Glad for the serenity of their trek, the old man abandoned the inconsolable despondency from his time in captivity and relaxed enough to regale the sojourner with Foke tales. The woman, quieter, morose about losing her mate, acted grateful for the well-being of her elder. When Nappy slept during the rest periods, Buie attempted to draw her out. His attempts elicited small talk about the Overworld and how, like a mirage, it mirrored actuality, bending worldlines in the four-dimensional manifold that embeds the gravitational universe. After a while, he gave up and used his rest time when not sleeping to test his memory of passages from the Utility Manual.
“That’s the Glyph Astra, isn’t it?” Chan-ti asked. They had camped in a night forest of shaggy trees and red mushrooms big as tabletops. Nappy snored from the sojourner’s silver tent, and a raucous bird cawed. “It looks different than mine.”
Buie looked up from the portfolio, where he had appended the annals of his travels to a large-sized, copiously illustrated edition of the Utility Manual. “You have a copy?” He sat on a moss ledge above a chattering rill, and when she took a slim volume from her jacket, he made room for her.
Buie whistled a piercing note, and the squawking bird silenced. “This is ancient. Where did you get it?”
Chan-ti nodded to where Nappy’s boots hung upside-down from a bough. “He gave it to me when I first set out to find Ned, before N’ym fell.”
“It’s far older than that. It’s a seventh edition, the one with the gruesome accounts of zōtl possession and the photos of distorts. This goes back to the Age of Knives.”
“Do you know the Oracles?”
Buie jutted his lower lip and flipped through the antique edition. “I’ve read them. The latest editions don’t carry them anymore. They’re considered spurious.”
“Do you know this one?” Chan-ti pointed out the passage that read, “When the lorn Foke marries the gentle warrior of the Aesirai, the last legends fulfill themselves.”
Buie clapped the book shut with a laugh. “Is that you?”
Chan-ti smiled dubiously. “I thought it was—at least, I did when I left the Eyelands for N’ym.”
Buie tugged at his beard, reminding himself to be charitable to those less schooled than he. “I can see why you thought so. From what you’ve told me of Ned, he does sound gentle—an odd characteristic for a sky-fighter of a race remembered for their ferocity and their indifference to the suffering of others,”
Chan-ti took the volume back with both hands. “You think me foolish for finding myself in the Glyph Astra, don’t you?”
Fondness glimmered in the sojourner’s stare. “I don’t think you foolish, Beppu. I’ve met people who believed stranger things than that. Yet, you must realize that what is written in the Oracles is meant allegorically. It is not to be taken literally. Whoever wrote this passage was striving for a paradox. It has been widely believed in the past that the Foke were covetous of their women, even the ugliest, and none were lorn. The cruelty of the Aesirai is famous, even now a thousand years after the last of them perished in N’ym. The idea of a gentle Aesirai is oxymoronic.”
Chan-ti nodded. “I’ve come to think I was foolish. Not for loving Ned. I don’t know where he is—or when in time—but I will always love him.”
“He sounds worthy of love,” Buie agreed. “He is a hero. I have recorded his deed here.” He slapped his portfolio. “Wherever the Utility Manual is read in the years that remain to these worlds, he will be remembered for finding the O’ode.”
Later, when Buie had closed his Manual and gone into the bushes to relieve himself, Chan-ti returned to the tent to sleep. She found Nappy sitting up. An iron shadow weighted his already weary visage. “I overheard you speaking with our guide.”
“He’s a very knowledgeable man.”
“He knows more than he feels, daughter. Listen closely to me now, for what I’ve to say won’t bear breath a second time. The prophecy in the Glyph Astra that has carried you here is true. It is true. You are a lorn Foke. Ned is a gentle warrior. You must not stop searching for him—for, as every experience finds its memory, you can do no less. You will never forget him. What you have found in him is what graces life. Seek him. And when you find him, the prophecy will be fulfilled.”
Chan-ti hugged Nappy and kissed both his ruddy cheeks. “I will search for him.”
“And you will find him, if he is to be found at all. Little enough time remains in these worlds to hide even dreams. You will find him. It is inevitable, for your heart is already there.”
“But what does the prophecy portend, Nappy? What are the last legends that will fulfill themselves?”
“Of that, there is no doubt, young Beppu.” A surprised smile lifted the heavy shadow from Nappy’s countenance. “We are the last legends.”
Chan-ti slept deeper and more restfully than she had since losing Ned in the wind of time. Nappy had restored her faith in herself. The din of chance loud as ever offered only slim hope of finding Ned, yet now she believed her search worthy; it was all she had of her own, anyway. And when she woke and found Nappy Groff dead, breath gone from him while he slept, she cried out—as much in gratitude for the ease of his passing and the peace he had left her, as in grief.
Buie helped Chan-ti carry Nappy’s body to the nearest lynk, so he could be buried among the worlds. Buie had assured her that the Overworld of trees and rivers, apart from the null fields, provided the same reality as the worlds—that all the particles of Chalco-Doror reflected in the Overworld exactly, down to their substanceless values of spin and parity; and that only the metrics of the Overworld were indefinite, echoing infinitely in multidimensional space. Chan-ti insisted, anyway, and they carried Nappy the short distance to a lynk that opened onto Xappur. Among slouching herds of fog, they dug a grave in mulchy soil that exhaled mist at each stroke of their blades. The work went swiftly in the soft ground, and soon they were done.
After Buie walked back to the lynk, granting Chan-ti privacy for her grief, she knelt in the rolling fog and wept again for the man who had loved her as a father. She remembered the radiant details of their life together, the silliness and the squabbles and the proud moments set forever now in her heart and dissolving with her into the future. She wept, too, for her real father and the endless onrush of living that carries everything to death. She wept for Ned. And, finally, she wept to weep, to feel the difficult pleasure of letting go, of releasing pain and memories to the fleeting instant that owned her.
When Chan-ti returned to the blue glow of the lynk, she felt ghostly, hollowed out. In the tenuous light, Buie smiled. “Forgive me if I seem insensitive,” he said, taking her hand with a touch soft but firm with excitement. “I just patched into the lynk.” He pointed with his look to where he had taped a corner of the silver tent to the iridescent surface of the lynk. In the aquatic glow, monitor lights of a slim communicator webbed like stars. “The Ordo Vala have been contacted by the Rimstalker. We are called to Elphame for a war council. Gai is ready to attack the surviving zōtl, who have gathered on Know-Where-to-Go. This is your chance to see the Mother of Worlds for yourself—and maybe to learn of your gentle warrior. Will you come with me to Ren?”
The smoke of Chan-ti’s grief lit up with sudden hope, bright and confused as a nebula. Hurt and desire tangled in her, and she had to close her eyes to steady herself. Nappy Groff’s voice rose directly from memory to her breath, and she said more to herself than to Buie, “My heart is already there.”
*
Nappy Groff had known he was dying even before he had given Chan-ti Beppu his Glyph Astra. In the year prior to Beppu’s leaving for N’ym, the drowsy spells that misted out of his bones had become more frequent, and he had known from the first that they augured his body’s collapse. The adrenal glands atop his kidneys had tired out, the Foke physicians had informed him, and Foke medicine could not abate the steepening lassitude. Nappy was hardly surprised that after nearly eight decades of life’s brutalities something would give out. Earlier that
same year, when his wife Velma had died, shot through with tumors, he had thought his heart would kill him, for grief had banged like a plank in his chest. Instead, he had begun to feel more tired more often. Toward the end, after the Witch Maze, he had barely had the presence of mind to keep his eyes focused and to string words into sentences. Gorlik, poisoned by his thoughtless betrayal of Lod, and Beppu, intrigued by the portents of Spooner Yegg’s ghost, had not seemed to notice. Nappy had been glad for that. He never wanted anyone fussing over him. He had hoped to die in the Eyelands, where his burial would have been routine among the Foke. But at least he had endured in his physical form long enough to see Beppu free of captivity and under safe escort. Now he could get on with the business of being dead.
Since adolescence, Nappy Groff had been trained in still-mind techniques that enabled him to directly experience his body of light. The skill had been taught to him by the Foke’s grandams and patriarchs, who conveyed the knowledge to all members of their society, though few willingly invested the long periods of meditative quiet necessary to attain mastery. Beppu’s exclusion from the training had been an angry issue for Nappy, who had threatened to teach her himself until the grandams agreed to inform her as soon as she had properly wed.
From the first, Nappy had devoted himself to becoming adept at still-mind. He had found that the quiescent skill facilitated his technical work and actually inspired solutions to engineering problems. Now that he was dead, he knew gratitude for the years of inner convergence that had put him in touch with his body of light. Bringing his awareness to bear on the subtle energies of his body had become rote discipline, with a few rare incidents in which he had actually stepped free of his flesh. The strength of that discipline was all that concentrated his awareness in the blustery cold of astral emptiness.
Nappy, glad that he had died gently, remembered how Velma had suffered so severely that when she finally left her flesh her body of light dissolved at once into the luminous fields surrounding life. He had never seen her ghost. Fate had been easier with him. He had died before he knew he was dead. Brushed with cold, he had sat up to reach for a blanket and winced, blinded by the glare of a snowfield. As his sight seeped back, he observed that he floated over his body. The sheer weariness that had weighted him had departed. Instead, he shone vibrant with energy—and cold.
Vision seemed to melt. Whatever he looked at shivered with the cold into vibrations of whitefire. The more strongly he peered out at the world, the more he felt himself breaking up, smearing into an icy blaze of whiteness that radiated from everything. When he concentrated his attention inwardly, the outer world resumed its familiar contours, and he experienced a burning core of cold smoldering in himself. As long as he could sustain that trembling frigidity and stay focused on this center, he remained whole and could go where he willed.
Nappy willed himself after Beppu and Buie, effortlessly pacing them as they carried his corpse through the Overworld to a lynk and Xappur. He regretted not telling Chan-ti more about the body of light and how it mattered not at all what became of the physical body once the light left it. He could have saved her the trouble of burying him. He floated close to the gravesite, though Chan-ti could not see him for all the fog.
“You’re handsomer as a carcass than you were alive, Nappy Groff.”
The voice startled Nappy, and he blurred into the glare. When he fixed again on that molten cold deepening in him, he perceived Spooner Yegg standing by the graveside. The thief looked as he had at the moment of his death, tall, silver-haired, with mischief in his laughing eyes, his black shirt caved in around a hole of luminous smoke where the laserbolt had freed him from his body. “You know the way of light?” Nappy startled.
“I’m as surprised to find you withstanding the cold,” the thief replied. “I thought your faith lived in nuts and bolts, Nappy Groff.”
“My faith is in myself.”
“Surely, you’re not going to argue with a fellow ghost.”
“Why are you here?”
“Same as you, Nappy. I’m here to see that Chan-ti finds her way to the Aesirai she loves.”
The cold hammered Nappy when he stared too hard beyond himself. He let the ice ray through him, and the shivering calmed. “Why is that so important to you?”
“I’m her father.”
“She told me. That’s not reason enough to endure this focking wind, Spooner. Why are you really here?”
Spooner rolled his eyes with mock annoyance. “You know enough to keep your body of light from breaking apart and you don’t know about the fatefulness of Chan-ti and her lover? Tsk, Nappy. I heard you myself, assuring her that the last legends would be fulfilled.”
“I know life is brutal,” Groff said. “That’s all I know. If she believes her love for the Aesirai is fated by the Glyph Astra, what harm? She still must face whatever is. I told her what she needed to hear.”
“Then you don’t know how to read the timelines in the Overworld?”
“That was Gorlik’s strength. I never learned how.”
“Too busy with the nuts and bolts, hm?”
“And who taught you, a thief, the way of light?”
“The disciplines of still-sitting are a boon in my profession, as I’m sure a man who appreciates my craft as you do can imagine. A lot of time is spent waiting—for occupants to fall asleep, guards to make their rounds, luck to change. I used that time to get to know my body of light. I learned inward focus from the Ordo Vala’s ku and from the voors that gave me sanctuary in my youth.”
“Voors!” Nappy looked disgusted. “They steal bodies.”
“True. But they’re very knowledgeable. And they don’t hoard what they know as the Foke do.”
“Some knowing must always be secret from the uninitiated. Knowledge is a cruel master for the beast. Now, stop smirking, Spooner, and tell me what you know.”
“There are many futures,” Spooner proclaimed and walked over Nappy’s grave to stand closer. “In one future, the zōtl pull the worlds crashing into each other. Chalco-Doror ends in a chaos of colliding planets. In that future, Chan-ti’s timeline never crosses her lover’s again.”
The cold fisted tighter inside Nappy. “And the future where they do meet?”
“The zōtl are defeated, and the worlds vanish in an eyeblink as the Rimstalker falls inward to its home.”
“No more appealing than the first.”
“Oh, but it is. You see, Chan-ti and Ned find each other only in the future where the Rimstalker is freed from its zōtl prison. The Rimstalker owes Ned, for it was Ned got the O’ode. The Rimstalker will reward them with passage through the Overworld to a world where they and their children will survive.”
That thought breathed as an ember of warmth for Nappy in the furious cold. “Then we must assure that future, Spooner Yegg.”
“Yes—if ghosts can assure anything.”
“We can witness,” Nappy said. “And we can warn.”
“You’ve yet to try to show yourself, I see. Think this is chilly now? To manifest, you have to become ice.”
“I saw you on the Dragon’s Shank.”
“I’m still weak from that effort. It almost sent me Beyond. But I had to alert Chan-ti that Ned was coming.”
“For all the good it did.”
Spooner wavered in the frigid glare. “The future is indefinite, Nappy. Nothing is certain.”
Nappy waded through the numbness to where Chan-ti knelt among talismans of mist, shaking with sobs. “Then failure has no certainty, either. Success can freeboot chance just as well—no, better, for the Rimstalker would not let her ship-of-worlds go to hell in a thimble so easily.”
Spooner Yegg smiled with sad cunning. “The timelines display as much chance for success as for failure, Nappy Groff.” He had to stand still and shut his eyes to keep from bleeding away. Silently, he shook in the wind walloping off the glazed fields of light, and gathered the strength to speak. “Chan-ti’s future is far less certain than ours, old-timer. Bu
t I’m glad for your lucky outlook. I was getting lonely and pessimistic being dead all alone.”
Fire’s Cold Thoughts
For fifteen centuries, Lod hung bound by the phanes before a ghost cave in the zōtl citadel of Perdur. His plasma shape, reduced to the contours of a human torso, had cooled to a brass translucence and expanded gigantically. The phanes had stretched with the torso and thinned to two black threads that still effectively trapped the consciousness of the machine mind. Over the centuries, the zōtl had successfully broken Lod’s program codes and had managed to seize control of his gravity-amp, which directed the orbits of the planets and the planetoid swarms. When Dreux jumped its orbit and exploded among the asteroids, Lod felt madness course through him.
Dream darkness expanded in Lod. In the darkness, he examined the magnetic tendrils the spiders used to manipulate his brain. The magnetic probes looked like silver tentacles, and his brain appeared as a glitter of electronic delicacy, ganglia of glassy wires, cool emerald neurons breathing with his sentience. The spiders’ magnetic tentacles crisscrossed his brain, suckers draining his strength, distorting his will. The fiber plexus that had managed Dreux’s orbit had lost all color. The nerve-nets around it looked anemic, bleeding power into the tentacles. The wobbles in the orbits of Ioli and Ras Mentis tingled in him, growing number.
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