiful.”
She stepped toward him. “Beautiful enough to risk your life—” He had already turned away and was hurrying through the crystal-stemmed bramble to his ship. “Come back,” she called after him. “I want to see you again.”
Ned did not look back. This sudden encounter had charged him with concern for his remiss behavior. Perhaps he would return again—but officially next time. If there were a group up here monitoring Aesirai patrols and tactics, they had to be identified. Yet—they obviously knew he had been shirking his duties, and if they were discovered, whoever they were, they would reveal his passive treason.
Ned resolved to do some research on his own. When he returned to N’ym, he went directly to the map registry and reviewed hundreds of satellite photos of the Eyelands. He found no sign of any people inhabiting the ruins of Caer or the surrounding area.
Ned reported sighting group movement in the ruins. After subsequent patrols returned without spotting anything unusual, he determined to go again himself. He had to find out more about these mysterious Foke who watched the Aesirai’s struggles from above as though gods. But before he could gather and enter into his ship’s computer all the photo-maps of the region, the feral woman from the Eyelands found him.
When the houseguard announced a visitor, Ned at first thought his forays to the Eyelands had been found out and security had come for him. He opened the door braced for uniforms. Chan-ti mistook the relief in his face for joy, and she hugged him, startling him with the iron of her grip.
“What are you doing here?” He quickly shut the door behind her.
“I’ve come to see you. I need to talk with you.”
Ned closed the curtains. His spare suite of empty polished wood floors, a few simple pieces of furniture and a sleeping roll for a bed seemed unused. “I don’t spend much time here.” He gestured for her to sit in the room’s one canvas-seat chair. “You’re lucky to have found me in.”
“Luck alone introduced us.” She accepted the chair. “I’m glad it’s still holding.”
“What do you want?”
“To marry you.”