“I am the Carrier of Peace. I have known the Tryl. It is they who have rewarded me with this chance to touch the crux of chance here, now, with you. The peace I offer is freedom. Light is the ultimate freedom. The path of light leads to the end of these worlds, the end of suffering, and the return of all the forms to their images. You can help by leaving Gai to her fate and accepting your own.”
“But I owe the Rimstalker. She saved me from Squat.”
“Your loyalty is misplaced. It is Gai who now owes you. For six hundred and sixteen years, she has been following your timeshadow among the worlds, while you traversed her lynk. Without you, she would have succumbed to the violent deceptions of Chalco-Doror long ago. You must release her to her destiny or you will forsake your own.” Joao looked ill. “I can say no more.”
“Wait. Give me some sign, something so I can trust you.”
“I am gone—” The ghost bleared away to a thin voice: “Freedom cannot be escaped. You must choose.”
Ned slumped back to the strohlkraft, his brain throbbing witlessly. Pahang did not like the shadow on Hawk’s brow and waded into the lagoon to fish with a hook and line he had devised from raffia fiber and a seashell. The Malay caught three fish, brown and thick as wrists, and built a driftwood fire. By the time he had cleaned and braised the fish, Hawk’s visage had cleared.
“The ghost has told me we have paid our debt to Gai,” Ned said after they had nimbly eaten the bony, steaming fish. He told Pahang what Joao had told him. “The more I think about it, the more I feel the ghost is right. What do you think, Pahang? The ramstat cells will be ready to power us in another hour. If Gai isn’t here by then, shall we go?”
“The gods are the worst enemies.”
“Gai is no god.”
Pahang shook his head. “Even Squat was a god.”
“On his beach, yes, he was.”
“How big is Gai’s beach? Hawk, these are her worlds.”
“So we stay.”
“And lose the blessing of our ancestors?” Pahang’s vivid features tightened. “No. We are men, not gods. Better to have the gods as enemies than lose our place among the ancestors. We must go. But we must remember, the Rimstalker will be displeased. We will have a powerful enemy.”
“You’re a brave one.”
“No, Hawk, I am not brave. I am afraid. I have been afraid since you told me that the Rimstalker spoke with you through the kakta. Whenever the gods speak with men, there is woe. Let us escape the Rimstalker, if we can, and find our way to our own people.”
The sky, a custard sunset, received the strohlkraft as it left the lagoon and soared over the serrated peaks. At the far side of the island, they had no trouble finding the Tryl lynk. Its parabola bent over a valley gorge, hued with twilight. On the sea’s horizon, needlecraft flicked like falling stars. But the strohlkraft’s shadowary hull, in a time two thousand years before it was invented, carried them undetected through the lynk.
*
Lod knew about the Overworld from his programming but was still unready for the strange reality of this metageometric domain. When he became separated from the other lynk wanderers that Gai had sent with him, he wanted to return at once to Dreux. All he had to do was step backward, for he had been fitted with a homing device of Tryl construction. Anywhere in the Overworld, no matter how far he wandered, he could return to his starting point by taking one backward step—so long as he had not previously turned left. Left turns broke the temporal chirality of the homing device and would make a return to the starting timeline impossible. “Right is right,” Lod repeated his own lynk dictum to himself, “left bereft.” To reach any point to the left, he had to turn fully around from the right.
Lod edged forward, straining to see anything in the empty grayness. This was the null field, where other timelines appeared as radiant images in the grayness. For now, the lynklanes were so distant they looked like tangles of colored thread far above and below him. The grayness itself reflected the vacuum of space in the Overworld. The ground beneath him was actually the earth of the lynk he had stepped through infinitely extended, like the air he breathed, or the gravitational force that held him upright. Every step he took projected the world he had come from. He was creating his own timeline through the void. But he had been warned about null fields. His timeline would be apparent in the gray emptiness, easily spotted by the zōtl in other lynklanes. He had to get out of the null field quickly.
High above, new timelines appeared as he walked, kaleidoscopic shafts of color and motion. They occupied a level he could not reach easily, they were that far away. Gai had forbidden the use of ramstat or any kind of flyer, because at those speeds the homing device would be ineffective.
Lod kept walking, looking for a timeline he could enter. None appeared nearby, and those that his telescopic sight singled out looked nothing like the memory-clips of Rataros that the Rimstalker had given him. Most of the tunnels of windy light that loomed out of the grayness as he wandered opened windows into places in Chalco-Doror, which is what he expected. Gai had said that one had to travel very far indeed to find the timelines of nonlocal worlds. She did not expect him to locate the O’ode, only to fulfill Joao’s prophecy.
Lod stopped before several timelines and gazed in at the landscapes. None seemed populated and none had a nearby lynk for him to enter even if he had wanted to. They were just large, transparent walls that flooded light into the null field, exposing vistas from the local worlds. Gai had said that these infinite tunnels of light projected the timelike geodesies of the lynk, echoes in the time-well of the universe that radiated randomly through the Overworld. Lod followed alongside one of them a long way to satisfy himself that the echo of images did indeed go on into the grayness indefinitely. Perhaps somewhere along its length existed a lynk by which he could enter, and he acknowledged now the necessity of a lynk-compass for finding one’s way between the lynklanes. But only a few lynk-compasses had survived the loss of the Tryl, and Gai had not given him one since he was not in fact going anywhere.
Lod wondered if he had journeyed far enough through the dimly lit zone to fulfill Joao’s prophecy. He was about to step backward when he noticed a human figure to his left. He curled to the right until he had come around and could face the approaching person – a young blond woman, small-boned and round-faced, with a solitude in her eyes that seemed useless for a human. She hailed him, and he waited for her to come closer.
She stopped a wary distance away, obviously intimidated by his flamewoven appearance. He toned down the radiance of his plasma body and projected the magnetic pattern of his story into her brain. She straightened when she felt the frosty magnetism tingling her scalp. But the next instant, as she comprehended what was happening, she sagged with relief and came closer.
Lod read the electromagnetic pattern of her brain and was so astounded that he had to review the pattern twice more to be certain of its veracity. The woman’s name was Reena Patai [note: Reena’s earth history is detailed in the third volume of the Radix Tetrad, Arc of the Dream.]—her origin, Earth, the first world, more than seven billion years in the past. Lod could barely comprehend how she had arrived in the Overworld. Apparently, she had been left here by a truly alien being, an entity she called Insideout, who originated in a reality she thought of as 5-space, tinier even than the gravity shell of the range. The implications dizzied Lod—and he realized that the significance of his story had equally startled her.
“I saw your glow from a great distance,” Reena said, her voice echoing. She had been afraid she had gone mad again, wandering the null field where Insideout had left her. She had been afraid. Nothing was familiar. But now, with Lod’s knowledge glittering in her brain, she felt the limitless, periodic nature of reality. Avignon, Honolulu, the Moon and the Sun, all the people she had never met and the few that were luminous in her memory, all gone. The void she had felt widening in her held their absence. And in that emptiness glittered Lod’s knowledge: the range, the Rimstalker Gai, Saor,
zōtl—on and on, another floor of reality, billions of years after everything she knew had become dust. Another reality. Another reflection in the hall of mirrors . . . How effortless it was, embracing the infinite—”I thought you were another lynklane in the null field,” she said to Lod. A smile tremored on her pale face. She wondered why she was not hysterical or at least numb, realized in the quiet delirium of her vast new understanding that her emotions, like her thoughts, existed as objective things to the machine fire that had found her, objects to be manipulated. “For all I’ve been through, I never expected to see the likes of you. You look like sunlight shaped into a human being.”
“This is just my plasma shape,” Lod began to explain. “My gel body. I can look . . .”
“Like anything. I know. The telepathic information you gave me is clear as my own memories. You’re a machine.”
“A machine intelligence, to be precise.”
“You must know all about me.”
“I can hardly believe what I’ve read in your electromagnetic memory, Reena Patai. You are an original human. But where is the 5-space being that brought you here?”
“You don’t know because I don’t. My last memory of Insideout is of him removing me from Earth, where I was too damaged to live. My brain was congenitally malformed. But Insideout fixed that—I think, though I’m feeling strange, really empty—” The solitary light in her green, lemur eyes steepened. “I guess the alien got home.”
“Come with me, Reena Patai. The new Earth I’ve told you about telepathically is one step behind me. Come. Take my hand. Don’t worry, it won’t burn you.”
Reena took the fiery hand, and it felt warm and soft as just-baked bread. Lod stepped backward, and she had to squint against the brightness. They stood hand-in-hand in the cavemouth before the giant lynk on Dreux. Weird, humanoid sculptures of glass shot with bright bubbles and opal striations guarded the entry to the lynk, and she vaguely knew from Lod’s prior input that these were Tryl sculptures.
As Reena’s eyes adjusted to the harsh light of Dreux, she caught sight of the others—men and women of every race in sandy, bedraggled garments: white cuirasses, dented and scratched, worn over baggy shirts and trousers; frayed burnooses with the sigil of an open hand embroidered above their hearts, and cracked wing-shoulder vests of leather. Some wore goggles, others mouth-scarves; everyone wore scruffy, ankleslung boots. They looked like a ragged motorcycle gang from a grim future. And then she remembered that this was her future, her far future—and she laughed.
Her laugh broke the apprehensions of the others, and they crowded in, fingering Reena’s twentieth-century clothing and jabbering at her in languages she did not understand. She looked to Lod for help, but the machine intelligence had gone. The moment he had returned from the Overworld, input from his Form registered that he had been gone from Chalco-Doror the equivalent of seventy-eight years—and Gai had had to oversee his Form that whole time.
Gai, greatly relieved by Lod’s return, gladly surrendered her post inside Lod’s Form. After she had sent Lod into the Overworld, she had flown to Ioli to meet Ned O’Tennis. But the Aesirai had moved on. In the lynk-echoes of the seacave where he had come through, she felt what had happened. The Tryl were having their revenge on her for forcing them to take bodies. They had used Joao to deprive her of Ned O’Tennis. Without his timeshadow, she would have to feel her way to the future on her own.
That frightful task had accompanied Gai into Lod’s Form and made her stay there all the more difficult, for now there was no assurance she would succeed. Her grave doubts of Lod’s return, as well as the constant effort to ascertain that the planets moved precisely in their orbits, had thoroughly exhausted her. Only when she heard about Reena Patai did she revive slightly. She insisted on meeting this first and probably only individual to reach Chalco-Doror directly from the original Earth.
For that to be possible, without waiting hundreds of years for her plasma shape to regain its strength, a special apparatus had to be constructed by the technical staff at the Dreux lynk. That took almost two years, and by then Reena had begun to acculturate herself to the New Earth, as she called Chalco-Doror. The day that the tech staff introduced her to the bulky, human-size vacuum tube that contained Gai’s enfeebled plasma shape, Reena wore the open-hand burnoose of Dreux’s kakta clan. She had used the klivoth kakta to facilitate her assimilation into this motley and violent society. The experience reminded her of schizophrenic episodes she had endured on Earth before the alien from 5-space saved her. She heard voices in her head, felt the sensations of other people, other creatures, in her flesh. This psychosis, however, truly touched the objective world—and it could be managed. She adopted the heavy-lidded gaze of the klivoth trance and admitted as much of the strange world around her as she could handle.
She moved in the kakta’s grasp when she met Gai.
Gai, in her weariness, felt glad for that, for it helped her to mell. She wanted to experience the insides of an aboriginal human, to identify how they differed from Genitrix’s creations. She reached deftly into the lucidity before her.
Reena Patai unfolded in Gai’s consciousness no differently than any human she had known before. But this one had immediate memories of the source world. By the vigorous light of Sol and nights salted with stars and Luna’s vaporous glow, Earth had parsed her days, 7,743 of them in this human’s experience. The last days, indeed, had unfolded into bizarre dimensions, occupied by the presence of a 5-space entity whose real intent and essence had sunk to irrecoverable depths in the emotional fervor of Reena’s brain. Of equal wonder to Gai, the great majority of mundane days that Reena had lived on Earth riffled with quotidian remembrances of seasons and weathers.
Meanwhile, through the prismatic sight of the kakta, Reena met Gai’s alienness like a sudden despair, a frightful abruptness. She had to look away.
“For a human to look upon a Rimstalker,” Gai’s voice crinkled over the speakers at the base of the vacuum-cylinder, “is to stare into the depths within and to feel the nothing from which the whole cosmos has come. My home, the range, is a way station on the infinite plunge toward the cosmic event horizon, the boundary of our reality, beyond which your Insideout lives. No human can look that deep without feeling despair, the hopelessness of the whole universe opening into nothing.”
“And what do you see when you look into us?” Reena asked.
The tremulous, feeble glow in the vacuum brightened. “I see my hope that I will defeat the enemies of my people and return home.”
“Then we see very much the same thing,” Reena affirmed, the look in her eyes a green distance. Lod’s infusion of information had amplified this young one’s intelligence along with her awareness. She spoke with an authority she had never had on Earth and amazed herself—not with the fact of it, for that felt natural—she amazed herself with the incumbent responsibilities of her unique knowing. It was as though all of humanity looked to her for a voice. “You have risen out of our hopelessness to find your hope within us,” humanity said to her. “Together we complete each other. Would we exist now without you? Can you continue to exist without us?”
“You are not angry that I have reproduced your world, your people, as bait to lure my enemy?” Gai inquired.
“At least, that is a reason. People have had to live, suffer, and die for no reason at all before. In my own time on Earth, many suffered in vain so as not to feel they had lived in vain. Now we have a reason—yours.”
“And you do not feel used?”
“You seem compassionate. I am willing to trust in that for now.”
“I think we will be friends, you and I.”
“That would be good,” Reena allowed and smiled, slimly. “If life is a dream, as the most ancient texts of Old Earth claim, then we should be friends. After all, we are dreaming each other.”
*
Bram Gorlik returned to the Eyelands from his grief sojourn purged of all the rotten feelings of love. He was glad that Chan-ti Beppu ha
d refused his offer of marriage. Had he really desired such a mushroom-pale giantess for a wife?—or, as he had come to see in the wilds, holding his own against chaos, had he not all along simply pitied her? Foremost on his triumphantly serene mind loomed the eventuality of facing her again, seeing her haughty-boned face and treelimb stature and feeling only cavedark indifference in his chest where before pity had incandesced bright as caring.
In the time that he had been away, the Foke had migrated to a new site deeper in the Eyelands, away from war. Now they would have to be more vigilant than ever, to protect themselves from the dangers of Saor’s Forest. To Gorlik, who had grown up among the aeries of Valdëmiraën, the cavernous gloom of the forest presented the most frightful vista in the Overworld. That was why he had sojourned there after Beppu refused him. Only there could he find sufficient jeopardy of death to vent with honor the traumas of humiliation and relief that had wracked his soul when his troll-woman denied him.
Gorlik gave cursory acknowledgment to the amazed Foke who watched him trudge out of the Forest strapped in the blue leather of the hippogriff. Shouts of welcome jumped ahead, and he hurried to avoid getting stopped by curious friends. He even ignored the alluring aromas from the mead grotto, though he had not had a well-spiced meal in many weeks. He headed straight for the workshop where the Foke would know where to find Beppu. Magnificent with the freedom he had won for himself on his sojourn, he tossed a casual greeting to Nappy Groff, who almost fell from his bench at the sight of him. “Where’s your gangle-shanked daughter, Nappy Groff? I’ve returned from the Forest of Wounds to laugh in her face.”
“Then you will have to laugh very loudly, Gorlik,” Nappy supposed, sadly, “for Chan-ti Beppu wanders the Overworld.”
Gorlik stood motionless, lithic with disbelief as workers yammered to him about weak-eyed Chan-ti’s sojourn to win the love of an Aesirai warrior; about N’ym’s flight into the black sun, and Chan-ti’s lover flung unwittingly into the Overworld; and about Spooner Yegg and Moku the Beast stealing the directional finder to help her quest for Ned O’Tennis to the very ends of time.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 21
