Paragaea

by Chris Roberson

  “It looks like one enormous gemstone,” Leena said, looking up with awe at the citadel rising above her.

  “Any culture capable of generating that barrier,” Hieronymus said, “must have had science we can scarcely guess at. Perhaps the city is an immense gem, a cultured diamond grown into this enormous size and strange configuration.”

  The dazzling walls of the multifaceted citadel seemed to glow from within, the same shade of vivid scarlet as the Carneol in Leena's pack.

  “Look there,” Balam said, pointing. Set into one of the lower facets was an immense doorway, standing open and unguarded.

  Warily, the trio crossed the plaza, while small machines went about their business, paying them no mind. The trio entered the door, passing into the forbidden city of the wizard-kings.

  Beyond the doorway, the trio found themselves in the city proper. It was like nothing Leena had ever seen, like nothing she'd ever imagined.

  Past a small vestibule that led to the plaza garden, they entered a large space whose crystalline walls rose to vertiginous heights overhead. The floor was like the surface of a diamond, slick and unmarred, decorated with intricate swirls of color and light that seemed to shift beneath their gaze, as though living things moved beneath the surface, though Leena was sure it was a trick of the strange light, a reddish glow that seemed to emanate from the very walls themselves.

  Strange shapes rose from the floor at intervals, constructed of the same crystalline material as the walls and floor, though whether these were furniture, or sculpture, or something stranger, Leena could not guess. There were also small pillars of polished metal, rising a meter or so off the floor, surmounted by square tabletop-like structures, on which were arranged crystals of all shapes and colors, in intricate geometric patterns, which for Leena called to mind the switches and dials of the Vostok module.

  The air within the city was clean and sweet-smelling, not nearly so thin as Leena would have expected for such a lofty height. And on occasion, they could hear distant tinkling sounds, like water falling or metal striking gently against metal, but whether this was music or the sound of hidden machinery, none of the trio could say.

  It took the trio several minutes to walk across the wide space to the doorways on the far side, and they passed the distance in silence, gripping swords, knives, and pistols warily, watchful for any sign of life. But the only movement that greeted their eyes was that of the scuttling crystal-and-metal machines, in their various sizes and configurations, that crawled over the floor and up the walls and over the ceiling, about their strange work.

  “They must be some sort of autonomic maintenance system,” Hieronymus said, pointing to the machines as they scuttled back and forth, polishing the crystalline protuberances, mending minute cracks in the walls and floor, and rearranging the crystals atop the metal pillars.

  “But where are their builders?” Leena said guardedly.

  “This place has the funereal air of a tomb,” Balam grumbled, tightening his grip on his knives.

  “Come along,” Hieronymus said, striding towards the doorway. “Let's see what other strange wonders the citadel city holds, shall we?”

  They passed through massive galleries filled with sculptures and art that defied understanding; through huge arcades filled with stuffed and mounted creatures of all imaginable types, even a massive indrik. In another huge chamber they found machines and vehicles, airships at full size dangling from impossibly high ceilings, ground cars, tram-engines driven by coal, or spring, or oil. But still they had no sign of any living creatures.

  After an hour of searching, having found no sign of life, the trio relaxed their vigil, and knives and swords were slid back into their scabbards, pistols returned to holsters.

  “This is madness,” Leena snapped, growing increasingly impatient. “We've traversed the length and breadth of the Paragaean continent, sent from one far-flung location to another, to reach the one place in this whole, misbegotten world where the answers we seek are rumored to be known, and we find no one here even to answer our questions!”

  “Perhaps the Atlans are all gone, as Benu surmised,” Balam said thoughtfully.

  “Don't lose hope, friends,” Hieronymus said, continuing on. “By my reckoning, we've still only explored a small fraction of the city's structure. There may yet be Atlans to be found.”

  “Suppose, though,” Balam said, “that they don't want to be found.” He glanced around them nervously.

  Hieronymus smiled, and threw an arm around the jaguar man's shoulders. “If there are Atlans still living, my friend, they are but beings like you or I, not the semidivine demiurges of the Black Sun Genesis's imaginings.”

  Balam straightened, and nodded curtly. “Lead on, Hero,” he said, his voice level. “I'll follow.”

  Finally, they entered a large, sunlit chamber in which dozens of men and women lounged, eyes open but unmoving, on couches and beds arranged haphazardly around the room. All of the unmoving figures had deep red skin, white hair, and long, thin skulls, with small gems of various opalescent shades set into the flesh of their foreheads. They wore loose robes of silvery white and pale greens and reds, draped over them like burial gowns.

  “The Atlans,” Balam said, unable to keep a reverential tone from creeping into his voice.

  “Are they dead?” Leena said, reaching out a tentative hand towards a woman on a nearby couch.

  Hieronymus crouched beside a man stretched out on a divan, and touched a fingertip to the unmoving figure's neck.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, “this one's pulse still beats. Slowly, but beating. They yet live.”

  “So do they slumber?” Balam asked, peering into the face of one of the unmoving women, her eyes wide and sightless.

  Leena, Hieronymus, and Balam moved from one to another, trying to rouse them, but while they seemed healthy and whole, none even blinked in response.

  Balam, frustrated, lifted one man off his bench, shaking him violently. “Wake, damn you!”

  “Balam,” Leena called out from the far side of the room. “Put that man down!”

  “Very well,” Balam said, shrugging angrily, and dropped the unmoving body unceremoniously to the floor.

  As soon as the man hit the ground, more of the many-legged machines scuttled out of a low alcove, lifted the still form back onto the couch, and carefully arranged its clothes.

  “I wish you wouldn't do that,” came a liquid voice from behind them. “It can't possibly disturb their repose, but I can't help but feel that it is in poor taste.”

  A man stood beneath a high archway, smiling but weary. He was of average height, dressed in a loose-fitting robe that seemed to be made of spun moonlight, and like all of the still figures in the room he had white hair that stood in stark contrast to his deep red skin; a long, thin skull; and a small gem set on his forehead.

  “Who are you?” Hieronymus demanded, hand flying to his saber's hilt.

  The strange figure gave a slight curtsy.

  “My nomen is Edurovrahtrelarnivast-(Ψ/b)2(Θe)ж-Descending-Viridian-Prime, but you may address me as Eduro.”

  “You are welcome to Atla,” the man called Eduro said, gliding across the floor to stop just before the trio, moving effortlessly and with an impossible grace, “as we have not had any visitors in long centuries, if not longer.”

  “You might entertain more often,” Hieronymus said warily, moving nearer to Leena, “if the Barrier wall did not still prevent all approach to the mountain.”

  “Oh,” Eduro asked distractedly, “is that old thing still on?” He tilted his head momentarily to one side, stared into empty space, and blinked. “There. We'd simply forgotten it had been left on, all those years ago.”

  He held his arms wide, and regarded the trio with a thin smile.

  “Now,” he asked, “why have you come to Atla?”

  Hieronymus and Balam both looked to Leena, who stepped forward, shuffling her feet sheepishly like a recalcitrant student summoned to th
e front of a classroom, uneasy in the spotlight's glare.

  “I am from Earth, an inadvertent traveler to this land,” Leena said after a moment's pause, her tone firm and determined. “Tell me. Do the Atlans know of the gates which lead to Earth?”

  “But of course,” Eduro said with a dismissive wave. “The fissures are simply a side effect of the unfortunate incident which created Paragaea itself.”

  “Created Paragaea?!” Hieronymus regarded the strange man through narrowed eyes. “What ‘incident' do you mean?”

  “An experiment involving a singularity, of course, much like the one which now powers Atla itself.”

  “Singularity?” Leena repeated. “You talk in riddles!” She paused, taking a deep breath, collecting her reserves of patience. “Explain yourself, if you please.”

  Eduro shook his thin head fractionally from side to side, and his eyelids slid closed and open sleepily. “I'm afraid all of this excitement has quite exhausted me.” He turned and started to walk back under the archway. “The servitors will lead you to your rooms”—he waved his hand, and a trio of the metal-and-crystal machines scuttled out of hiding, one stopping before each of them—“where you can make yourselves comfortable. When we have all regained our strength, I'll summon you and we can talk further, yes?”

  Eduro passed beneath the archway, and from a hidden recess above, a door slid down into place in an eyeblink, sealing off the passage.

  “It would appear,” Leena said, her mouth drawn into a line, “that we have no choice.”

  The scuttling creatures led them to a suite of sumptuous, palatial rooms, the finest Leena had ever seen. Each room had a separate bathing chamber, with a crystal tub the size of a small boat that filled with steaming hot water at the touch of a fingertip, smelling slightly of roses. Trying to quell her mounting impatience, Leena took a long, luxurious soak in the tub, collecting her thoughts.

  “This is a remarkable place,” came the voice of Hieronymus from the doorway. He had stripped off the bulky layer of clothes he'd worn through the frozen wastes, now barefoot and wearing only a new pair of trousers and a loose-fitting shirt open to the waist. “If anyone has the answers we seek, it must be these people.”

  “New clothes?” Leena said, leaning her soap-slicked elbows on the edge of the tub and giving him an appraising look.

  Hieronymus looked down at his shirt and trousers admiringly. “Yes, it appears our host has thought of everything. When I climbed out of the bath, I found the strange little servitor machines had lain out clean clothes for all of us in the vestibule.”

  “Oh,” Leena said with a disappointed pout, “so you've already bathed, then?” She rolled over and kicked to the far side of the enormous tub, floating lengthwise on the surface, her breasts and belly just cresting the water's edge.

  “Well,” Hieronymus said with a sly smile, “I suppose I could still use a bit of cleaning, at that. Balam will be busy grooming himself in his room for ages, and until this Eduro summons us, we've got nothing to do but wait.”

  He slipped out of the shirt, which fell to his feet, his tattoos and scars revealed, like a history of his lifetime written in ink and blood.

  Leena stood, the water coming just to her navel, her wet hair plastered against her neck. Hieronymus shucked off his trousers and, as he slipped into the tub, she watched him admiringly, and smiled as she took him in her arms.

  After a time, the voice of Eduro echoed from the walls, inviting them to dine with him. Hieronymus and Leena smiled sheepishly, entangled in rugs on the floor of the bathing chamber, and dressed quickly in the clothes provided. Leena's options included a floor-length gown, a kilt and blouse, or a pair of trousers and a loose-fitting shirt much like Hieronymus now wore. She opted for the trousers and shirt, though was grateful to find a pair of comfortable slippers in her size laid out on the bed, thankful not to have to put her boots on again for a short while.

  When they had dressed, the trio gathered in the vestibule. Having traveled rough for so long a time, they each found it strange to see one another clean-scrubbed and dressed in finery. Each of them, though, had strapped on their holsters and scabbards, just as a precaution.

  The servitors, scuttling before them, led the three through the corridors of the citadel city to a small room, modestly appointed with strange paintings and tapestries covering its walls, dominated by a long dining table upon which was piled a confusion of fruits, vegetables, and meats. At the head of the table sat Eduro, a beatific smile on his face, his teeth showing bright white against his red skin.

  “Eat, my friends,” he said, gesturing broadly to the table. “The city's senses indicate you have not eaten well in many days.”

  Leena, Hieronymus, and Balam exchanged guarded looks, but then sat around the table, eagerly diving into the proffered food.

  “Why have we seen none of your countrymen,” Balam asked, fruit juice dribbling down his chin, “none but the living dead in the sunlit room?”

  “I am the only Atlan to remain mobile,” Eduro explained, taking a sip from a crystal goblet that held some sort of light green liquid, “the rest having opted to impair the functioning of their right temporal lobes, severing their sensory connection to the outside world, preferring instead to live on in silent contemplation in their ageless, near-immortal bodies. Most of the more adventurous Atlans departed millennia ago, off to explore space or time.”

  “Exploring in ships, you mean?” Hieronymus asked. “Sailing the heavens?”

  “Some left in vessels, to the moon, the planets, and the stars beyond,” Eduro said. “But others used the fissures to travel back to Earth, in an attempt to save Atla that was, the original island nation that had been their home before the creation of Paragaea; but the fact that Paragaea persists suggests that they failed. Or, if nature prefers diversity to paradox, perhaps their efforts merely created an Earth where the island nation of Atla did not destroy itself in an accidental discharge of energy with the unleashing of a black hole, incredibly small but dissipating so quickly that their whole culture was destroyed.”

  Leena looked to Balam and Hieronymus, and it was clear they were as confused as she.

  “I'm not sure I understand,” Leena said. “You said back to Earth?”

  “Yes,” Eduro said, with a heavy sigh. “My people originated on Earth, like you. But at our civilization's peak, we destroyed ourselves, and were very nearly pushed over the brink of extinction. Our civilization had harnessed the power of singularities, such as that found when a star is so massive it collapses under its own gravitational pull. We used the power of controlled singularities to conquer the fundamental forces of the universe, and were the undisputed masters of Earth. In our arrogance, though, we grew lax in our precautions, and as a result, there was…an accident.” Eduro blinked slowly, deep in thought. “Atla was a highly developed nation, our cities covering the length and breadth of our island continent. We had outposts on the other six continents, and our sphere of influence covered the globe.”

  Eduro pointed to a painting on a nearby wall, which seemed to depict a stylized map, with an island at its center, roughly circular, with a large inlet on the east, a hump to the west, and a tail of a peninsula to the south, surrounded by oceans ringed by oddly familiar landforms. Leena looked at it for a long moment before realizing that it appeared to be a map of Earth, with the Antarctic continent at the center of the projection.

  “We had harnessed the means of creating singularities,” Eduro went on, “and then drawing power from the energies that evaporated from them. But the temperature radiated from a singularity is inversely proportionate to its mass, and the smaller the singularity, the faster it evaporates away. Our scientists…miscalculated, and created a singularity that produced such a high energetic output over such a short span of time that our machinery was unable to compensate.”

  Eduro lowered his head for a moment, his eyes shut, but after a pause, resumed.

  “We can only speculate what happened to Earth in th
e days and weeks following the destruction of Atla. It is theorized that one effect of the catastrophic release of energy might have been to shift the Earth's crust around its molten core, creating ecological havoc worldwide. Others object that the crust could not move in such a fashion, and in the absence of empirical evidence, the debate has raged for millennia. But, as I am the only Atlan still communicative, and I hold to the crust migration theory, I suppose that is the history to which we will adhere.”

  Leena and Hieronymus exchanged a glance, while Balam munched happily on some kind of iced fruit concoction.

  “Whatever the extent of the devastation, though, Atla as it was had been destroyed. Only the pocket realm of Paragaea, created by chance in the wake of the explosion, proved our salvation. Two ships full of Atlans, aware of the coming catastrophe, attempted to flee, and found themselves thrown into the maelstrom of gravitational effects, where the very stuff of space-time itself was distorted. One of the ships passed through a fissure into an infant universe, which had been spawned just moments before in the final instant before the singularity released its energy in the final cataclysm. The other ship did not appear, and it was originally believed that it had been destroyed along with the Atlans' island home. In any event, this infant universe in which the Atlans found themselves was like a degraded copy of their home universe, though operating at a different time scale, and by the time the hapless Atlans were through the fissure, a billion years had already passed. Here, they found a twin to Earth, the continents familiar but lifeless.”

  “Lifeless?” Hieronymus asked.

  “Yes, here on Paragaea, life had not taken root. The world which first greeted my forebears' eyes was barren and lifeless. Our history does not record their thoughts of those early days, but they must have been dark days, to say the least. They had only the contents of their ship to sustain them, and meager supplies at best.”