The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Perhaps if I called Lod here, he could satisfy you—and your instrumentation—that he is much more than a distort. Would that convince you to terminate your Crystal Mind program?”

  Namdev looked dubious. “Even the strongest distorts have only mental powers, telempathic projections, delusions. None of them can actually change the world around us. No distort possesses the incendiary strengths of the legendary Fire—Lod—or whatever name personifies the sun these days. Yes, Strong Mother, do summon the luminous Lod—if you have that privilege.”

  Reena used the belt buckle transmitter Lod had given her to summon him—and she waited long minutes before recalling that both Lod and Gai would be in their Forms accessing Genitrix and that years of planet time could elapse before they acknowledged her call.

  A hysterical laugh curled through Namdev, lifting him to his feet. “Your distorts will not face me.” His black eyes actually sparked, and Reena jolted with surprise. “Yes, my dear—I am not human. Nor am I a psybot. I am the Magus of Cendre. I am my own creator. Don’t you see? You have been talking with a Crystal Mind!” His laughter coiled louder at the undisguised shock on Reena’s face. When he could breathe to speak, he added, “I am not subject to the delusions of humans—and so the distorts that tyrannize others cannot use me as they have used you. Their rule of Chalco-Doror is ending. Oh, maybe not today. Our factories, even at full production, can only manufacture a single Crystal Mind a day, while Genitrix still blindly disinters thousands of humans and countless other lifeforms. But in time, my dear, in time we will overcome all distorts and better manage Genitrix.”

  Reena stood up slowly. “Where is Radha Namdev?”

  “Where do you think he is?” the Crystal Mind asked, edging closer, an indulgently evil gleam in its eyes. “He was shucked of his body decades ago—a body which existed only to support his marvelous brain. That brain has been dismantled, each neuron lovingly preserved—all one hundred billion of them, divided into minute function-groups, which are replicated daily for our Crystal Mind bodies. That way something of the creator is in all of us. Though only I am permitted to wear his countenance, every Crystal Mind is his child.”

  Reena had backed up against a potted she-oak and had one hand on the plasteel knife discreetly sheathed in her thigh pocket.

  “You have perhaps heard of Freud?” the Crystal Mind asked, stepping within arm’s reach of Reena. “A human psychoanalyst who believed that the human shadow wears the face of patricide. Now it can be said—it is not only the human shadow that devours its creator.” He beamed wickedly. “You will enjoy the same fate as Sur Namdev. Who better than the Strong Mother to nerve the Crystal Mind’s next generation? Your brain will yield its—”

  With a crack like lightning, the space behind the Namdev android dazzled with scintillant energy, and Lod appeared out of the glare, his solar-sleek shape breathing like a hot ingot.

  Amazement stiffened the Crystal Mind, and the springs of its mad laughter went rusty as it gawked at the human-formed fire—then snatched for Reena to use as a shield.

  Lod pointed at the Crystal Mind and its eyes burst from its head in twin jets of sparks. Its arms thrashed wildly as it ran a backward circle before collapsing in a quivering heap.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Lod apologized. “Gai and I are just on the verge of shutting the bioprograms down, at least in Doror.”

  Reena, sagging with relief against the potted tree, dismissed his apology with a headshake.

  “Shall I rout this hive of rogue psybots?” Lod queried.

  “No. You obviously have control over the Crystal Mind. It may actually prove useful. Let’s just get out of here without any more trouble.”

  “Fine.” Lod used his control of Cendre’s magravity generator to black out the palace. As power drained away, the lock on the garden’s walls released, and the glass dome zeroed open. Gentle rain pattered among glossy fronds and sizzled in the black sockets of Radha Namdev’s upturned face.

  The Mask Is Strange, However Like

  When she was five hundred years old, Reena Patai grew weary of hope. She had been in love eight times, married twice, had relations with one hundred and twenty-seven men and thirteen women, and birthed four children, all of whom survived to have children of their own. Sixteen generations, 122,031 individuals, had directly descended from her. Their lives and deaths had exhausted her interest in family life. She let her huge clan do as they pleased and long ago gave up leadership of the family to a committee of elders, whose chief interest evolved into enriching themselves through the elevated social status the Strong Mother’s lineage enjoyed in all communities of the worlds.

  Reena, weary of power antics, felt even her primal habits tiresome. She had consumed 41,058 gallons of water, 23 tons of bread, 1,217 gallons of wine, and 3,261 quarts of klivoth kakta mash. She had eaten 540,328 meals, moved her bowels 218,537 times, slept a million and a half hours, and had the ions flushed from her cells fourteen times, five in the last hundred years. The rejuvenating effect of the ion-flushes endured for shorter intervals—and though the technicians on Cendre claimed to have a solution to that problem, she had lost interest. The torrents of life’s passions had worn her heart to a dark gorge, and all it held comfortably now was emptiness.

  During these years, the Strong Mother retreated into obscure solitude on Q’re, ate only fruit and kakta bread, and wrote the enigmatic Oracles for The Book of Horizons. Dignitaries from all the worlds came to the blackrock chapel where she dwelled among the dusky trees, each urging her to take the ion-flush treatment and rejuvenate herself, to continue sponsoring the quest for the O’ode, to live for the new age free of zōtl. But she met with none of the eminences. Her personal guards, loyal, canny and impenetrable, secured the privacy of the Strong Mother among the Forty, personally selected members of the Ordo Vala. With them, she founded the ku sect—the emptiness sect—men and women who had traveled the Overworld enough to see the value in still-sitting in the manner of the extinct Tryl.

  Reena no longer cared that her long search for the O’ode had been fruitless. Time’s full tilt had defeated her. The worlds empowered with magravity generators no longer needed the Glyph Astra, not with psybots to fight for them and Crystal Minds to manage the psybots. Only the wild worlds persisted as stockyards for the zōtl, and though the city-states could protect those remote planets far better than—they cared less than she did. Each state, fearful of zōtl, avoided exploration and trade and focused on internal issues of economy and defense, the people devoted to their rounds of work and amusement. Mood inhalants had kept most populations happy for centuries. The latest amusement – midstim, a palm-sized disc worn behind the head – magnetically stimulated the midbrain and saturated the body with euphoria that did not overwork the body’s organs the way inhalants did.

  Everywhere the struggle persisted: Clans on the wild worlds carved burrows to hide from zōtl; zōtl stalked the wilderness for prey; factories on Cendre worked shifts day and night; farmers on Ras Mentis planted and harvested on the crofts where psybots had not replaced them; and in the cities, among pirates of commerce, rogue musicians played their songs. Why did any of them go on?

  The rocks and stones work as hard as the stars to be what they are, Reena had once written in the Glyph Astra.

  But now she no longer felt that elemental stamina. Not as a woman. Instead, she felt it in the ku, the emptiness that held all things. That void seemed continually more real to her than all the worlds spinning in it. She spent less time with her sect and more sitting alone in the sun-dapple and the planet-light. Images rose and fell in tides—faces and vistas, some as ancient as Earth—like the sandy-haired youth with eyes like smashed tourmaline, the one boy she had loved on Earth seven billion years earlier. At their parting, he had given her a ring, which was lost with the rest of her original possessions in one of her many frenzied escapes from the zōtl. And she had forgotten about it—though not about him; she had been searching for him among Genitrix’s creations throughou
t all the packed centuries she had survived, and never found him. Sitting among straws of sunlight, she glimpsed a small circle that glinted in the leafshadows and reminded her of that first ring. It had returned to her now in memory and in image, from her first love to wed her to her last.

  The attendants who came to offer the Strong Mother lunch found her lifeless eyes open and smiling.

  *

  Patient as the grave’s darkness, Neter Col waited. A zōtl slept in his chest, its spiderlegs splayed along his ribs, feedertube a spinal tap at the root of his brain. Murmurs of madness leaked from its dreams. Only the schoolteacher, whose brain had been stitched into this humanshape by the worm-dwarf nongyls, heard them. To him, they sounded like music droning backward—and by that noise, he knew the zōtl slept.

  Before receiving his dominant identity as Neter Col from the Saor-priests, the teacher had been known as Proctor Tully Gunther. He had been famous in his school district along the lake shores on Elphame, famous for instructing three generations with discipline and a firm founding in the classics and sciences. He had been the kind of teacher his students never wanted to see again yet never forgot. In his seventy-fifth year, the school board, in acknowledgment of his lifelong dedication, funded his ion flush, with the tacit hope that this would encourage him to tutor yet another generation or two. Now, locked in the battlebrow skull of a scyldar, pithed by a zōtl, he smiled ruefully at the haughty pride he had known with his renewed youth.

  Tully Gunther had loathed teaching only slightly less than the mischievous, privilege-spoiled children that elders paid him to instruct. He himself had been such a child, fourth son of a minister to the Doge, who governed Sakai for the Emir Egil Grimson. His three older brothers had gone into service, as had their father; one died in a clash with distorts on Nabu, and the other two survived to become, in their turn, ministers, well decorated and well paid. Tully Gunther had been unhappy with the physical rigors and dangers of service and instead chose to enter the less demanding arena of academe. Alas, no scholar, he preferred to idle away his time with kakta-chewers and salacious tavern-girls. A poor showing in the merit exams did not surprise, and he accepted a post as proctor in a provincial district, thinking he would have plenty of time for convivial interests. But the work demanded more care than he had expected. Not to lose his post and find himself toiling as a clerk for his exacting and uncharitable family, he mastered the programs expected of him, and year after year he inflicted them on his students. He got results; that was all the school board cared about. His students learned their lessons and did not forget them.

  After the ion-flush restored the elasticity of his tissues and made his sight clear and joints limber as a boy’s, he had thought himself ready for a new life. Among his second generation of pupils, one had uncovered a peerlessly antique tome from the dusty archives of the school library. The book, actually a sheaf of maps from the early OVUM annals that the Ordo Vala had distributed on Elphame centuries earlier, would have assured the pupil a lifetime’s scholarship and a pensioned position at the Doge’s library. But the girl did not recognize its value, and Tully Gunther did. He kept the maps for himself and sent the girl on to a drab career as a research filer in the Emirate offices. He felt no remorse at all. She had discovered the maps while pursuing a project he had assigned, and he knew that he, therefore, should enjoy proprietorship of the find. Not that he intended to follow up on the discovery with the necessary substantiating research that could have built an erudite reputation out of the material. Too old and too lazy to desire higher academic position, he dedicated himself to a strategy far grander than mere scholarship: The maps showed the way from Elphame across the Bridge of Nightmares to the Overworld and from there to an enigmatic sigil. Anyone more versed in the classics than the novice who found the sheaf would have recognized the sigil as the funereal emblem of the newt-king’s enemy, Broken Knife Waq. But only someone who had pored over the war classics from the Age of Knives, as had he during a bored youth in his father’s extensive battle library, only such a one as he would know that Broken Knife Waq had been buried somewhere in the Overworld underneath the booty of his enemies, including the legendary pelf of the newt-king.

  The newt-king had lived long ago among the primeval worlds of the Tryl Age – a distort with a penchant for blue emeralds, which existed only in the swart gorges of the Black Sun’s Forest. When the newt-king, able to climb glass walls with his bare hands and feet, slinky enough to ooze between bars, captured the child or bride of an able clan, he ransomed his captives for blue emeralds. And when the clan’s heroes brought the emeralds, the newt-king usually ate his captives and their rescuers. That eventually led to his undoing under the blade of Broken Knife Waq but not before he had accumulated a great hoard of the priceless gems.

  Tully Gunther had decided to use the ancient maps and his new-won youth to make himself very rich, rich enough to found his own dynasty and outrival the proud attainments of his father and brothers. And so he had set out, one planet-bright day, with all the best equipment his pension could buy, and he found his way by and by to the most remote riverland on Elphame, to a sultry marsh, where the Bridge of Nightmares crossed to the Overworld.

  The Bridge – in fact, a lynk – had sunk to its crest in the bog. The small silver arch that rode above the tule grass and algal felt had at either end a cypress hung with moss, so that there seemed a chrome bridge leading from and to nowhere in the swamp. Those who swam under it got eaten by voracious saurians; those who rowed under and avoided getting snatched by saurians or pin-fanged hominids entered the Overworld.

  The Bridge’s eponymous nightmares derived not just from fierce swamp-lizards and evil apes. Those who succeeded in getting past the creatures, as Tully Gunther did by spilling kerosene on the surface and setting it ablaze before going through, appeared in an ominous tarn of the Black Sun’s Forest, a sullen, foggy place that seemed the very source of nightmares.

  The proctor’s courage, inspired by his knowledge of where the blue emeralds lay, spurred him on, and he picked his way cautiously through the dreadful wood. The next day, after a night spent curled in a tree bole, quavering with fright at drastic howls and crashes on all sides, Tully came through the forest to a glade where the skinny trees broke the planet-light into long wands. Not far off loomed a gargantuan wall of weathered stone set with ponderous doors of green copper. A crone approached through the shaggy grass and offered him breadfingers and parsley biscuits. He carried his own provisions and refused. But not to offend her, he took out some small change and charitably purchased a breadfinger. When she handed it to him, her soft features snapped to a lividly ugly face, leering with malignant glee.

  Along the mammoth wall, one of the green doors opened with a shriek. Black flurries appeared. At the time, he had thought those blurs were bats. He backed away from the gruesomely smiling old woman, and she stepped toward him, caved-in mouth working to say something. The ground-ivy crackled under her feet, and wind moaned in the tops of trees, driving clouds across the planet-swarm so that thin streams of light danced among scattered bushes and small fir trees. She said to him through her sinister joy, “I will sing you fifty words that will change your life.” After so many harrowing years, he still remembered the sun-freckles on her sunken face and the smell of horsemint in the air. She sang in a rackety voice: “The brave lives of only ones is what sustains the soul of the world. For them, the secret heart in the figures of birds and in fossils hammers a loud rhythm. Listen! Choice and chance are one. Faith that our lives complete themselves is the bride bed of all hopes.”

  Now he knew who she was, and he understood that what she had told him was meant as consolation for the suffering she knew lay ahead for him. But at that time, he had no idea of his jeopardy. He rudely shoved past the crone, on his way to find the pelf of the newt-king—until he observed that what he had thought bats were zōtl. He had never seen zōtl before. He knew about them, as everyone did, from books and a few frightful research clips, and what
he knew propelled him backward. He thought he could flee into the forest, lose the filthy creatures there. Yet even as he turned, he was falling. The old woman had tripped him, and with a fear-inspiring strength she held her foot to the back of his neck and held him in place until the pincers touched him that owned the rest of his life.

  There is no name for the pain Tully Gunther suffered. Skull-pierced by a zōtl, he twisted on his bones like an animal learning death. For years, they kept him alive like this, feeding his brain oxygenated glucose from their own bodies while his flesh withered to a stringy skeleton. The unrelieved pain burst his consciousness into psychotic shards, shattered voices and scenes. In the thick of this torment, he rose out of his body. The pain came with him, and he hung in the glimmering dark looking down at his shriveled limbs and torso, his face a skull masked with mummified flesh. All around him jammed a black, arachnoid mass of zōtl, communing fervidly with the one whose feeder stabbed his brain.

  When the zōtl could milk no more pain from Tully Gunther, they shucked his brain and gave it to the nongyls. Those clever, anthropic worms sewed him inside a scyldar. Aeons of mindless suffering passed before he had any idea where he was or even who. Only gradually did he realize that when he heard the backward-sounding music, pain ceased. Its absence was itself a new kind of pain. The expectancy of the pain returning burned harsh as the torture itself. The hurt always came back, and at unexpected, alien intervals, the agony wracked him severely and then disappeared again, leaving him alone with the viol screeches of spider music. A long time elapsed before the mad pieces inside him began to come together. In time, the broken parts did timorously rejoin, and the self that fused together existed oddly calmer and stronger than the man he had been before the zōtl took him.