The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  You speak her very name. Pam'Pel. How grotesquely droll it is that you should speak her dread name, and all in perfect nescience of its meaning, in ignorance of the world that once was mine. I thank you truly, priest and footpad—your news has long been known to me, and I stand calm and ready for what comes. I shall pay you notwithstanding soon enough.

  But first, the oddest fancy moves me. Yes, I find that the drollest impulse quite possesses me, my dear little humans: it is to impart to your brief, puny selves my past—to bequeath to you some record of my past, in case it should happen that my end in fact is near. How delicious this wistful absurdity seems to me! And, forgive me, but I must indulge it in my own droll way—I have need, priest—you'll forgive me, won't you?—to use you for a puppet. Feel no alarm! You'll be restored immediately after. . . .

  Pandagon crumpled at my side, his body going crooked as if gripped in an invisible hand. His neck went slack and his head slumped to one side and his eyes rolled back dead white. He was not standing, for his legs were too awry; he was gripped and held there, hung there like an eyeless doll.

  Then his lips began to move, and a rusty whisper emerged from his mouth, the voice not his own, but a reedy, ancient quaver which, issuing from that empty face, stood the hair up all along my neck. It was in this borrowed, millennial hill-troll's voice, and mantled in the mockery of this human puppeteering, that the A'Rak spoke to me, and told me of the world of his birth, and his loss of that world.

  A'RAK I

  Arthro-Pan'doloron

  World I was born upon . . .

  My world, Thief, was Arthro-Pan'doloron, a world of lush plains richly threaded with rivers, a world of forest-crowned highlands, and of boundless jade-green seas.

  Our red sun, both in its genial warmth and its vast girth, dwarfed your own pallid ember of a star. Our sun's seething sphere filled a quarter of our sky, gorgeously simmering in lavender skyscapes, or wreathed with black satin cloudrack. When it rose, upon its leading rim could be discerned in profile the banners and fountains of fire that flourished all over its surface: great sprays and high helixical arches of flame that forested our maternal star.

  Our sun in majestic largess lavished life on us, baking to fullness the hosts of beings that tenanted Arthro-Pan'doloron. Our sun beamed a million forms of creature into being, and all, almost all, were my food!

  Arthro-Pan'doloron teemed all the more with life because her sun was a-growing. She had been swelling in recent eons. She had, within historical memory's remotest reach, engulfed three sister worlds of ours. On each of these, in the centuries of its dying, there were races which had, by desperate contrivances, retired to the planet next outlying them. The waves of the refugees that reached my world from Arthro-pod'holobane, third from our sun and the last slain by her swelling, were a mixed lot of beings, you may be sure. This earth of yours, Thief, is a well-enough-stocked larder, I grant, but Arthro-Pan'doloron swarmed with lives of every form, a cornucopia of toothsome prey!

  Had our sun not yet ceased to swell? Was our world to die in its turn, become a sphere of smoking stone? This question was so much bruited among us that it had become the very air we breathed, and thus, a question that in truth we scarcely thought of. That our world could die we believed we knew. But when, at a stroke, it died in fact, in a manner utterly unimagined by us, our seething terror, our vast stupefaction showed that we had believed it not at all, that our world could perish . . . !

  Great was the glory of the nightskies of Arthro-Pan'doloron! When we turned our back upon our sun, that crimson conjurer, so huge did she loom behind us, that faint rosy auroras rimmed even our midnight skies. But meanwhile our zenith, with no moon to dim them, blazed with a starswarm as thick as a blizzard! Oh that glorious thickness of stars! How paltry and sparse are your own starfields, Thief, when I recall the diamond swarm of them vaulting the nights of my world!

  As dense as a dome were those stars, like our roof! Such a wealth of them, how could we not feel them ours, a cosmic bequest? They were the witnesses of our rich life—they were our retinue, gathered to light and to landmark our nights.

  This proprietary arrogance is the folly of any life that prospers. There exists only Now for such lives, and all they survey, they seem to own, and their own Death is a thing which Cannot Be.

  Such indeed was my own folly on the night my world died. Great was my pride, and my stature. I had just attained to my fourth moult. I now in bulk did stand preeminent among my kind through all the lands in the South East Seas. I was growing to become a monarch of my kind, and my kind was itself preeminent among predators on Arthro-Pan'doloron.

  There was one greater predator than we who shared our world, but she was uncertain in her coming upon us. So unpredictable in her coming was she, that we asked ourselves if ours was the only world she found her prey upon. Among my generation it was being said that she came oftener among us than she had in our forefathers' times, but still she had not yet in my lifetime come to my part of the world. If I believed at all in catastrophe, the only form it took in my imagination was the visitation of this dire and ravening nemesis, whose predation on my kind entailed unspeakable atrocities. But what befell on the night I tell you of, Thief, was the Unthinkable itself!

  I was taking the evening air, gazing down on the seashore from the coastal hills above high-walled Kin-Kozom, whose lantern-trimmed parapets shone down on the darkling shingle of Clatterstone Strand. And as dark fell the thousands—all easy and idle—came out from the city, the glow of contentment and their after-supper wine still upon them. They strolled and mingled, and the peaceful murmur of their conversation floated above the surf-growl, as the wide Shangle Sea with its white hands of foam slowly, ceaselessly ransacked those glittering gravels.

  I was still feeling that ineffable freshness that follows a moult, and I remember that evening a glorious contentment enveloped me, a serene contentment to be gazing on this plenty my planet dispread before me, this feast of forms all fashioned for my feeding!

  With my attention thus engaged, I did not at first notice the horror in the sky, not till I grew aware of a new note in the voice of the multitude, and aware next of a lifting of heads and limbs and faces skywards. . . . And only then did I become aware—in the deepening night above—of a hole in the starfield.

  As the stars blazed fiercer in a more perfect black, the voice of the host rose to a steady roaring of disbelief, for this round void in the stars, perhaps the size of your own full moon, grew as distinct as a jet-black coin dropped on a diamond gravel. Moreover, this hole was circumferenced with wisps of white light, as a saw's blade that sliced through the stars might spin off a dust of their torn radiance.

  Does such a fancy seem madness, Thief? Then envision an utter Madness made manifest in the heavens, and you will guess the consternation that did seize us all!

  It was rising, and crossing our sky, as the stars did themselves, and it was growing, yes—half again as large in its diameter it was, by the time it crossed the zenith.

  As this night unfolded, all the world was gathered out of doors, and a storm of speculations roared through the gathered hosts. It must be some aberrant cloud or some flying thing. That blotted-out circle of stars had not vanished, after all! A vessel, then, a visitant.

  But if it hovered between us and the stars, why did it rise with them? And there was something else, something I felt in the soil beneath me, and down in the planet-bone under it. I felt below a stir, a hum, a latent low note, a muttering down in the marrow of our old world.

  The multitude sensed it not, but to me it was a declaration of alien forces a-working on us—a declaration that in its more muted way was as compelling as the hair-stirring spectacle above us. At length I turned and stole away inland to seek the mouths of the chasm-coombs.

  The chasm-coombs of Arthro'pan were the artifacts of a giant race predating my own, predating, it was said, our sun's first reddening and growth. These deep labyrinths were dwellings, perhaps, or dungeons for yet more di
re things that those giants had first won the planet from. Long had they lain tenantless, or rather haunted only by later beings nurtured in their depths, the silence of them broken only by the voices of the subterranean river which the coombs channelled down to feed the Sunless Sea. Down I plunged, then, into the coombs, down and down I sped through the long hours of night.

  A hundred leagues down I went before I rested, and stood a-listening once more, down where one could overhear the planet talking to itself in deep creakings of its ancient bones. Down here, I heard the Old Bedrock speaking, in very truth! And its speech was new. The tale it told was of the planet's very foundations groaning and fretting like an old ship's timbers in a striving sea! Our world creaked and fretted as if at the nearing tread of something huge.

  A prescience touched me then, though a prescience pitifully near the event itself. Young and ascendant though I was, scarcely at the threshold of my reign, I understood then that my world's annihilation was at hand.

  My anguish is beyond your slight conception, Thief. Whatever nascent powers might be a-burgeoning in me, what is the future of a king whose planet dies?

  Yet what if this was not our world's death, but only some grave blow she would—at least in part—survive? In that case, if disaster fell from our sky, I could retreat to the deeps of the Sunless Sea, and subsist there on the hordes of giant worms that thronged its blue-litten benthos, until the upper world's upheavals subsided.

  Of course, if this were survival, it seemed a thing hardly better than death itself. I would retreat thus only at the last possible instant. Consuming vast reserves of my strength (for a moult is exhausting) I made haste skywards again, in torment now to know our fate's unfolding. I found at length the Fen River's channel, and followed it back up and out into the boglands it drained from, where immemorially my race hunted the hackle-tails and quoggmires.

  I emerged in a dull-litten, overcast morning. There was a dense high roof of cloud rack blown in off the ocean—would the skies be hid from us tonight? One of my brethren hailed me from a careful distance. I assured him that I hungered not, and he came out in sight of me, out of a dense screen of reeds. This brother was a goodly size indeed—a contending power not many years from now, wise to skirt me in the meantime. I told him, The deep rock hath a strange and sickly resonance. What think you?

  He answered, I hunted the offshore this morning. The tide runneth hither and whither—nor at ebb, when it should have been, nor at flow neither, but jittery-jaggedy, as if something tugs the waters awry.

  I answered, Worser and worser, Brother, yet wonders still multiply. You've not smelt the change in Fen River's waters I gather.

  When he'd drawn nigh enough, I pounced on and pinned him and thrust my fangs home in his brainpan, for first was my need for replenished strength. I fanged him part by part to get him dissolving, explaining, Mere common sense urges food when disaster impends, brother, lest our next meal prove long in coming.

  His reply, before his thought crumbled away, was sullen in tone: Your death will prove short in coming, false-spoken vermin. All Arthropan's a meal. . . . Starhole. . . . a Galactivore's maw . . .

  My lesser brother's thoughts dissolved. I fed long and studiously; naught but the flimsiest moult-husk remained of him. What had that word of his been? Galactivore? What could that mean? I had no time for musing on it.

  For I required instant knowledge of the sky, masked by this malignant vault of cloud, and I believed I could gain such knowledge from the crawbags. I hastened inland at once, following the Fen River's channel.

  Of all our winged denizens, the crawbags were arch-navigators of the atmosphere. They sold information for meat quick enough too. For some paralyzed prey to stretch on their curing racks, they sold my race the fruits of their aerial reconnaissance: the movement of the snerrl herds on the tundras, to forearm us for our winter hunting.

  I hastened by gully and channel inland, going discretely not to fright off others, on whom I eavesdropped as I went. What a war of terrified tongues raged all around! City and market-town, farmstead and cattlefold, cosmologists were everywhere on this dire, overcast morning:

  "Hole? But the stars are a blizzard we're in, a sunfall falling near and far, falling infinitely far in all directions! In this what hole is possible? The universe itself is one great hole we all fall through!"

  My tarsal claws were fluent in the dozen tongues that rumored through my natal soil. I went gingerly fast, harkening, wondering as avidly as did any of my prey. We all had the one roof in common, I found: and that was no roof—no roof at all against the naked Nothing that we spin through. I had thought at one time or other that my prey were pathetic—their flimsy defences, their marginal sustenance toilingly gained and so precarious. But now understanding had touched me. I, on my throne in a world of my prey, was in this hour no better housed than the least of my food. One breeze off of the titanic machinery of stars could blow me roofless and set me spinning away, a dustmote, into the Great Outside.

  A valley of canopy forest now lay between me and Chalk Bones Scarp where Crawbags reliably eyried. I skirted it rather than crossing—the Kankerdanks' habitations densely roofed the forest. They wove wicker, withe, and vine into catwalks and pathways and basketwork cottages light and tight as drums. The Crawbags I sought came down here from the Scarps and hunted the Kankerdanks' pups and dams. In defense, the resolute 'danks made gliders that could ride on updrafts for hours at a time on great basketwork vanes, and from these the 'dank aerialists in reprisal deployed flaming siege oil on the 'bags' eyries from bellows-powered pneumatic cannon.

  The 'danks were my world's arch-archivists and foremost in the commerce of learning. Their lexical societies and etymological sodalities had preserved, and cultivated all the major tongues of the three nearer worlds our genial, expansive sun had swallowed in her rubicund matronly age. I would have been interested to speak with people of such ingenious tenacity—I often indulged myself in discourse with my food, or food-to-be. I find the intricacy of smaller lives exquisite. Still, I skirted the danks' forest valley, for they had a science of dispensing burning oil which was precisely adjusted to my own race's few weak points, and were quite skilled at burning out one's eyes, or many of them. This a brother I was feeding on obligingly surrendered, upon my inquiring how he had lost six of his own.

  West of the 'dankish woods, high stone bluffs rose sheer from bushy terrain. Fissures split the cliffs in segments. Crawbags chose the most islanded sections for their rookeries, moated round by the deepest fissures.

  I soon spied a crest crowned by several little crude gibbets of deadwood with what looked like bloated 'dank pups hung splay-leg in the ropes. Crawbags called these "curing frames," where prey hung to putresce a little and be maggoted. Crawbags, before they had—by grotesque contrivance—made themselves into strong-pinioned raptors, had been but crude aerialists: leaping gliders, who dove from trees for carrion and then scrambled back up to the boughs with it. Though their toughness, ingenuity, and profitable symbiosis with the gorgon-fly now made them potent predators, they retained that gustatory bias towards spoiled flesh.

  I began climbing up the face of the next cliff northward from the gibbeted one, studiously avoiding the appearance of assault, since—my ascent made—a gulf would yet yawn between me and their roost.

  I'd climbed scarce tenscore cubits up the cliff when a pair of the 'bags coasted in from hunting, barbed nets dangling empty from their shanks. The foremost wheeled high on seeing me—Crawbags more than most abhorred my kind's indifference to sheer barriers.

  He hung glaring down on my ascent, just above leaping for. I recognized him then for one of Grey Urmodd's flock. I breathed him greeting, and the question of his captain's whereabouts. He roared disgust, spurned the air like a saddlemount rearing, and shrilled at me:

  "Unpluck thine unclean, swarming thought from out my brainflesh!" Even his Crawbag scurrilities, Thief, are nimbused with nostalgia for me now! They were gamesome, you see, great buffoons, thes
e 'bags. "Are we," he screeched, "to have no peaceful retreat left to us? Avaunt, ye Crookleg vermin! That said, Old Shaggy, I'll do my proper post, and will convey your advent to venerable Urmodd." He turned his head and roared still louder, "Urmodd! A hair-bug of uncommon hugeness would have speech with thee!"

  "Admit him to the chambers," came a farther cry above.

  I climbed on without answer. Foul-beaked though they always were, there was a new level of recklessness in these bags' badinage, a new level of fearlessness of myself and a strange furious mirth. These Crawbags, I realized, knew something that I did not yet know.

  From the clifftop I saw the land everywhere rolling away under the seamless gray cloudrack. If the stars were hidden tonight, the world might go half mad with doubt and wonder before dawn.

  "Welcome, O agile colossus!"

  This was Grey Urmodd, on the next islet of broken clifftop, a higher more prow-like stone eminence. He was idling by one of the curing frames, plucking morsels from a bloated 'dank pup. "We're to be neighbors it seems," smiled Urmodd with a gesture at our situations.

  Then visit me, Urmodd; I would pay thee much for certain answers.

  Urmodd ambled over to the chasm between us. His silence was full of that thing which I did not yet know. There was a whimsy on him. All of them, slouched on their perches, showed not the least awe of myself. It frightened me not a little . . . disoriented me. They seemed like beings just awakened in a world unknown to them, trying to remember the fear my dire visage had once roused in them.