The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Not even to save yourselves?”

  “We were saved, until you brought us here. And we will be saved again, when we leave here.”

  “I’ll have Genitrix stop animating Tryl if you’ll help me get the O’ode.”

  “But then you will still need bait and some other unfortunate species will be selected. No, Gai. We will not help you.”

  Before Gai could attempt another argument, a chime rang and Genitrix’s remote voice spoke urgently, “The zōtl are here, Gai! They have opened a lynk on one of the night worlds.”

  “Patch those coordinates to my Form. I’m on my way.”

  Gai willed herself directly to her Form, and her plasma body flew through the glass wall. “The Tryl will let you use their lynk system to reach the scene,” Genitrix said as Gai prepared to leave the planet. “You will get there a lot faster.”

  Genitrix directed Gai to one of the silver parabolas. Battle-fear and rage whirling in her, she walked through the lynk on Doror and appeared outside a lynk on a world in Chalco. She turned off the Form to see clearly what awaited her in real time.

  Under a sky dark, cloud-covered, and drizzly, the terrain, contoured for rain, shone radiant as day. The zōtl lynk, a red dolmen, molten and lustrous, stood before a clave similar to the one Gai had just left. The towers of this clave had blasted open and jetted flames. Green light glared from the red dolmen, illuminating a crowd of Tryl herded from the burning clave by bat-like blurs of motion that Gai knew were zōtl.

  The sight of the passive Tryl hurrying toward the zōtl lynk, their city in ruins behind them, struck Gai like a blow. She had never seen combat before, and the sight of the destruction inspired fury in her. These monsters had stolen and devoured her family, just as they were abducting these gentle creatures. Wrath mounted in her, and she stalked forward.

  The zōtl spotted the Form and swarmed toward her. They appeared as black smudges of flight in the Form’s viewer. An arachnid body with a stiletto feed tube rotated at the edge of the screen, displaying all its gruesome mouthparts and legs.

  A wince of laserlight struck Gai’s faceplate, and the viewer blacked out.

  “System overload,” a mechanical voice chattered. “Circuit broken. Activating emergency backup.”

  Other blows jolted the Form before the viewer came back on and showed the Form circled by flying spidershapes shooting bursts of red light.

  “Use the photon guns in your gloves!” Genitrix’s voice shouted. “Their lasers are cutting into your Form!”

  Gai marked the spidershapes as targets and fired her photon guns. The Form’s arms thrashed, and searing bolts of energy glared the surroundings blind with their intensity. In an instant, the carnage ended. The Tryl stood about stunned, big eyes squinting into the afterglare. The surprised zōtl were nowhere to be seen, their bodies entirely vaporized. Only the lynk remained, a glowing red doorway into the refulgent core of hell.

  Gai raised both arms toward the lynk.

  “Wait!” Genitrix yelled.

  But Gai was too infuriated to stop. She fired full power into the lynk. And it exploded, incinerating the clave and surrounding terrain and kicking the Form off its feet. Mammoth strokes of lightning writhed in a fiery vortex and disappeared with a pounding roar.

  Darkness swooped in. Rain drummed louder. Where the lynk had been, a crater spilled faintly glowing vapors. The Tryl had vanished, their clave a nest of rubble.

  “Gai—” Genitrix called. “Your life functions seem intact. Can you read me?”

  “I’m all right. I thought the lynk would blow inward, the way ours do when they overload.”

  “The zōtl have obviously rigged theirs differently.”

  “Obviously.” Gai stood the Form up and surveyed the devastated landscape.

  *

  “Empty the land where life had been,

  empty our hearts where our pain wrestled heaven.

  The land continues—our heart continues

  fixed in our fate—shadows of emptiness.”

  *

  “Turn off the gene recovery program for the Tryl,” Gai said, finally.

  “Stop producing Tryl?”

  “Yes. Stop producing Tryl. They’re too much like us. I won’t have them suffer any more. Stop immediately.”

  “But what about our mission?”

  “Our mission goes on. As you say, we are fixed in our fate. But not with the Tryl. Find me another species, a more cruel, more selfish species, whose suffering will not empty our hearts.”

  Pages from the Book of Nothing

  “Gai—are you awake?”

  “Just dozing. What is it, Genitrix?”

  “I left you to rest while I fulfilled the conversion you requested. But I should go no further without your approval. I have found another species. Would you like to review their suitability?”

  Gai slowed the Form’s timerush and looked about at the zōtl lynk site she had blasted, where she had fallen asleep grieving the suffering she had caused the lemur-eyed Tryl. In the hours that she had slumbered in the Form, seventy years had passed, and the terrain had transformed. The crater where the lynk had exploded had filled into a large lake, still and glassy, reflecting the wheel of the galaxy.

  Lod’s distant brilliance hung low on the watery horizon, a silver feather. The ruins of the clave had submerged except for the parabolic tip of the Tryl lynk far out in the lake. The nocturnal land on the lake shore flourished with bizarre vegetation: lamplike flowers glowing in the perpetual dark, tentacled trees moving leafless sucker-edged branches without wind, silver shrubs with mouth-leaves and needle-teeth chewing insects snatched from the air.

  “I have changed the gene-mix,” Genitrix went on. “I have introduced a lot more lifeforms, to diversify the eco-base. That is necessary for this new species we will use as zōtl bait. They are a lot less sophisticated than the Tryl and will need a rich milieu to survive.”

  “Can you present one in plasma form from the tesseract?” Gai asked.

  The dark air before the Form glittered with brush-sparks, and a figure appeared whose shape looked similar to that of a Tryl and equally alien. Instead of horn stubs on its head, it had hair that fell past its shoulders. Its flesh, sleek as the Tryl’s, displayed no throat frills or markings— and its eyes peered about, small and frightened.

  “These creatures call themselves humans,” Genitrix said. “They are more cunning than they look though nowhere near the stature of the Tryl. Their music is orgulous and strident—occasionally poignant.” Strains of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto 6 intercut with Coltrane’s Ascension. “They existed a billion years prior to the Tryl, and their history is nothing more than a catalogue of wars among themselves. They are profoundly sexual—which will facilitate breeding them—yet their passion for procreation did not prevent them from exterminating themselves. They are vicious and selfish animals with pretensions of intelligence. I am confident that the zōtl will find them appetizing and that we need feel no remorse for their animal suffering.”

  “Can the creature hear me?”

  “Oh, yes. He is struck dumb by what he sees. You appear imposing to him in your Form—not unlike the god-images the people of his time worshipped. But I recommend you not use your plasma body. Your Rimstalker shape would appear quite ghastly to him. I’ve already informed him of who we are and our mission. The information seems to have shocked him.”

  The human trembled and fell to his knees and then rose again, lifted by impulses from Genitrix. “Spare me—please,” the quaking man begged. “I have suffered enough in my life. It is not I you should torment. I have a brother—a vile man, a thief and an adulterer—he is the one you seek. He is worthy of all the torments you wish to inflict. But spare me. I am an honest and worshipful man.”

  Gai dismissed the wraith with a wave that broke the simpering plasma shape into a gust of sparks. “I’ve seen enough, Genitrix. You’ve found the ideal beast. Go into full production.”

  *

  The Malay
woke with a start. He had lived as a fisherman over eight thousand years before Christ and had drowned in a storm in his thirty-second year of life, leaving behind two wives, twelve children, and five grandchildren. He woke into a world he could never have imagined: endless night and the sky huge with stars—a maelstrom of stars. By that, he knew he had arrived in the upperworld, no matter the nonsense about Rimstalkers and zōtl that he had heard from the demons in his dream. The shaman had told him as a child that demons guarded the upperworld, and they whispered confusing lies into the ears of spirits passing upward on heaven’s stream.

  But the shaman had told the Malay nothing about Squat. And perhaps wisely—for Squat ruled the upperworld ruthlessly. All in the night world served Squat. During the many sunless days that he had been here, he had worked hard with the other dead, wandering the beaches scavenging for anything that might please Squat. For only by pleasing Squat could one have more than slime to eat.

  Some of the dead thought they were not dead. Why did the dead have to eat? Why did they suffer pain when Squat hurt them? The Malay had no answers for them, those strange men and women who looked so different and with whom he communicated only with great difficulty—and profound risk, since Squat did not approve of the dead talking.

  The Malay rarely spoke with the others. Their arduous work, lugging heavy metal shapes out of the sea to the thronelike boulder among the dunes where Squat presided over the dead, left him at day’s end with barely the strength to slurp slime, let alone join in the whisperings of others, endlessly planning escape—as if escape were possible for the dead.

  Only one other endured as silent as he—though perhaps more silent, for the Malay did speak of the demons and what they had told him to whomever among the bedraggled dead would listen. The one most silent of all, and the one who seemed to listen most closely, was a man with red hair and green eyes and a face like a hawk’s.

  The Malay called him Hawk, but never to his face. The Malay had not seen men like that in his life—but then neither had he ever seen people as strange as many of the others, black-fleshed some of them, white-skinned and gold-haired others. And never, ever, had he even dreamed the terror that was Squat.

  Big as three men—and not simply fat, though he was obese – Squat had legs like trunks, hands big as paddles, shoulders stooped as a boulder’s, and a grotesquely bulged head with square, osseous temples and, sprouting from his skull-seams, tufts of gray hair coarse as goat fur. He looked abhorrent with skin white as the flesh of a coconut and eyes pink, set deep in the scowl of a fetal face.

  The power of Squat over the dead resided not in his obscene size, which he flaunted naked, his genitals shriveled and only rarely visible under many folds of flesh. Squat ruled the dead, because no one could resist his commands. “Obey me!” he whined—and those who heard his cry felt it pierce their marrows, and they obeyed, even if he commanded them to drop dead—which the Malay had seen happen numerous times. The dead, when they were commanded to die, fell unconscious as though they had been alive, and they rotted where they fell.

  Ever more living dead arrived to replace the twice dead. New bodies molted from the sand bluffs every day, all with the same mournful bewilderment. The Malay had worked the bluffs for a while, searching for the newborn dead and clearing the sand from their eyes, and he was glad when Squat transferred him to the beach scavengers. The new dead, so pathetic in their helplessness, proved irresistible to Squat, who toyed with them before setting them to work. The Malay had become sickened by their grievous wails of hurt, incomprehension, and revulsion as Squat first exerted his command over their wills and then forced them to submit to disgusting acts among the dunes.

  The beach scavengers, left alone to do their work until day’s end, lived better in the dark upperworld. The sun rose and fell as it did in life, only here it arrived terribly small. Nevertheless, the air felt warm, balmy with the pelagic breezes that flowed off the sea. By the light of the stellar whirlpool, brighter than a full moon, the scavengers roamed coves and strands looking for what the tide had delivered. At day’s end, they presented what they had found to Squat. If the offerings pleased, he rewarded the scavengers with shellfuls of slime. If the day’s work delivered nothing of interest, the workers went hungry. And if for any reason Squat knew rage, people died—again.

  Pleasing Squat was not difficult. The tide carried in wonders: coils of smooth rope that glowed brightly, heaps of crystals that played dreamy music when they came together, tangles of shimmery garments, sheets and panels of floating metal that Squat used for his ramshackle palace; and once a puppet man, with no face but two rubies for eyes, who never needed to eat or drink, and who had the strength of twelve men. Squat used him as a personal servant, to prepare his meals from the animals and vegetables the dead gathered, and to help build the shabby palace.

  The Malay usually worked alone. Squat discouraged cooperation by forcing those who brought their offerings in groups to fight among themselves for their food. Also, talking was forbidden, and those caught died as miserably as though apprehended trying to flee. No one ever escaped. Squat’s mind penetrated the world too deeply for anyone to hide from him. But occasionally, when Squat slept or became thoroughly engrossed in humiliating the new dead, talking with the other scavengers became possible. Then the Malay told the others about the demons and queried them about their experiences. He learned very little, only that all had once lived among their own people and had died.

  Once, while the Malay struggled to haul to shore a carpet woven of glowing fibers, Hawk approached him. “Tell me again about the demons,” he said in the Malay’s tongue.

  The Malay dropped the carpet, gawked at the tall, red-haired man, and cast a frightened glance down the beach to where the junk palace cluttered the breakwater.

  “Don’t be afraid. The bluff workers found some women among the new dead. Squat will be preoccupied for a while. We can talk.”

  “You know my tongue. How?”

  Hawk shook his head once. “Never mind that. Tell me about the demons again.”

  The Malay related all that had happened to him that first night before he awoke in the bluffs.

  Hawk listened intently. In the distance, screams of the new dead rose and fell as Squat dallied with their minds while he defiled them. “You’re certain that they called themselves Rimstalkers?”

  The Malay confirmed that and repeated how the demons had hung him naked before the massive and shining shape of the night god.

  “That was no god,” Hawk said. “But it might as well have been.”

  The shrieking from up the beach stopped.

  “Tell no one we talked,” Hawk instructed with iron in his voice. “No one. Tonight, while Squat sleeps, we will talk again—and perhaps the night god will speak with us.”

  The Malay threw a terrified look toward the bluffs and espied Squat’s huge white head lolling above the starlit dunes as he shambled toward his palace. The Malay turned back to Hawk, but the fire-haired man had waded into the sea, kelp raiment floating about his waist as he probed a tide pool with his stave. Had he spoken at all? The Malay could hardly believe he had heard his own language again—and spoken by a man all the others had thought mute.

  That night, the Malay did not sleep. Nor did he hear the sobs of the new dead women Squat had abused or the moans of those who had gone hungry several days in a row and were now too weak to scavenge. The Malay listened inward for his memory of Hawk’s voice. What had the strange man meant—they would speak with the night god?

  A ticklish sensation glossed the space an inch behind the Malay’s eyes, and he knew from experience that Squat was feeling into him, fingering his thoughts. Terror whipped him upright, and he sat sparking sweat as Squat rummaged through his mind, alerted by the Malay’s excitement.

  On the beach, the Malay had feared that this might happen. No secrets could be kept in this place. Squat had warned them against hatching murderous strategies. Having too often seen conspirators ferreted out by Squa
t’s mind-reach, their bodies made to dance furiously on the sharp rocks until their feet hashed to pulp and the exertion made blood spurt from their ears, the Malay had prepared a memory in which to hide. He remembered the fury he had felt when his brother had stolen his second wife from him before she could even bear him children and how her first son was his. He wondered loudly in his mind if his brother, still alive when the Malay had died, would be joining them here in the upperworld. All the old resentment rose up in him and toiled into a vengeful excitement.

  The itching behind his eyes stopped. The Malay lay back and firmly placed his thoughts in his memories of his former life and let the scald of his hurt at his brother’s betrayal seep into his heart. Sleep muted his discomfort, and dreams closed in.

  A hand shook him awake. Hawk bent over him. “Come.” He scurried quickly toward the dunes.

  The Malay did not move. If Squat woke and found him with Hawk, they would certainly die in some horrifying way. He lay still a long time in the grip of fear before the thought that he was already dead and still suffering loosened his fright enough for him to crawl among the other sleepers toward the dunes.

  Hawk waited near the tide flats, where the clatter of the waves among the shells and gravel would hide their voices. He gripped the Malay by the shoulders, and his face expressed an urgency all the more startling on those ruddy features that had always before seemed immutable as rock. “Call the Rimstalker,” he said.

  The Malay shook his head with incomprehension.

  “The night god. The one you were hung before naked. Call him.”

  “The demons said he was a woman,” the Malay whispered in a huff of fright.

  “Call her then—but be quick. Squat’s puppet man will be heading this way soon on his rounds.”

  “How? How do I call this god?”

  “With your mind. Call for her. She talked with you once. She’s never talked with anyone else. She’ll listen to you. Call her.”