by Robert Reed
A breath emerged from King’s high mouth.
Words followed.
“In no way is this about you,” King said.
“Not about me personally,” List agreed.
“And it isn’t about any of you monkeys.” King was facing the corpse, and then he turned, gracefully and with no sound. He ignored his father. The eyes were fixed on his brother.
Diamond took a reflexive step backwards.
“We are supposed to do this thing, whatever this thing is,” said King. “But we can’t remember what the duty is. We forgot because too much time passed. Because the corona kept us locked inside her belly longer than she should have, than was intended, and even our great minds couldn’t keep every memory clear and fixed.”
Diamond looked at the satin black corona flesh.
“Too many days have passed,” said King. “I’ve looked in my mind, poked and looked, and I don’t remember enough even to know what we’re late for.
“But I can’t believe it has anything to do with these damned monkeys.”
Karlan didn’t feel like moving. Watching the monster remaking herself, guessing what she would become, seemed like a suitable game.
Then somehow the one-time Archon ended up standing nearby. She wasn’t doing anything, but she was breathing quickly nonetheless, like someone halfway up an unwelcomed set of stairs. He didn’t know the woman from a can of paint. If they ever talked, he had forgotten the conversation. Yet something about her being a prisoner—one of the great enemies of the modern world—made her fascinating.
Karlan approached, and when he had her gaze, he said, “I’m going to leave with them.”
She blinked, saying nothing, probably building her own response.
“This world is dead,” he said. “But from what I hear, our little friends might be heading someplace else.”
Now she laughed.
Good.
“You should come too,” Karlan said.
The next laugh died. Prima used both hands, wiping at the short hair that prisons liked to mandate for criminals and guards alike. Then with a quiet smiling voice, she asked, “Why should I? Because there’s no reason for me to stay?”
“If you think there isn’t,” Karlan said, laughing.
Then he turned, both of them watching Quest.
Like any woman, she kept changing appearances. She became a narrow and very tall cone, and then the cone collapsed into a rounded mass, flesh swirling around some stubborn core. But where were the legs? Why wasn’t the girl making legs or living ropes, anything that could drag her to ruined doors?
Karlan thought that part through, finally seeing what was simple.
There really wasn’t enough air to breathe, was there?
Staring out into the killing night, Diamond waited for Quest to finish her preparations. Distant fires were struggling to survive. A dead corona fell past, limp and dark and almost soundless. Then a civilian blimp followed, two heavy timbers strapped to its underside, helping drag it toward thicker air. For an instant, Diamond saw inside the brightly lit cabin, saw packed bodies and desperate faces and hands holding guns.
Haddi approached him, stopping short of the door and the endless fall. She was breathing in long, weak gasps, but once she began to talk, nothing about her seemed weak.
“You need to know,” she said. “I am proud of you.”
Diamond watched the blimp turn small with distance.
“I was foolish, holding you to such a high standard,” she said. “Whatever you are, you are a child, and I shouldn’t have expected so much.”
“But you should have,” he managed.
“Look at me, Diamond.”
She wasn’t alone. Master Nissim stood behind her, his big frame surrounding her body, both lit by the weak glow of burning wood and Quest’s ongoing metamorphosis. The gray ball was on the floor where he left it. And nearby stood Elata and Seldom, one of them clinging to the other one’s free hand.
“You’re my mother,” Diamond said. “Nobody else is.”
Haddi straightened a back that was rarely straight anymore, and her breath came even faster than before.
“Thank you,” she said.
Everyone was suffering. Speed mattered, and Diamond wanted to leave now, which was why he tried to walk past them.
But the Master put a hand to his shoulder, saying, “I have something to give you.”
Diamond paused. “A lesson,” he guessed.
“But not as a teacher,” Nissim said.
The entire facility began to shake. Quest was violently twisting, the body burrowing through the abattoir’s floor.
“A butcher’s perspective can help you,” Nissim said.
“All right,” Diamond said, sick of waiting.
The butcher said, “Wherever you happen to go, show up on time and sober, and do all of your work with an artful amount of complaining. And when you’re working with other butchers, remember: everybody has knives and cleavers.”
Diamond stared up at that worn old face.
“When there’s trouble,” said Nissim, “and there always is trouble among butchers, your advantage comes in realms that don’t involve the steel.”
Diamond closed his eyes, thinking.
With no warning, Quest plunged through the bone floor.
Was his sister leaving without him? And without the key too?
But no, she was inside the rooms below, grabbing hold of the building’s foundation, and her body hadn’t finished making ready for whatever she was planning.
King was holding the gray ball in his hands.
King ran, and then Diamond ran. Nobody else could even try.
The two Archons had found each other in the gloom, converging beside a booth where call-lines ended. One circuit was working, and like dear friends, they put their ears to the same earpiece, listening to some quick voice.
Diamond stopped running.
Until his mother caught him, he wasn’t sure why he was standing still.
Her hands had never felt colder, every little bone struggling to be felt. She squeezed him and panted for a long moment before saying, “Good-bye.” Then she said, “Good-bye,” again, with a softer, sadder voice.
“I do remember your face,” he said. “When I was looking up from the toolbox, I saw you watching me.”
With that. Diamond had to turn and run again.
He didn’t dare do anything else.
Only at the end, by accident, did Seldom suspect what Elata wanted.
The moment they emerged from the giant sister, the girl began to chase after Diamond, and a familiar, reassuring jealousy fell across Seldom. He always felt inadequate next to any corona’s child, but particularly his best, almost-human friend. He had no choice but assume that she wanted nothing but to be near Diamond. Which would have doomed her, maybe. And maybe all of them. But then Seldom began to think how Elata stood apart from everybody all day, saying nothing unless forced to talk, and he remembered how she had acted every day for what seemed like a long while. She was far from happy. Almost nothing in her life was pleasurable, and the world since Marduk fell was horrible, and maybe Seldom wasn’t as sensitive about people and emotions as he should be, but had one talent not shared by the perfect-brained Children: he was a genius when it came to misremembering the past.
That’s what Seldom did then. He thought he remembered Elata turning to him once, confessing that if life became too unbearable, she would simply jump.
Later, replaying the abattoir and his faltering memories, Seldom would realize that the girl had never said anything of the kind. He couldn’t figure out where that non-memory came from, unless instinct or intuition were talking. But the recollection felt genuine then, and that’s why he forced himself to run, catching her and grabbing her hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he lied.
“Then stop,” she said.
Too graceless to invent an explanation, Seldom simply told her, “
No. I want to keep you close.”
Elata considered fighting and didn’t.
They were standing together, not talking, when Quest sank through the floor. Then Diamond finished talking to his mother and to Master Nissim. He trotted past his friends, seeing them without seeing them. Diamond had a way of noticing everything, but he didn’t even make eye contact with his only real friends. Elata watched him pass them, and then she started to follow Diamond.
Seldom allowed himself to be dragged along behind her.
The Archon of Archons had dropped a call-line receiver, and he hurried to catch his son, presumably to share more of his political genius.
Karlan appeared, placing himself in Diamond’s path. Loudly, very happily, he announced, “I’m going with you.”
Seldom stopped running, and Elata shook free.
Quest was almost invisible, her body squirming under the floor, destroying rooms and machinery as she made herself ready.
Diamond told Karlan, “No.”
Seldom watched his brother and the rifle that he was carrying. He knew his brother. Karlan was considering shooting Diamond and maybe King too, giving him the freedom to do whatever he wanted. Seldom shivered, watching the rifle barrel drawing little circles in the air.
Again, Diamond said, “No.”
King came past both of them, saying, “He is coming. With a gun. We need soldiers.”
Diamond asked, “Why?”
From under the floor, a giant mouth roared at them.
Quest said, “Hurry.”
Everybody was walking towards her.
Diamond asked King, “Why do we need guns?”
“The spotter station below us survived. They just got their com-line fixed, and they’re reporting. After the sun vanished, after the coronas were done rising, the papio started launching their slayer ships. Maybe they’re trying to save their people, looking for better air. Whatever the reason, we aren’t going to be alone down there.”
Diamond gave no reaction.
“So I am going,” Karlan said, showing a smile to his little brother.
Elata was past all of them. Before anyone could stop her, she jumped into the fresh hole in the floor, vanishing inside whatever Quest had become.
Karlan laughed while picking up ammunition belts.
King and the key plunged into the hole.
Diamond ran a little ways and then stopped, turning in one circle and half of another before asking, “Where’s Elata?”
Seldom caught up and said, “She already got onboard.”
Diamond didn’t want to believe him. “Why?”
“She doesn’t like here,” Seldom said reasonably.
From below, Quest roared, “Now,” and as if to prove the urgency, beams of bloodwood and bone pegs began to shatter.
“Out of my way,” Karlan shouted, and he vanished.
Diamond ran and jumped after him.
And then Seldom sprinted to the hole’s edge, finding what looked like an ordinary wooden trap door flung open, and the only surprise was how little surprise he felt, watching himself fearlessly leap after the others.
ELEVEN
They fell past the lost sun, mesmerized eyes absorbing the endless night. Seven of them noticed nothing else, but with the same vision, the eighth teased out a thin sliver of pale golden light.
Tritian fixed the eyes on a narrow patch of ink, and the light was a little brighter.
Whatever it was, they were closing the gap.
Two moments of debate ended with a plan. The glow was below them but not beneath. Aligning the head while extending arms and legs, the Eight allowed themselves to fall like the world’s weakest bird, fast but not straight, and time made the corona become real—one of the last and the oldest, too weak to flee the gaping wound in the world, far too stubborn to give up and die.
The Eight planned for a graceful collision.
The disk-shaped body sang in painful colors, in sharp yellows, and the bladders expanded for lift and then collapsed, and it sounded as if the last of the world’s air was exploding out of the giant’s mouth.
The Eight believed in inevitable successes. Their aim was perfect and true until they missed the giant corona. But the ancient creature noticed motion and ended up catching them instead, its longest, strongest neck stretching as far as possible, the last of its teeth removing a hand and foot before bringing the Eight close.
The corona might be the last living First.
Why it would grab this miserable creature was a mystery, and what it thought about its quarry remained unknown. But the leviathan kept the Eight close, and they fell together. The Eight clung to the neck that had damaged them and saved them, and they grew a new hand and a worthwhile foot. The giant mouth was close, wide when it caught the air and roaring when the air jetted free. In the presence of vast memory and every answer, there was no chance to piece together even the barest conversation. The world remained built from puzzle, from ignorance. Yet the Eight had never felt closer to any organism than this desperate doomed wondrous soul.
In Creation, no fall is eternal.
In the end, in terror or exaltation or maybe by sheer chance, the First emitted a single pulse of scorching purple light, showing its passenger what was rising fast from below.
The chamber ended with a barren floor, and all nine died.
And time flowed and eight of them were less dead.
More time was crossed while the shared body wasn’t just repaired but reinvented, the old papio-form given lungs for this air and a mouth gifted at cursing.
The body crawled out from beneath the corona’s smashed remains. The Creation loomed overhead. Walls defined a finite, knowable space. The space couldn’t be seen but was felt, invisible every way but in the mind. Tritian made the new body stand, and they enjoyed the first shared breath. The floor beneath was slick and gray and a little cool against just-born flesh, and it seemed far too flat. A perfect sphere had been promised, but the wise Masters were again proved wrong. They were standing at the bottom of a pipe, and a steady wind was blowing across the floor, one direction in mind. In the distance, in the darkness, great masses were slamming against the floor. Not just the coronas were falling. With the forest overhead, dead trees were falling, and downed aircraft, and it was inevitable that one object or a thousand more would crash down on top of the Eight. They would die again and crawl out into the open again, nothing ahead but work, hellish laborious work that would not end until the starved forest was safely dead underfoot.
The Eight practiced running, covering a short distance before a new sound made them pause.
A papio wing was diving from high overhead.
Divers fell silent inside them.
Tritian told the others to give him the only voice.
The jet engine throttled down, and the nose sprouted a column of light that pivoted, finding the gray floor rising, and then the machine landed in the distance, skidding sharply and then crashing into piece of debris.
Unused munitions detonated.
The violence washed across the landscape, and overhead, dozens and maybe hundreds of aircraft took sight of the goal.
They came in waves, exhausted wings followed by overloaded airships full of tree-walkers, and there were individuals riding beneath parachutes and inside drop-suits. Most of the refugees landed badly, dying instantly or after some plaintive wails. But others touched down successfully, and only time stood between now and that moment when some survivor, standing amidst the carnage, noticed the Eight
Those lucky eyes belonged to a papio crew riding inside what looked like a slayer-hunting aircraft. Motors and gas bladders held several dozen soldiers aloft, and they fixed their spotlights on a big papio body, a woman’s magnified voice shouting at them and echoing across the gray plain, asking if they were the great missing Eight.
Tritian demanded calm from his siblings.
Each of the Eight helped raise one hand high, friend to friend.
And then Tritian told a us
eful lie. Shouting over the roar of engines, he said, “We are the Seven. Divers is dead.”
Human memory forgot quite a lot after one day, and six hundred days could wipe away much of the past. But these creatures knew how to nourish old emotions, keeping them raw enough to last for generations.
Divers or not, one of the papio gunners opened fire, gutting the creatures that had helped ignite this endless war.
And once again, the Eight became dead.
Inside the Creation, in this one tiny realm, perhaps nothing had ever moved so swiftly.
Quest fell like a dart.
Massive and narrow, wearing a skin that slipped through any air, she plunged faster than the papio wings, and soon faster than every rocket. Distances that should have felt enormous were crossed in moments, crossed and found empty and barely noticed as a consequence. She spawned eyes that didn’t interrupt the precious airflow. She spat out brilliant flares to throw light across the walls of the world. And what she saw was shown to her passengers: the intricate, lovely reefs that had infested the corona world; the formerly high-realm where the sun ruled and where a great hole now waited; and beneath that hole, an expansive but not spectacularly wide cylinder leading down for another enormous journey, swiftly crossed.
“But do you see Them?” asked Diamond.
“If I do, I will tell you,” Quest said.
“See who?” asked Seldom.
Nobody answered.
Then Seldom looked at Elata, and she mouthed, “The Eight.”
The rounded chamber was intended for two bodies, plus the unfathomable gray ball. Crowded together, everybody touched everybody. The humans occupied one side, King and Diamond the other. The gray ball lay on King’s hands. Karlan’s rifle looked at home in his arms. The ceiling and floor were flat, but beyond each was a bubble that bore a strong resemblance to Quest’s crystalline eyes. They could see what she saw, except for the details that their speed that washed away, and the total exhaustion that stole their focus, and the limited numbers of eyes in their few heads. The reef wasn’t built from coral, it was woven from countless holes, and Diamond worried that the Eight were hiding inside any one of those holes, or they were lost in some other way.
