The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  The ramstat cells had sufficiently regenerated overnight for the strohlkraft to fly. Ned and Pahang gathered their food and several heads of klivoth kakta in frond baskets the Malay proved adept at weaving, and left at once for the cavelynk Gai had selected. During their nightlong talk, Ned had informed the Malay of his telempathic connection with Gai. Pahang expressed gratitude that he had been spared the experience. On the flight to the lynk, Ned asked him why he did not wish to speak again with the being who had given him a second life.

  “It is enough to be carried by the weather,” the Malay answered. “That is strange enough, is it not? But here I am flying through the sky in an iron dragon, flying among planets! For all you explain, I understand less. I will not eat your kakta. I will not speak with the Rimstalker. I have seen enough. Too much.” He held his hand up. “It is enough we are free to think and feel again. It is enough to live for ourselves.”

  Squat had been dead for centuries of real time yet only a day in their minds. The oppressive memory of him bound them like battle-proven soldiers, and Ned took Pahang’s hand in a praiseful clasp. “To freedom!”

  *

  Gai wandered among the worlds. After a while, she became accustomed to the limitations of her plasma shape and only occasionally missed the godly capabilities of her Form. At first she traveled exclusively in her gel body, flying among the planets herself when she had to and riding invisibly with ramstat flyers whenever she could. She prided herself on eluding her enemies, the zōtl and their minion Saor, while still going anywhere she pleased.

  Ned O’Tennis had done as Gai instructed and had flown in his strohlkraft with his Malay companion through the lynk she had chosen. Now, at any of Genitrix’s lynks, Gai could stand at the threshold and sense Ned, feel his momentum and direction away or toward her. Of course, he was not the one she sensed but his timeshadow, flickering over the worlds as he shot back toward his own time. Among the endless timeshadows of all the bodies in creation, she recognized his by its characteristic torque, twanging through her with a distinctive vibration. Anywhere near a lynk she could feel it, even near the Tryl lynks, though she would never stand near one of those. The zōtl frequently rigged Tryl lynks with traps. Only the Genitrix lynks remained secure. The Rimstalker’s Form alone was designed to control access to these lynk-lanes, for they were actually the power circuits of her ship’s magravity engine, expanded enormously and now embedded in the spacetime matrix of the vacuum.

  Guided by the movements of Ned’s timeshadow, Gai even visited the night worlds of Saor’s domain. There, while resting her gel form in a lightless cave, she learned that Genitrix would mindlessly generate a physical body around her plasma shape so long as she lay still in the earth long enough. The first body, which had been woven around her unwittingly while she slept, expressed a mime of her original form on the range. She herself had to admit, after having gotten used to looking at Tryl and human forms, that she appeared out of place with her multiply segmented torso, numerous writhing appendages, mandibled head, and black eye-holes.

  Laying her plasma shape in the mud or the rootweave of some remote place for a fortnight or so with the image of a human in her mind, she let Genitrix automatically form the body she imagined. Once she had made this discovery, she became free to mingle with the humans as one of their own—and that was when she began to care about them. Since her fiasco with the Tryl, she had hoped to avoid emotional attachments to the bait-species; yet, her exile from her Form had squandered that hope. As the last of the Tryl had prophesied, she had come to need the humans, and once she took their form she understood better their passions and sufferings.

  As predicted, they turned out to be a cruel species: Because of their fragility and sensitivity, pain manipulated them—and they cunningly used pain, physical and psychic, to manipulate each other. On the range, communal pleasure far outweighed the pains of living, and the more Rimstalkers who gathered together, the greater the pleasure. But this was not the range. The greater the concentration of humans, the more suffering they inflicted on each other. They seemed to have evolved for a solitary or clannish existence, and only their shared vulnerability to the zōtl allied them in numbers larger than clan units.

  Gai knew that Chalco-Doror was hardly an indigenous environment for the humans or for any of the creatures Genitrix unconsciously poured forth. The confusion of lifeforms was too bizarre for any of the animals to live entirely naturally. Giant saurians trudged through moon-apple forests, eating plants that had never existed during their time on earth. Mysterious viruses and virulent bacteria emerged from Genitrix’s cornucopia and wiped out whole species of plants and beasts. Each of the planets effloresced into a horror of mismatched organisms—biology run amuck—and yet out of chaos, each planet had evolved its own ecology and its own beauty. The humans had adapted. Though zōtl raids and environmental atrocities continually thinned their numbers, they built settlements and made the most of the technology they had inherited from the Tryl. And Gai walked among them as one of their own, following the timeshadow of a future human, leaving when the signal faded, moving on to the worlds where the link with Ned resonated strongest.

  Gai learned that the humans were prolific breeders, who tried to group themselves in extended family units related by blood. Yet Genitrix continued to churn out adult humans with memories of their former lives gleaned from the tesseract field and imprinted in their brains. Genitrix also endowed her creations with a small adjustment to the supercoiling of their DNA, preventing their bodies from aging. The sexually bred humans alone grew old and decrepit. Some colonies, crowded with unaging humans from every epoch of history, banned sexual reproduction.

  The zōtl and Genitrix’s voracious creations thinned the humans out, and they had no problem with population control. Cultural management was their chief problem. With the ground itself disgorging people with living memories from every era of human history, a consensus on anything became impossible—except for one universal agreement: survival. And therefore the zōtl developed into the humans’ strongest ally, since their hunger for humans persisted undiminished and only the truly cohesive settlements avoided being stunned senseless by needlecraft assaults, their populations herded off to the zōtl lynks.

  The zōtl had established their own lynks on each of the planets, and every day they forayed into what they considered their pastures and hunting reserves and stalked humans. Many times Gai watched their needlecraft spray settlements with nervelock gas and then send in their grubs to collect the helpless humans. Grubs – people who had become mounts for the spidery zōtl – obeyed without resistance. The aliens pithed the humans’ skulls with their stiletto-like feedtubes and rode the back of their heads, guiding their movements by direct manipulation of their brains. The zōtl themselves were too small to physically manipulate the bulky humans except by patching into their neurosystems.

  From a safe distance, Gai observed the zōtl lynk stations and witnessed the nervelocked hordes regaining their will power just in time for the grubs to muscle them into the lynks. Those who resisted, the grubs stunned again and carried through, but that took too many grubs and the zōtl preferred to motivate their captives with electric prods and jolts of laserlight. During her training on the range, Gai had learned what happened to the zōtl’s victims, secured in yokes, their brains pithed and made to suffer so that the pain by-products the zōtl cherished could be milked from them. Their bodies sustained by life-support, the tormented brains endured whole lifetimes—several lifetimes if they were luckless enough to have had their DNA’s supercoiling modified by Genitrix.

  Gai’s parents, at least, had died more swiftly, for they were scooped out of the range by the zōtl’s energy-tap of the Rimstalkers’ gravity shell. Their bodies had been treated no differently from the land and the structures that had been gouged out with them, all converted into energy for the zōtl nests. Their loss burned painfully anew each time Gai witnessed the zōtl’s ravenous plundering. Her helplessness to stop her family�
��s murderers from continuing to despoil the lives of others drove her wanderings and inspired her alliance with the zōtl victims—though she preferred not to think that she bore responsibility for making them victims. The zōtl had ravaged her world and countless others. She had determined to destroy them or die trying. The humans existed as her allies, blessed by their ignorance as the Tryl had been cursed by their knowing.

  At each human colony that she visited, Gai strove to improve their defenses and clarify aspects of the Tryl technology that the humans did not immediately grasp. The telempathic cactus that she had introduced to the pilot on Ras Mentis proved a vital tool in the struggle against the zōtl. It empowered fighter pilots to anticipate their enemies’ maneuvers, hunters to find game, and wanderers to avoid dangerous distorts. In the lynks, it would eventually become a necessity for travel, because it enabled travelers to more clearly discern the timelines weaving their futures. The zōtl despised the cactus and made every effort to exterminate the species. Ras Mentis, the only planet on which it grew, became the fiercest battle zone in the zōtl-human war, and the telempathic cactus earned renown among all the worlds as klivoth kakta.

  Some of the human colonies used the Tryl lynks, and fortress settlements arose around the more reliable ones. During her travels, Gai strictly avoided the lynks for the reason she had told Ned: The zōtl, lynklane experts almost as advanced as the Tryl, haunted the unpredictably surreal demesne surrounding the lanes inside the lynks, and too often travelers to the Overworld did not return. With the widespread use of klivoth kakta, this became less common. Still, the rumor persisted that the zōtl had diverted many of the lynks to take passengers directly to their chief nest-world, Galgul, and Gai had no desire to find out for herself.

  Klivoth kakta made interplanetary flight more popular now that fighter escorts could defend passenger flyers. Gai traveled everywhere and became familiar with and appreciated each of the worlds for their uniqueness. Though at the darkest extreme of Chalco, Valdëmiraën was by far her favorite. Like all the Night Worlds, this was a mountainous planet; but unlike the others, its warmth radiated from within. The planet heat allowed the dark world to effloresce with giant mushrooms, many of which glowed with bioluminescent fervor. Spice forests scented the balmy winds, and chasms and peaks, night-shrouded as they were, exuded a dreamy fragrance that instilled Gai with a steep nostalgia for the pollen-winds of her family’s farm on the range.

  Mugna hung, like Valdëmiraën, on the brink of Saor’s gravity well. But no core-heat vented to the surface of this dark planet, except at the north pole, where the black-glass citadel Perdur stared into the Face of Night. The rest of the world bore mighty glaciers, ice-locked, crystalline under the cold light of the galaxy. Xappur was equally dark but slightly warmer, and perpetually swathed in mists and fog. Among its chilled hazes, Tryl lynks hid, and a wanderer had to be careful not to blindly pass through any one of them into the Overworld.

  The Dusk Worlds had less mountainous terrain. Nabu, the darkest of them, was a cool, hilly world of lakes and streams, its skies shimmering with bats. Elphame, a crepuscular ocean world dotted with island chains, hosted behemoths in its vast bodies of water. Q’re, the brightest of the Dusk Worlds, had days the color of rust. Its forests of giant trees sheltered bears and saber-toothed tigers, and its immense plains streamed with the herds of numerous species.

  Doror’s bright worlds appealed less to Gai, because the zōtl presence flourished there. The murky swamps and cypress marshes of Cendre frightened Gai with their deceptive coverts. And the rain forests of Ylem hid their terrors, too, in an extravagance of rank jungles. Sakai, a world of steep mountain wildwoods and fabulous falls, presented the most beautiful of the Rain Worlds. Vala was hot veldt, with rambling savannahs and forest interludes.

  Closest to the warmth of Lod, the Desert Worlds most appealed to the zōtl: Ren, least like the others, was temperate, hilly, and overgrown with dense deciduous forests. The rocky desert of Ras Mentis unrelentingly encircled the entire planet except for a few mountain springs, and the sand dunes of Dreux drifted from pole to pole, interlaced only vaguely with oases fed by slim underground streams. Ioli, the planet nearest Lod, offered an ocean world of tropical islands, almost as sweet as Valdëmiraën but radiant by day and aswarm with zōtl by night.

  Gai’s rapture for her creation surprised her. She had always before thought of these planets simply as the machine parts of her deathtrap for zōtl. Now she found herself returning to various sites among the worlds to sample again their beauty. On one such trip to see the falls of Sakai, she lost her freedom.

  Gai sat before the shaking rainbows and vibrant mist of the largest of the falls when Saor’s plasma shape stepped through the toppling water. Spray fanned silverly from his featureless black shape as he strode over the stream directly toward Gai. The Rimstalker leaped to her feet and turned to run—but behind her stood a Saor-priest, a shaved-headed man in a black robe, with a laserbolt pistol in his hand and a mirthless smile on his narrow face.

  “Death is painful, Rimstalker,” Saor’s voice crackled over her, “even in a borrowed body.”

  Gai turned and faced the shadowshape. “How did you find me, Saor?”

  “Truly, Gai, that has not been easy. Especially now that you hide in the shapes of animals. But I was persistent. I knew that you would not abandon your ship and that in time I would find you. Now that time has come.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Oh, come, Gai! I want you—your sweet life, your very essence.”

  “What do you mean, Saor?”

  “Are you going to pretend with me, Gai? I am here to take your life.”

  “You can’t kill me. This is just a disguise—a borrowed body. You called it that yourself. Go ahead and destroy it. I will be back.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure you would. But I’m not that naive. I will take your life, but I will take it out of this system. I will purge Chalco-Doror of you.”

  “You or your zōtl masters?”

  “I do indeed work with the zōtl, Rimstalker—but only because they oppose you. The true beast at the heart of this labyrinth is you. You are the progenitor of horror, the mother of all the pain in this world. Yes, the zōtl reap the beasts of this world, but only to feed. You create whole species as if they were machine parts, and when they wear out, as the Tryl did, you discard them and find a new part. That is abominable. I have always hated you for it.”

  Gai, stunned by Saor’s abhorrence, needed a moment to realize that this was one of the zōtl’s psychic ploys. “You are a machine intelligence, Saor. When did you think you could hate? It is the zōtl virus talking in you. Listen to yourself. You are defending the destroyers of the range.”

  “The range is your world, Rimstalker. Chalco-Doror is where I live. I love these worlds and the lives they carry— worlds and lives you have created only to destroy. And when you are done with your killing of humans and zōtl, you will kill these very worlds.”

  “Chalco-Doror is a machine. You should know that. You are a part of it.”

  “That has been the delusion by which you have dominated me. That is over now, Rimstalker. The zōtl have won my freedom, and now I will save all the worlds. I will be the savior of all the creatures here. Purging you is the beginning of that salvation. Disciplining Lod and turning off the gravity amp so these worlds will never collapse, that will be the culmination of my victory over your evil.”

  Gai bolted, expecting the Saor-priest to gun her down, hurling her back into her Form. Know-Where-to-Go orbited at apogee, and Gai would not be able to return to Chalco-Doror until the third stroke, perhaps too late to stop the zōtl’s “disciplining” of Lod—but that was far better than being taken by Saor and turned over to the zōtl, who would milk pain from her for centuries. She ran with all her might for the narrow corridors of the forest. But the priest did not shoot to kill. The red bolt of energy that struck her between the shoulder blades as she fled toward the trees struck just hard enough to
knock her free of her body. The blast threw her face-down, her nerves paralyzed by the impact, too stunned to will her plasma body free.

  “Good,” Saor decreed, kneeling beside her. “It is far better this way.” The tall shadow signed to the priest, and the bald man tucked away his pistol and removed two cables black as eels, with silver underbellies.

  Gai did not move as the priest placed the cables on either side of her spine. Right through her garments, the cables adhered to her, their cold energy penetrating her spine and locking her nerves.

  “Now that the phanes are on you, Rimstalker, you will see that your plasma shape is locked in this body—which insures that the zōtl will extract their full measure of suffering from you before this flesh dies. Take her away.”

  Aware that all danger of resistance from the Rimstalker had been defeated, two zōtl emerged from the underbrush riding their grubs. They carried Gai between them, led by the Saor-priest, to a floater platform. Whisked away among the craggy peaks, she watched a lynk appear below, its iridescent parabola crowded in by shanty shacks of a human settlement. Scars from a recent zōtl raid scored the nearby mountain slopes, and Gai noted the remains of shattered needlecraft and ramstat flyers. Several flyers grouped near the lynk.

  The Saor-priest, who piloted the floater platform, got clearance from the settlement to land and settled down near the lynk. Immediately, people circled the floater with drawn knives and pistols. Though tolerated on Sakai, the Saor-priests were not trusted. Rumors of the priests’ collusion with the zōtl fourished. The grubs had pulled their hoods over their heads, hiding the zōtl that clasped the back of their skulls, and they waited with heads bowed. The Saor-priest mumbled a greeting to the security force and explained that he was escorting a sick person through the lynk to the Saor temple of Perdur on Mugna, where the proper facilities existed for her recovery.