The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  The pilgrims watched Sword thrash his legs, wobbling his flight into the darkness. Only one bleak scream descended, at the black moment when he discovered his place among the flesh-twisted frescoes. He had thought them dead sculptures—until one jawless face cried again the hilarious scream that had betrayed him. Piece by piece, cowl, mantle, shredded garments, eyeglasses, and finally boots dropped to the mirrorfloor from where it was dark. Nongyls carried the torn fabric away, and pilgrims and priests resumed their strolling chants to the glory of the Face of Night.

  Glyph Astra (Annals of the Overworld)

  2000 Doror

  Life is one mud of all sculpting.

  —Glyph Astra

  In the midst of the Rust Age, Buie had been born upon a baby field of Valdëmiraën. A sojourner for the Ordo Vala took the infant back with her to Vala. The ancient order had provisions for such living treasures. Reared in the Ordo Vala’s capital of cloistered gardens, bright canopies, and air-domes on the hot savannah, the boy grew up to remember his life on First Earth as Fructuoso Sanabria, son of a castellan in Moorish Spain. He had died of fever in his fourth year on First Earth, and his memories of that life endured so scantily that he had abandoned his old name and thought little of that time. He became a sojourner himself, responsible for carrying the Glyph Astra to outback settlements and warning people there of the coming collapse of the worlds when the Rimstalker woke to return to the range—or the zōtl wreaked their vengeance.

  After a long period of training on Vala and in the Overworld, Buie’s first assignment took him to the jungle planet of Ylem. He arrived wearing the traditional red and gray vestments modified for wilderness trekking: his cuffs cinched to prevent insects from crawling up his limbs, a cloth attached to the back of his rumal cap to protect his neck, and a viral alarm on his utility belt to alert him to any virulent strains in the environment. The lynk he arrived through had overgrown with strangler fig, and he had to cut his way out with his laser pistol.

  The nearby city, constructed during the reign of Ieuanc 751, seventeen centuries earlier, bore all the distinctive markings of the numan culture—functional elegance and a complete absence of organic support systems: no aquifers, granaries, slaughterhouses, or sewer system; instead, every hundred meters among the elegant boulevards, plazas, and ribbon ramps leading to the monorails, onyx-plated kiosks stood, which the numans used to recharge their power cells. This was typical of Ieuanc 751’s paranoia. Numans could easily have been constructed with power cells that never needed recharging; yet, almost all the Crystal Minds, with the exception of a few military models, had to recharge every six hours. This had afforded the tyrant continual input on the whereabouts of all his citizens without the Foundation actually having to install individual monitors.

  Of course, after overthrowing Ieuanc 751 with the help of Lod, the Emir had equipped all numan cities with support systems necessary for human life. But these crude addenda to the seamlessly beautiful cities of numan architecture had fared poorly as the centuries passed. When Buie arrived on Ylem, the jungle had dismantled almost all the human structures, and only the tallest of the numan spires rose above the riotous tangle of lianas and figwort. Unlike Sakai, where Buie had been moved by the loveliness of jungle crags, chasms, and waterfalls, Ylem tendered a nightmarish tumult of shining, rubbery, fleshy plants pervaded by a damp heat of miasmic steam.

  Within minutes of arriving, Buie’s viral alarm buzzed angrily, and he slapped on a filter mask and was soon almost swooning in the quivering heat. On a deserted esplanade, overlooking devastated terraces, vine-scrawled towers, and the monkey-loud jungle, he spotted the people he had come to supply with the Glyph Astra and to warn of the coming doom. Pongid faces, thick-browed and fur-tufted, watched him from the green conflagration of the jungle and flashed screaming into the trees when he removed his mask and approached.

  Toward night, under sunset clouds like ribbons, an arrow struck him. It hit him squarely in the chest and lodged in his body armor, and he collapsed as if wounded. Two more arrows thudded into his sweat-soaked padding before a gang of the simians breasted through the overgrowth and came to him. At their touch, he sat up, and they bounced away. But this time, he took aim with his laser pistol and fired into the jungle ahead of them, turning them back. In the gloaming, the laser bursts flared, and the band of proto-humans reeled sightlessly across the shattered flagstones of the terrace.

  Buie removed his mask and approached them again. One drew a plasteel blade from his loincloth, and Buie struck him with a stun bolt that heaved him to the ground and made the others shout. When Buie bent over him and used an inhaler secreted in his palm to bring him around, the war party moaned with amazement and fell to their knees. From then on, they refused him nothing.

  Buie traveled to their camp in the umbral depths of the ruined city. There, he unfolded his silversheeted tent, which also served as a solar panel and radio transmitter, and began his ministry. He dispensed food packets, water-purifying tablets, and plasteel knives. During the long spells when the viral winds abated, he wore no mask. To appear more like his hosts, he grew a great beard. With medicines and a gentle manner, he eventually won the trust of the tribes.

  “Don’t waste your time with those sims, Buie,” the expediter on Vala told him by radio after he filed his first report. “We trained you to save people, not monkeys.”

  “These are people,” he protested. “They live in tribes—they make tools.”

  “They’re homologues, proto-humans.”

  “The Book of Horizons clearly states that we are one mud. I can’t just ignore them.”

  “Give it up, Buie. Next you’ll be potting plants and carrying them into the Overworld.”

  Buie ignored the expediter. It took him years and he had to work without support or further supplies from Vala but eventually he penetrated the archaic heart of the wild people and learned of the great ancestors who had created them. Genitrix had often regenerated early hominids among all the worlds, and here on Ylem they had flourished in the jungle. The original proto-humans, their DNA adjusted by Genitrix, had lived for centuries, enabling them to promulgate their wilderness faith, deep in the forest away from the numan cities and the rare human settlements. After the numans disappeared and the ravages of the jungle weakened the humans, these hominids took over the ruins. The few humans that had remained quickly assimilated. Even after Buie taught them all he knew and stood himself in the portal of the lynk waving goodbye, the thick-boned, fur-sleek people continued reluctant to surrender their jungle home for the mysteries of the Overworld. The doom that the sojourner prophesied lurked over fifteen centuries away. In their timeless communion with the rain forest, that measured eternity.

  2050 Doror

  Hunt and you are hunted—listen and you are heard.

  —Glyph Astra

  Valdëmiraën, a dark world, glowed warmly, heated by thermal vents from the core where a component of Genitrix regulated temperature by modifying radioactive decay. Warmth and the silver luminance of the galaxy promoted the growth of flowery groves among narrow valleys of steep mountains, and winds riffled with perfumes of looted blossoms.

  After the collapse of the Emirate, five hundred years earlier, The Book of Horizons had again become useful to pilots and farmers for its ephemeris. The loss of the Aesirai’s technical proficiency meant that only the Ordo Vala retained the computational expertise to plot the complex orbital patterns of the thousands of planetesimals, and they did not hostage this knowledge. Though most of the settlements that Buie visited on Valdëmiraën eagerly received those copies of the Glyph Astra that he freely distributed, they wanted the great book only for its ephemeris. Those that desired to get out of Chalco-Doror had already entered the Overworld, and those that remained wanted to exploit resources.

  Occasionally, Buie encountered a croft family whose children had no ambition for farming and trading. The worlds were emptying and opportunities diminishing. Those families he organized into caravans and led into
the Overworld. Under the holoform map that loomed inside the portal of each lynk, he taught the caravan travelers how to read the lynklanes that would lead them to the many terrene worlds that the Ordo Vala had discovered. After that, they boarded ramstat convoys and flew to their destinations guided by trained Ordo Vala pilots, and Buie returned to his sojourning.

  In a moon-apple grove of a lonely pass on an aerie of Valdëmiraën, where waters seeped among crystalline pebbles with a sound like tinkling bells on their way to the great cascades below, Buie met the dead. They occupied a Tryl tesseract-field monitor embedded in a rockface. Virtually invisible for the rime that had crusted over it, Buie himself would not have seen it had not the dead called to him: “Man! Man! Come here. You are the first to cross these iron miles and reach our window into time in many a long year. Come—speak with us and tell us how it is with the Rimstalker and her worlds.”

  Buie followed the calling voice among the calcined folds of rime and roots of apple trees. His foot snagged, and as he bent to free it, his left arm got caught. An arthropodic figure twice the size of a man suddenly reared up out of the hulking roots a stone’s throw away. Swift, hook-jointed legs blurred against the backdrop of whirlpool stars as it scurried toward him.

  Demented laughter skirled from the darkness ahead.

  With his free hand, Buie unholstered his pistol and rapid-fired into the creature scuttling at him, chopping it into twitching pieces and evoking screams shrill as an eagle. By the flare of the gun, he spied skeletons of humans and animals hung in taut gossamer among the root-crevices.

  He freed his leg and arm with his knife, then threw a lux flare ahead, toward where the laughter had died. The flare caught in the webbing strung among burls and boulders, lighting up more skeletons—and beyond them a roseate mosaic of Tryl architecture almost entirely overgrown by rock drippings. Vague glimmerings shifted in the dark center of the Tryl mandala. Moving closer, he recognized humanoid apparitions and realized that the dark center served as a lens, a Tryl aperture to the t-field.

  The wraiths in the lens waved him closer, but he stopped when he understood what he saw. “You tried to kill me!” he shouted, then turned to go.

  “Wait! Come back. We would talk with you. We have wonders to share, knowledge to bestow. Do not turn away! You have slain the threshold monster and earned the wisdom we have to share with you.”

  “Others will come,” he yelled back at the dead. “I will send them, and you may share your wisdom with them.” He did not even look back but strode firmly away.

  The ghosts shrieked and went suddenly silent. An ensorcelling music filled the moon-apple grove, and the lens brightened with a silvery radiance.

  Buie turned about and confronted a man-shaped lizard in white raiment beckoning to him. Chary of another deception, he unsheathed both his knife and pistol and edged closer.

  “Do not leave this lens intact,” the apparition of the lizard-man entreated. “I am the Tryl guardian of this place, usurped by waveforms that have died in this grove. So long as the thoughts of observers from your side are directed into the lens, they have been able to shunt me aside. They have lured many to their deaths here. You are the first to turn your thoughts aside—which has allowed my waveform to come forward at last. Destroy this lens now, human, and let emptiness redeem the evil that has been done here by Tryl negligence.”

  Buie gawked at the lizard-man. Moments lapsed before he found his voice. “The Ordo Vala will decide if that is the correct action,” he finally told the ghost.

  “No! You must heed me. The future is too narrow for Chalco-Doror. You must keep your impetus moving forward to escape the coming collapse. Do not distract the Ordo Vala with this window into the past. Use your laser pistol. Aim directly at me—and fire!”

  Buie shook his head. “My superiors would not approve. I know what this is. This is a t-field monitor. There is nothing like it anywhere in the worlds—except in legend.”

  The lizard-man pressed closer. “Don’t you see, young soul? That is precisely why it must be destroyed. If you do not destroy this device, throngs will pilgrimage here to speak with their dead. They will make this a shrine, and a cult will grow like a cancer about this site, feeding off the rantings of the craven dead.”

  “Craven dead? What do you mean?”

  “When people die, they return to light, where all life originates and persists. Physical bodies are but temporary storage units for this energy—capacitors, if you will. At death, these capacitors release their energy to the tesseract-field, and the waveforms then are subject to the laws of the t-field—causal laws determined by the characteristics of the waveforms. And what are those waveforms, after all, but the action-patterns of our lives—behaviors, memories, thoughts.”

  “We are light,” Buie understood.

  “Yes. All life is fundamentally light,” the lizard-man explained. “And these waveforms of light, like radio waves, persist invisibly all around us until they are picked out of the t-field by antennae tuned specifically to those wavebundles. Those antennae are gamete-DNA, which initiate the growth process of a new organism. Vegetative waveforms are subject to vegetative antennae and become plants again somewhere among the manifold worlds of the manifold universes. Animal waveforms likewise are susceptible to reception in animal forms. Human DNA is precisely tuned to receive human waveforms.”

  “Then death is not the end of consciousness?” Buie asked.

  “Not at all. Consciousness persists among the physical forms suitable to it. The helical strand of DNA in the gamete cell—the fertilized egg cell—is among the most complex open antennae in creation. It will receive only one waveform from the t-field—the one waveform whose characteristics match its genetic potential. Thus, waveforms of destructive, unloving behavior will be received by DNA that itself has been shaped by such action-patterns—usually of a physically deformed nature.”

  “You’re talking about karma,” Buie huffed with surprise. “I’ve learned about that legend.”

  “Yes—karma,” the Tryl confirmed. “But there is nothing supernatural, mystical, or religious about it. It is a law of nature. A causal law. Those of your people who wish to avoid the consequences of this law are clinging to the attractive field of this monitor. They will be the ones your pilgrims will meet here. They are the craven dead, rightfully afraid of the consequences of their past behavior in your worlds. Unless you want those loveless and destructive personalities informing your people, act swiftly. Use your laser pistol. Fire directly at me.”

  “But isn’t there some way—”

  “There is no other way. Look around you, young soul. Who do you think lured those humans into the grasp of the Spider?” The Tryl’s voice swelled with need. “Please—if you love your fellow humans, use your pistol. Aim at me— and fire.”

  The command seemed amplified by the heathery music echoing through the grove, and Buie’s muscles obeyed. He could have stopped himself, but he sensed the truth in the Tryl’s plea and shunted aside all fear of reprisal. He raised his pistol and pulled the trigger. A blue laserbolt flashed, the lens milked over, and the mesmeric music vanished.

  2100 Doror

  Blood never sleeps.

  —Glyph Astra

  The Ordo Vala expressed disappointment with Buie. On Ylem, he had squandered their resources and his time to tend to proto-humans—and on Valdëmiraën, he had irreparably damaged an invaluable Tryl artifact. For his next assignment, they sent him to the old vassal-world of Ren, where the Ordo Vala thrived and The Book of Horizons was fully distributed. His secretarial work involved monitoring computers that catalogued harvest yields and weather patterns. He had plenty of time to himself and spent it visiting historical sites on the planet: zōtl stations with their teratogenic chambers and pits designed for arachnoid bodies, plasteel pens where vassals had been gathered before lynking to the zōtl nest world, and pastures, rambling meadows and coppices where vassals had run nakedly wild, fed by manna-bales dropped from needlecraft.


  At his one hundredth re-birthday celebration, held among the willows beside a crater lake and attended by fellow sojourners and a score of proto-humans from Ylem, prosperous descendants of the tribe he had educated seventy-five years earlier, Buie fell in love. The woman who won his heart was a historian and schoolteacher he had met earlier on a tour of the vassal sites. Until his re-birthday, he had not given much thought to love. Like all sojourners, he had tempered his sexual drive with sublimol, an inhalant that stilled desire. A century of wandering, distributing the Glyph Astra, had offered little opportunity to establish relationships, except with those he led into the Overworld never to see again.

  As he had learned from his own training, the blood is restless; and when he stopped traveling, his heart wandered beyond his work as he explored the joys of sharing. In time, despite the protests of his superiors, he married the historian his heart had found, and they had several children. For the next three decades, he focused on rearing his family and preparing them to go with him into the Overworld. But his wife did not want to leave Ren, where she had grown up, and as his children grew older they too became attached to the sidereal beauty of Chalco-Doror and sought their fortunes among the bright worlds.

  Buie’s wife grew old, while he, a human created from relic chromosomes by Genitrix, aged much more slowly. Buie often wished that Genitrix had not adjusted the supercoiling of his DNA, so that he would age as his wife, children, and others born of natural parents in these worlds aged. Shortly after their forty-seventh anniversary, Buie’s wife refused any further medical treatment for her advanced kidney congestion and died of renal failure. Buie, sick of being mistaken for his wife’s grandson, requested a transfer, promising to obey all directives if only the Ordo Vala would give him some meaningful work away from his careworn memories of Ren.