“Later, perhaps later,” Christian mumbled, and cursed himself for his falsity.
“Could we reach the planets—Caged, the warrior spirit turns inward on itself. Rebellion and massacre in the Westlands—”
Laurinda asked what songs the people sang.
Clouds closed up. The rite in the courtyard ended. Khaltan’s slave stood motionless while he himself talked on and on.
The eastern horizon lightened. “We must go,” Christian said.
“You will return?” Khaltan begged. “Ai-ha, you will?”
Laurinda embraced him for a moment. “Fare you well,” she stammered, “fare always well.”
How long would his “always” be?
* * *
After an uneasy night’s sleep and a nearly wordless breakfast, there was no real cause to leave the house in England. The servants, scandalized behind carefully held faces, might perhaps eavesdrop, but would not comprehend, nor would any gossip that they spread make a difference. A deeper, unuttered need sent Christian and Laurinda forth. This could well be the last of their mornings.
They followed a lane to a hill about a kilometer away. Trees on its top did not obscure a wide view across the land. The sun stood dazzling in the east, a few small clouds sailed across a blue as radiant as their whiteness, but an early breath of autumn was in the wind. It went strong and fresh, scattering dawn-mists off plowland and sending waves through the green of pastures; it soughed in the branches overhead and whirled some already dying leaves off. High beyond them winged a V of wild geese.
For a while man and woman stayed mute. Finally Laurinda breathed, savored, fragrances of soil and sky, and murmured, “That Gaia brought this back to life—She must be good. She loves the world.”
Christian looked from her, aloft, and scowled before he made oblique reply. “What are she and Wayfarer doing?”
“How can we tell?”—tell what the gods did or even where they fared. They were not three-dimensional beings, nor bound by the time that bound their creations.
“She’s keeping him occupied,” said Christian.
“Yes, of course. Taking him through the data, the whole of her stewardship of Earth.”
“To convince him she’s right in wanting to let the planet die.”
“A tragedy—but in the end, everything is tragic, isn’t it?” Including you and me. “What … we … they … can learn from the final evolution, that may well be worth it all, as the Acropolis was worth it all. The galactic brain itself can’t foreknow what life will do, and life is rare among the stars.”
Almost, he snapped at her. “I know, I know. How often have we been over this ground? How often have they? I might have believed it myself. But—”
Laurinda waited. The wind skirled, caught a stray lock of hair, tossed it about over her brow.
“But why has she put humans, not into the distant past—” Christian gestured at the landscape lying like an eighteenth-century painting around them, “—but into now, an Earth where flesh-and-blood humans died eons ago?”
“She’s in search of a fuller understanding, surely.”
“Surely?”
Laurinda captured his gaze and held it. “I think she’s been trying to find how humans can have, in her, the truly happy lives they never knew in the outer cosmos.”
“Why should she care about that?”
“I don’t know. I’m only human.” Earnestly: “But could it be that this element in her is so strong—so many, many of us went into her—that she longs to see us happy, like a mother with her children?”
“All that manipulation, all those existences failed and discontinued. It doesn’t seem very motherly to me.”
“I don’t know, I tell you!” she cried.
He yearned to comfort her, kiss away the tears caught in her lashes, but urgency drove him onward. “If the effort has no purpose except itself, it seems mad. Can a nodal mind go insane?”
She retreated from him, appalled. “No. Impossible.”
“Are you certain? At least, the galactic brain has to know the truth, the whole truth, to judge whether something here has gone terribly wrong.”
Laurinda forced a nod. “You will report to Wayfarer, and he will report to Alpha, and all the minds will decide” a question that was unanswerable by mortal creatures.
Christian stiffened. “I have to do it at once.”
He had hinted, she had guessed, but just the same she seized both his sleeves and protest spilled wildly from her lips. “What? Why? No! You’d only disturb him in his rapport, and her. Wait till we’re summoned. We have till then, darling.”
“I want to wait,” he said. Sweat stood on his skin, though the blood had withdrawn. “God, I want to! But I don’t dare.”
“Why not?”
She let go of him. He stared past her and said fast, flattening the anguish out of his tones, “Look, she didn’t want us to see that final world. She clearly didn’t, or quite expected we’d insist, or she’d have been better prepared. Maybe she could have passed something else off on us. As is, once he learns, Wayfarer will probably demand to see for himself. And she does not want him particularly interested in her emulations. Else why hasn’t she taken him through them directly, with me along to help interpret?
“Oh, I don’t suppose our action has been catastrophic for her plans, whatever they are. She can still cope, can still persuade him these creations are merely … toys of hers, maybe. That is, she can if she gets the chance to. I don’t believe she should.”
“How can you take on yourself—How can you imagine—”
“The amulets are a link to her. Not a constantly open channel, obviously, but at intervals they must inform a fraction of her about us. She must also be able to set up intervals when Wayfarer gets too preoccupied with what he’s being shown to notice that a larger part of her attention has gone elsewhere. We don’t know when that’ll happen next. I’m going back to the house and tell her through one of the amulets that I require immediate contact with him.”
Laurinda stared as if at a ghost.
“That will not be necessary,” said the wind.
Christian lurched where he stood. “What?” he blurted. “You—”
“Oh—Mother—” Laurinda lifted her hands into emptiness.
The blowing of the wind, the rustling in the leaves made words. “The larger part of me, as you call it, has in fact been informed and is momentarily free. I was waiting for you to choose your course.”
Laurinda half moved to kneel in the grass. She glanced at Christian, who had regained balance and stood with fists at sides, confronting the sky. She went to stand by him.
“My lady Gaia,” Christian said most quietly, “you can do to us as you please,” change or obliterate or whatever she liked, in a single instant; but presently Wayfarer would ask why. “I think you understand my doubts.”
“I do,” sighed the air. “They are groundless. My creation of the Technome world is no different from my creation of any other. My avatar said it for me: I give existence, and I search for ways that humans, of their free will, can make the existence good.”
Christian shook his head. “No, my lady. With your intellect and your background, you must have known from the first what a dead end that world would soon be, scientists on a planet that is a sketch and everything else a shadow show. My limited brain realized it. No, my lady, as cold-bloodedly as you were experimenting, I believe you did all the rest in the same spirit. Why? To what end?”
“Your brain is indeed limited. At the proper time, Wayfarer shall receive your observations and your fantasies. Meanwhile, continue in your duty, which is to observe further and refrain from disturbing us in our own task.”
“My duty is to report.”
“In due course, I say.” The wind-voice softened. “There are pleasant places besides this.”
Paradises, maybe. Christian and Laurinda exchanged a glance that lingered for a second. Then she smiled the least bit, boundlessly sorrowfully, and sho
ok her head.
“No,” he declared, “I dare not.”
He did not speak it, but he and she knew that Gaia knew what they foresaw. Given time, and they lost in their joy together, she could alter their memories too slowly and subtly for Wayfarer to sense what was happening.
Perhaps she could do it to Laurinda at this moment, in a flash. But she did not know Christian well enough. Down under his consciousness, pervading his being, was his aspect of Wayfarer and of her coequal Alpha. She would need to feel her way into him, explore and test with infinite delicacy, remake him detail by minutest detail, always ready to back off if it had an unexpected effect; and perhaps another part of her could secretly take control of the Technome world and erase the event itself.… She needed time, even she.
“Your action would be futile, you know,” she said. “It would merely give me the trouble of explaining to him what you in your arrogance refuse to see.”
“Probably. But I have to try.”
The wind went bleak. “Do you defy me?”
“I do,” Christian said. It wrenched from him: “Not my wish. It’s Wayfarer in me. I, I cannot do otherwise. Call him to me.”
The wind gentled. It went over Laurinda like a caress. “Child of mine, can you not persuade this fool?”
“No, Mother,” the woman whispered. “He is what he is.”
“And so—?”
Laurinda laid her hand in the man’s. “And so I will go with him, forsaking you, Mother.”
“You are casting yourselves from existence.”
Christian’s free fingers clawed the air. “No, not her!” he shouted. “She’s innocent!”
“I am not,” Laurinda said. She swung about to lay her arms around him and lift her face to his. “I love you.”
“Be it as you have chosen,” said the wind.
The dream that was the world fell into wreck and dissolved. Oneness swept over them like twin tides, each reclaiming a flung drop of spindrift; and the two seas rolled again apart.
11
The last few hundred man-lengths Kalava went mostly on his belly. From bush to bole he crawled, stopped, lay flat and strained every sense into the shadows around him, before he crept onward. Nothing stirred but the twigs above, buffeted on a chill and fitful breeze. Nothing sounded but their creak and click, the scrittling of such leaves as they bore, now and then the harsh cry of a hookbeak—those, and the endless low noise of demons, like a remote surf where in shrilled flutes on no scale he knew, heard more through his skin than his ears but now, as he neared, into the blood and bone of him.
On this rough, steep height the forest grew sparse, though brush clustered thick enough, accursedly rustling as he pushed by. Everything was parched, branches brittle, most foliage sere and yellow-brown, the ground blanketed with tindery fallstuff. His mouth and gullet smoldered as dry. He had passed through fog until he saw from above that it was a layer of clouds spread to worldedge, the mountain peaks jutting out of it like teeth, and had left all rivulets behind him. Well before then, he had finished the meat Brannock provided, and had not lingered to hunt for more; but hunger was a small thing, readily forgotten when he drew nigh to death.
Over the dwarfish trees arched a deep azure. Sunbeams speared from the west, nearly level, to lose themselves in the woods. Whenever he crossed them, their touch burned. Never, not in the southern deserts or on the eastern Mummy Steppe, had he known a country this forbidding. He had done well to come so far, he thought. Let him die as befitted a man.
If only he had a witness, that his memory live on in song. Well, maybe Ilyandi could charm the story out of the gods.
Kalava felt no fear. He was not in that habit. What lay ahead engrossed him. How he would acquit himself concerned him.
Nonetheless, when finally he lay behind a log and peered over it, his head whirled and his heart stumbled.
Brannock had related truth, but its presence overwhelmed. Here at the top, the woods grew to the boundaries of a flat black field. Upon it stood the demons—or the gods—and their works. He saw the central, softly rain-bowlike dome, towers like lances and towers like webwork, argent nets and ardent globes, the bulks and shapes everywhere around, the little flyers that flitted aglow, and more and more, all half veiled and ashimmer, aripple, apulse, while the life-beat of it went through him to make a bell of his skull, and it was too strange, his eyes did not know how to see it, he gaped as if blinded and shuddered as if pierced.
Long he lay powerless and defenseless. The sun sank down to the western clouds. Their deck went molten gold. The breeze strengthened. Somehow its cold reached to Kalava and wakened his spirit. He groped his way back toward resolution. Brannock had warned him it would be like this. Ilyandi had said Brannock was of the gods whom she served, her star-gods, hers. He had given his word to their messenger and to her.
He dug fingers into the soil beneath him. It was real, familiar, that from which he had sprung and to which he would return. Yes, he was a man.
He narrowed his gaze. Grown a bit accustomed, he saw that they yonder did, indeed, have shapes, however shifty, and places and paths. They were not as tall as the sky, they did not fling lightning bolts about or roar with thunder. Ai-ya, they were awesome, they were dreadful to behold, but they could do no worse than kill him. Could they? At least, he would try not to let them do worse. If they were about to capture him, his sword would be his friend, releasing him.
And … yonder, hard by the dome, yonder loomed the god of whom Brannock spoke, the god deceived by the sorceress. He bore the spearhead form, he sheened blue and coppery in the sunset light; when the stars came forth they would be a crown for him, even as Brannock foretold.
Had he been that which passed above the Windroad Sea? Kalava’s heart thuttered.
How to reach him, across a hard-paved space amidst the many demons? After dark, creeping, a finger-length at a time, then maybe a final dash—
A buzz went by Kalava’s temple. He looked around and saw a thing the size of a bug hovering. But it was metal, the light flashed off it, and was that a single eye staring at him?
He snarled and swatted. His palm smote hardness. The thing reeled in the air. Kalava scuttled downhill into the brush.
He had been seen. Soon the sorceress would know.
All at once he was altogether calm, save that his spirit thrummed like rigging in a gale. Traveling, he had thought what he might do if something like this proved to be in his doom. Now he would do it. He would divert the enemy’s heed from himself, if only for a snatch of moments.
Quickly, steadily, he took the firemaker from his pouch, charged it, drove the piston in, pulled it out and inserted a match, brought up a little, yellow flame. He touched it to the withered bush before him. No need to puff. A leaf crackled instantly alight. The wind cast it against another, and shortly the whole shrub stood ablaze. Kalava was already elsewhere, setting more fires.
Keep on the move! The demon scouts could not be everywhere at a single time. Smoke began to sting his eyes and nostrils, but its haze swirled ever thicker, and the sun had gone under the clouds. The flames cast their own light, leaping, surging, as they climbed into the trees and made them torches.
Heat licked at Kalava. An ember fell to sear his left forearm. He barely felt it. He sped about on his work, himself a fire demon. Flyers darted overhead in the dusk. He gave them no heed either. Although he tried to make no noise except for the hurtful breaths he gasped, within him shouted a battle song.
When the fire stood like a wall along the whole southern edge of the field, when it roared like a beast or a sea, he ran from its fringe and out into the open.
Smoke was a bitter, concealing mist through which sparks rained. To and fro above flew the anxious lesser demons. Beyond them, the first stars were coming forth.
Kalava wove his way among the greater shapes. One stirred. It had spied him. Soundlessly, it flowed in pursuit. He dodged behind another, ran up and over the flanks of a low-slung third, sped on toward the opal dom
e and the god who stood beside it.
A thing with spines and a head like a cold sun slid in front of him. He tried to run past. It moved to block his way, faster than he was. The first one approached. He drew blade and hoped it would bite on them before he died.
From elsewhere came a being with four arms, two legs, and a mask. “Brannock!” Kalava bawled. “Ai, Brannock, you got here!”
Brannock stopped, a spear-length away. He did not seem to know the man. He only watched as the other two closed in.
Kalava took stance. The old song rang in him:
If the gods have left you,
Then laugh at them, warrior.
Never your heart
Will need to forsake you.
He heard no more than the noise of burning. But suddenly through the smoke he saw his foes freeze moveless, while Brannock trod forward as boldly as ever before; and Kalava knew that the god of Brannock and Ilyandi had become aware of him and had given a command.
Weariness torrented over him. His sword clattered to the ground. He sank too, fumbled in his filthy tunic, took out the message written on bark and offered it. “I have brought you this,” he mumbled. “Now let me go back to my ship.”
12
We must end as we began, making a myth, if we would tell of that which we cannot ever really know. Imagine two minds conversing. The fire on the mountaintop is quenched. The winds have blown away smoke and left a frosty silence. Below, cloud deck reaches ghost-white to the rim of a night full of stars.
“You have lied to me throughout,” says Wayfarer.
“I have not,” denies Gaia. “The perceptions of this globe and its past through which I guided you were all true,” as true as they were majestic.
“Until lately,” retorts Wayfarer. “It has become clear that when Brannock returned, memories of his journey had been erased and falsehood written in. Had I not noticed abrupt frantic activity here and dispatched him to go see what it was—which you tried to dissuade me from—that man would have perished unknown.”
“You presume to dispute about matters beyond your comprehension,” says Gaia stiffly.
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 89
