The guards glanced at Gai flat on her back, her body immobilized, and they sheathed their weapons. Hoisted between the black-hooded grubs, Gai approached the lynk.
“Wait,” a young voice called.
The grubs stopped, and the priest put his hand on the pistol under his robe before turning about with an ingratiating smile. A young man, better dressed than the rag-clad security force, walked briskly toward them, a cape flapping at his heels. Two burly guards accompanied him, and as he drew closer, the imperial emblem of Sakai Command became visible at the clasp of his cape.
“Lord Tseng,” the priest recognized, bowing his bald head. “How gracious of you to see us off.”
“We do not often get visitors from Mugna on Sakai,” the young man replied. “I trust your mission here has been successful.”
“Yes, indeed, Lord. We have found the priestess whose distress message we received. She is quite ill, and so we must not tarry.”
Tseng looked down at Gai, held securely between the two grubs. The moment their eyes touched, Gai knew she was saved. The young lord felt her despair with the clarity of klivoth kakta.
“Free this woman,” Tseng commanded his guards. “And watch it—these are grubs!”
Knives flashed and cut down the grubs even as their hands released Gai to reach for their weapons. Gai struck the ground and heard the sizzling crack of a laserbolt. Paralyzed by the phanes, she could not even move her eyes to see what had happened until the air went suddenly golden and Lod stooped over her.
“I came the instant I saw what was happening,” Lod spoke, rolling Gai’s body over with a touch of vibrant heat. “The zōtl came within a meter of carrying you off to one of their nest worlds. Only that boy saved you.” The phanes withered at Lod’s touch, and Gai sat up.
The Saor-priest lay crumpled beside the dead grubs, still clutching his pistol, a plasteel throwing-knife embedded in his throat. Lord Tseng lay dead in the arms of his guards, a burnhole over his heart.
Gai tried with all her might to bring Lord Tseng back. Though he was a bred human, she had him buried and lay her plasma shape over his corpse, hoping Genitrix could revive him. But that effort proved futile.
Eventually, Gai journeyed to Vala, where the Tryl had left behind a tesseract-wave monitor. The mammoth geodesic structure stood in the open veldt, a likely target for the zōtl, who had leveled all Tryl artifacts but the lynks. The humans had preserved the t-wave monitor by guarding it with their best troops and armaments. Constant patrols kept the hemisphere clear of zōtl lynks, and a series of floater platforms in geosynchronous orbit above the monitor protected it from attackers dropping out of space. The expense was well worth it to them, for the pink-domed wave station could access the tesseract field, and by standing within the tall, dawn-gray emptiness of its interior, one could talk with the dead.
After introducing a tissue sample from the corpse into the station’s analyzer, the dead DNA served as antennae to tune in the waveforms they had once released into the t-field. “Forget me,” Lord Tseng’s wraith voice reported. “A new life carries me.”
“Your courageous act has saved Chalco-Doror from the certain dominion of the zōtl,” Gai informed him, eager to make peace with the human who had spared her unspeakable agony. “I would return you to this life among those who love you—if I could, young lord.”
“Forget me. I am away. All life is but the history of grief. Forget me—as I am forgetting you.”
A new voice imposed: “Gai—do you remember me? I am the first human to set eyes on you. Years and years ago that was—on Know-Where-to-Go, when the last Tryl died in our presence.”
“You are Joao, 164-97’s disciple. Yes, of course I remember you. You will be glad to know, you are also remembered among the people. They call you the Carrier of Peace.”
“Remembered with scorn by almost everyone—by all who have lost lives and loves to the zōtl. Peace is far more alien than pain.”
In truth, the very name Joao had come to mean a fanatic idealist, a dreamer of delusory utopias. By those with the most vengeance in their hearts, he was considered a zōtl collaborator for preaching nonviolence. “Why do you call to me, Joao?”
“A prophecy, Gai. I have a prophecy for you now that you have fulfilled 164-97’s oracle. You have made your alliance in blood with my species. Your death under the needles of the zōtl is less certain now. From here, I see thousands of years of war still ahead. You must send Lod into the Overworld. Send Lod to search for the O’ode.”
“Which lynk should he enter?”
“The Overworld touches all lynks. You know that, Gai.”
“But the Overworld is infinite. Where will Lod find the O’ode?”
“I have said nothing about finding the O’ode—only searching for it. Now that you have found compassion, now that you are of a flesh no different from ours, you are trapped with us in our cage of freedom. Send Lod into the Overworld. Choice meets chance there.”
Gai called after Joao, wanting him to elucidate. The grainy darkness remained silent. For several days, Gai tried in vain to find him, but he had died five hundred and thirty-seven years earlier—and the survivalists who had killed him had been careful to leave no traces.
Echoes in the Time-Well
Lod, for all his preoccupation with maintaining the gravity amp, was well aware of the horrors of the zōtl. One of his most frequently recurring memory clips portrayed a human on klivoth kakta pithed by a zōtl. By chance, Lod had encountered her on a palm-clacking beach on Ioli shortly after the zōtl had seized her. He had thought he might be able to save the human and used his plasma shape to grab the zōtl and burn it free. It withered in his grasp, its feed tube sliding out of the puncture wound chrismed with brain fluid. The human died in his arms, but not before he had telempathically experienced what the klivoth kakta had shown her of the zōtl mind.
For an instant, Lod had felt what it was like to be a zōtl—the adroitness of the prehensile pincer-clusters on four of its eight legs; its leg muscles delicately tuned as fingers; its swivel-jointed gossamer wings twitching with the power to fly; its richly convoluted brain, sparking with the biochemical programs fed to it earlier by its female.
Lod had not realized until then that all the small flying zōtl were male. The females remained on the nest-worlds and exuded not only eggs but also an ichor the males sipped containing molecular programming, which inspired their behavior in everything from feeding and sex to mathematical calculations and engineering designs. The females, bulky and immobile eggsacks, did most of the complex thinking; the males did all of the manipulative work, following the programs in the ichor they ate. But knowing this and feeling it were terrifyingly different for Lod. He still flinched to recall the chittering sensations throughout his body as the female code-chemicals urged him to find fresh food for the eggs.
So when Gai brought Lod to a Tryl lynk on Dreux and ordered him to enter the Overworld, where the zōtl certainly waited in ambush, terror struck him. What had befallen Saor could easily happen to him—and worse, for if the zōtl immobilized his plasma body with the phanes, they could carry him off to Galgul and use their technology to inflict pain for aeons to come. He begged Gai to reconsider.
But Gai was adamant. She understood what Joao had meant when he had said that now she was trapped with humans in their cage of freedom. Choice and chance mated noisily in the future, and the outcome of anything remained uncertain. Even with Ned’s timeshadow to follow, time opened into a maze. Only timeloose entities, like the dead in the tesseract-field, could discern the true probabilities of worldlines—and even they could not communicate anything with certainty, for the communication itself changed everything. Gai was free to choose, either to keep Lod in Chalco-Doror or to send him forth into the Overworld. But the future shaped itself differently around each choice. The more she knew, the less freedom she had. Like every timebound being, she had been caged by levels of clarity.
Her decision complexified when, through her own lyn
k system, she sensed Ned O’Tennis’ timeshadow leave Dreux and appear on Ioli. She had to leave at once to keep her own timeline near his, and she had no time to patiently assuage Lod’s fear of the zōtl. Determined to heed Joao’s prescient command, she overrode all of the machine mind’s objections. Lod suppressed his memory clips of the zōtl and mustered his courage.
At about this time, the humans had discovered on Dreux the largest of the Tryl lynks. Hidden by the scarp of a cordillera near the planet’s south pole, a lynk parabola towered over a hundred meters tall, embedded in the rockface. Its tip had been exposed only after centuries of wind erosion. By the time that Gai and Lod arrived, the humans had excavated most of the lynk and had discovered the massive tunnel that led directly to the lynklane.
Over the centuries, Lod and Saor, whose physical bodies existed as the two suns of Chalco-Doror and whose minds could take shape on any world, had been both revered and reviled by the humans as gods, demons, robots, and aliens. Most people cherished superstitions, and when the machine minds appeared to them in their plasma shapes, the humans were awed. Some, who had lived in more enlightened times on Earth, were as astonished but less willing to accept a supernatural explanation for the dazzling Lod and the shadowy Saor. But during the Age of Knives, such rational people were rare. The clans and tribes, composed of humans from every period of the human epoch on Earth as well as the many who had lived only in Chalco-Doror, kept faith with their religious instincts and believed the machine intelligences to be deities. Saor took advantage of this misperception to call himself the Face of Night and to inspire his priests with missionary fervor. Using his ability to project thoughts into the minds of these small creatures in their cold reality, Saor had won a large following. Gai and Lod, as straightforward with the humans as they were in their mission, had presented themselves only as what they were—warriors from another world.
Lod hardly felt like a warrior when confronted with the necessity of entering the Overworld. He paused before the mammoth opening on Dreux and the iridescent arch above it, both, for all their size, dwarfed by the red mountain wall and surrounding expanses of salt-white desert. He knew that the parametrics of opening a lynk’s internal spacetime system required these proportions, but he was still intimidated. He looked up at his Form blazing toward noon. His Form, of course, would stay behind. It was the ship’s booster, engineered to provide light and warmth and programmed to manage the gravity amp in his absence. It did not need him to function, so long as nothing unusual occurred. Nevertheless, Gai planned to occupy Lod’s Form with her plasma body while he was gone, entering through her own internal lynk to be certain that nothing interfered with the precision of the planets’ orbits.
A squad of twelve battle-proven troopers volunteered to accompany Lod. They included Laudens, the klivoth keeper, a brawny yellow-bearded man whose courage had been thoroughly tested as a fighter pilot and Seyna, a snaky distort with dislocatable limbs for crawling through the tightest openings. Gai orated encouragement and promised that these explorers would never be forgotten, which turned out to be true, though not for helping Lod. Shortly after entering the lynk, which appeared as nothing more than a paved boulevard into the mountain, Lod and his team got separated.
Earlier explorers had demonstrated that this lynk connected to more than one point in Chalco-Doror, unique among all the previously discovered lynks, which connected only two points. A few strides through the lynk, and Lod and his squad stood on the threshold of a dozen worlds. Like multiple viewscreens, twelve separate tunnels of light confronted them, each tunnel with its own vista: icy Mugna, wave-lapping Ioli, jungled Ylem, the bat-twitching sky of Nabu—
*
The plan to step sideways off the lynklane would have placed them in the Overworld. But before they advanced farther, the air flurried with shrieking black blurs and flashes of laserlight. Freeflying zōtl streamed from the lynk-opening of Cendre. Lod startled and leaped sideways. Immediately, the lynklane vanished, and he found himself in a gray, quiet zone—the Overworld.
Meanwhile, the humans, who had remained on the lynklane to fight the zōtl, defeated their enemy. The wounded humans returned to Dreux with their dead, and the others went on, stepping sideways off the lynklane and into the Overworld. They never found Lod, and their wanderings, which took them across Chalco-Doror on a decade-long series of adventures among zōtls and distorts, became legend.
Shortly after losing the others, the klivoth keeper Laudens sighted the Beppunauts. The three wanderers that he observed in the mirage-depths of the Overworld’s sky meant nothing to him, and he ignored them. They were just shades. But Spooner Yegg recognized the burly navigator with the wide beard, his glamour pack full of kakta, eyes shining with telempathic clarity.
“Laudens!” Spooner shouted into the lake. From his perspective, the klivoth keeper seemed to be walking through a wooded terrain under water.
Chan-ti Beppu, who had often sat by crystal-water ponds in the Overworld and watched animals and people come and go in their depths, laughed. “He can’t hear you. He may not even be able to see you. He’s on another level.”
“Do you know who that is?” Spooner asked.
“Not so loud.” Chan-ti glanced anxiously over her shoulder, at the desert-garden surroundings. Sandy corridors and rocky fields rambled among dense, miasmal everglades. A rhomb of aluminum-white light burned in the sky ahead of them—the Overworld shadow of the sun, Lod, leaving the sky behind them black, with only a few anonymous glints of starlight. “You’ll have the screamers on us.”
“That’s Laudens, the klivoth keeper,” Spooner stated excitedly. “I’m sure of it. He was famous in the schoolbooks of my childhood. We’ve come a long way down the time-well to be seeing him, I say.”
Moku the Beast, who led the way, paused at the sound of his friend’s voice. He left the sandy path to amble in a flowery meadow under a wall of pea-vines spangled with blossoms. “Moku!” Chan-ti called. “Come on.” She waved the finder at the Beast. “We have a long way to go—and we just started this leg.”
“Hush yourself,” Spooner said. “What about the screamers?”
“At least a screamer would get Moku off his tocks.”
“Calm yourself. Have some glamour. Let’s toast Laudens, who led his fellow heroes through zōtl nests and distort kingdoms back to their home.”
“No more of that stuff for me,” Chan-ti said. “I’m still wincing from feeling those zōtl hooks under my skin.”
“Don’t look so deep into the scary things—zōtl, screamers, corpses. Then you’ll be all right.”
Bright flakes of music glittered from Moku’s flute.
“I’ll trust you and Moku to lead me home,” she said. “But first we’ve got to find Ned.”
“We will.” Spooner sat on a flat boulder by the lakeside and cut a small smile of kakta from an already shriveled head.
“Not if we sit around.” Chan-ti kicked a clump of weed. “We’ve had twenty-three sleep stops since we left Ras Mentis.”
“You are precise.”
“I’m just eager to find him. The longer he’s alone this far from our time, the greater the chance he’ll always wander timeloose.”
“You know a lot about the Overworld.”
“I’m Foke.”
“No you’re not.”
“They reared me. When we sojourned, they let me watch the leaders as though I were one of their children. I know about the Overworld.”
Spooner dabbed the kakta juice from his lips with a wad of cotton grass. “I’m just a city thief. I never thought of the Overworld as anything but the nightmare behind the joke of the world. I’ve been stealing for laughs since I was a boy. Never did a job for anything but laughs. Until I walked the Overworld.”
Chan-ti sat on her pack. “When was that?”
“After I learned to be serious by falling in love. I was quite old by then and had thought myself immune. That was my blunder. I fell in love. I fell a long way. I was married and happily
so, my wife pregnant—and my work had become very serious, indeed. I was about to be apprehended. Usually at such precarious times, I would disappear, go to another city. But with my wife big with child, I couldn’t escape. I thought flight into the Overworld would be easier than trying to disguise an expectant woman and fleeing with her to another city. Can you imagine how naive I was then?
“What city were you escaping?”
“Does that matter now? I took my wife through a Tryl lynk sideways into the Overworld. I’d read about it. I’d seen clips. I thought we could find our way to another city. Instead, the zōtl found us. It was pathetic. We were in a null field.”
“You tried to cross a null field?” Chan-ti shook her head ruefully. Null fields – empty plains in the Overworld, void of timelines – provided nowhere to hide. “No wonder the zōtl found you. You’d gone too high. How did you escape?”
Spooner patted his sack of jewels. “I had another like this one, rigged to explode if tampered with. When the black cloud of spiders swarmed over us, I detonated it. I thought it would kill us and most of them. But they came on us faster than I thought. They ripped the pack away from me. When it exploded, the blast hurled us across the null field and into a lynklane. We were both severely wounded. My wife died in the forest where we were hurled. But our child lived. I heard it screaming. Through the trees, I saw others approaching. Then the zōtl swooped down and carried me off. But the others I saw among the trees were armed, and they drove away most of the spiders. Enough of the swarm remained to hoist me into the treetops, where I saw the forest people lift the child. She was a girl— and I knew by the way they held her that she would be safe.”
Through the klivoth kakta, Spooner felt Chan-ti Beppu’s recognition.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 19
