Ned could not believe the verdant landscape before him. He had traversed the Eyelands enough times to know with certitude that only tundra, treeless and rockstrewn, occupied the arctic ranges above N’ym. He had seen satellite photos of the pole, had inspected the glaring deserts and splotches of taiga. No sequoia forest this immense could elude those high cameras.
“This is the edge of the Overworld,” Chan-ti spoke above the cold notes of rain dripping from the rock arch. “It’s a natural lynk formed by the open event horizon of the black sun. The cleared area here near the timeshaft we call the garden.”
“Timeshaft? You mean, the corridor we walked through is a lynk?”
“A natural one. The black sun reflects this part of the planet. The whole region is really a reflection in the Overworld. If you stay on this side of the garden, you stay on the planet. You follow it left or right, you can practically walk all the way around Valdëmiraën. But if you cross the garden and go into the forest, you wander deeper into the Overworld, off-planet and timeloose.” She cast her stare toward the dark trees. “Out there, spacetime opens up infinitely. That’s why the Aesirai have never spotted this forest on their patrols over the Eyelands. The forest is not really there. At least, not on Valdëmiraën. It’s there only in the Overworld, the timefree space inside lynks.”
The shower had dwindled, soft as a breath in the hyacinth-colored air. Chan-ti Beppu walked Ned down stone steps to a lawn diamond-pointed with raindrops. “We never know what’s going to come out of Saor’s Forest, so we have to be careful. Monsters come from there —distorts and the spiders that eat us, that ate my parents. And some of our people have come from there, lynk wanderers who got lost.”
A pine shadow breeze prickled them with cold flecks of rain. Ned stopped walking in a shaft of champagne light. He knelt beside Chan-ti and stared closely at the raindrops gleaming in the grass. The reflections in each drop dwindled with jigsaw-like patterns into snowflake-lace. The same in each blade of grass. In the cellular mosaic of each leaf, the same almost microscopic puzzle-shapes repeated.
“Those are the timelines I was telling you about,” Chan-ti said. “They’re miniaturized images of the Overworld architecture. We’re reflected in there. So is everyone in all the local worlds, every animal, plant, and bacterial colony. You just have to know how to read them.”
“I see them,” Ned whispered, “but I still don’t understand.”
“I don’t think anyone really understands timelines any more than we understand light or gravity or inertia. They’re part of the natural world. The natural Overworld, I mean.”
“Do the Foke study these?”
“Oh, yes. You see, in the Overworld, we’re outside the time of the other worlds yet intimately connected. All random events here reflect the relationship of all existing particles in the world of time. When you’re in Chalco-Doror there seem to be endless things—leaves, insects, grains of sand, atoms. But, actually, there are a finite number of all things. And how they relate is very specific. You can see that relation here in the timelines. To study it more clearly, the Foke sometimes use photographic plates, where molecules of silver halide swirl randomly. The patterns that emerge here in the Overworld reveal the timelines for this region of spacetime. They are extremely complex, but once you begin to identify the parts—yourself, others, landmarks among the worlds—you can read what’s going on outside the Overworld.”
“Then no one can hide.”
“That’s right. If you can read timelines, you can find anyone, anywhere.”
“It’s as strange and wonderful as you said,” Ned admitted, closing one eye to see more sharply the fractal outlines in a bead of rain. The richness of the enchained colors staggered his effort to see the whole. “The Foke are incredible to live here.” When he looked back at Chan-ti, the wet intensity of her stare startled him. She took his hand into hers.
“That may be,” she told him, voice low and reckless, “but you are as incredible to me as the Foke. You see more than what is there. Yes, it is strange to see the timelines. And stranger yet to realize that all of us, at one time, have been in the Overworld, whether we know it or not. We live at the very brink of infinity. Yet not all of us see past what is before us. The Foke are not rebels, intent on power. We are just survivors. Very practical, hard-working people. That is our weakness. We have surrendered our dreams for clarity. Even the rebels have dreams. But the Foke, we are too vigilant. Otherwise we would lose ourselves up here to the bonelight or to the horrors that rush out of these woods.”
Chan-ti released his hand and looked again toward the tree haunts, where someone was playing a flute. “Nappy and the others cannot bear to give up watching,” she went on. “It has become an end in itself. But I want something of the dream. When I come here and see the guardian cedars and pines, the heavy forest walls hung with blossom clouds and tree fog, I touch the dream in beauty—and I feel alive. Yet, I know that feeling cannot last, for nothing lasts. And then I burn with the need to find that beauty in my life—to live the dream, no matter the cost, because in the end, however we live, we pay with everything we’ve got.” She faced Ned with bright expectancy. “Just as you live. That’s why I would go anywhere to find you, to be with you in your dream.”
A crow hacked from the great trees, and Chan-ti glanced apprehensively at where shadows stirred in the glittery dark. A green deer strode into view, regnant under a crown of white antlers, blinked at them and walked away.
Ned blew a laugh. “Maybe I could live here.” A new, sudden reality had opened, and the truth of it sank in with a riddling urgency to reach out and embrace this woman who had led him here. Who was she really, this bespectacled waif who saw beauty as he did, a mortal act? And what of the war? What of his duty to N’ym? Now that he had found a place apart from the killing, could he belong here?
Chan-ti sadly read his questing thoughts. “There is an adage from the Glyph Astra—”
“That old farmers’ manual? Is that still kicking around up here?”
“It’s old, but its truth does not age. Especially when it tells us that life is short—but desire, for all that lives, desire is forever.”
*
The first two days of Ned’s stay with the Foke passed swiftly. Chan-ti introduced him to the whole tribe at a dinner in his honor in the mead grotto, a lux-lit cavern large enough to hold several hundred Foke. They dined on food garnered from the Overworld, including rainbow trout, endive and walnut salad, and saffron rice. Chan-ti felt proud of her choice for a mate, for he showed kindness with the youngest of the Foke and respect with the eldest. Everyone spoke of how glad they would be to make a place for him in the community and among the rituals. After the leaf-plates had been rolled up and thrown into the cooking fire, signifying the satisfaction of the diners, Ned saluted his hosts with an Aesirai melody in a baritone brightened by three goblets of apricot wine. Fervid round dances closed out the evening celebration, and everyone went to their beds delighted with the gentle warrior.
The dream endured until early the next day. Chan-ti and Ned had crept out of the sleeping barrow early to make love in the garden, and were in the midst of their passionate delirium when Ned’s monitor burred loudly among their heaped clothes.
“What’s that?” Chan-ti asked, almost flung from him as he bolted upright.
“Battle alert!” He fumbled through his flightsuit to turn off the alarm. “I have to get back.”
“No. You can stay. You never have to leave.” She groped for her glasses.
“I can’t.” He tugged on his suit and hopped out of the covert where they had lain. He clasped his boots with iron-jawed anger. “I was going to return the strohlkraft and ask you to take me out the Back Gates. That was my plan. But now there’s no time for that. I have to go alone.”
“You mustn’t go back now,” Chan-ti insisted. She threw on a shirt that fell below her knees and followed barefoot. “Your strohlkraft will make no difference.”
Nappy Groff witne
ssed Ned’s hasty departure through the grotto and Chan-ti’s distress as she hurried after. He left his workbench to follow the hubbub and bumped into an excited operator from the sentinel station. He told Nappy that the bubble monitors on the deck flurried with data bits showing incoming high-orbit flyers, thick as a snowstorm, descending on N’ym.
Nappy hurried after Ned and Chan-ti and found them on the ferny concourse of Caer, the ruined city, facing off before the warrior’s strohlkraft. Chan-ti wept. “You’ll die.”
“Perhaps.”
“Not now. Not while we’re together.”
“Your sentimentality means nothing to him, Beppu,” Groff said, striding through the saw-grass to her side. The inevitability of this moment angered him. “We thought he could be one of us. But he is Aesirai. His time in these worlds is over.” He slid his eyes toward Ned with annoyance. “Let him go—and begin to forget him.”
Ned looked hard at Nappy Groff, sad music in the pilot’s voice. “If I had left my strohlkraft in N’ym, I would stay. If the rebels had waited just another two days, I . . .”
“If zero could shut its mouth, none of us would have to be here in the first place, fool.” Nappy Groff’s sour face trembled irately. “Go! Go, Aesirai pilot, and fight your enemy. Die a good death, Ned O’Tennis.”
Ned faced Chan-ti. “I have to be there now. I have an Aesirai gunship. I must return it or use it. If the fates let me live, I will be back.”
“That’s stupid.” She punched his chest, and he let the blow turn him. “I’ll never see you again.”
His hurt found no voice. The battle alarm whined from the cockpit and would not relent until he lifted off. He kissed her forehead and quickly swung through the hatch.
“Wait.” She held out a black wafer edged in silver. “Take this.”
“Beppu—” Groff interrupted. “You’ll need that. We can’t afford another for you.”
“I won’t want one if I lose him,” she said. “I have to know.” To Ned she added, “It’s my tracer chip. We all have one, in case we get lost in the forest. As long as you have it, I can find you. Take it, please.”
He took it, squeezed her hand. “I’ll bring it back.” He smiled narrowly and pulled down the hatch.
*
Ned arrived at sea level to find N’ym’s last defense already collapsed. The dunes blazed, littered with burning hulks of the battle rigs that had guarded the shore. Towers of black smoke leaned against the stars and gouts of flame crawled up the sky.
On the slopes above the beach, where the workers’ hamlets had been, fiery nests shimmered. The rebels’ armada swarmed in the sky before the palisades, just below the city, battering the remaining bunkers that shielded the low approaches to N’ym. In moments, enemy flyers would sweep over the eaglebrow cliffs and devastate the Aesirai metropolis. Laser cannon that had prevented the rebels from dropping directly on the capital scythed the sky in vain attempts to hold back the adroit fighter craft.
To prevent being hit by the strobing laser bursts, Ned banked sharply over the Silver Sea, directly into the rebels’ line of advance. Only a handful of the Sky Guard remained, and as he watched, most of them burst into fireballs. He pulled into a climb, deciding to risk the laser cannon and find a way into the city. As he came out of his curl, the palisades glared white. An immense explosion ruptured through the glare, sundering the cliffs.
Ned leaned hard on his yoke to avoid flying head on into the bowshock. The ship’s radiation detectors glared red. He had not expected a nuclear attack from the rebels. He thought they would have wanted to ravish the city, not simply destroy it.
When he came out of his dive, lifted by the shockwave, he could find no trace of N’ym. It took him a stunned moment to understand what had happened. The pylons of the city had severed. The massive ramstat engines embedded in the foundations had fired simultaneously, and N’ym—rather than submit to its enemy—had launched itself into the sky.
Ned’s skyward arc bucked the crest of the shockwave, and he had a moment to gaze up and see the refulgent blue glare of neutron fires carrying the city toward the stars. Colossal bolts of lightning barbed the sky as N’ym smashed through the ionosphere. Rebel ramjets scattered in a buzz of sparks, swept aside by the turbulence of the flying city.
Ned had known that N’ym had this capability—he had toured the titanic engine chambers as a boy with his school class—and he knew the ultimate destination of the city. No enemy would harry N’ym where she was going now. The huge ramstat engines hurled the city into the black sun.
Turbulence flipped Ned out over the sea. By the time he wrested control of the ship from the cyclonic blast, he was skimming starslick wavetops. Tears smashed his vision. N’ym was gone. The eaglebrow cliffs had collapsed to rubble where the city had been. The glassy spires and minarets, the idyllic plazas and park glades, the hillside houses and hanging gardens where he had learned beauty, all gone forever.
Ned cried, glad his parents had not lived to see this. And he anguished for lovers and friends thrown into space. The ramstat generators would dome the city in a pressurized atmosphere and provide inertial gravity. The Aesirai who survived the quake of the launch would live to see Valdëmiraën and all the shining worlds fall behind them, and the cosmic blackness of Saor engulf everything. They would live free a while longer, a few weeks, before the tidal forces of the black hole ripped them down to their very atoms and then to nothing. There would be no ruins of N’ym. Only light would remain, stretched long by the fall to forever.
A wall of rebel flyers loomed ahead of Ned. Laserbolts seared around him and struck the sea in splats of steam. Ned dove. The impact of the splash jarred through him. Flying by scan, he located his objective on the panel’s sonar. The lynk under the Silver Sea tendered his only hope of escape now that N’ym was gone. It appeared as a blue glyph on the green scope. The rebels who had peeled off to stalk him showed as four red blips, hot on the white pulse signifying him. But they were not the real threat. Static lines twisted directly behind the enemy pulses. That was the blast force from the nukes and the ramstat thrusters churning boulders through the water at nearly the speed of sound. When they hit, his craft would shatter.
Ned powered his engines to the limits of stability. There would be no time to brake before entering the lynk. He had to full throttle to get there or he would fall into the range of rebel fire. From training, he knew that entry to the lynk was prohibited at anything but full stop and slow glide. “Fock!” he shouted at the warning array that flashed and clanged from the control bank.
LYNK VIOLATION blazoned the view-visor. At his speed, he would be flung clear of the known lynklanes and plummet deep into the trackless Overworld.
Two of his pursuers pulled up to avoid the lynk and get clear of the advancing shockwave. Of those that pursued, one blip vanished in the encroaching static. The last bore down.
Ned sighted the lynk visually: the silver arch he recognized from a hundred photos, radiant in the benthic dark. The bulky cargo transports that usually clustered about the lynk had been cut free and drifted aimlessly before the portal. Ned steered clear of them but made no effort to brake. Ahead, the lynk swelled closer, a mute gray parabola. Bracing against transition impact, Ned aimed for the center.
As he shot through, no disturbance rocked him. The view went blank as an empty page. He braked hard. Thunder rattled the craft, and dazzling colors snapped into random shapes. The ship slowed, and the shapes reformed, composing an undersea view similar to where he had just been. On the scope, he found the blue glyph of the lynk, far behind him. The red blip chasing him came through the lynk at a steeper pitch and vanished.
Ned slammed off the klaxon and warning lights. Ahead floated the jagged outline of a coast. He pulled back on the yoke to surface—but the engines had failed. The ship began to sink. Swiftly, he angled the fins to minimize the speed of his descent. A quick scan of his console revealed the engine’s depleted ramstat cells. Weeks would pass before they could fully recharge.
He had neither the air nor food to last that long.
In an instant, he made the decision to eject. He unstrapped himself from the flight sling, punched in a departure sequence with a time lag, stripped off his clothes, palmed his translator and the finder chip Chan-ti Beppu had given him, and crawled to the bomb-bay airlock so that his leaving would not flood the craft. Maybe later he could retrieve it.
Cauled in a whoosh of silver bubbles, he dropped from the strohlkraft and pumped for the surface, trailing in bright streams the last breath of his first life.
*
“He’s in the Overworld,” Nappy Groff said, reading the numerics from the bubble monitor. “Deep in the Overworld.”
Chan-ti Beppu stared over his shoulder, then straightened. “I’m going after him.”
Groff hung his head and turned about slowly. “Forget him, Beppu. He’s too deep. You’ll never find him.”
“He still has my sender. I’ll find him and bring him back. He’s mine now. N’ym is gone.”
The operators who had been on the platform deck when N’ym launched into space still milled about, muttering with amazement. Groff signaled for one of them to assume his post, and he rose and took Chan-ti by the hand. He led her off the platform and behind the partition to his cluttered workbench. “Forget your grand notions of love,” he insisted. “You know there’s no place for love in the Overworld, what with the zōtl and the distorts. You’re safe here with us. Out there, we can’t help you.”
“Come with me, then.”
Groff’s blue eyes bulged. “Are you daft? Only a fool would do that. No one among us will go with you.”
The Last Legends of Earth Page 5
