The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  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 c
ould 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.