“Mooker, why have you come?” the elderly man asked again.
“I—I was called—by my chief,” he muttered. Looking beyond the ghost, he recalled the dusty courtyard where they had lived together as a family. Dogs prowled slowly, waiting for the moon.
“After I died, you were good to your mother,” the ghost reminisced. “You worked hard for your brothers and sisters, as the eldest should. You served them well, and I am proud that they grew up healthy in your care. All married and had children. But you, my son. You did not marry.”
“I could not, Father. After you died, it was all I could do to keep the family together. There was a drought for three years afterwards ...” He stopped in midsentence. In the courtyard, he laid eyes on the shop where he had worked for twelve years after his father’s death, until the same fever that had killed his father had claimed him. The barrels he crafted for local merchants waited under the sun-awning in various states of construction. A foam of voices flowed from the shop, and he recognized his mother’s laughter.
“Mooker!” a strange voice shouted. “Mooker Jee! Snap out of it.”
Strong hands seized him and turned him about to face a coffee-skinned man with kinky black hair and crystal-cracked eyes. That incongruous sight jolted memory into place, and he swooned and had to be held up by the numan.
“Steady now,” Lugar Descanso said. “These are phantoms, Mooker. They are culled from the tesseract-field.”
Mooker clutched the numan’s arms and cast a look back over his shoulder. The courtyard of his former life ranged empty. A jawbone of moon hung over the tile-roofed buildings.
“Come with me,” Lugar insisted, and led the dazed man away from the ramstat field to a floater that carried them toward the Library. A covey of ostriches jaunted across their path, and they slashed through them emptily. “It’s horrible, Mooker. What you’re experiencing has overwhelmed every human in the complex. I’ve lost everybody.”
The floater set down in a pavilion, an open-roofed plaza where the lifts into the Library waited in a wide circle. Usually, researchers and their staff crowded the pavilion. Now only the specters of camels and dunes moved across the plaza.
“What do you mean lost?” Mooker asked, the windy ride having helped him regain his composure. “Where is everybody?”
“Most of them are dead,” Lugar answered. “Suicides. The long-lives are killing themselves. The ghosts of their pasts have lured them into the tesseract-field with them. Only myself, the psybots, and those humans born for the first time here in Chalco-Doror remain unaffected. We were able to subdue a few dozen before they could kill themselves. We have them under sedation in the clinic. But the rest—the great majority—are gone. Dead. By their own hand.”
Lugar seemed stunned, and that deepened Mooker Jee’s shock. They strode through the flank of a dromedary and entered a lift. “Why is this happening?” Mooker wanted to know.
“It’s the Rimstalker, I’m sure. We know she’s got her physical body in one of the Tryl caverns below us. I don’t know what she’s up to, but she’s wreaking havoc with us. Not that she would care if she knew. We mean nothing to her. But Lod—he may help us.”
Mooker understood that Lugar’s admiration of Lod rested in his identity as a numan. Lod had been responsible for helping to create the Crystal Mind. “What can Lod do for us?” Mooker asked. “We’ve never been able to successfully communicate with him.”
“All our prior inquiries were purely scientific,” Lugar replied as a flight of ghostly locusts whooshed through the lift. Now our survival is at stake. We can’t keep our people sedated indefinitely. I’ve been broadcasting distress signals in a wide spectrum to Lod, detailing our crisis. But decades may pass before we get a response.”
They stepped out of the lift at Mooker’s suite. “Why’d you bring me here?”
“Your life is in danger, too. You saw what happened to you on the ramstat field. I’m sure you have sedatives in your suite. I thought you’d be more comfortable here than in the clinic. Though perhaps I was foolish for even asking you to come back. You were safe in Doror. But I need your counsel. You’re the only psychobiologist I have now, and I was hoping you would have some idea how to control human neurological responses to the t-field.”
Mooker’s apartment, spacious and white-carpeted, offered black leather flexforms arranged around a crystal helix Tryl sculpture. Narrow panels of abstract paintings screened the doorways to the kitchen and bedroom. They focused the suite toward the plate windows that filled the far wall with an expansive view of the wraith-hung grounds. There, the galaxy rose.
“You must have some idea why we’re seeing ghosts,” Mooker pressed.
“I’m not seeing ghosts of my past. Nor are the psybots. Therefore I believe it’s the DNA of the human body that is serving as receiving antennae for the waveforms in the t-field. That’s why each individual is attracting particular ghosts from the past.”
“That’s remarkably similar to my line of work.” Mooker gestured at the panels of abstract shapes. Lugar noticed then that they were not paintings but photographs of molecular structures, each with a tiny label at eye level: Ibogaine, Bufotenine, Psilocin. “This is the dephosphorylated derivative of Psilocybin,” he went on, tapping one of the panels with a knuckle. “The natives in the Amazon of Earth called it teonanacatl—the messenger of the dead. It’s one of the cornerstones of my recent work.”
“That’s why I dared to call you back,” Lugar said and read from his mental files: “Your latest project is the informational readout through molecular intercalation into neural nucleic acids, specifically the molecular broadcast of electron spin resonance from waveforms stored in the neural nucleus.”
“In simpler terms,” Mooker responded, staring through an apparition of a farm girl he had admired on Earth, “I’m learning how our DNA functions as antennae. Certain molecular compounds enhance our ability to tap the t-field by activating the receptive potential of our genetic code. Traditionally, we call those molecular compounds hallucinogens—but they are, in fact, keys to the t-field—ways of accessing the cosmic memory bank.”
“So is there some way to block those antennae?” Lugar asked.
“Of course. There’s a whole pharmacopia of antihallucinogens. They won’t stop the ghosts, but they will prevent individuals from attracting specific ghosts from their past. I assume that is why they are suiciding?”
“I am why they are suiciding,” a strange yet familiar voice sounded from behind the photographic panel.
Mooker peeked around the panel and confronted himself standing there—himself as he had been on Earth. He had been twenty-three when the fever killed him. And there he stood in white pajamas and pugaree headcloth, barefoot, hands barked with calluses, face harrowed by the illness that had killed him. He gasped, and Lugar stepped to his side and put a hand to the back of Mooker’s head.
“It’s you!” the numan exclaimed, seeing the ghost by reading Mooker’s brain waves. “What is he saying? I cannot hear him. His lips are moving to a language I do not comprehend.”
“Only you can hear me,” the ghost said to Mooker. “I am you. And my chest is soaked dark with love for you. That is why I have come back. Don’t you see? We are one. Only the illusion of your body separates us.”
“You are the ghost of my past life,” Mooker spoke in the ghost’s dialect. “We are not truly one.”
“Not in this life,” the ghost lamented. “Since you were created among these phantom worlds, I have suffered, for I have had to endure the limits of corporeal existence again. Feel with me the limitless love of the afterworld.”
The ghost of Mooker Jee’s past stepped into Mooker, and an electric chill brushed his body from scalp to soles. His eyes fluttered, and he collapsed into Lugar’s arms. In trance, he ranged beyond his body into a pelagic luminosity pervasive with a peace and pleasure he had known before and forgotten. In an instant, he recalled that this was the joy of the afterworld, which is how his mind had under
stood this boundless serenity after his first death. Now he knew that it was the mystery of light itself he experienced. Free of the constraints of his body, he had become pure waveform— pure light. And, like light, there was now for him no time, no space, no charge, no mass, and no rest. He flew through infinity, rising and falling simultaneously, indescribably happy, replete.
A blow of blackness crashed through him—and he woke, lying in a flexform in his suite. Moments staggered before he oriented himself and recalled what had happened. He gazed out at galactic fire, sodden with deaf-mute grief.
“I am waiting,” his own autumn-sad voice whispered from beside him. When he turned his head, he faced his ghost watching him. “Don’t linger any longer. You know the way out. Come back to me. Come back, Mooker Jee.”
Mooker sat up, groggy with the thickness of his senses, the corpulence of his body. He felt as though he moved in syrup as he rose to his feet. He knew now there was only one cure for this torpor. In the cabinet under the Tryl sculpture he kept a wide range of olfacts. The proper combination of them would painlessly unlock him from the confinement of his body. He staggered to the cabinet.
Lugar Descanso had fled the suite when Mooker Jee collapsed in his arms. He had lain Mooker in the flexform and rushed to the clinic. From the psybots there he procured an anti-hallucinatory inhalant and hurried back to Mooker’s suite. He arrived as Mooker fumbled in his olfact cabinet.
“Stay away from me, Lugar,” Mooker warned in a froggish voice. “Stay away.”
Lugar seized Mooker by his hair and forced the inhalant to his nose. Mooker struggled but could offer little resistance against the numan. Mooker’s ghost watched sadly as the inhalant shot into Mooker’s sinuses. He did not disappear, though his edges blurred.
“You’re not going to die on me, Mooker,” Lugar insisted.
“I am already dead, you fool!” Mooker tried to shout but only succeeded in grunting. “Let me go. I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to live.”
Mooker Jee lived. The numan fully sedated him and left him in the custody of the clinic psybots. After several weeks, Mooker’s ghost vanished and the memory of the afterworld faded. But Mooker was never the same again. Nor were any of the other long-lives who had survived after experiencing themselves as waveforms. For they had touched infinity and from then on could never be satisfied in the worlds of shadow and the denials of light.
Dream Is the Transparency of Death
Twilight filled with a new level of indigo. Loryn and her lover Hazim sat in a cafe atop a hill overlooking the palatial and desolate splendor of Towerbottom Library. During the long centuries of Know-Where-to-Go’s night, while the planet journeyed through space far from the other planets, the Library, with its rambling grounds lit by lux lanterns among groves and knolls, had a fairy-tale aspect. But now that the planet fast approached Chalco-Doror, the brilliance of Lod revealed the wretched emptiness of the landscape. From the white ivy that matted the giant barrel-structure of the Library itself, to the scraggly and knobby trees that lined the winding footpaths among scattered hills, the terrain appeared ghostly, almost surreal in its vacancy.
The gigantic indigo evening, whose reflection bled away in the glass tops of the cafe tables, held the last color of reality; and, with the night, the fairy illusion reclaimed the land. Hazim, dark, taut, and angular face bent in a sincere smile, toasted his lover with his cup of jasmine tea. “To your dream, Loryn.”
Loryn, named—as many had been—after the legendary leader of the former age who had found the O’ode in the Overworld and used it and the distort tribes to topple the Emir, looked nothing like the great heroine of yore. Pale and blonde, with eyes a color close to the sea, she was the most beautiful woman Hazim had ever seen, and his lupine eyes sparkled with admiration whenever he gazed at her.
“What do you think my dream is?” she asked with a wistful smile.
“To record every story from the Falling City, of course,” he answered and waited for her to raise her cup.
The Falling City was N’ym, the Viking capital of Valdëmiraën that, fifteen centuries earlier, had sheared away from its mountaintop perch and thrown itself into Saor’s gravity well, rather than surrender to Loryn’s forces. Its fell eternally toward Saor’s event horizon; at least, it appeared that way from outside. Anyone with a good telescope could see the starlike pinpoint of the city seeming to hover above the absolute blackness of Saor. The actual city had long ago vanished behind the event horizon, but the image it left behind would float there forever—or for as long as Chalco-Doror lasted. The last transmissions from the city still climbed out of the steep gravity well, the signals enormously stretched so that years of real time elapsed before a few minutes of message came in. Among the diversified information in the broadcast, Hazim’s Loryn found interest only in life stories broadcast by the Falling City’s radio stations. In the intervening millennium and a half, only a dozen histories had been fully received, and she had memorized each of them.
“I wish I were a long-life,” she said, “like you Hazim—then, I would live just to record those stories. But I’m twenty-six. I’m at the margin of old age.”
Hazim almost snorted tea. “Old age? Come on, Loryn. You’re still a kid.”
“To you I am. You could live a thousand years.”
“Yeah, sure—long enough to see the worlds collapse.”
“You should get out,” Loryn suggested, “into the Overworld, before the next age. That’s when the lynklane instabilities will start. At least now you can choose the world you’ll live in.”
“I won’t go without you.”
Loryn frowned. “I belong in Chalco-Doror. It’s all I’ve ever known. It’s all I want to know.”
“I won’t stop trying to convince you,” Hazim insisted, dolefully. “You’re just a librarian, and I’m just an assistant librarian. Your parents are dead and I never had any in this life. There’s nothing holding us here.”
Loryn stared at him through eyes deep as jewels, deciding whether to tell him. She sat back suddenly and shifted her line of sight up into the hour of traces.
Hazim’s breath tightened in his lungs to see that look come over her, for he knew it meant she was drumming up her philosophy. Hazim had never known anyone as philosophical as Loryn. He felt content to simply sit with her and share the sunset and a cup of jasmine tea, she was unfulfilled until she had mulled over and spouted some profundity that he would then have to spend the next three days pondering to make head or tail of. Lately, he never even bothered trying to comprehend her ideas, but listened to them abstractly as if they were music with no real meaning beyond the tone of her voice.
“Have you noticed how everything hides within itself?” she asked.
He loved Loryn—he loved her thin, quiet gestures, her shoulder-straight walk, her animal stamina when they made love, and her soft laugh when he amused her—but he wished she would burden him less with her far-flung ideas. “Everything hides within itself?” He squinted with incomprehension.
“Absolutely. Oaks in acorns, people in their desire. Like the poet inside the prince inside the frog inside the fairy tale, even your face is the reflection of someone deeper—someone tranced by the absolute spell of memory—someone who knows what your hands are for—knows what your dreams are riddling.”
I’m not sure I understand, he wanted to say but did not, because that would have invited an even more arcane explanation. So he nodded and lost his gaze in her sea-dew eyes.
“I think I’ve found my way through to that deeper self hiding in me,” she continued. “All my life I’ve been fascinated by the Falling City and what it must be like down there, falling forever, free of time’s constraints.”
“Relatively, you mean. Time goes on for them—or at least it did. The Falling City must have been smashed to quark soup long ago.”
“Yes, but their stories are forever, immortalized by their mortality.”
“Immortalized at least for one more age. Aft
er that, who will be listening?”
“The whole universe, Hazim. That’s the beauty of the way they chose to die. They made the whole universe listen.”
“If anyone’s interested, I guess.”
“I’m interested. Somewhere in this universe there must be others like me. I want to speak with them the way the Falling City has spoken to me.”
“You certainly have enough to say. And as librarian you have the chance to put it all down in the archives. Maybe some far future will find it.”
“I’ve found a better way.” Her smile dazzled. “About a year ago, I liquidated all my assets, everything my parents left me, and I commissioned a tech group to design and manufacture a body pod with a gigawatt radio and a ramstat thruster. They think it’s for exploratory excursions among the planetesimals when Know-Where-to-Go swings through Chalco-Doror. But I’ve arranged with the Ordo Vala to have the one-passenger flyer positioned on Valdëmiraën. I’m going to ride it into Saor.”
“What!” Hazim smacked his legs and almost toppled the table as he lurched halfway upright. He toned down under the curious glances of other people in the cafe. “That’s an insane idea, Loryn.”
“I knew you would understand.”
“Does Lugar have any idea what you’re up to?”
“Don’t be silly. He’d never let me do this.”
“And neither will I.”
A hurt look crossed Loryn’s face. “I was really hoping that you would help me.”
“Help you? Loryn, I love you. I’m not going to let you fly into a black hole. This is a joke, isn’t it? You’re making fun of me for not paying more attention to your ideas.”
“No. I’m not joking. I’m leaving tonight. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I thought, just now I thought, you were ready to know.”
“By the seven powers of light! I can’t believe that you’re serious.”
She looked away into the night, regretting her decision to tell him. Hazim read her disappointment and blinked once, like a lizard, as the truth of what she had said sunk in. They spoke little more to each other after that, Loryn afraid she had already given him too much information and Hazim desperately trying to figure out what to do. At her apartment, he tried again to dissuade her or at least to delay her suicidal plan, but she would not hear of it. They parted angrily, and he went at once to the nearest of Lugar Descanso’s message cubes and reported what he had learned.
The Last Legends of Earth Page 41
