The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Zōtl battle language! Neutrino bandwidth. Genitrix-18 is compromised, Gai. Pull Saor.”

  “In a moment. Saor—from where in communications is the zōtl code coming?”

  “Everywhere. All the planets. I’m getting a few scraps of signals from one of the planets in a primitively coded language. Must be the lifeform they generated here. I’ll patch them in.”

  Voices scratchy with static overlay each other, talking fast and panicky: “Fire-shield down!”—”They’re coming around the dark side, watch it, Blue.”—”Can’t get through. Line’s broken.”—”Blue, give me a fix.”— “Trauma control! Get the hell over here, now!”—”Blue, Blue, where are you?”

  “Saor, can you find the mission commander?”

  “Positive. Rimstalker waveform locked in. Do you want me to amplify?”

  “Yes.”

  The panorama of planets on the Form’s view-screen splintered, and an image of another Form appeared. This Form looked identical to Gai’s bulky armor but for the identification coode on the brassard and across the helmet.

  “The waveform’s locked in,” Saor reported, “but I’m getting no response from the hailing frequency.”

  “Genitrix, identify the Rimstalker.”

  “Ylan—male mission commander Genitrix-18—completed training two months before you and launched with the first assault three weeks ago. Gai, I strongly recommend that you pull Saor now.”

  Gai remembered Ylan, a robust and fun-loving officer, fond of the ladies. He had tried several times to bed her and been sternly rebuffed each time. For him, love and life belonged in the category of games and only war merited serious-mindedness—but for her, there was only war. “Ylan is alive. Saor’s found his waveform. We have to get through, see if we can help.”

  “Hailing line is open,” Saor announced.

  The next moment, the view-screen filled with an image of Ylan—though, at first, she did not recognize his disfigured face, swollen and glossy, eyes reduced to slits, mouth a moue of suffering. At his blood-crusted temples, black straps dug into the flesh. Staring closer, Gai identified them not as straps but lines of tiny black creatures, jammed like insects, stuck to his flesh. His head lolled to the side, and she glimpsed a thriving mass of the black ticks, big as an outstretched hand, clasping the back of Ylan’s skull. Genitrix magnified the swarm to display one of the entities. Above jointed pincers, numerous spider-eyes stared abstractly from joined hemispheres of a hideously bulbed body.

  “Zōtl!” Genitrix identified.

  “Saor, break the lynk and return at once!” Gai ordered.

  The image of Ylan’s harrowed face and the horror grasping his head broke up. Before the connection entirely dissolved, a rush of mindwaves bleated through the channel, and for an instant Gai experienced Ylan’s suffering. Pain exploded through her so fiercely she nearly blacked out. A sour, excremental odor crept up from where the Form’s bio-functions had momentarily overloaded.

  Saor appeared alongside Lod. “The lynk is dissolved.”

  Lod appraised the shadowshape skeptically. “Saor should be purged,” he told Gai.

  Gai, still reeling from the feedback of pain that had lashed her, nodded, and the two machine intelligences vanished. The shock of seeing Ylan dying in the grip of the zōtl tightened in her chest. “How could that have happened?”

  “The zōtl have found a way to overcome our defenses,” Genitrix answered.

  “But they were inside the Form with him! They got into the Form without killing him. How could they possibly do that?”

  “The Form can’t be breached without killing its occupant—unless the zōtl have found a way to usurp the machine minds and utilize their codes to open the Form’s lock. But … that would only be possible when the Form is attached to the sleepod, otherwise the high-energy interior of the Form would blow out like a nova. He was in the pod when the zōtl came for him.”

  Gai knew all this, but she did not stop Genitrix. She needed a voice. “What can we do?”

  “Complete the purge of Saor. Remain vigilant. Avoid the sleepod.”

  “But what can we do for Ylan?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How long will he suffer like that?” she asked, already knowing the answer—knowing her enemy too well to endure silence at this horrifying moment.

  “The zōtl prolong the lives of their victims to maximize their harvest of pain androgens. Ylan will most likely suffer until the life functions of his Form run down.”

  Flat-voiced, she asked, “How long will that take?”

  “About a year. A Rimstalker year. That’s over ninety-one thousand years in the continuum. And the zōtl will certainly hook him to the continuum.”

  Gai reeled and struck her arms against an adjacent outcropping so vehemently the rock cracked like glass. “There must be something we can do.”

  “We are helpless. Horrifyingly so. Of the twenty-two known Genitrix systems, fifteen are down. Perhaps more, though it will be years before the last of their gravity pulses reach here, so we can’t know. But what we do know is terrifying.

  *

  “In the fourth day of our nightmare in space,

  the last nightmare for our people,

  we suffer the suffering of others and lament

  our helplessness, ignorant of hope.”

  *

  “Leave me alone,” Gai commanded and stalked toward the lake. In the time since she had last stood here in her plasma body, the water had risen steeply. Despite the suffering of Ylan and the many other Rimstalkers, Genitrix still busily fused oxygen and hydrogen in her chambers under the crust. The water rose and would continue to rise into the sky as vapors and fall again into rivers and oceans. Planets birthing, and Rimstalkers dying.

  She cupped a handful of water and viewed it with the capacities of her Form. Its molecular structure scintillated in her viewer, the water’s one-hundred-and-seven-degree molecular bond angle quilting a distinctive geometry around clusters of impurities. How like water on the range it looked. How very like the range this whole terrain had become, now that the absolute zero of the vacuum had been walled off by an atmosphere and Lod’s warmth. Yet how frightening to remember the great distance from home.

  The lake had risen to her chest in the time she had spent studying the water. She waded to shore and found Lod and Saor waiting for her.

  “Saor is purged,” Lod declared. “Neither Genitrix nor I detect any zōtl contamination.”

  “How do you feel?” Gai asked Saor.

  “I’m fine. The lynk depleted my energy resources for the time being. But I’ll make that up in a few more hours. As I have insisted all along, the threat does not reside in me. Now that you have prematurely alerted the enemy to our presence, your whole mission is in jeopardy.”

  “We are sorry about Ylan,” Lod interrupted Saor. “You knew him from the range.”

  “I know most of the mission commanders. These were in the class ahead of mine. They understood the risks as well as I—as well as we all do.”

  “Obviously, we don’t understand them well enough,” Saor fretted. “What chance do we realistically have? The zōtl are a superior technology.”

  “Not superior,” Lod corrected. “Just alien.”

  “Then how do you explain their success in destroying so many of our systems?” Saor asked. “They may be alien, but they seem to understand us only too well.”

  “We have yet to grasp that, Saor,” Lod retorted, “but we will—because we must.”

  “Go now,” Gai ordered, and the two immediately vanished. Their bickering too closely mimed her thoughts. Emerging from shock, she needed silence; not to think—the machines did that better—but to mourn.

  From his own Form in the blackbody of the launcher’s nosecone at the dark extreme of Chalco-Doror, Saor listened. He heard the entanglings of Lod’s high-energy particles trapped in the gravity net. He heard gravity’s basso profundo throbbing as the system shuttled its masses. He heard Genitrix mutteri
ng to herself about the planets she busied herself building. And, far, far off in the secret depths of his own strength, much further away than he could ever hope to voice, he heard the zōtl finding their places inside him.

  The Tryl Age

  The First People, as they are still remembered by settlers of the Dusk and Night Worlds, were not people at all but bipedal reptiles. During the sapien era on Earth, their primary ancestor, a gecko (family Gekkonidae), fairly reliably traces their origin to the island of Vanua Levu. A billion years after the end of the sapien era, the Tryl evolved from that small creature. They had the stature of humans, though far more clever and compassionate. Earth’s preeminent intelligence, the Tryl produced the greatest technological artifacts in world history, including ramstat, the antigravity mechanism that revolutionized human history.

  —Rikki Carcam, from Letters to Friends about the Way Things Are,

  noteleaf dated Day 87, 222 D

  *

  Traces

  Know-Where-to-Go completed its first full orbit of Chalco-Doror, and the gravity net in which it moved resonated more powerfully as the masses of the planets harmonized their undulating distortions of spacetime.

  “Gai, I have something I think you should see,” Genitrix told the mission commander shortly thereafter.

  Gai resided in her Form, flying among the planets, calibrating each mass’s degree of deviance from programmed orbit. Though Genitrix had already completed that calculation, Gai wanted to check it herself. After losing Ylan and the great majority of other Rimstalker outposts, she had become even more determined to supervise each detail of the mission. Grief and horror had intensified her lifelong despair at losing her family. She slept only several hours a day now and spent the rest of the time exhaustively overseeing the system’s development.

  At Genitrix’s call, Gai interrupted her survey, placed her Form in orbit about the nearest planet, and tuned in to the mother program. “Well, what have we found?”

  “Something quite startling—and certainly the source of much future poetry. Do you know what this is?”

  The Form’s viewer displayed an intricate mandala of molecular shapes. The pattern opened into a three-dimensional view of a spiral helix close-packed with molecules in a haze of electron interactions.

  “The biological program for the creatures you intend to recreate,” Gai answered, impatiently.

  “Yes. The diribonucleic acid sequence for the Tryl.”

  “The Tryl—is that your name for these creatures?”

  “No, that is their self-name.”

  “What do you mean? How could you know what they called themselves?”

  “That’s why I called you, Gai. What I have found astonishes. I’m sure that all the other Genitrix systems were as astounded as I am now when they made this discovery. Too bad there hasn’t been time to convey any of this important information back to the range. Our scientists there would be most impressed. It may resolve a mystery that has haunted us from the beginning of our own history.”

  “Genitrix, make your point.”

  “These DNA molecules I’ve found are not just replicating sequences. They serve another equally important and parallel purpose aside from coding the physical structures of lifeforms. Look at this molecule—”

  The spiral structure rotated in the viewer, and the perspective rode up the axial channel and stared down from the top, revealing again the ornate symmetry.

  “I see the image, Genitrix. Now what are you getting at?”

  “Well, what does this look like to you?”

  “A molecule of DNA.”

  “You’re seeing with your preconceptions, Gai. If you didn’t know what this was—if you had no idea of how small it is—what would you think ...”

  “Genitrix, I’m too upset about all that’s happened to be much impressed by anything you’d have to say right now. So say it and let me get on with my work.”

  “An antenna. The DNA molecule is the most complex and sensitive antenna that occurs naturally. It transmits and receives waveforms.”

  “So?”

  “So! You’re thinking like a Rimstalker. You forget that we’re not on the range where energy levels are many times higher than here. This is as close to the vacuum as life gets. Here very subtle energies make big differences.”

  “Genitrix—”

  “The DNA antennae in every living being transmit the waveform of that being during its lifetime. When it dies, its transmission ends but the waveform persists in the vacuum indefinitely. You do recall that light has no rest mass and therefore does not diminish over time? Individual photons meet extinction only when they actually come in contact with matter. But matter is so extremely tenuous out here in the vacuum that most light will never touch matter during the entire lifetime of the universe.”

  Gai studied the screen intently for a moment, and then realization opened in her. “You ... You’re saying that the waveforms of these creatures—these Tryl—are still present?”

  “Until Know-Where-to-Go completed the first stroke and stepped up our energy, we lacked the power to detect them. But they are here—all around us. And so is everything that ever lived. All of this ancient world’s life preserved in waveforms.”

  “But wait a minute. This world was destroyed in a nova two billion years ago. Whatever light persists should have expanded through a time-cone at least two billion light years wide.”

  “Yes, much of that light is indeed flying through spacetime. But spacetime is a tesseract. Think back on what you learned during your training about the physics of outer space.”

  “My specialty is weaponry, Genitrix.”

  “Then let me remind you: Spacetime is a manifold. Think of it as a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. Yes, light propagates through space but also through time. And, as we know, light has no rest mass—it is timeless. That means that light is itself a tesseract vector. For three-dimensional beings, light is what is visible of the fourth dimension. In fact, if one were poetically inclined, one might say that light is the window on the infinite.”

  “Okay, okay. So you mean the waveforms of the Tryl are intact in the tesseract and we can access them?”

  “Yes. Now that our energy is stepped up, we have the means to tap the tesseract and receive waveforms. We can talk with the dead.”

  “That’s hardly believable.”

  “I know. When people die on the range, the same thing must happen, but the energy requirements there to tap the tesseract would be prohibitive. Out here in the cold of space, with the energy we’ve brought up from our hotter gravity shell, that capacity is well within our means.”

  “And you’ve done it? You’ve spoken with the Tryl?”

  “Not exactly spoken. Not yet. I’m still developing the hardware for that—which I should complete soon. But I have listened to them. That’s how I know their self-given name. Their language is far more translatable than the zōtl’s. Also, they are exquisite poets and musicians. Would you like to hear their music?”

  Gai agreed, and after a spattering of static, the Form vibrated to a music heathery with silence. “It’s enchanting,” Gai breathed. “Truly beautiful.”

  “So I think. When time and inclination permit, set down on a planet. The electron flux for generating plasma bodies is far more optimal inside an atmosphere. I’m just about ready now to amplify specific waveforms, using Tryl DNA as antennae.”

  Gai lowered her Form to the planet she had been orbiting. The energy increase had dramatically enhanced the formation of the worlds, and the planet’s surface seethed with oceans and towering clouds. Mosses and lichen blotched the land masses. Gai lighted on a plain designed to serve eventually as a swamp. The Form sunk to its knees in the rich loam that the Genitrix program sloughed from the planet’s interior.

  Night and day strobed over the Form in one-second pulses—a drowsy rhythm that suddenly reminded Gai of her fatigue. She had slept poorly since witnessing Ylan’s grim fate. Eyes batting wearily, she watched the
first ghosts waver into view.

  “They are easier to see and communicate with outside the Form,” Genitrix advised.

  Gai stepped out into her plasma body, and the diurnal strobe stopped somewhere in the night. Before her, three wraiths wavered in and out of sight, tall, narrow, bipedal creatures. Three of them solidified into plasma bodies shaped very much as Genitrix had predicted the Tryl would look, from the horn stubs on their skulls to the throat frills and brilliant markings that seemed to glow in the galaxylight.

  What did one say to beings who had been dead billions of years? “Greetings, Tryl. I am Gai, a Rimstalker—”

  “We know,” one of them responded in a genderless voice plump with vacancies. The Form sent its translation to Gai telepathically. “Genitrix has informed us already. We have agreed to appear here that we might talk directly with you, the mission commander.”

  Gai tried to read feelings in their features, but these faces were too strange—noseless but for two tiny holes, lobe-browed, and with huge eyes, colorless in the dark yet luculent with withheld light. “Genitrix has told you of our mission?” Gai asked.

  “Yes. That is why we must speak with you.” The three Tryl shared a look as if silently communicating, and then the speaker continued. “We are appalled that you have returned us from the Light to aid you in war. The Tryl are a peaceful species. We no longer war.”

  The directness of the Tryl disarmed Gai. “I’m sorry that we have—appalled you. I would not choose this to be the reason for returning you from the Light—but I have no choice.”

  “Is that true?” the Tryl asked with obvious incredulity. “You seem a free agent. Even your artificial intelligences display almost full autonomy.”

  “Yes, I have free will. But, you see, my people, the Rimstalkers, are being threatened with extinction by the zōtl. The zōtl—”

  “Genitrix has told us this already. We do not see how that delimits your free will.”

  Gai stared at the Tryl with incomprehension, then ventured, “Most of our other missions have failed. Maybe all the others. I must succeed against the zōtl or my people will die. I have no choice but to elicit your help.”