The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  The first complete chain of thought to gird Tully’s newly tempered awareness focused on the pupil from whom he had stolen the maps to the newt-king’s pelf. Purged of greed, purged of the whole fog of subjectivity that had been his mind before, he clearly envisioned how that choice had risen nascent from all the circumstances and selections of his life, from his childhood fears of his father and brothers to his passive decision to teach, right to his arrogant journey across the Bridge of Nightmares. The words of the crone’s song had been true—there was no chance to the choices that had led him to his fate—and there was no choice in the chances that shaped him. Being did not split into choice and chance, as he had always imagined. The truth of ‘being’ is that ‘being’ followed the way in the dark, the frightening and spontaneous balance between impulse and will, the headlong rush that the Ordo Vala called the stream. He knew he had changed when he found himself agreeing with the Ordo Vala. Always before, the lynk wanderers had seemed ridiculous, risking their lives in the Overworld to garner yet more knowledge, enlightening the uninformed with ephemerides and platitudes that seemed self-evident. Their sermons about streaming—about seeing oneself as time and seeing time as a river—had resounded shallowly for him, until the pain of the zōtl changed him.

  In the interludes between bouts of pain, Tully’s mind entered the streamtime. That’s what the Ordo Vala called pure objectivity. He remembered that now because, unshackled from the constraints of linear thinking by the pain of his possession, he had become all his memories. And not just his memories. All the stored experiences and programs of the scyldar Neter Col and even the zōtl hung before his awareness, a colloidal suspension of knowledge. The calmer he was, the more he streamed among the floating bits of data, experiencing the furthest ranges of his brain and the horrifying and profound knowledge the nongyls had stored there.

  The closest memories occupying Neter Col recalled his existence from the time shortly after the nongyls had patched him together in the vats under Perdur, to this moment in the alcove in a temple on Ras Mentis. Terrible images of his early assassinations glowed as if in amber. Tully streamed past lurid glimpses of blue-bunched bowels slithering through the fingers of a soldier surprised by Neter’s blade in a sunlit field, where a moment before he had seen only cloudshadows on the lanky grass; and a night landscape with tangled bodies syrupy with blood, punched open by laserbolts; and a beach, with severed heads dangling windpipes and strings; sudden groans under the impact of his knife—hacked limbs—far more than Tully cared to catalogue. Not that he felt frightened or even repelled. His suffering had cleansed him of all such grief and hardened him to every brutality. He streamed among his memories eager to reach the deeper ones, the nongyl programs that defined the scyldar’s identity.

  Tully Gunther controlled his streaming with the strength of focus he had earned from losing his mind to pain and finding it again. When he located what he sought, he centered his attention, undistracted by the impatience of a human body or the laziness of a mind that owned itself. Never for an instant did he forget that he was dominated by the zōtl. His life had become a mask, something the zōtl wore to look human, and the mask was strange, however human-like it was. He would never be human again—and that gave him the solemn intent he needed to reach deeply into himself. Knowledge streamed through him, and he discovered who had built Neter Col and why.

  The nongyls’ programming included full recall of the Saor-priests and the zōtl technology they had used to molt worm-dwarves in the wombs of captured humans. From there, Tully learned about Saor and how the black sun existed as a machine mind with its counterpart in Lod controlled by the Rimstalker Gai, and how the zōtl had trapped her in her Form deep in a chthonic chamber on Know-Where-to-Go.

  Waiting for Ned O’Tennis, Tully had ample time to assimilate all the know-ledge in the scyldar’s body. With ironic distance, he appreciated that: By using him, the zōtl had empowered him in a way he could not even have imagined in his former life. Long, long ago, in the mangled past of his anguish, he had lost all expectations of anything but more pain. He knew he would never be free of suffering again. So when this bounty of knowledge became his, he had not one thought of how to use it. Like a dragon with its hoard, he sat with it alone in the cavedark of Neter Col’s skull.

  The nongyls’ information concatenated deeper stores of data. There, Tully found out who the crone was who had turned him over to the zōtl. Lore called her the Weed Woman, and she guarded the Back Gates, the first and largest lynk-interface that the Rimstalker had constructed between the Overworld and its artificial planetary system. The crone was, in fact, one of Genitrix’s earliest creations, a humanoid programmed to attract lynk wanderers to Chalco-Doror and to warn Gai of zōtl and any armed incursions. When the zōtl lobotomized Genitrix, the Weed Woman went mad, transformed from an attractive female designed to host wanderers, into a hag that the zōtl altered to alert them when humans approached the Back Gates. Whenever anyone accepted food from her, the zōtl arrived.

  Tully Gunther knew a moment of remorse when he realized that he might have gotten past the Weed Woman had he known her function. That remorse blacked him out. Anytime he got emotional, the sleeping zōtl became restless and squirted his brain with a chemical that hurt him until he passed out. Early, Tully had learned to quell avid feelings. He simply watched. The zōtl did not seem to notice him so long as he stayed quiet. The darkness became his shelter.

  In the dark, when the backward music played, Tully joined the streamtime, devoid of emotion yet intense with alertness. Going inward, he had learned all that the scyldar knew of the war between the zōtl and the Rimstalkers. He understood that if Gai found the O’ode and destroyed her enemy, Chalco-Doror would be collapsed to a point smaller than an atom and all the worlds would exist no more. That pleased him, almost orgasmically, and he was knocked out four times exulting with the possibility of death and emptiness. Suddenly, he had hope again. Expectation flourished in him, and he thought that maybe, somehow, he could make some difference.

  Thinking was as dangerous for Tully Gunther as feeling, for it always roused the spider in the scyldar’s chest. Better to stream. He returned again and again to Neter Col’s programmed memories of Ned O’Tennis, each time penetrating deeper until finally he tapped into the very instructions of the Face of Night. Streaming through the dark of that remembrance, Tully touched Saor’s mind and experienced time as geometry. A gray globe splashed with hot colors spun slowly in unyielding blackness. Tully recognized the pattern of the splash from his schoolteacher days. That exhibited a fractal pattern, lacy, filigreed figures with dimensions somewhere between one and two or two and three dimensions—fractions like 1.26, 2.48. Clouds, coastlines, river branchings, mountain chains were all modeled by different kinds of fractals. Before him floated a globe of fractals, the continuous surface of time suspended in the black of the cosmic vacuum. The fractal splash patterns on the globe showed the timelines of all the particles in the universe, displaying how they combined across time to shape events. The closer one got to the globe, the more clearly the fractal patterns resolved into smaller, even more intricate groupings. All temporal possibilities lay there: the one past of this universe and all its futures.

  Saor had traced Ned O’Tennis’ timeline and found that it led to a future where the zōtl died and the Rimstalker imploded her worlds to make her way back to the range of her origin. If the Aesirai died first, that future narrowed.

  After learning this, Tully Gunther stopped streaming inward. He had learned enough. He had become a player now. Knowledge had made him powerful even in his impuissance. Instead of searching further inward, he looked out through the scyldar’s faceplate. Nearby ranged the dark of the vault. Infraview showed diorite slabs cracked by centuries of continental plate shift. Gold snakes nested between the scyldar’s boots. Through the vegetation that shawled the open face of the vault, day and night chinked. Comets and sparkbright transports crawled among stairways of stars and bunched planets. Closer
, the lynk glared by day and shimmered by night. The scyldar monitored the kilometer between its two ends continually and in all practical bandwidths. Pilgrims to the shrine of the Carrier of Peace came and went. Troops, too, sometimes pausing to fight among themselves. Then mourners came and made offering to the rubble of the Tryl statues for the spirit of the Strong Mother who had died recently. By that, Tully knew from his history that they had penetrated deep into the Age of the Crystal Mind, twelve centuries before his own birth and grisly demise.

  Neter Col had been still so long that when he came alert and moved, Tully Gunther flattened under the force of the scyldar’s will. The schoolteacher, who had spent the long wait strengthening his concentration, needed all that inner stamina to stay watchful. The scyldar had observed something that had activated him. Streaming into Neter Col’s sensory center, Tully experienced the scyldar’s perceptions. Voices half a kilometer away discussed Ned O’Tennis. The time had come. The scyldar glided through curtains of vines as though he had been poised only moments instead of years.

  Daylight flexed off white sands and the chrome surface of the lynk parabola. Birds squirted through the sky above the oasis. Thumbling monkeys scattered to their hiding places among ancient cherry trees. The scyldar loped silently through the day’s long waves of sunlight, among date palms, slick fronds, and bristly sago. The voices drew nearer.

  “The directional finder says he’s here already,” a woman spoke. She came into view as the scyldar crouched around a thorntree: a tall girl in brown denim trousers and camouflage jacket, her dark hair sunstreaked, and eyeglasses glinting on her young face. “He’ll be here any moment. I’m sure of it.”

  The angular man beside her wore black, his white hair sleek with sweat and combed back from a well-worn face. He wearily lowered a heavy sack. “Chan-ti—you better take a look at this.”

  At the sound of his voice, a creature twice as big as a man reared from the shade of a fern holt. Gray and jagged as a humanshape incompletely carved from granite, it moved lissome as smoke. Neter Col crouched lower at the sight of the beast, and Tully felt its awe at the silken silence of the giant.

  The old man pointed toward the lynk, where two men fast approaced. They were small men, almost dwarves, one old and bald, hurrying along; the other swarthy and reluctant. “Come on, Gorlik,” the old man chided. “You’ve come this far, take me to my daughter. Quickly now.”

  “Not quickly enough for what I’ve seen,” Gorlik grumbled. “We’re doomed here. We shouldn’t be here at all. Not at all, Groff. Not at all.”

  “Shut up and come along. They’ve already seen us. Ho! Chan-ti Beppu! Spooner Yegg! There is no world far enough for you to hide from me!”

  “Nappy Groff!” Spooner called out. “So you’ve finally decided to help us after all.”

  “Help you?” The small old man came huffing through the reed grass. “I should brain you for stealing that finder. And you, Beppu—you don’t know the danger you’re in here.”

  She embraced the old dwarf and kissed the top of his head. “Nappy, you’ve come just in time. Look at the finder. Ned will be here any moment.”

  “Now you call me Nappy?” Groff complained, fists on hips. “You don’t call me Father anymore? Too full of yourself from success in the Overworld, eh?”

  Chan-ti looked to Spooner, who smiled, proudly. “There’s no time to talk now. We’ve come through the lynk of a whirlpool pattern in the Overworld. No telling where the timelines go from here. We’re in danger. We should find Ned quickly and get out.”

  “So, you can read lynklane sign,” Gorlik observed. “Then you know—we will not leave if we wait for the Aesirai. We must go now.”

  Chan-ti regarded the dark dwarf coolly. “We’re not going anywhere, Gorlik, without my mate.”

  “I am your mate, Chan-ti-Beppu.” Gorlik’s pikethrust jaw pointed at her. “You are Foke—and you belong to me. Why else am I here, risking my life?”

  She blew air between her lips and checked her finder again. “The metrics are zero. He may already be here.”

  Gorlik stepped closer and reached for her. But the gray giant trained his flame-

  core eyes on the dwarf and sent the little man scurrying backward. “Moku—she’s mine. You know that.”

  A sonic boom throbbed across the oasis. From the top of the lynk, Ned O’Tennis’ strohlkraft shot into the cobalt sky of Ras Mentis. Blue fire dwindled in its thrusters, and it glided in a long, high curve out over the desert. Chan-ti cheered and shielded her eyes with her hand to watch the craft’s descent.

  With their backs turned to Neter Col, they presented the only barrier between the scyldar and his prey. Tully Gunther watched helplessly as the laserifle engaged. Neter Col’s thoughts, bright as the dayworn planets in the sky, fixed on gunning down these humans and confronting Ned O’Tennis as he emerged from his strohlkraft. But before he could fire, Moku the Beast whirled about and heaved a cobble at the scyldar.

  The rock bashed Neter Col in the chest, dropping him to his back and spoiling his shot. The laserbolt struck a shrub and kicked it into flames. A scream flapped from the dark dwarf, and everyone scattered. With eerie grace and precision, Moku the Beast dodged among broken architecture and brash shrubbery, moving so fast that Tully Gunther knew at once who he must be.

  Like the Weed Woman, the Beast was a Genitrix creation. Though Genitrix’s external connections had been resected by the zōtl and she had lost control of what her wild planets created, she was obviously still aware within herself and knowledgeable of the events around her: Moku had been grown at great depths and in secrecy for just this moment—to protect Ned O’Tennis from Saor’s assassin.

  Tully Gunther knew this from the preternatural way the creature had anticipated Neter Col’s attack and the way he moved. He was not relying on environmental clues to guide him. He connected somehow through Genitrix to the land itself. He read the magnetic flux of all the bodies around him. Every move that Neter Col made, the Beast sensed at once and countered. Laserbolts scorched spaces where the Beast had just been. In an instant, lurching from behind a collapsed wall at an unexpected angle, Moku sprung upon the scyldar and succeeded in ripping the laserifle away. He swung it like a club.

  Neter Col fell backward, the rifle-butt glancing his head. From his hip, the laserbolt pistol snapped forward in its holster and fired. The bolt struck Moku square in the chest and rammed him against the broken wall. He heaved the laserifle over his shoulder and slumped dead.

  The rifle landed in the grass near Spooner. He seized it and fled with the others through the grass, toward the lynk and the strohlkraft that had settled like a raven among the dunes. Neter Col pursued, laserbolt pistol raised high. There was no escaping him. His speed overtook them at once. Spooner curled and fired. His bolt split rock behind the scyldar. Then Nappy got in the way, cowering under the massive shadow of Neter Col.

  Tully Gunther pressed all his intent into one muscular instant and willed himself to stop. As the scyldar aimed his pistol at the dwarf’s head, his arm stiffened, locked by the schoolteacher’s sudden assertion. The block lasted less than a second. That was all the inner power Tully could muster. But it was enough for Spooner to get off another shot. That bolt struck Neter Col directly in the faceplate with a splash of sparks and a scream of rent metal. The scyldar flew a meter through the air and crashed to his back, limbs jerking.

  The impact of the laserbolt smashed Tully like a black fist. Knocked free of his senses by the heavy blackness that hit him, he reeled through no-space, agonized. Then he recognized, in a whirl of amazement, that he flew outside his body, tugged free as he had been once before, under the pain of zōtl possession. The pain passed, and husked with astral coolness, he hovered above the dead body of the scyldar, staring down into the fist-sized hole punched into the faceplate, its ripped edges still glowing.

  Gorlik, who had crawled into a tight space under a fallen column during the scyldar’s pursuit, squirmed out and seized Chan-ti’s arm. “You’re
mine now!” he shouted. “Ned O’Tennis will not have you.”

  Chan-ti tried to yank her arm free. But the dwarf was far too strong and pulled her into his grip, close to his crooked-toothed sneer. Nappy got to his knees, waved feebly at Gorlik. Spooner yelled at him, “Let her go, small meat!”

  From the diamond-fire blaze of Ras Mentis’ noon, Tully watched, shivering in the inexhaustible cold. Twitches of energy coiled through him, reaching up through incandescent air escaping Neter Col’s corpse. He hovered as an exhalation of Neter Col’s wounded body. And he realized that the scyldar was not dead. The bolt had gouged his brain but not destroyed him. Already he gathered strength, bunching power in his muscles to rise. Tully screamed a warning from the lucid sky where he bobbed. But that was hopeless. Everyone fumbled with the girl and the dark dwarf, and no one noticed the scyldar sit up.

  “It’s alive!” Gorlik wailed as Neter Col lunged to his feet. He let Chan-ti go and dashed off into the grass, vanishing around a pile of rubble.

  Spooner got off one shot. The bolt hit the scyldar’s shoulder and sent his left arm flipping into the air, wrenching his body about. Neter Col fired his pistol, and Spooner’s chest flared whitehot for an instant, searing his last cry to a silent gape as he collapsed.

  “Father!” Chan-ti cried.

  Nappy thought she called to him as she ran toward the fallen body, going for the laserifle. But before she could reach it, the scyldar, his shoulder a jag of white bone and red rags, bounded toward her. He grabbed her with his one arm and tried to turn to shoot Nappy.

  The old man ducked. Scurrying on hands and knees through the tall grass, he came up beside Spooner’s corpse and pulled the big-barreled pistol from his shoulder-holster, ignoring the scyldar’s laserifle. When he popped out of the grass, the scyldar had vanished. He clambered atop a pile of rocks and spotted Neter Col among pillars on the lower slope. He lurched toward the lynk, spurting blood, staggering, Chan-ti Beppu gripped fiercely in his one arm.