The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  Ned remembered enough history to know that in this primitive age, they confronted the extreme jeopardy of zōtl attack. Know-Where-to-Go had completed its raid a century earlier, seeding fortress communities among the planets. A thousand years of war raged ahead.

  Pahang looked to Ned to share his amazement at the vista of planets and galactic vapors and met the pilot’s consternation. “Trouble, lah?”

  “No more trouble than Squat,” Ned answered, typing into the flight deck a landing program that would take them down on the nightside of Ras Mentis. The scope displayed the marker for zōtl needlecraft, a red triangle. “Forget the stars for now. Watch here. You see this triangle, let me know.”

  Ned concentrated on guiding his ship into the atmosphere at an angle that would optimize power and leave the least contrail. Once in the envelope of the stratosphere, he cut thrust entirely and nosed into glide attitude.

  “Tuan—look!” Three green blips came over the eastern horizon, three hundred kilometers below.

  “Flyers!” He recognized their markers from aviation history. “Those are the earliest ramstat fighters ever built. Looks like they’re heading north. They haven’t seen us.”

  Ned considered flaring his thrusters to alert them, then thought better of it. The strohlkraft’s shadowary hull would be untrackable on their radar. They would have no idea what he was, and that would force him to break radio silence, which might attract the spiders. He let the flyers sail out of sight and placed his attention on the desert night-landing ahead. Infraview projected the landscape below onto the visor. He selected an open basin, then got the idea to look for lynks. If he put down near one, they could use it to escape if necessary.

  During the slow high banks of entry, Ned relished being able to think freely again. After so long under the thrall of Squat, his mind had cramped, and he found thinking about anything but immediate actions difficult. History seemed the most remote. He had forcibly forgotten his past, afraid Squat would hurt him with it. Now it came back thunderously. N’ym had been flung into space, into the black sun! Not yet lost, not for another twenty-eight centuries, but N’ym was doomed to fall. He had witnessed it. Could it be averted now that he had won his way back into the past? This last passage through the lynk had moved him forward in time hundreds of years. Would further lynk jumps carry him closer to his own time? He reeled with the freedom to think again and had to rivet his mind on the panel controls to steady himself.

  Pahang began chanting. He thanked the deities who had delivered him from the demon Squat. He sang praises to them for allowing him to glimpse their high heaven and their resplendent floating bodies of light. The sphere below them, a brushed gold crescent emerging from shadow, possessed the splendid body of a god, perhaps the very one who had freed them. “What is the god’s name?” he asked Hawk.

  Ned grunted quizzically and kept his eyes on the indicators to be certain the entry stayed smooth and no flyers or needlecraft approached.

  “The god—” Pahang gestured at the limb of weather under them. “What is the god’s name?”

  “That’s not a god,” Ned laughed. “That’s a planet.”

  “What is a planet?”

  Ned puzzled a reply.

  “Are you the planet-god’s power?” asked Pahang.

  “What’s your name, man?”

  “I am Pahang, son of the fisher chief Selingtang of the Yue tribe. I was but a net-weaver myself, being fifth son.”

  “I am Ned O’Tennis, son of the warrior Dunman O’Tennis of the Aesirai. I was myself only a ferry pilot.”

  “How came you to fly this iron dragon?”

  “It’s not a dragon, it’s a machine. It’s not alive. It’s like a boat. The Aesirai build these.”

  “The Aesirai are very powerful.”

  “The Aesirai are dead.” Ned nailed his gaze on the altimeter. “I am the last.”

  “But are we not all of us dead here?”

  “No, Pahang. This isn’t the afterworld.”

  “But I have died. I remember—”

  They had both seen humans taken alive out of the sand bluffs, fully formed inside the ground, each with a story of a former life. Ned recalled Chan-ti Beppu telling him that the worlds were machines, and now that he had confronted the Rimstalker, he believed she was right. A heartsore feeling saturated him at the memory of the brindle-haired girl who had won his love in the last days of his old life. What had become of her? She had known the truth all along. She had tried to teach him. But it took Squat to show him how to listen.

  “You were dead,” he told the Malay. “The Rimstalker brought you back to life.” Chan-ti had called the Rimstalker the World Eater. What had she meant by that?

  “The night god and the demons carry our lives among the worlds,” Pahang said with conviction. “We live again— so we will die again.”

  Despair fluted through Ned. The shock of Squat, of N’ym’s destruction, of losing Chan-ti, wound like a cyclone around the lucid center of his watchfulness. He had lived at this center of pure observation to escape Squat’s mindreach. Now the horror of his fate flung him outward, casting him across time and worlds—and he knew he dared not leave the storm-core yet. “We will die,” he agreed, and returned his full intent to the flight deck, “but not now.”

  “We are men, the two of us.” Pahang reached out and clasped Ned’s forearm. He was afraid to be alive again, terrified by the incomprehensible powers that now owned him. When he felt the solidity of Ned, he calmed. Here was a man like himself, colored differently yet alive and cast off from his tribe just as he was.

  Ned felt the fear in the Malay’s grip, felt his own fright at their exile from everything known. “We are men,” he said and met his companion’s apprehensive stare.

  “We are men in the hands of the gods. We are homeless and alone. We must strive together,” said Pahang.

  “Together.” Ned put his hand atop Pahang’s.

  The Malay relaxed and turned back to the aerial vista before them. Whatever was to be would be. The sun flaring at the brink of the planet winked out as the ship descended into night.

  The infraview on the visor brightened. The glidepath that Ned had selected soared over sharktooth mountains, yawed above a jagged canyon, and curved down toward a lynk near an oasis. Thermal layers buffeted the craft, but Ned was proficient at airfoil landings in the gale-force gusts off the eaglebrow cliffs of N’ym, and he had no trouble alighting in a still desert night. The strohlkraft skimmed the tops of dunes and slid over a star-shadowed expanse of sand, rolling to a stop before the base of a lynk.

  Before shutting down the control pod, Ned scanned a last time for other craft. No one. During their slow, falling stoop, he had searched the terrain with infraview for signs of others—fires, thermal exhausts, human geometries—and had spotted nothing but the rhythmic chaos of the desert floor.

  Ned disengaged the flight deck but left on the pod light and helped Pahang get out of his sling. They still wore the kelp garments of their thrall to Squat, their bodies grimed with algal blotches and salt stains. Ned shoved aside the puppet man he had shot between the eyes and whose body had slumped against the cabin locker, and removed two flightsuits still in their compress-packs. There was only one pair of boots, but there were two pairs of sturdy softsoles, regulation issue for officers. Another laserbolt pistol hung at the back of the locker between two black armor vests and helmets.

  Pahang admired the sleek mirrorgloss black helmets, and donned one while Ned opened the weapons bin and searched among racked laserifles and various types of grenades and munitions. He came out with a sheathed broad-blade. They put on the softsoles and opened the hatch. Between them, they lifted the puppet man and threw him out into the crayoned shadows. Then Pahang picked up the compress-packs, and Ned led the way out with the knife and a laserbolt pistol.

  The night rose as a wave of stars above sandcut ridges. The lynk reflected the sky and glowed a hushed violet. Its broad stride encompassed the oasis. To avoid walki
ng through the lynk, the two men slogged across the sand around the outside of the arch’s base toward the wet smell of the treeshadows. At the margin of the oasis, Ned stopped short. He pointed to a slum of white cactus crowding the leeside of a sandscarp. “Klivoth kakta!” he whispered. He recognized the telempathic cactus from his sky-fighter training. The rebels used it when they fought zōtl, and the Aesirai had been instructed to destroy it whenever they found it. He knew its properties, though he had never sampled it, never even seen it except in images. He knew it could help him ferret out threats at a distance; with it, he could feel through the dark oasis without entering. Yet, he hesitated. The Aesirai believed that klivoth kakta distorted the brain, and they had outlawed its use. The Aesirai also believed that the zōtl were their allies with whom they had evolved to rule the worlds; that the worlds had grown out of the void, that lynks were linear transporters, and that the Overworld existed as a blank hyperfield devoid of metrics, where no one could live.

  Ned cut a wedge of the white cactus and smelled its citrus charge. He bit into its pulp. A numbing brightness outlined his sinuses, and a pang of regret pierced him as the onslaught of the chemical penetrated his brain, seizing his senses. A rainbow circle came on. At its center something like radio noise funneled into him, replete with muscular sensations, tapestries of odor, ghostly sounds.

  Pahang had drifted ahead. The silhouette of his small body under the lowslung helmet looked risible—but seen through the ring of color, the Malay blustered with sensations and memories, glimpses of the seacoast jungle where he had once lived under one sun and one moon and a sky blue with emptiness by day and stingy of stars at night.

  The oasis, empty of human minds or of any awareness that seemed malefic, trilled with insect noises, coughs and chuckles of small animals that wove through Ned’s mind. The wanderers entered the grass field on the margin of the oasis, and Pahang led them to a trickling stream that emptied into a rock pool. After splashing the surface to drive off snakes, they stripped their kelp rags and bathed.

  The Malay’s thoughts, quiet, accepting, helped Ned keep to his own calm center, where the telempathic cactus connected him to the whole world. Buzzing with borrowed sensations, he closed his eyes, drifted to the edge of the pool and listened gratefully to the absence of Squat.

  “Ned O’Tennis—I need you.”

  The voice had come from inside him. Its abruptness locked him in the moment. Time stopped. Alarm widened, then stilled when he recognized the voice of the Rimstalker.

  “Don’t be frightened. My name is Gai.”

  Ned intended to look and see how the Malay reacted to this, but he floated in the pool paralyzed.

  “You only seem paralyzed,” Gai told him. “That’s because you are temporarily joined to my Rimstalker awareness. In telempathy you partake of my body’s immobility and dilated timesense. Don’t be afraid. This will last but a fraction of a second of real time, a few moments of apparent time.”

  Gai’s success with the crashed pilot whom she had overshadowed emboldened her to extend herself across the planet to Ned. But she was wary about damaging his cold-energy mind with her hot thoughts, and she restrained herself from dumping what she knew into his brain. They would have to talk. “Do you remember me?”

  You saved us from Squat, Ned spoke, mentally. All his experiences and memories shone like ore in him, in the silences of his being. Out of this vein of memories about the entity called Gai arose Pahang’s story of having hung before the night god that called itself a Rimstalker and claimed to have built these worlds to war with zōtl. There, too, ascended Chan-ti Beppu’s declaration that these were artificial worlds, templates cast from an aboriginal planet. Awe swelled in him, and he said, You are the Rimstalker who built these worlds.

  “Yes. I need your help now.”

  What must have been his heart slammed against his ribs. Anything.

  “You are going home. Every time you use a lynk, temporal torque moves you closer to your own time. But, like a pendulum, you’ll fly past your starting point and then eventually swing back to it and past again, many times until the torque is spent. I can help you displace that torque once my own body is free. Right now, the zōtl have locked me up where even they can’t reach me—but neither can I get out. I need you to move through time in a way that will help me.”

  How?

  “Some of the lynks are zōtl, some Tryl, and the rest belong to Genitrix, the machine mind I used to build these worlds. If you move exclusively through my system’s lynk-lanes, I can track you through time.”

  What good will that do?

  “You come from a time when my enemy, the zōtl, are defeated. Your track through the Overworld between lynks will show me the timeline that leads to the future I desire. Once you go through, I can use any of my lynks to monitor your direction. For you, the crossing will take an instant. But for me here in the worlds, centuries will pass. During that time, I’ll patch into my lynks to see what event-corridor you traverse, and I’ll choose the same events. You will be the oracle I follow.”

  I don’t understand.

  “Every choice we make creates a fork in our timeline. Wouldn’t it be nice to see ahead of our forks and choose the timepath that ultimately leads where we want to go, even if it means some discomfort in the present or near future? I can stand at the threshold of my lynks and follow your progress through time, choosing the forks that lead toward a future with you in it, since that’s the future where I succeed.”

  Why not simply come with me?

  “I can’t abandon these worlds. They are my ship. If I leave and get lost, my programs could go on indefinitely replicating old lives in the shapes of new suffering. I can’t take that chance. You will have to lead me through the Overworld—or I must surrender to chance. Will you help me?”

  You would return me to my own time—to the Eyelands?

  “If my body is freed, I can free my machine minds from the zōtl; then, I will have the power to displace the torque that skips you through time between lynks. When that happens will determine how well I can place you in time. The sooner I regain my power, the better chance I have of getting you where you want to go.”

  Minutes ago I was a slave to a distort. You freed me. I promised you then that I would serve you all my life. I am glad the future proved ample and clever enough for me to return the favor and help myself at the same time. What do you want me to do now?

  “The lynk here is a Tryl artifact. Don’t go through it. When your strohlkraft is ready, fly north-northwest six hundred and thirty-eight kilometers. There’s a giant cave in the mountains there, at about twelve thousand meters. It’s one of my lynks. Go through there.”

  That’s all?

  “For now. I will meet you on the other side, wherever that may be. Good luck, Ned O’Tennis. I am grateful that you have joined your fortune with mine.”

  The bond dissolved, and Gai found herself in brash light on the dayside. The mell with the crashed pilot had thinned during Gai’s extension to Ned. Now it, too, slimmed entirely away. She drifted across the sun-sledged basin, rejuvenated by her union with the humans, yet eager to separate. A renegade, a fugitive in her own creation, she dared not leave a trail for the zōtl to follow—especially now that she had found Ned O’Tennis.

  Gai hovered among the rock pinnacles until sunset streaked the horizon green and a hoverdrone arrived to pick up the pilot on the desert floor. She felt proud that her exile had begun with such portentous discoveries. Now the humans would have another weapon in their struggle against the zōtl, and she had a guide through the Overworld. Before going her way, she watched as the hoverdrone hoisted the pilot aboard, his arms and the pockets of his flight suit filled with the telempathic cactus.

  Cage of Freedom

  Sunrise on Ras Mentis set the visible planet-swarms adrift in cloudless blue. The white husks of asteroids looked vaporous in the solar glare of Lod.

  All night long, Ned O’Tennis and Pahang had talked about their shared fate
. Ned explained about planets, genetic codes, ramstatic generators, machine intelligence, lasers. The Malay pelted him with questions, challenging all his assumptions. If Pahang had not seen the orb of Ras Mentis during their landing approach, he would have doubted that the world actually consisted of many worlds, each a sphere. Ned wanted him to eat the klivoth kakta and telempathically share knowledge, but Pahang refused. “Life has mysterious powers,” he said. “Even death is surprised by life. What I see here in the sky and in the land is not the life I knew, yet I live. Yet I live.”

  Through the klivoth kakta, Ned had seen the world Pahang had come from—very like Chalco-Doror but alone, its blue sky vacuous, empty of planetesimals, rafted with clouds and, at night, a lone moon, its wan glow and a sprinkling of stars the only respite against unanimous darkness. That was the first world, where life had found its shapes on its own. Chan-ti had been right. In the after-shimmer of the kakta, her image hung unperturbed in his memory, lanky and wild-haired. He fingered the finder chip he had wedged into the clip of his translator and wondered where she roamed now.

  At first light, the men explored the oasis, looking for food. They found plenty to eat—dates, breadfruit, and red bananas—but as the land came clear, dew mists parted before a great unhappiness. Temple ruins appeared in the incessant vegetation, every pedestal and truncated column stacked with human skulls. A ragged banner stretched proudly between the tallest palms, its colors bleached yet still displaying the military sigils of the army that had taken these heads.

  “This is the Age of Knives, all right,” Ned mumbled.

  “Life is war,” Pahang answered. “My third brother, the soul-catcher, was always telling me that.” He had filled his helmet with the sour yellow berries he liked, undistracted by the emblems of carnage staring from every nook of the verdant temple. “Peace is not possible—except with oneself.”

  The myriad skulls reminded Ned of the war between the Aesirai and the rebels. Gai’s promise to help return him to his own time inspired him with the hope that he might be able to save N’ym. Here he was—alive in the Age of Knives, a dozen centuries before the Aesirai arrived on Valdëmiraën. Fate had selected him to wander timeloose. Why, if not to make a difference in his own time? Perhaps the Aesirai did not have to act as puppets of the zōtl. He determined to discuss this possibility with the Rimstalker the next time they met.