She smiled at the way the Malay pronounced her name. “I remember. Blue skies. Just one moon in the sky at night. No razorjaws. And no zōtl.”
Ned held out his fist, opened his fingers, and showed a pearlescent blue bead. “Genitrix tell you about this?”
“What is it?”
“It kills zōtl,” Ned declared.
“We have brought it from Rataros, far from here.”
The O’ode! The thought rang in their minds and turned them to face the strohlkraft. The Rimstalker appeared in the hatchway, a vaguely human shape of jellied light bristling with electricity.
The majestic strength that had revived Lorraine expanded in a rush that almost knocked her from her feet. Gai had finished fitting the strohlkraft’s computer with the flightpath to where the zōtl held Lod captive. At any instant, the spiders could wrest control of Lod’s gravity-amp and scuttle all hope of returning home.
Gai had another reason to hurry. Her thoughts echoed across the gray traverse of the null field, and she could hear herself thinking. The Overworld reflected her energies. As she worked, the noise had sharpened; the echoes never completely faded. They rang on, overlaying each other in a clamoring reverberation that threatened to dissolve her plasma body.
The humans she had gathered here did not hear the confusion of her time-dilated mind. They seemed frozen in time. The hot energy of her plasma shape distorted the cold reality of the Overworld, worse and worse as these echoes mounted, and she knew she would explode. Her time scheme unraveled around her in barking coils of blue electricity. She had to work swiftly—little time remained before her vibrations destroyed her. She feared that if her plasma shape broke up here, the Overworld would swallow her mind. Even if flung back into her Form, she would arrive unconscious—Lod would belong to the zōtl, and the humans would hold the O’ode.
Desperate to save herself, Gai touched Lorraine. Take the O’ode.
Lorraine snatched the pearl. Everyone crouched as the Rimstalker’s plasma body began shredding apart in snarling ropes of voltage. Spitting sparks, Gai shot from the hatch and flew for the tunnel. Come quickly! she called after, and the echo of her cry sizzled toward a scream. She vanished in the lynk, trailing fiery dust.
Lorraine gazed after the alien, then peered down at the blue bauble. A memory from her first life shone brightly—the image of a minister, wrought face glinting like a boxer’s, exhorting: He that loses his life shall find it! And she had—twice now. Memories of Earth flitted like fish in the ocean depths of her mind, visible but intangible. The past was lost—on Earth and on Xappur. The past was lost and had left room in its place for another life, a life wider than her own. An eerie calm of destiny descended. Here in her hand, she held life for all distort clans, for all the tribes of people. Here presided peace for Koo and Waltho and for everyone the zōtl had killed.
She looked up with a fierce joy. Ned and Pahang had backed away from her. The brushstroke sparks of Gai’s flight lingered behind and burnished the air around Lorraine with electric streaks. Gai reached for her from the other side of the lynk. A new destiny waited.
Lorraine closed her fist over the O’ode and ran to the lynk. In the mouth of the tunnel, she turned and fixed upon Ned and Pahang standing by their ship. Ned waved, Pahang lifted both palms. “Glad luck, Loryn!”
With the O’ode raised in her fist, she walked through the lynk.
“There goes history.” Ned turned and climbed up into the flight pod.
“Lah.”
Torso Before the Cave of Riddles
At the boreal pole of Mugna, in the baneful palace of Perdur, Lod hung on display. His plasma body had shrunk to a manshape of crimson embers mottled with black clots across torso and thighs, where the phanes bound him. He dangled upright above a pentagonal base under the archway of a colossal cavern, suspended by magnetic flux. On either side, peristyles of coiled serpents rose from the glossy, acid-blotched floor and disappeared in vaulting shadows.
Voices weirded from the cavern. They simulated human voices that the zōtl generated to lure people into their lynks. In the Age of Knives, when these voice-baited lynks had been common, the tribes dubbed them “ghost caves.” The one that Lod hung before taunted him with questions: Where are you? . . . What is supposed to happen next? . . . When?. . . Does chance sponsor fate? . . . Or do the hands of the clock feel their own way? . . . Is time alive? . . . How then will the mind wear its suffering, its shame? . . . Can accident sire meaning? . . . Have you forgotten that before the atoms that shaped the first cells became cells they were still atoms? . . . What rearranges them? . . . Were the first patterns accident? . . . Is memory anything but garbled history? . . . Do you remember why you are here? . . . What can I say to you? . . . What can I say? . . .
Lod could not help but listen, his will almost wholly paralyzed by the phanes. Control of his Form and the Form’s control of the planetpaths still belonged to him—while the zōtl picked diligently at his machine mind through his trapped gel body. In the shadowed vault high above his suspended plasma shape, a dozen spiders in a web of scaffolding and cables worked full-time at their glassy induction consoles, magnetically decoding Lod’s programs.
The Rimstalker machine mind resisted them, straining with all his diminished will to stymie their access. His strength wearied. Over the first dozen days that he hung under the spiders, his gel wore away. His limbs and his head faded to translucent outlines and finally disappeared entirely. Only his torso, circled by the phanes, remained.
Inside the smoldering core of his plasma shape, Lod had no strength to resist anymore. Cumbered with weariness, he sunk into a torpid trance and listened to the small lives around him, reflecting on their tiny but elegant energies as they paraded before his captured shape. Pilgrims from all the worlds came, and he reflected through their memories the shanty thorps under the plasteel walls of the Aesirai’s great cities, the green cliffs of Sakai strung with hydroelectric lines, the deserts of Ras Mentis quilted with irrigated farms, and the vassal world Ren, where primitive tribes wandered forest corridors until the zōtl harvested them.
Most of the humans in Lod’s presence served as Saor-priests assigned to guard him. Through them, he linked telepathically with their leader, the Cenobite Fra Baba Bathra, on the slopes of the Dragon’s Shank. Lod could feel the lives around Fra Baba. Idly, he regarded the human instrumental in capturing him.
Gorlik quavered tiny and bright as a star before the mountainous dark of Saor. They stood in highlands above the Brood of Night’s hamlet, where Saor had carried the human to reward him for his service. From a cavelynk, the Face of Night brought out a sphere lit with silky purple. The dwarf held the pumpkin-sized sphere in both hands, ugly face underlit with astral violet.
“You hold the Globe of Influence, Bram Gorlik.” The voice of Night festered with echoes. “With it, you rule any world you choose.”
Gorlik squinted into the bright ball, eyed landscapes gathering like thunderheads out of the purple fumes.
“Will you be master of Valdëmiraën—” Saor asked, “or would you prefer a brighter world? Vala, perhaps, or Ylem?”
In the sphere, Gorlik recognized the world’s brow of the Eyelands, then Vala’s grassy veldt, Ylem’s sprawling jungles. He lifted a puzzled face to the darkness.
“This is my reward to you, mortal spark,” the Night said. “With this tool, you may view any place in the world of your dominion. No enemy can hide from you. No secret not your own will live long under your scrutiny.”
“I don’t want this,” Gorlik countered, somberly.
“It is your due, Bram. Without you, I would never have captured Lod. You have earned your place among the legends.”
“Take it back,” Gorlik called and held up the sphere. “What I did, I did unknowing.”
“Don’t be modest. You are a hero. Thanks to you these worlds will live. You should be proud.”
“Proud? Of betraying my friends? I am Foke. Betrayal is worse than death for us.”
> “How have you betrayed your friends?”
“I came here with Nappy Groff. Same reason Lod came —to free Chan-ti Beppu. Now Beppu, Nappy, and Lod are your prisoners.”
“You may have the girl and the old man when I have captured Ned O’Tennis. He comes. Already I feel him at my lynk. In hours, he shall be apprehended. Then you may take your Foke and go to any world you wish.”
Gorlik shook his big head. “Thirteen days I have lived in the hamlet, tolerated by others but unloved. They have no trust or love for me.”
“I could not come earlier or maybe I could have spared you that indignity. But I needed to oversee the interrogation of Lod. You will have new friends—many new friends. Do not grieve over the loss of these few. They are fools not to see your compassion, your heroism.”
“I am Foke!” Gorlik shouted. “The zōtl are my enemy! What I did, I did unknowing!” He raised the glowing sphere over his head.
“Wait! That is a Globe of Influence! What you see in it, you can touch with your will. Don’t you understand? I am offering you a kingdom.”
“Fock your kingdom!” Gorlik heaved the sphere to the ground, and it burst among the rocks with concussive force.
As the globe erupted, Lod heaved out of his trance. He awoke in his plasma body, wrung by the grip of the phanes. What windows burn in your brain? the Cave of Riddles asked. Might there be hope? Faith in a secret freedom? Echoes of Lod’s telepathic rapture came and went.
Gorlik somersaulted down a slope nubbled with mushrooms. Above him, Saor became a black sky glittering with hot shards of the exploded globe.
A laugh twisted feebly in Lod. The power Saor had offered the gnome provided a direct patch to Lod’s machine mind. Gorlik’s rejection of the Globe had freed some of Lod’s power, and his torso breathed a brighter scarlet. Humans are as unpredictable as Rimstalkers, he thought at the crest of the surge. As unpredictable and as desperate. Saor, you are a fool to try to manipulate them. The ticking of the zōtl, probing the program codes in his brain, tattooed louder, and Lod’s enthusiasm dulled. From the Cave of Riddles, a synthetic voice asked, What doors glide open in your heart with a wind that walks for love?
On the slopes of the Dragon’s Shank, the Brood of Night witnessed the flare from the ruptured Globe of Influence. Distorts moaned and quivered, for any visitation of light portended ill. Too recently, Fire himself had been defeated before their startled eyes by the gnome Gorlik. Night ruled all now. How could any mere beam of light dare stand before Saor? The sudden appearance yet again of radiance on the night-thick Dragon’s Shank could only mean that Gorlik worked some evil.
Since the capture of Lod, Gorlik had sulked about the hamlet. The other Foke, father Nappy and daughter Chan-ti, consoled him. Too proud in their happiness at finding each other again to carry anger at Gorlik, they bore no grudge. But Gorlik was furious with himself for his compliance with Saor. The gnome sat glumly outside the window of Chan-ti and Nappy’s prison. And when the Cenobite allowed them to stroll the hamlet’s one street, he tagged along, whining after them, pleading with them to believe he had acted unwittingly. Fra Baba and the Knower alone believed him, as they could gauge him telepathically. The other distorts feared he had gone mad.
“Betrayal saved my life,” Nappy Groff finally told Gorlik when the big-faced man came to their room above the winery and begged forgiveness. The older gnome had sunken into himself after the Witch Maze, and he spoke in a thin voice. “You have grunion for brains, Gorlik. Making deals with the Face of Night! I am old. I shall die soon anyway. Betrayal serves only you.”
“No betrayal!” Gorlik insisted. “I saved your life that you might be with your daughter again. And here you are! What wrong did I do? Would you be dead in the Witch Maze? Was I to know Lod would come to save Beppu?” He turned to Chan-ti. “Beppu, you must hear me. I have no deal with the Face of Night.”
Chan-ti nodded but dared not offer even a pat of consolation: Gorlik looked crazed, worse than he had on Ras Mentis when he had seized her for his own, before the scyldar sent him scurrying.
“I betrayed no one,” Gorlik repeated. He began to believe his own lie. In the Witch Maze, at the threshold of death, carrying the phanes for the Face of Night had seemed a small task to undertake for more life. He had perpetuated no intent of defeating Chan-ti’s escape with Lod, of binding Lod for the zōtl. He had not even known that Lod, too, sought her. He had been used. Why would no one believe him? Ire meshed with shame, and he took Chan-ti by her shoulders and turned her to face him. “There was no betrayal.”
Nappy roused himself from the corner where he sat, and Gorlik placed his foot on the elder man’s chest and shoved him back. Nappy dropped heavily and sat glowering.
“I am Foke,” Gorlik moaned. “I do not obey Saor.”
Pity dampened Chan-ti’s lungs, and though Gorlik’s grip hurt her arms, she did not struggle. “I never asked you to come after me,” she reminded. “Courage led you. It will, yet.”
Gorlik’s grip relented. “You forgive me?”
“There is nothing to forgive, Bram. You did your best to find me. As you say, how were you to know of Lod?”
Gorlik nodded once, heavily. He stared up past the reflections of Chan-ti’s eyeglasses, into the life of the woman he had wanted for his own. Pity for him shone back, and he knew then there would be no vows between them. Out of the heart’s dark, a useless cry lifted, but he gave it no voice.
Gorlik slouched past a haggard Nappy without looking at him and left. For days, he moped, sick of heart at the thought of how the Foke legends would remember him. Several times, he brinked on suicide but loathed himself too much to let himself escape that easily. Then, Saor appeared above the hamlet, a darkness that blotted out the firefly-tinkling cliffs. All the Brood heard Gorlik called out into the street by the thunder-voice of the Face of Night, and they beheld him lifted and flown to a higher slope—where light now staved darkness.
Chan-ti caught another light—a pale glow in her window—that she thought might be the ghost of Spooner Yegg. Since the night of Lod’s capture, she had been seeing him wandering among the spike trees and mushroom fields. At first, she had thought the blur just nostalgia, the wind brushing spoor from where the gills of bioluminent fungus notched the trees. But the blur had hardened to Spooner Yegg’s shape, the black garments he had worn in life dusty with wraith-light. His silver hair and thin moustache had gleamed brightly from the solemn shadow of his face. On his chest, in the fist-sized hole from the laserbolt that had killed him, a heraldic splash of scarlet smoldered.
Nappy had seen him, too, but ignored him. He was still angry that the thief had helped Chan-ti begin the futile search for Ned O’Tennis that had led to this dark place. Chan-ti had thought of telling him that Spooner was her true father but thought better of it when she gauged the tenuous strength left in Nappy’s small body.
At the window, Chan-ti watched the Brood of Night spill out of their cottages and come running from their fields to watch the flare of radiance above the hamlet. Across the street, obscured by a thorn-trellis at the corner of a bungalow, the ghost waved for her to come down. Chan-ti’s blood whirled. She helped Nappy from the straw cot where he had been sleeping, and guided him down the narrow stairs. In the dark, empty winery below, Spooner waited, smudged with ghostly vapors.
Nappy grunted and raised a fist to the ghost. “Away, thief! Leave the living alone!”
“Ease, Nappy,” Chan-ti gentled and stepped ahead of him. “The wraith is trying to speak with us.”
Spooner’s body of light drifted on the field of force that Genitrix had projected for her creation, Moku the Beast. When Moku died, the forcefield had persisted, long enough to sweep along Spooner’s wavebody. The thief was as perplexed as Chan-ti to find himself on the Dragon’s Shank, in the hamlet of the Brood of Night, at the threshold of a winery, the moldered scent of the place vividly musky. He smelled, he saw, he heard through the waveforms that still had bodies, through the living. Images of battles
yawned in him, he knew not from where, and the image of a brown youth with a blue pearl in her palm—
Understanding came in waves, surges of ideation out of nowhere, though actually from Genitrix who watched everything through her lynk system. The zōtl had shut down her communication network, yet she retained sentience and what she perceived excited her.
The O’ode has been found. Spooner’s ghost spoke in the Foke’s minds. The words rising in the thief amazed even him. Who was speaking? The zōtl are dying even now.
Lod—who had, all along, been the object of Genitrix’s communication—heard. The mantle of power from the Globe of Influence faded with its explosion and with it Lod’s presence dulled. As he dimmed so did the thief’s ghost. Spooner, drifting painlessly alert in the forcefield inherited from Moku, felt himself borne gently outward. He was dying. No, he corrected himself—he was dead and this the journey to his source. He stared a last time at his daughter and the familiar contours of remembered reality. He managed a smile. The expanding field that Genitrix released quietly carried him away, dissolving shapes, and sensations borrowed from others. A majestic continuum of radiance broadened around him, sweeping him onward into the boundless reaches of eternity.
“Father!” Chan-ti shouted and ran to where the ghost had stood.
Nappy came up behind her. “Spooner Yegg—” Thoughts moved the jigsaw pieces of his seamed face as he realized. “He is your real father?”
Chan-ti nodded, lifted her glasses and wiped tears from her eyes. “He came back for me.”
Nappy put his arm around Beppu. Through the window of the wine-shop, he sighted the Cenobite stalking toward them.
In Lod’s mind, this telepathic image broke up into hot, jiggling motes. The synthetic voice from the ghost cave spoke: “Inside the oak is the acorn—and inside the acorn an oak forest thrives, and in the shade of the forest there are squirrels and birds and the emptiness that carries all of this. What is the name of this emptiness?”
The Last Legends of Earth Page 35
