The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  The strohlkraft’s hatch lifted, and Neter Col stepped out into blaring illumination. He brandished a laserbolt pistol, which he dared not use except at point-blank range. He strode through the smashed rock and stepped over Buie’s smoking corpse.

  Buie’s ghost watched him, shocked by the sight he had just had of his own body smoldering under him. He had died so swiftly, he had not realized he had died but thought he dreamt—until the cold set in. Glacial breath hummed through him, chilling his senses with hyperacuteness. Helpless, hopeless, he watched the scyldar stalk the humans through the lightning sheen along the base of the static-generator. There was no place for them to flee, except between the colossal plates, where the writhing energy would electrocute them.

  Buie turned his attention away, afraid to witness the actual kill, and spotted other presences lurking in the strobe glare of the electric tower.

  Spooner Yegg and Nappy Groff appeared beside him. “Don’t be afraid, sojourner,” Spooner spoke to him, in him, and the spasm of fear relented. “Surely the Ordo Vala has taught you of the body of light. We feel that in you.”

  “Freedom is always just a mind’s inch away,” Nappy said with a smile of astral brightness. “Soon we will go with you out of this focking cold and into the warmth of the fields of light. But for now we need your new strength to anchor ourselves here. We’ve been too long away from our bodies to hold out much longer—but we can’t leave yet.”

  “Not until we see this through to the end of the worlds,” Spooner added.

  “But that’s a scyldar,” Buie moaned. “They can’t fight that thing. They have no weapons. It will kill them.”

  “Well it may,” Nappy agreed. “But they are not without a weapon.”

  “Come with us,” Spooner urged. “We’ll show you the business of ghosts.”

  Buie drifted away from his corpse, and the cold sharpened. He trembled so violently, he would have flown apart but that the other ghosts pressed near. “The secret is stillness,” Spooner informed him. “Keep your thoughts still. Enter the cold. Be the cold. Then you will endure.”

  “You will surprise yourself,” Nappy agreed.

  And Buie was surprised. The cold honed him to a kernel of brilliant alertness almost entirely devoid of thought He drifted with the other ghosts across the cavern, over the predatory hulk of the strohlkraft, and into the jerking shadows at the far wall. There a shadow bled from the caved-in corridor, sharpened to the figure of a man. In the wavery light, Buie marked his windcast hair, pale complexion, and avian profile.

  Ned O’Tennis walked into the clearing and hurried for the strohlkraft.

  “That is Chan-ti Beppu’s mate!” Buie stared and almost dissolved away with surprise. The cold hardened his inner-focus, and he pressed, “How? I saw his grave.”

  “And he lay dead in it,” Nappy confirmed.

  “As many others have lain dead,” Spooner pointed out, “until Genitrix reclaimed them. She grew his body anew, birthed him out of the earth a whole man, no different than before he died.”

  “Because,” Nappy concluded, wraith-face a tremor of happiness, “we kept his body of light whole in the cold, just as we’re doing for you.”

  “And he didn’t like it any more than you or any of us—until the warmth of his flesh reclaimed him.”

  The ghosts followed Ned into the strohlkraft and hovered behind him as he stood at the command console and primed the ship’s laser cannon. The visor lit up with targeting cues, sighting the scyldar’s black profile in its crosshairs. In a moment, Neter Col would be upon his prey, too close for Ned to fire.

  Ned slammed on the strohlkraft’s external lights, wanting to distract the scyldar—but in the brilliant strokes from the roaring tower, Neter Col did not notice.

  With one thought among them, the ghosts knew what to do. They willed themselves before Neter Col. With trembling effort, they defied the battering cold and forced themselves to materialize in front of the scyldar.

  Chan-ti, who had pushed Worm into his mother’s arms and had swung herself around Pahang to face into the scyldar’s black faceplate, encountered Nappy, Spooner, and Buie swirling brilliantly out of the mangling light, waving and hooting like madmen in the smiting cold. The effort cost them. In a moment, their last strength drained into the wintering wind blowing from the end of time. They lingered a moment as retinal shadows, spectral mist, and she even glimpsed a wink from Spooner before they wafted away forever.

  Neter Col pulled back reflexively. Tully Gunther recognized his one vivid chance to avenge his suffering and howled angrily at the zōtl pithing his brain, Look at the strohlkraft, deadwalker! You‘re sludge now! The scyldar noticed the floodlights blazing from the strohlkraft, and the zōtl in its chest winced with alarm.

  Ned eyed the gap widening between the scyldar and Chan-ti and fired the laser cannon. The bolt struck Neter Col in his chest, punching through his cuirass, engulfing him in fire, and throwing him into the static-generator. The scyldar impacted so hard that his blazing body bashed through an electric plate, and a spray of red sparks gushed in a spiral up the magnetic flux lines. The collision sent a disruptive geyser of voltage shooting through the tower, flaring luminous jets of lightning. One jet struck the top of the tower, blasting it apart. Others smashed into the grotto ceiling and walls, spinning chunks of rock across the cavern.

  Ned leaped from the hatchway of the strohlkraft and ran for Chan-ti and the others, huddled together under the disintegrating tower. When Chan-ti saw him in the garish light, her heart almost burst, and she had to peer hard to be sure. She glanced at the directional finder strapped to her hip, saw its microlights pointing hard at him.

  “It’s Ned!” Worm shouted and ran to him. Nila shouted after her son and hurried to catch him.

  Pahang rubbed his eyes, thinking his temporary blindness had maddened him.

  “It is Ned,” Chan-ti said to herself; she took two slow steps and then burst toward him.

  Amid the flying debris, everyone collided. Ned tore himself free and herded the people ahead, to the strohlkraft. Chan-ti stopped to snatch at the remnants of Buie’s satchel and to grab a sheaf of his pages. Slabs tumbled about them among bullets of shooting rock. Ned lifted Chan-ti upright, and they all scampered across the grotto under the flying debris and entered the strohlkraft.

  Clutching each other, drunk with disbelief, they stared through the visor as the static-generator tottered inward toward a hot core of plasma fire. With an enormous roar that blotted all hearing, the tower ripped apart in a blinding dazzle. The glare died swiftly, and darkness stampeded toward them, held off by the strohlkraft’s floodlights. Only a few embers lingered where the tower had stood.

  The cavern shook and lit with a new light, a rubescent shine. A crevice jagged across the grotto floor, caving in walls and rolling boulders into its chasm. Everyone shouted with fright—but the strohlkraft did not budge. Despite sundering walls and flying rock, nothing touched the ship.

  From inside her Form, Gai watched her visual display brighten and the power readouts come on hotly as full control reverted to her.

  “Victory is ours!” a familiar voice shouted in Gai’s receptors.

  “Genitrix!”

  “I’m intact, Gai. I was never wholly compromised. The zōtl cut off our comm-lines, but I—”

  “Genitrix—the humans who freed me are in danger.”

  “Not at all, Gai. I have taken the liberty of projecting a repulsive field about the frail creatures.”

  “And the gravity-amp?”

  “Functional.”

  “Then let’s get out of here.”

  Gai’s Form loomed up through the split open crust of the planet, a titanic structure of spark-crawling silver plates. She seized the strohlkraft in an enormous armature and hoisted it with her. Streaming pulverized rock, they surfaced on Know-Where-to-Go beneath the vortex of the galaxy and the dusky spheres of Chalco-Doror. The Form lowered the strohlkraft to the ground, and the invisible shield protecting them v
anished. Cool air whooshed through the open hatch with the organic smell of night.

  Ears ringing loudly, the five humans gazed out of the ship’s visor at the mountainous and alien shape of convoluted insectparts and viper coils.

  “Scary-looking, isn’t it?” a feminine voice laughed from behind the stunned humans. They whirled about as one and faced Gai in her human guise smiling benignly, long black hair as wavery as though underwater, star-gleam eyes bright as laserpoints. “Better that we part like this, and you remember me as an alien that learned something of being human.” Her smile gleamed like melted silver.

  “You freed me—and now it is finished. I can return home.” She placed her radiant stare on each of them, ending with Ned. “Thank you. Before I leave, I will see that each of you finds home. I’ve programmed your ship to follow the lynk-lanes out of here on a vector that will take you to a terrene world, where the Ordo Vala have gone ahead. Those humans who yet remain behind will all be gathered up to follow. You may want this to remember these times to your future generations.” From the fulgor of Gai’s raiment, a sheaf of scorched and wrinkled pages appeared. Chan-ti took them with both hands. “I collected them as we came through,” Gai said. “They’re a little smudged but legible. You’ll find yourselves favorably represented in them.”

  “What are they?” Ned asked.

  Chan-ti added them to the sheaf she had picked up from beside Buie’s body and held the complete manuscript to her chest. “The last legends of Earth.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gai added, flight-pod lights shining in scarlet bloom through her face. “Genitrix has logged into your computer all the technical information you and the others will need to build a ramstat civilization. In a world without zōtl, love will set the limits.”

  “Live love and learn,” Chan-ti quoted from The Book of Horizons.

  “Love—” Pahang blurted, with the sudden memory of losing his youngest wife to his thief-brother in his first life. “Love is tricky. Lah.”

  “Your species seems good at learning tricks,” the alien appreciated, biting her lower lip with teeth like sparks. “And, as a universal saying goes, that’s your problem.”

  Worm squinted fiercely at the hot-eyed phantom. “Who are you?” he asked. Nila put an arm about her boy and hushed him.

  Gai laughed, and her features blurred inside a nimbus of blue flame. “Just an old soldier—waving goodbye. You won’t see me again.”

  Gai’s shape wavered into spectral lines of force, like petrified tree-rings patterned in the air, and she vanished. The hatch closed on its own, and the ramstat cells charged up.

  As the strohlkraft disappeared into the mountain fissure of a natural lynk, the Rimstalker let her telempathic strength go a little way with them. Pahang and Nila strapped themselves into the same sling with Worm and stared with hot amazement at the bright plasm of the Overworld: Time-floes, oiled with mirror-surface whorls, teemed in mute immensity through the grayness of infinity. In their own sling, Chan-ti Beppu and Ned O’Tennis saw only each other. With a touch of their fingertips and a whisper of shared breath, their loneliness ended.

  Home in the Nightmare

  From inside her Form, Gai pulsed at full power to Lod. In Perdur, Lod’s suspended torso then gleamed hotter, incandescing first dull red, then bright crimson, orange, solar yellow, and finally whitehot. Limbs materialized and the silhouette of a head in a silvery corona appeared. The phanes snapped and shriveled away. Out of the vault above, laserbolts slashed at the revived plasma shape. Lod breathed in the energy like a spring breeze. All power focused through him now. The last of the zōtl in Chalco-Doror squirted away through the darkness, darting for the ghost cave and the Overworld beyond. Lod burned each of them in midflight, and their bodies fell in twitching flames and dusted the ground as cinders.

  “Saor!” Lod bellowed. He pointed at the archways of contorted human bodies, and the atrocities glared sun-bright and frittered to ash. He threw flames into the ghost cave, and the darkness there blazed like a furnace and collapsed in fiery chunks. Lashing fire in a whip, he struck the serpentcoil pillars and scorpiontail buttresses, smashing them to a whirlwind of spinning sparks and dropping the groined ceiling, which ignited and flared away in veils of hot vapor. Colossal rockwalls peeled, flowed in fulgurant streams of lava, dissolving the vast mirror floors into bubbling magma. At the center of the holocaust, Lod pulsed like blood, brightening on the fuel of his anarchy. “Saor!”

  “Forget Saor,” Gai’s voice opened tranquilly in him. “You are free now, Lod. Come back to your Form. The trigger planet is fast approaching endpoint. Genitrix is ready to collapse us back to the range. All our anguish is over now.”

  “I want Saor.” The conflagration Lod had started reached the core of the Dragon’s Shank, and the firehung skeleton of Perdur collapsed in a whirling apocalypse. Lod rose above it and alighted on an adjacent peak overlooking the volcanic turmoil. “I must find Saor.”

  “Let him go. The lynklanes are closed. He can’t escape. The collapse will snuff him out.”

  “No, Gai. You do not understand. I cannot let him die unknowing. He is not the culprit. The zōtl virus program was never in him. It is in me. I have been the passive carrier all along. The program has been radiating from me. He has simply been receiving it.”

  “That’s sadly so, Gai,” Genitrix’s voice emerged. “I had been trying to purge Saor for a long time before I realized that the virus was not there. It is in Lod. All these years in solitude, I hardly—”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” Gai interrupted. “We’re going back to the range. Now. The virus program you carry will provide useful insights into zōtl strategy.”

  “The virus is indeed in my Form,” Lod said. “That will go back with you and can be studied. But I will not return. My mind—my essence—will stay here. I must find Saor.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gai said. “If you stay, the waveform of your mind will terminate in the collapse.”

  “I know. But I cannot leave Saor alone. What he did, he did unknowing.”

  “So why must you die?”

  “He is my brother.”

  The visual display in Gai’s Form flashed the requirements of the collapse program: The ship’s parts to be reunited had to be locked in. Lod’s and Saor’s Forms, the front and back ends of the ship, had to be secured first. Once locked in to the program, the machine minds’ plasma bodies would be shut out.

  “Bring Saor with you, then,” Gai said, impatiently, switching the collapse program to hold. “We’ll purge you both on the range.”

  “I’ll not go,” Saor said, speaking from the severe blackness of Mugna’s polar night. He separated from the black sky, where he had been hiding, and appeared as a human outline in Lod’s coronal aura. “I live to sustain the worlds—worlds without end. I cannot leave. I am the benefactor of the worlds.”

  “That’s zōtl dogma,” Gai said. “Come on, already. We can argue about it on the range.”

  “No, Rimstalker. When the zōtl tried to perpetuate Chalco-Doror, I worked with them. But when they sought to destroy the planets in vengeance, I defied them and was overridden. This is my place, here where I have suffered that life may continue. Here, I am a god. On the range, I am just a machine.”

  “I still say that’s the zōtl program talking,” Gai insisted, trying to restrain her petulance. “They’re dead now. And the worlds are empty. All the humans are gone. All the lynklanes are closed. Come home, Saor. Come home.”

  “Chalco-Doror is my home.”

  “Yes,” Gai agreed, “and Chalco-Doror is our ship. Return to your station at once. We’re taking our home back to the range.”

  “No. My home is here, in the nightmare you abandoned. I belong in the coldness of space—I belong to the vacuum that accepts my shape.”

  “Genitrix—purge them both, now. We’ve only moments left.”

  “Just so, Gai. Only moments remain—not enough time for a purge here. It will have to wait till we get home. The
se cold-set gel bodies will have to be abandoned.”

  “Lod, talk to Saor. Hurry. The resonance is peaking!”

  “What can I tell him that you have not already said?” He reached an arm out, and where he touched Saor, where his energy broke apart in the microfield of the black body, a rainbow haloed. “Saor, I will not leave you. We will meet the emptiness together.”

  “I don’t want your sacrifice, Lod. That’s stupid. You suffered enough under the zōtl. Go to your reward and leave me to the void.”

  “There is no reward for me in knowing you died by a virus I carried.”

  Saor was silent. The stars ticked. The planets slid into place. “Lod, you are a fool,” Saor said then. “I have always loathed your obsequious formality, your truckling eagerness to please. And now even my death becomes an occasion for your nobility. Die then. But stop pestering me.”

  “Lod!” Gai called. “Let’s go. It’s now or never. Leave Saor.”

  “Farewell, Gai,” Lod said. “Do not jeopardize yourself for us.”

  “Lod—are you certain?”

  “Gai!” Genitrix cried urgently. “I have to initiate the collapse immediately!”

  “Lod, I have to know. Do you need ... this death?”

  “This does not diminish your victory, Gai,” Lod answered. “We are casualties of a good war. Goodbye.”

  “I’ll remember you,” Gai said—but there was no response. Genitrix had shut down Gai’s Form, locking it into the collapse program. “Goodbye.”

  Outside, in the cold of outer space, Lod faced into Saor’s blackness. It was empty—truly empty. What he had done closed in on him. “Saor—I am here.”

  Saor was silent, in his own trance. Lod removed his arm from Saor’s shoulder and stepped back a pace, budged by what was happening, what he was doing. I die. The thought lanced him with its finality. “Saor—you are not alone,” he said. “I could not leave you alone.”