The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  When Gai had eventually reached Sakai and learned about Ned’s death, she had reached down through the mud and wild stones of the Aesirai’s grave to the very stasis of the corpse, the bone and rag-rot flesh, thinking to inspire the carcass with her own plasma force. The zombie would retain its temporal torque, she figured, and they could go ahead with their plan to jump forward in time and surprise the zōtl hiding in the maze of grottoes under Know-Where-to-Go. But when Chan-ti saw the grave buckling and realized what the Rimstalker was doing, she screamed with rage, unholstered the laserbolt pistol she had been given on Elphame, and would have blasted Gai’s plasma shape had the Rimstalker not immediately withdrawn and gone invisible.

  Gai’s strategy then had been to convince Pahang to continue the fight against the zōtl. The Malay, eager to avenge the death of his friend, and, despite the protests of Nila, who had become fond of him and wanted him to stay among the Free, Pahang agreed. After Chan-ti had calmed down and her grief loosened, she was the one who came up with the idea of entering Know-Where-to-Go through Saor’s Forest in the Eyelands of Valdëmiraën.

  The Rimstalker was waiting for them when they arrived. Gai’s anxiety had ripened to fear in the intervening two days of range-time that she had spent in her Form, vainly trying to override the lockforce of the static-generator. She had hoped that she could possibly reprogram her Form to ignore the static interference and unlock from the sleepod, but the deeper she probed into the Form’s intrinsic functions, the more confused she became. At one point, she triggered a response from Genitrix:

  *

  “From the crest of despair

  in the forsaken hour

  at the point of death

  our naked need circles.”

  *

  Hope flared in Gai then—but no other response was forthcoming. The fluke convinced her that Genitrix persisted intact inside the coma of their communication block. If Gai could get herself free in time, she believed, Genitrix would still be able to pilot them back to the range.

  Gai felt equally hopeful about Lod. Though she had not been able to communicate with her radiant machine intelligence, the Rimstalker knew that he functioned: Since Dreux’s destruction, no other planets had abandoned their orbits. The debris of Dreux had impacted on many worlds and shaken their paths, yet the system held together, testimony to Lod’s continued resilience. Numerous assaults on Perdur to liberate Lod had been launched by Gai’s human allies, and none had trespassed the zōtl’s lethal traps. Neither had any of Gai’s quest champions been able to penetrate the zōtl’s maze on Know-Where-to-Go. And now there no time remained. Soon the trigger planet would orbit past its critical point, all the accrued gravitational resonance would be squandered, and collapse to the range would become impossible.

  “You are my last hope,” Gai told the humans who arrived in the Eyelands out of Saor’s Forest. She had assumed a human shape for the occasion, a snow-skinned female with gem-facet eyes and prolix hair black as night. “We must hurry.”

  Chan-ti shuddered to see again the greensward and stone steps that led into the cliff-face under the ruins of Caer, where she had first met Ned O’Tennis. The skirt of the forest had changed somewhat in the intervening two thousand years. Giant mushrooms crowded between the trees, and lianas with phosphorescent blossoms shone like haloes in the depths. No Foke were anywhere in sight. But there, among shrubs with leaves like bright sapphires, she discovered the covert where she and Ned had made love—it seemed like only days ago. A bleat of grief resounded in the hollow of her chest, and she turned away.

  Pahang and Nila talked in hot whispers while Worm explored the tall blue grass fringing the forest. Nila wanted to go with them, but Pahang thought it too dangerous.

  “Danger is everywhere now,” Gai warned. “There is no safe place in all the worlds—and all are doomed if the zōtl keep my Form in bondage.”

  Buie arranged the order of march and placed Worm and Nila in the center, Pahang at the back, and himself and Chan-ti at the point. The Rimstalker flew ahead to avoid staying too long in the Overworld, where her energies would only loop back on themselves and disrupt their trek.

  The journey through the forest transpired no differently for Buie than any of his Overworld sojourns. He ably read timelines by the misty radiance of the Milky Way’s horizonlight, and so led the group among mammoth trees toward Know-Where-to-Go. Luminous bats whirred in the total blackout of the sky, breezes of blue butterflies whirled out of tattered mists, bird chimes blinked, and slinky shadows paced their progress under the forest canopy.

  During rest periods, after foraging and eating, Buie wrote in his annals, Pahang and Nila nestled, and Chan-ti told Worm Foke tales. The boy’s presence soothed Beppu’s sorrow. The child sufficed as the emblem of the children she would never have, of all the children among all the worlds who needed for them to succeed. Gai had promised to save them all, every human in Chalco-Doror, if they freed her Form. That was a mission greater than her remorse, and she gave herself to it with all the passion that fate had frustrated in her.

  *

  Red climbed the cliffs of Valdëmiraën, hugging rockwalls along fogroads, crawling the narrowest ledges like a snake, moving upward above fluorescent lowlands and the shining sea. At last, the land opened before him. He stopped at the edge and gazed down to where Darkhole smoked with radioactive mists. The City of the Sky had once perched there—long ago in his diminished memory. Clearly, he could see the lyric streets and alleys haunted by his youth. Yet he could not bring to mind his own name.

  He turned about, and a strange terrain opened before him. Evening’s dark violet limned a forest horizon, where glowing kites flitted in the breeze. Looking closer, he made out that they were not kites but eerie, limbless creatures with translucent bodies and broad-stretched faces. Seraphim, the thought came to him. Between him and the forest, grasslands shimmered in galactic light. Two of the seraphim blew closer over the tall grass, guiding him toward a final bluff.

  Red approached the two wavery beings, deep in the chest-high grass before noticing that these were not seraphim at all but humans glowing in the dark, drifting like smoke—ghosts. They blew closer, waving him on, and then disappeared. His heart rattled.

  At the bluff, Red distinguished tall doorways set in walls so ancient they looked like natural rock formations. The mortar between the rocks had dissolved to loose sand, and much of the wall had collapsed, leaving many of the big green-rusted doors standing alone. From out of the tasseled grass, a few meters away, an old woman popped. Red jumped with surprise. “Welcome to the Back Gates, Ned O’Tennis.”

  The crone’s voice shook him as violently as though the earth moved. The sound of his name sundered his amnesia, and memory stretched through him. He quaked where he stood, barely grasping the reality. He remembered N’ym and the war with the rebels, his own queasiness about war, and his solitude in the Eyelands, where he wandered now, he thought—though this was not as he recalled. Where were the ruins of Caer? And Chan-ti Beppu, the woman in whom he had found himself, where was she? Dizziness almost claimed him as he recalled N’ym roaring into the sky and his own plunge into the sea, into servitude to Squat on the very beach that would become the Vanoi’s. And he remembered Pahang and the Rimstalker and the quest for the O’ode. Chan-ti Beppu had come through the Overworld to save him, to save herself, for they had found themselves only in each other. The truth of their love had endured even his amnesia he realized, finally fitting bespectacled Maretta into her rightful place in his memory. She had been the most he could find of his mate among the Vanoi—and she had never been his mate at all.

  The fullness of this recall came upon him in an instant and left him wobbling at the theshold of his last memory among the Free, futilely firing a laserifle at his own strohlkraft as it dove to kill him.

  “Yes,” the old crone warranted. “Your strohlkraft killed you. The scyldar Neter Col burned you to a tarry corpse. Remember.”

  And he did. He remembered witnessing his
charred body crawling with sparks. He had floated above it in a withering cold. But he had not died then. Though the cold had pummeled him to the drumming limits of pain, swooning toward blackout, he had not lost consciousness. Nappy Groff had been there. He had seen the old man in frosty light, pressing close, keeping him warm, urging him to stay calm, to still his racing thoughts and sink deep into the cold, deeper to where he became the cold and could endure. Another ghost had been there, too. He recognized that ghost from the body he had buried on Ras Mentis with the explosive-rigged pack. Spooner Yegg—Chan-ti’s real father, the ghosts had informed him when he himself had become a ghost in their care. They had guarded him from his blithering ignorance, which would have destroyed his body of light. With them beside him, the cold could not break him. They had held him alert and had taught him how to float in the eerie brightness, to wait until his body could be regrown, shaped again by the wisdom in the ground. What had they called that wisdom?

  “Genitrix,” the crone named it. “Genitrix is the Rimstalker’s machine mind, which rebuilt you, cell by cell, until you were ready to wear your body again. Then Genetrix sent you through a Tryl lynk and released you into the Silver Sea of Valdëmiraën.”

  “And you? Who are you?”

  “I am the Weed Woman. Genitrix built me in the beginning, and I am here now for the end, that I may lead you to where you may bring the end to us.”

  “Me? Why me? Why am I here?”

  “Chance and choice are one, Ned O’Tennis. Our fates choose us even as we choose them. Symmetry is everything in this cold universe. The coldness makes it so. Fate and will complete each other.” The Weed Woman’s knobby fingers held up a blackened coin—Chan-ti’s sender chip. “From your grave.” She tucked the chip in the pocket of his vest. “A token from Genitrix.” She pointed to a corroded door open a crack. “Squeeze through there, and you will find your own way.”

  “Where will it lead me?”

  “To Chan-ti Beppu, of course. If you hurry, you may get to her before the scyldar that killed you serves her the same fate.”

  The warmth that had come round his heart went cold, and he jumped toward the monolithic door.

  The Weed Woman held up a basket and called after him, “Wait! You must be hungry after your long journey. Have a breadfinger—a mushroom muffin—some groat cakes.”

  Ned O’Tennis ignored her and ran hard to meet the risks of his fate.

  *

  Buie announced their arrival in Know-Where-to-Go. The sojourner, tracking the Rimstalker’s timeline, had led them to a natural lynk that connected directly with the grotto where the static-generator sat.

  Pahang hugged Nila, whispered his fidelity, and then, as arranged earlier, went through first so that his temporal torque would not affect the others. As soon as he disappeared, the others followed and found him waiting for them in a hexagonal tunnel with bossed walls of faintly glowing Tryl arabesques. The residual torque that Pahang had acquired from his travels with Ned had apparently already exhausted itself. He and Nila embraced, and Chan-ti looked away, wanting no nostalgia to weaken her intent.

  Buie, Pahang, and Chan-ti took out their pistols, and everyone peered down the tunnel. A broken smell rode a faint breeze. Far ahead, a sharp hissing echoed, muted by distance. The sibilance mounted gradually as they walked, becoming a grating roar after they had turned several bends. When the tunnel finally ended, the air boomed. They crouched in the mouth of the tunnel, feeling the thick heat of the planet’s interior and smelling the fearsome scent of a massive thunderstorm.

  Before them opened a grotto big as a cathedral lit by the Tryl’s coiling lux cables and brambly lightning from a massive, angular tower made of black plates. Blue arcs of voltage jumped randomly among the plates, jarring hearing and casting shifting, unpredictable shadows through the cavern of fang-like rock drippings.

  A green bolt of light zipped over their heads. Another struck the rock wall beside them and spit chunks of stone.

  “Zōtl!” Pahang yelled, and the three pistols fired rapidly toward where the laserbolts had come. A high-pitched whistle shrieked from the dark, piercing the electric roar, and a spidery shape fell in bright rags of flame to the cavern floor.

  “They know we’re here now!” Chan-ti shouted. “Let’s move!”

  They scrambled down a gravel slope and had gone only a few paces when the tunnel behind them lit up with laserfire.

  The zōtl had been surprised before. Other humans had tried to invade from Saor’s Forest, and all had easily been dispatched by neurotox flushed into the tunnel and the cavern. The spiders used their makeshift technology to flood the conduits to the cavern with nerve gas. But Genitrix, who had been waiting silently, detached in her machine aloofness, recognized the beauty of the moment; and, at last, she asserted her internal processes to reverse the flow of the neurotox and to seal the corridors where the spiders had their stations. A rumbling of avalanches shook the grotto. Dust and pebbles shot from the corridor, where the travelers had entered. The zōtl, trapped in Genitrix’s maze, instantly perished from the death gas they released.

  The four zōtl who remained entered from a redrock dolmen perched high on the cavern wall opposite the sparking static-generator. Laserbolts smashed at the stalagmites behind which the humans cowered. Buie returned fire and lanced a zōtl, kicking it into a small fireball.

  The three remaining zōtl split up. Spidery twitches closed in on the crouching humans from three sides. Their erratic flights kept the humans from picking them off until they got closer—but by then one or more of the zōtl would surely hit them.

  “Stay here!” Buie shouted above the electrical roar. The best shot of the three, well trained over his long life in the Ordo Vala, he figured to draw the spiders’ fire and use their tracers to mark them. He rolled toward another fang of rock, and laserbolts slashed above him, shearing the tip off the stalagmite where he came to rest. The shattered rock bashed him to the ground, unconscious.

  Pahang and Chan-ti fired at where they had seen laser-light, and the zōtl swooped toward them, blasting the pinnacle they hid behind. Pahang stood and fired at the source of tracer light. A zōtl flared into flames. The two survivors trained on him in a crossfire. Nila grabbed for him, pulled him away as green bolts cut the space behind. The brisance of smashed rock threw them both to the ground. His pistol spun free, and a laserbolt smashed it into a splash of hot metal, searing his hands and hair and glaring him blind. Nila and Worm tugged him back behind the stalagmite.

  The two remaining zōtl swooped down, firing. Bolts punched the rock on all sides, kicking rock chips as they narrowed in. Chan-ti darted into the open, firing as fast as she could. One of her shots struck a zōtl, and it cometed to the ground and curled up under a sputtering blaze. The other arced around to avoid Chan-ti’s wild fire. It swung erratically and returned fire, making Chan-ti leap back.

  She curled up against a stalagmite and glanced at the directional finder in the belt-web at her hip, red microlights showing the direction of her lover’s grave. She blinked. Instead of the alphanumeric ciphers for Ned’s grave on Sakai, the finder’s lights indicated a position at the far side of the grotto. She tapped the finder, figuring it had been damaged by a flying rock chip. Before she could further examine it, the air dazzled with laserfire.

  Buie roused in time to see the last zōtl spiraling toward Beppu through the glare of the electric tower. Clutching his pistol in both hands, he took aim from where he lay and fired a rapid burst. The zōtl exploded and dropped in burning shards. Buie heaved himself to his feet and raised his arms to accept Chan-ti’s triumphant shout. That instant, the whole cavern flared blue, and Buie split apart in a sudden conflagration that shot flames from his eyeballs and mouth and hollowed his torso with venomous fire. The utility pack at his hip flung free from the impact and ripped apart, spewing pages of his annals into the flashing shadows.

  Through the redrock dolmen, the angular batwing silhouette of a strohlkraft glided. It swooped gracefull
y under the stalactites, landing gear lowered, and another blue blast from its laser cannon cleared the ground before it in a concussion of shattered rock. It skidded toward a stop on the grotto floor, the smoke and rubble of its attack roiling like thunderheads in the lightning glare from the static-generator.

  Chan-ti grasped at once that the strohlkraft was swerving to place them in its line of fire. She grabbed Worm by his shoulder, pointed at the tower of writhing voltage, and shouted, “Run there, boy! Run as close as you can to it! Go now!” Worm looked despairingly to his mother, who crouched over Pahang. The dazed Malay, his sight just beginning to return, sat up. Chan-ti yelled at them, “We have to run! Come on, Pahang! Now!” She grabbed Pahang’s arm and yanked him upright.

  They ran in a crouch among glisteny columns of dripped rock. A laserbolt from the strohlkraft’s cannon blew up the column that had covered them, and spinning shards pelted their backs. One chunk hit Chan-ti hard behind her knee, and she fell. Her pistol jumped from her grip and disappeared in the dust coiling around them. She abandoned it and let Worm help her to her feet. Squinting against the glare of lightning and flying grit, they dashed after Pahang and Nila into the pounding aura of the static-generator and collapsed under their effort in a tangled sprawl.

  The strohlkraft sat silent, watching them with its hidden cannon but not firing. At the controls, the scyldar Neter Col’s thumbs locked above the firing buttons by the zōtl that mastered him. It dared not shoot at the humans, for the blast would damage the static-generator and release the Rimstalker.

  In the petrified scyldar, in its human brain, the trapped and tormented teacher, Tully Gunther, exulted at the humans’ cleverness that had bought them moments more of life and the chance to continue their fight. The zōtl’s rage masked the hopeful joy of the scyldar’s human brain, and Tully almost shouted aloud with pleasure at the zōtl’s frustration. Only the doomful certainty of what lay ahead restrained him. The scyldar would have to leave the strohlkraft to kill the humans. Infrascan revealed that they were unarmed, and Neter Col unstrapped himself from the sling, flushed with the spider’s eagerness to destroy its enemies.