by Greg Bear
“Do you recognize me?” asked the Sidhe standing at the table. Michael turned, and nodded. “Who am I?”
“You are Tarax.”
“And you know your crime?”
Michael nodded again, knowing it was useless to argue.
Tarax removed his black robe, revealing a blood-red cloak. He then pulled back the cloak, unveiling not another layer of clothing, nor his body, but a forest of leaves, as if his head were supported not by flesh and blood but by a tree. Birds flew from the leaves high into the darkness, their wings beating steadily. The wingbeats faded.
Gwinat leaned over him. “Tarax says you are quite guilty,” he said, “And that you are the one they want. Even had you been innocent, we would have the authority to take you from the Ban now. Adonna wants you.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
They led him away from the table. The risers vanished as quickly as they had appeared, and the beautifully dressed Sidhe with them.
“We are going below,” Gwinat said. Michael detected a hint of pity in the Sidhe’s voice.
The center of the dome of the Irall was occupied by a pit perhaps fifty yards across at its rim. Concentric steps descended to a narrower opening of ten or twelve yards. Gwinat urged his horse down the steps, pushing Michael ahead. The coursers followed. A cold breeze blew up from the center. “Mount,” Gwinat said, extending his hand. Michael took hold and was lifted onto Gwinat’s horse, sitting before the Sidhe.
Michael’s eyes widened as Gwinat booted the animal’s flanks. It tossed its head, reared and kicked off into nothingness. The coursers leaped after.
He closed his eyes momentarily. His stomach twisted and his eyelids fluttered involuntarily, then opened. He blinked against the wind. They plunged down the hole into darkness. Gwinat kept a tight grip with one arm on Michael’s waist. To each side, the coursers’ beasts stretched out in silvery, elongated poses of leaping, tails twisting and waving behind, manes unfurled and gleaming like fire, lips drawn back from gnashing teeth. They seemed to pull at the air ahead with their teeth, legs straining for solid ground and finding none.
The darkness was broken only by hanging swatches of luminous green moss on the smooth-bored stone walls. Michael turned to look at Gwinat. The Sidhe’s teeth were bared; he seemed to be grinning, grimacing and preparing to scream all at once.
Michael shielded his eyes with his hands. The dry wind stung. The stone walls gave way after several minutes to ice as clear and deep as flawless blue glass.
Far ahead—below—a tiny dot of dim rainbow-colored light appeared, then rushed toward them. Michael prepared for destruction. He felt the horse’s muscles relax beneath him. He leaned close to its neck and clasped its mane with what must have been a painful grip, but the animal didn’t protest. The walls of the hole vanished; they had fallen for at least a quarter of an hour and now glided over a maelstrom of cloudy, turbid light.
They were now beneath the bottom of the Realm, beyond all solidity, into darkness and terrifying creation. The horses navigated through an upside-down forest of ice stalactites with bases hundreds of yards thick. Below, small brilliant globes of indefinite size flitted over the maelstrom.
Michael silently prayed; not that he would have been heard above the rush of wind which filled the void, pasting his hair to his head and threatening to tear him from Gwinat’s grip. “Lord,” he mouthed, “I thank you for all I have lived, all I have seen. I am sorry I never acknowledged You, and I hope this is not all for nothing—If I the now, I know I have done nothing worthwhile, and have brought pain and death—” He thought of Eleuth’s spinning, fading shadow in the Between, and then of the Ban of Hours’ accepting, forgiving arms. “I know I am nothing in the face of this, and that this is nothing before You…” He was repudiating all his weak attempts at disbelief, and all of his young materialist philosophies. And he was doing it clumsily, with inelegant words and far too many repetitions of the word “nothing.” He was half-crazy with fear, and yet he realized he was editing his own prayers, his own supplications… He was worried about style in the face of extinction.
Gwinat tightened his hold as Michael began to tremble, then shake. With some surprise, the Sidhe realized that the boy was laughing. Tears blew back from the human’s face and struck Gwinat’s, streaming across his cheeks. For a moment, the Sidhe felt it might be best to simply drop the human into the maelstrom and be done with him. There was something weird and dangerous in this laughter and weeping, something he could not fathom. But he held on and the boy became calm after a time.
The horses pitched downward, away from the ice pillars. Michael was through praying. He was filled with a wordless, profound silence. Only one thought crossed his mind as they dropped away from the Realm’s underside: This must have been the way the Sidhe crossed between the stars. Taking their own wind with them in the emptiness of space, traveling in hordes of millions, so many they would have seemed like a comet’s tail from far away, glittering like pearly motes against the stacked razor’s-edge blackness.
Ahead, drifting over the Maelstrom, was an oval object like an elongated bean. The bean-shape clarified into a cylinder about twice as long as it was wide. Spinning slowly on its long axis; it appeared to have been lathed from a solid piece of brass. The cylinder pointed down toward the maelstrom, irregular blotches of verdigris rolling along with its outer surface.
They approached the top. The flat expanse loomed like a wall, pierced by an irregular gaping entrance at its center. Michael wasn’t able to get an impression of its size until the very last, just as they entered the hole.
The cylinder was perhaps a mile in diameter.
For a moment there was confusion. One of the coursers got ahead of Michael and Gwinat. His animal’s hoof twitched a few feet from Michael’s face, then swung back and caught Michael on the side of the head. He was knocked from Gwinat’s arm and fell away, seeing nothing but warm, mellow red, dimming rapidly to deep brown…
Michael’s awareness returned in stages. First he smelled dust, acrid and irritating. He sneezed. Then came the pain. His forehead felt on fire. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see until the darkness irised and revealed another, even more profound black. He was in chains.
His wrists and ankles were shackled to a brass bar with a ring on each end. Chains extended from the rings to another bar a few yards away. Shackled to that bar was a skeleton, clothes and dried skin floating in tatters on its translucent yellow bones.
He was weightless. All around was the ineffable presence of something huge, moving. Within a feeble gray illumination Michael could see nothing but chains, bars and more bodies.
He was floating in a graveyard. He shut his eyes and probed outward to the limit of his range. Only uncertain murmurs came back to him. The impressions were strong enough to convince him that he was at the center of the brass cylinder, and that the cylinder was an outpost of the Maln—an extension of the Irall.
Michael probed again, and suddenly withdrew cringing as a voice blasted him. He threw up his shields, but they were not strong enough to mask the power, and the hatred.
“For your crimes, antros, for all the creatures that have died that you might eat their flesh; for all that have loved you and been betrayed, for all the so very human things you have done. Together we face a mystery, antros.”
It was the voice of Tarax. The Sidhe emerged from the darkness, standing on a brass platform.
“Who are you?” Tarax asked, white hair floating in a nimbus around his head.
“I am a poet,” Michael said, feeling none of the hesitance or awkwardness he would have once experienced on naming his occupation, his obsession.
“That means nothing to me. Who are you, that you should be protected, that I am prevented from killing you. Now even Adonna requests you. Frankly, I am puzzled. Who are you?”
“What does Adonna want?” Michael’s throat was dry from inhaling the acrid dust.
“I do not know. I have served Adonna for a long, long age, a
nd kept his secrets, and admired his creation—”
“His?”
“You are his now. I do not need to be discreet with you. In fact, I have only one function to perform, and since time means nothing to Adonna, I do not need to be hasty. I know these things about you: that you are an evil; that your worst crime is not the theft of a horse. It is being human… and helping the one who calls himself Isomage. You would bring a Song of Power to him, would you not?”
Michael felt the pressure of the book against his hip. Tarax’s platform drew closer and the high priest of the Maln reached out with long fingers to touch the chains bonding him to the other bodies. “This is my only task, to release you and send you down the axis to the Mist. For all these,” he gestured at the hundreds, thousands of corpses, “I have done the honors, and come back a short time later to find them here, returned by Adonna, who took from them what he needed. Most have been Sidhe. Few humans have earned such a demise.”
Tarax’s robe suddenly came to life. Gray stripes rose from the black fabric, writhing and forming knotwork designs. He touched Michael’s chained feet and shoved him slowly, steadily away from the floating graveyard. “Michael Perrin,” Tarax announced loudly. “Antros.”
An exit opened in the opposite end of the cylinder. Michael looked ahead and saw the rainbow light of the maelstrom. Behind, the graveyard receded into a lattice of brown points, and then was enveloped in obscurity.
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard.
When he opened them again, he drifted through the hole and saw the flat cylinder wall rushing around him, rotating endlessly, brass and verdigris illuminated by the flickering light of what Tarax called the Mist.
There was activity below. Something rose toward him from the Mist. Darkness sparkled. A pseudopod of night, full of potential, extended and enveloped him. Forms flashed all around, passing in a parade of metamorphosis; faces, bodies, less pleasant shapes. Michael moaned and tried to stop seeing, but couldn’t
There is no magic but what is allowed in our heads.
“No!” He recognized the tone, the intention.
Universes may co-exist in the same wave-train, operating as the harmonics of a complex of frequencies. Analogous to the groove in a phonograph record, which is easily distinguished into horns and strings by the practised ear—horns one universe, strings another. We may exist in all universes, but ‘hear’ only one because of our limitations, the valve of our desires, our practical, physical needs. All is vibration, with nothing vibrating across no distance whatsoever. All is music. A universe, a world, is just one long difficult song. The difference between worlds is the difference between songs. All Sidhe know this when they do magic.
Michael had been struggling, but now he was limp, horrified, waiting. He had not anticipated this. He knew the voice very well—had been searching for it recently, hoping for answers, help.
The book was withdrawn from him, and with it, memory of the poem Lin Piao Tai had sought, the first half of the Song of Power the Spryggla had thought the Isomage needed. His only secret, his last defense, was now gone.
“You’re Death’s Radio,” Michael said.
I am the Realm. My body is the Realm, and my mind is the Realm.
“Why have you helped me, if you hate me?”
I do not hate. The Creation is flawed. Holding it together has become very tiresome. And there is not as much time as once seemed possible… not an eternity.
The voice became less hollow. At the same time, Michael’s focus sharpened and he saw the darkness and the clouds of chaos eddy inward, flashing green and yellow and blue, becoming rosy, giving off halos of brilliant red.
Before him, standing on the cut-stone field high in the mountains first revealed to him by Biri, was an extraordinary figure. He was a Sidhe, certainly, but like no other Sidhe Michael had seen. Despite the lack of wrinkles, the full redness of the hair, the apparent strength of bare arms and legs, the figure looked old and weary. His eyes were black as the void and without whites, and his teeth were stone gray.
He wore a short kilt and a loose tabard tied with a length of golden rope. The kilt was decorated around the hem with branches and leaves in gold thread. Michael glanced down but could not see his own body; he was simply a pair of eyes, at least for now.
“So you recognize me?”
Yes.
The Sidhe came forward. “I went to some trouble to disguise myself. Still, you’ve been very perceptive. It wasn’t my voice you recognized, was it?”
No.
“My delivery. Even a god can’t disguise his inmost self, I suppose.”
How long have you been… a god?
“Not long, actually. Twenty, thirty thousand Earth years. But quite long enough. Do you know what I am?”
A Sidhe.
“Yes, and a very old Sidhe, too. Not of this younger generation. All the Sidhe alive today—with very few exceptions—have forgotten me. All they know is Adonna. They forget Tonn, who led them back to Earth, who opposed his own daughter and the Council of Eleu. I was the leader of the Council of Delf. Do you know who Tonn was, boy?”
The Sidhe mage.
“Good memory. There were four mages, boy, remember them?”
Tonn, Daedal…
“Manus and Aum. Others, less powerful, the mages of the lesser kinds. All are animals on your Earth now, not strong enough to re-evolve, or content with their lot. Only humans struggled back, hated us so much… Now so few of your fellows remember why they struggled back. Perhaps only one… the Serpent Mage. I imagine he remembers, oh, yes!”
Michael didn’t respond.
“You won’t remember this exchange, either. Not for a while. Wouldn’t do the great majority of the Sidhe any good to know that Adonna was once one of them. A mage is impressive, but a god must be infinitely more impressive. Aloof. I know my people, how to chastise them and keep them in line. But life in my Realm is just not enough. I’ve labored long and hard to keep the Realm going, to reconcile all its inconsistencies… all the poor judgments of my own creation. And I’ve sacrificed, too. Whatever personal life I may once have had… the respect of my offspring… and my own wife.”
Michael remembered the skull-snail on the Blasted Plain.
“Yes, yes,” Tonn said, coming even closer, until he seemed right next to Michael. “The time has come for a change. Perhaps the Council of Eleu was right, Perhaps Elme was right. It is time for the Sidhe to return to the Earth. Ah, if only poor Tarax could hear me now! He’d lose the very foundation of his life. He’d melt with shame. You, a pitiful human child, must carry the burden—not a powerful and faithful Sidhe. But then, Tarax is remarkably ignorant. All my people are ignorant, except perhaps the Ban of Hours.”
Michael conjured back an image of tall figures around his bed on Earth, discussing him. You? he asked.
“No, indeed,” Tonn said, pulling up a block from the stone field with the palm of his hand and sitting on it. “Not even the Maln, or the Council of Delf. The Council of Eleu chose you, and they would be very distressed to know I concur. But before any of our plans can be carried out, some obstacles must be cleared away. Some old greeds. We do not precisely agree, but each of us has a use for you.”
Then I have no will of my own?
“You have all the will you’ll ever need. And you won’t need this.” He held up the black book. It faded from his hand. “Nor will you need Death’s Radio. Time now for forgetting…”
The stone field’s blackness intensified and smeared up to take in the sky and clouds, to sweep around Tonn and obscure him.
Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings—stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.
The cloud of creation was back in its place. The receding blackness sparkled and churned.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Michael walked and whistled tunelessly, caught himself whistling and stopped abruptly. He looked around warily, his armhairs tingling. Then he
frowned and sat down, wondering why he was still alive. He had been in the Irall.
He felt for the book. It was gone. He looked around frantically, pushing aside the grass to see if he had dropped it. Everything in his memory was jumbled.
The broad river flowed nearby, noisy as it rushed slick and turbulent over boulders. A few hundred yards beyond the river was one wall of a canyon, and much closer—overshadowing—the opposite wall. Both were gray stone streaked with rusty red, jagged and scarred as if the river’s gouging had been neither gentle nor discreet. Each wall rose at least five hundred feet and stretched for as far as Michael could see. Trees clustered in fives and tens along the banks, leaves swaying in a cool, persistent breeze—a canyoned river of air to complement the river of water.
“What happened?” he asked, taking a step one way, then back, then another. He remembered meeting Death’s Radio, a tall fellow in a kilt and tabard… but who had that been? He remembered being told certain things, but he couldn’t recall what the things were.
Tarax he remembered quite clearly, and he shivered.
“Michael! Michael!”
Two figures clambered down a rugged trail in the canyon face nearby.
“Nikolai!” he shouted. His difficulties were temporarily driven out by joy. “You didn’t make it back to the city!”
“And you did?” Nikolai and Bek ran across the river sand, skirting patches of grass. Michael and Nikolai embraced and Michael was surprised and embarrassed at how good Nikolai’s warm, strong body felt in his arms. Bek stood to one side, smiling faintly at the reunion.
“I was captured,” Michael said.
“We were filtered out, then… by the Ban,” Nikolai said. They laughed and embraced again. “We were sent here. And so were you. By the Ban? Did she rescue you?”
Michael explained as much as he remembered, which wasn’t very helpful. He described the interior of the Irall, the ride below the Realm, and the cylinder above the Mist. “After that… I think I was dreaming.”
