Far Horizons

by Robert Silverberg

  Above the rows of flipbook trees and the living layers of ash stretched a dead and twisted sky. From the hideous chancre of dead blackness, with its sullen ring of congealed red, depended curtains of rushing darkness that swept the Night Land like rain beneath a moving front.

  “Mother’s hair,” Karn said, and clutched her clavicle tightly in white-knuckled hands.

  “She’s playing with us,” Rasp said. “Bending over us, waving her hair over our crib. We reach up to grab, and she pulls away.”

  “She laughs,” Karn said.

  “Then she gives us to the—”

  Rasp did not have time to finish. The vehicle swerved abruptly with a small squeak before a sudden chasm that had not been there an instant before. Out of the chasm leaped white shapes, humanlike but fungal, doughy and featureless. They seemed to be expelled and to climb out equally, and they lay on the sandy black-streaked ground for a moment, as if recovering from their birth. Then they rose to loose and wobbling feet and ran with speed and even grace over the irregular landscape to the trees, which they began to uproot.

  These were the laborers Olmy had seen from the pyramid. They paid no attention to the intruders. The chasm closed, and Olmy instructed the car to continue.

  “Is that what we’ll become?” Karn asked.

  “Each of us will become many of them,” Rasp said.

  “Such a relief to know!” Karn said sardonically.

  The rotating shadows ahead gave the ground a blurred and frantic aspect, like unfocused time-lapse photography. Only the major landmarks stood unchanged in the sweeps of metaphysical revision: the Watcher, pale beam still glowing from its unblinking eye; the Castle with its unseen giant occupant; and the obelisk with its scaffold and hordes of white figures working directly beneath the lesion.

  Olmy ordered the vehicle to stop, but Rasp grabbed his hand. “Farther,” she said. “We can’t do anything here.”

  Olmy grinned and threw back his head, then grimaced like a monkey in the oldest forest of all, baring his teeth at this measureless madness.

  “Farther!” Karn insisted. The car rolled on, jolting with the regular ridges some powerful force had pushed up in the sand.

  Above the constant sizzle of rearranged world-lines, like a symphony of scrubbing and tapping brooms, came more sounds. If a burning forest could sing its pain, Olmy thought, it would be like the rising wail that came from the tower and the Castle. Thousands of the white figures made thousands of different sounds, as if trying to talk to each other, but not succeeding. Mock speech, singsong pidgin nonsense, attempts to communicate emotions and thoughts they could not truly have; protests at being jabbed and pulled and jiggled along the scaffolding of the tower, over the uneven ground, like puppets directed by something trying to mock a process of construction.

  Olmy’s body had up to that moment sent him a steady bloodwash of fear. He had controlled this emotion as well as he could, but never ignored it; that would have been senseless and wrong, for fear was what told him he came from a world that made sense, that held together and was consistent, that worked.

  Yet fear was not enough, could not be an adequate response to what they were seeing. This was a threat beyond anything the body had been designed to experience. Had he allowed himself to scream, he could not have screamed loudly enough.

  The Death we all know, Olmy told himself, is an end to something real; death here would be worse than nightmare, worse than the hell one imagines for one’s enemies and unbelievers.

  “I know,” Karn said, and her hands shook on the clavicle.

  “What do you know?” Rasp asked.

  “Every meter, every second, every dimension, has its own mind here,” Karn said. “Space and time are arguing, fighting.”

  Rasp disagreed violently. “No mind, no minds at all!” she insisted shrilly.

  Light itself began to waver and change as they came closer to the tower. Olmy could see the face of oncoming events before they occurred, like waves on a beach, rushing over the land, impatient to reach their destinations, their observers, before all surprise had been lost.

  They now entered the fringes of shadow. The revisions of their surroundings felt like deep drumming pulses. Caught directly in a shadow, Olmy felt a sudden rub of excitement. He saw flashes of colors, felt a spectrum of unfamiliar emotions that threatened to cancel out his fear. He looked to his left, into the counterclockwise sweep, anticipating each front of darkness, leaning toward it. Ecstasy, followed by a buzz of exhilaration, suddenly a spasm of brilliance, all the while the back of his head crisping and glowing and sparking. He could see into the back of his brain, down to the working foundations of every thought—where symbols with no present meaning are painted and arrayed on long tables, then jerked and jostled until they become emotions and memories and words.

  “Like opening a gate!” Karn shouted, seeing Olmy’s expression. “Much worse. Dangerous! Very dangerous!”

  “Don’t ignore it, don’t suppress,” Rasp told him. “Just pay attention to what’s in front! That’s what they teach us when we open a gate!”

  “These aren’t gates!” Olmy shouted above the hideous symphony of brooms. The twins’ heads jerked and vibrated as he spoke.

  “They are!” Rasp said. “Little gates into directly adjacent worlds. They’re trying to escape their neighboring realities, to split away, but the lesion gathers them, holds them. They flow back behind us, along our world-lines.”

  “Back to the beginning!” Karn said.

  “Back to our birth!” Rasp said.

  “Here!” Karn said, and Olmy brought the car to a stop. The two assistants, little more than girls, with pale faces and wide eyes and serious expressions climbed down from the open cab and marched resolutely across the rippled sand, leaning into the pressure of other streams of reality. Their clothes changed color, their hair changed its arrangement, even their skin changed color, but they marched until the clavicles seemed to lift of their own will.

  Rasp and Karn faced each other.

  Olmy told himself, with whatever was left of his mind, that they were now going to attempt a cirque, a ring gate, that would bring all this to a meeting with the flaw. Within the flaw lay the peace of incommensurable contradictions, pure and purifying. Within the flaw this madness would burn to less than nothing, to paradoxes that would cancel and expunge.

  He did not think they would have time to escape, even if the shrinking of the Way was less than instantaneous.

  He stood on the seat of the car for a moment, watching the twins, admiring them. Enoch underestimates them. As have I. This is what Ry Ornis wanted, why he chose them.

  He hunched his shoulders: something coming. Before he could duck or jump aside, Olmy was caught between two folds of shadow, like a bug snatched between fingers, and lifted bodily from the car. He twisted his neck and looked back to see a fuzzy image of the car, the twins lifting their clavicles, the rippled and streaked sand. The car seemed to vibrate, the tire tracks rippling behind it like snakes; and for a long moment, the twins and the car were not visible at all, as if they had never been.

  Olmy’s thoughts raced and his body shrieked with joy. Every nerve shivered, and all his memories stood out together in sharp relief, with different selves viewing them all at once. He could not distinguish between present and future; all were just parts of different memories. His reference point had blurred to where his life was a flat field, and within that field swam a myriad of possibilities. What would happen, what had happened, became indistinguishable from the unchosen and unlived moments that could happen.

  This blurring of his world-line rushed backward. He felt he could sidle across fates into what was fixed and unfix it, free his past to be all possible, all potential, once more. But the diffusion, the smearing and blending of the chalked line of his life, came up against the moment of his resurrection, the abrupt shift from Lamarckia—

  And could not go any farther. Dammed, the tide of his life spilled out in all directions. He cried
out in surprise and a kind of pain he had never known before.

  Olmy hung suspended beneath the dark eye, spinning slowly, all things above and below magnified or made minute depending on his angle. The pain passed. Perhaps it had never been. He felt as if his head had become a tiny but all-seeing camera obscura.

  There was a past in which Ry Ornis accompanied the twins; he saw them working together near a very different vehicle, tractor rather than small car, to make the cirque. Already they had forced the Way to extrude a well through the sand. A cupola floated over the well, brazen and smooth, reflecting in golden hues the flaw, the lesion.

  Olmy turned his head a fraction of a centimeter and once more saw only the twins, but this time dead, lying mangled beside the car, their clavicles flaring and burning. Another degree or two, and they were resurrected, still working. Ry Ornis was with them again.

  A memory: Ry Ornis had traveled with them in the flawship. How could he have lost this fact?

  Olmy rotated again, this time in a new and unfamiliar dimension, and felt the Way simply cease to exist and his own life with it. From this dark and soundless eventuality, he turned with a bitter, acrid wrench and found a very narrow course through the gripping shadows, a course illuminated by half-forgotten emotions that had been plucked like flowers, arranged like silent speech.

  He had been carried to the other side of the lesion, looking north down the endless throat of the Way.

  The gripping baleen of shadow from the whale’s mouth of the lesion, the driving cilia wisking him between worldlines, drove him under and over a complex surface through which he could see a deep mountainous valley, its floor smooth and vitreous like obsidian.

  Black glass, reflecting the lesion, the flaw behind the lesion, scudding layers of mist. The cilia that controlled Olmy’s orientation let him drop to a few meters above the vitreous black floor.

  Motion stopped. His thoughts slowed. He felt only one body, one existence. All his lines clumped back into one flow.

  He tried to close his eyes, to not see, but that was impossible. He faced down and saw his reflection in the mirror-shiny valley floor, a small still man floating beneath the red-rimmed eye like an intruding mote.

  On either side of the valley rose jagged glassy peaks, mountain ranges like shreds of pulled taffy. A few hundred meters ahead of him—or perhaps a few kilometers—mounted in the middle of the valley, lay something he recognized: a Jart defensive emplacement, white as ivory, jagged spikes thrusting like a sea urchin’s spines from a squat discus. Shaded cilia played around the spikes, but the spikes did not track, did not move.

  The emplacement was dead.

  Olmy held his hands in front of his face. He could see them, see through them, with equal clarity. Nothing was obscured, nothing neglected by his new vision.

  He tried to speak, or perhaps to pray, to whatever it was that held him, directed his motion. He asked first if anything was there, listening. No answer.

  He remembered Plass’s comments about the allthing: that in its domain it was unique, had never learned the arts of communication, was one without other and controlled all by being all. No separation between mind and matter, observed and observer. Such a being could neither listen nor answer. Nor could it change.

  He thought of the emotions arrayed along the path that had guided him here. Pain, disappointment, fear. Weariness. Had the allthing learned this method of communication after its time in the Way? Had it dissected and rearranged enough human elements to change its nature this much?

  Why pain? Olmy asked, spoken but unheard in the stillness.

  He moved north down the center of the valley, over the dead Jart emplacement. His reflection shimmered in the uneven black mirror of the floor. He looked east and west, up the long curves of the Way beyond the jagged mountain, and saw more Jart emplacements, the spiral and beaded walls of what looked like Jart settlements, all abandoned, all spotted with large, distorted shapes he could not begin to comprehend.

  Olmy thought, It’s made a Night Land for the Jarts. It does not know any difference between us.

  As if growing used to the extraordinary pressure of the shadow cilia gripping him, his body once more sent signals of fear, then simple, childlike wonder, and finally its own exhaustion. Olmy’s head rolled on his shoulders and he felt his body sleep, but his mind remained alert. All his muscles tingled as they went off-line and would not respond to his tentative urgings.

  How much time passed, if it were possible for time to pass, he could not judge. The tingling stopped and control returned. He lifted his head and saw a different valley, this one lined with huge figures. If the scale he had assumed at the beginning of his journey was still valid, these monolithic sculptures or shapes or beings—whatever they might be—were fully two or three kilometers distant, and therefore hundreds of meters in height. They were so strange he found himself looking at them in his peripheral vision, to avoid the confusion of placing them at the points of his visual focus. While vaguely organic in design—compound curves, folds of what might have been a semblance of tissue weighted by gravity, a kind of multilateral symmetry—the figures simply refused to be analyzed.

  Olmy had many times experienced a lapse of visual judgment, when he would look at something in his living quarters and not remember it right away, and because of dim lighting or an unfamiliar angle, be unable to judge what it was. Under those conditions, he could feel his mind making hypotheses, trying desperately to compare them with what he was looking directly at, to reach some valid conclusion, and so actually see the object. This had occurred to him many times on Lamarckia, especially with regard to objects unique to that planet.

  Here, he had no prior experience, no memory, no physical training or familiarity whatsoever with what he looked at, so he saw nothing sensible, nameable, to which he could begin to relate. Slowly, it dawned on Olmy that these might be more trophies of the allthing’s encounters with Jarts.

  He was drifting down a rogue’s gallery of failed models, failed attempts to duplicate and understand, much like the gallery of objects and conditions around the Redoubt that made up the Night Land.

  Humans had approached from the south, Jarts from the north. The allthing had applied similar awkward tools to both, either to unify them into its being, or to find some new way to experience their otherness. Both had been incomprehensibly alien to the allthing.

  Pain. One of the emotions borrowed from Olmy’s mind and arrayed along the pathway. A sense of disunification, unwanted change. The allthing had been disturbed by this entry; there was no evil, no enthusiastic destruction, in the Night Land. Olmy suddenly saw what Enoch had been trying to communicate to him, and went beyond her own understanding.

  A monobloc of pure order had been invaded by a domain whose main character was that of disunity and contradiction. That must have been very painful indeed. And this quality of order was being sucked backward, like gas into a vacuum, into their domain.

  Enoch and the guild of gate openers had manufactured the tip of a tooth. They had thrust into this other domain the bloody predatorial tooth of a hungry universe seeking quickening, a completion at its own beginning.

  But this hypothesis did not instantly open any floodgate of comprehension or communication. Olmy did not find himself suddenly analyzing the raw emotional outbursts of another mind, godlike or otherwise; the allthing was not a mind in any sense he could understand. It was simply a pure and necessary set of qualities. It gripped him, controlled him, but literally had no use for him. Like everything else here, it could neither analyze nor absorb him. It could not even spread back along his world-line, for Olmy’s existence had begun over with this new body, with his resurrection.

  That was why he had not met any ghosts of himself. Physically, he had almost no past. The allthing, if such existed, had flung him along this valley of waste and failure, another piece of detritus, even more frustrating than most.

  He squirmed, his body struggling to break free like an animal in a cage. Panic
overwhelmed him despite his best efforts. Olmy could not locate any point of reference within; not even a self was clearly defined.

  Everything blurred, became confused, as if he had been smudged by an enormous finger and no outline remained. I am no where, no here, no name, moving, no future.

  He twisted, convulsed, trying to find his center. The figures mounted on the ranges of mountains to either side seemed interested in this effort. He could feel their attention and did not welcome it. He fancied they moved, however slowly, advancing toward him across astronomical time.

  If this lump of conflicting order and chaos could define himself anew, perhaps these incomprehensible monoliths, these unworshiped gods and unrealized mockeries, could establish a presence as well.

  The panic stopped. Signals stopped.

  He had come to an end. That minimum condition he had wished for was now upon him. He cared nothing for past or future, had lost nothing, gained nothing.

  I am or was a part of a society really no part of any

  This name is Olmy Ap Sennen

  Lover of many loved and loving by few

  Contact nothing without

  Without contact nothing

  Uprooted tree

  The lesion’s inflamed rim began to brighten. The suspended and aimless figure in its gripping cilia of probabilities maintained enough structure and drive to be interested in this, and noted that, compared to past memory, the lesion was much smaller, much darker, and the flaring rim much broader. It resembled an immense solar eclipse with a bloody corona.

  Loyalties and loves uprooted

  Language itself faded until the aimless figure saw only images, the lushness of another world out of reach, closed off, the faces of old humans, once loved, once reassuringly close, now dead and without ghosts.

  Can’t even be haunted by a past uprooted