Awake in the Night Land (36 page)

Because of the strain of holding the bowstring taut, Mneseus could only speak through clenched teeth. “Hah! Is mine eye the only open eye here? None other has seen it. Enough! I am not your tutor, barbarian. I am armed, and you have taken weapons up against me. Will you strike now? Or else I let fly!”

I said, “Your Majesty, you seem to know things, even what a person is thinking before he speaks. Are you a mind-reader? Is there someone among us who is not thinking like a human being?”

Mneseus said, “My daemon speaks to me. Why were you spared? I saw the Cold Hand pluck men up from your left and right. I saw the Pyramid pass over you. I saw the envenomed snow fall softly on the faces of the men. But not on your face. Always, always, men die to the side left of you, and to the right, and before you and behind, but you are spared. They do not smite you. Have you taken their coin?”

I said, “Ydmos said the traitor might be possessed without the traitor himself knowing it. Might it be me?”

Mneseus now swung to turn the bow toward me. I smelled ozone.

He said through clenched teeth. “A cold hand touches my neck. There is a
ker
among us, sleeping, perhaps, like a dragon coiled in the bottom of the belly. From time to time, it stirs, but it does not wake. It is near: perhaps it is in me. Or you! Do you understand me? You yourself, Pwyll, said it might be you, but unknown to you. So it might be of any of us. There is one solution. The door is open.”

“Door? What door?”

The muscles in his arm were trembling, but the arrowhead was steady, and he did not relax his draw. Mneseus hissed: "The door through which we were pulled to come from there to here. The door the fifty-headed hound must guard.”

Ydmos said softly, “He means the Capsule.”

The words did not mean much to me, but something in his tone made a shiver go up my spine.

I said, “With three mind-readers here, we cannot figure out which one of us is inhabited by this – this thing?”

Mneseus said sharply, “This is no riddle for us to puzzle over and solve! There is no solving of this, only ending! It lives in one of us. When we all slay ourselves, it dies, and whatever it had hoped or planned for us to do, whatever dark purpose moved this thing to break us from our deadly graves, that hope is dashed, that purpose is no more.”

The arrowhead was less than two yards from me. The bowstring creaked under the tension.

When Mneseus swung his arrow to cover me, I raised my rifle to my shoulder, but I did not point it away from my previous target. I did not want to shoot from the hip a weapon that had so much kick.

I had been very casual. When I had said my piece the Blue Man made tools from his fluid. But, when I turned my head and directed the conversation towards Kitimil, I had not turned my barrel away from the Blue Man.

Only after a moment of silence did the Blue Man look up to notice that I was pointing my barrel at him. He raised an eyebrow.

The man from AD 11,000 was as blue as a peacock’s neck, and highlights of purple, cyan, and jade shimmered through his skin substance when he moved. The Blue Man was reclining, leaning with one hand—chalk-blue on the palm, Prussian blue on the back of his hand—against his smooth plum-colored cheek.

His eyes were half-closed. In his other hand, he held a long-stemmed pipe of clay, like something a leprechaun would smoke, but in the bowl of the pipe was some luminous liquid that fluttered like a butterfly with wings of flame, and a weft of acrid smolder crept upward from the bowl.

He came from a dark age between the first and second eras of space flight, when mankind engaged in a thousand years of war with giant things living on the Moon, creatures once men, descended from exiled space-farers, who had grown strange and terrible during their generations-long voyaging to haunted worlds; beings who, in the weightless void, had grown enormous.

“Ah, me," he drawled in a voice of casual disdain. “And what might this poor son of Old Earth have done to lure the sniffs and blinks and pointy-fingers of our brave Boom-stick-shooter here? He is so proud of his chemical explosives, his surface-dimensional thinking, his pre-conflux cortex. I am merely an Adept of the Mind Core, a Ninth-Rank adept of the Excellent rating: whereas he extinguishes meaty beasts for sport, not to eat. What do I do to earn the honor of his suspicion?”

I said, “You will forgive me, sir, but you have complimented the enemy once too often to make your loyalty to mankind a matter safe to take for granted.”

Mneseus, who could not maintain the tension on his bow for so long, relaxed his grip, and lowered his bow: but he kept his eye on me, and kept the arrow ready on the string. Some of the tension went out of He-Sings-Death, but he kept his flint-tipped spear pointed toward Mneseus. Mneseus kept his eyes on me, and He-Sings-Death on Mneseus, but both men listened to what Crystals-of-Bliss was saying.

He was saying: “They are a more efficient form of organization, and even those that are not alive, they replicate, they spread, they consume. They thrive in this present environment, a dark cosmos where the stars have died, and all particles of matter start to fray. How long have they reigned? How many billions of years? A higher form than us, as we are higher than mere germs that make us sick.” He held up his powder-blue palm. “This bath-born son of Old Earth will cheer for the sickness called humanity, this time. Why not?”

“Sir," I said, “The turtle will outlive a man, as will a Redwood tree; the elephant is stronger, the tiger is more swift, and the lion more majestic. Nature arms us with but feeble tooth and claw; clothes us with hides fragile and naked to the cold and wet; equips us with a nose duller than a dog's, and an eye more night-blind than a cat's. The enemy is stronger than man, and wiser, and older: but so is the devil himself.”

“Devils, are they, then, you think? Is that the science of your awkward old-time age now speaking up, my poppet?”

I said, “With all due respect, I was more skeptical of claims about the afterlife before I was resurrected from the dead. If these are not black fiends from Hell, they'll do until the real ones come.”

The Blue Man said, “Ooh, that would be comforting, my pets, to know the universe cared about me and mine enough to hate us all! The cosmos is not alive: it is merely processes in motion. Stars do not twinkle to make us smile; runaway disease-mold does not eat worlds to make us cry. Smiles are a tug of muscles in the cheek: tears are salty water in the eye.”

The Blue Man was a smooth-shaven youth with the improbable name of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Version Seven. He had also been normal-looking before Abraxander had equipped us. Now his skin was dyed blue and hair on his head was a freakish chalk-white. The stubble on his cheeks had vanished, though I had not seen him shave.

(Neither, by the way, did Ydmos shave. Despite his silver hair, Ydmos was a strong young man, but no hair grew on his cheek. Enoch had black ringlets surrounding his full, red-lipped mouth, and he trimmed his beard into a rough square with his meat-cleaver, and he joked that the blade had no other good use.)

The Blue Man, back when he had been dusky and dark like a Spaniard, had asked Abraxander for flasks of bluish liquid that flowed sluggishly like molten glass. Only if you looked quite close, could you see the liquid was actually a mass of swarming midges, or mites; and even these mites you would see with your eye were fabrications, made out of the substances suspended in the gel by even smaller mites.

Unlike my rifle, which had taken three sleep-periods to solidify, his flasks had turned solid within an hour or two. The Blue Man drank the damn stuff, rubbed some of it in his hair, rolled it between his fingers like a child playing with fast-drying library paste.

He took it like snuff, wiped it into his eyes and ears, and, for all I know, rubbed it up his bunghole.

After that, his skin turned blue, and he grew himself a garment (if it can be called that), out of his skin cells. He shed his skin like a snake and then wrapped it back over himself as a skin-tight sheath.

Why shed your skin in the first place if you are just going to put it back on again? The garment was an oily material where he could make hues appear. Crystals-of-Bliss was smart enough to copy the camouflage idea from the armor of Ydmos, and kept his chameleon cloth turned to an unobtrusive dull pewter.

Many rows of tiny little pockets, looking almost like fishes scales, ran up and down the arms and legs and chest, giving a texture to the strange material, and here and there I saw a glint of wire or a bead of jet, and I wondered what they were. Ornamentation? I doubted it. I suspect his projection-tube was merely a toy: these electric circuits were his real weapons.

He said, “Is this, all this, merely Human versus Other? I suspect not. But say that this bath-born Ninth-rank Excellent is just as rah-rah, just as filled with patriot's delight, as our fine Captain Powell of Nantucket, unmodified baseline human, no-rank, born from a woman's womb like the beasts his age exterminated. But say it is so. Are you sure we should hate these creatures? Don't you know who they are?”

He looked around at us. He smiled a half-cocked smile and leaned back, taking and slow draw on his pipe, and letting the smolder waft from his grin. “This bath-born knows. Am I the only one whose brain matter matters?” He watched the plume of purple smoke trickle upwards toward the ceiling.

I said, “Forgive me, sir, but again you speak with admiration of the horrors who have annihilated all but eight of us. These things, whatever they are, these horrors are the enemy of all mankind….”

He laughed a bitter laugh. “What is man? Matter in motion. Meaningless atoms.” Then he pointed his pipe-stem at Abraxander. “Go ahead, gray-hair. Go ahead, you womb-born biomass. Tell them what you told me. You know where we are. Who built this place?”

Abraxander-the-Threshold dated from about AD 30,000, and came from the Earth-sized moon of a superjovian-sized world circling a double star in the constellation Cetus.

His people, at one time, had ruled the planet, but their atmosphere-equipment, over the generations, had failed, and the poisonous air native to the planet, the poisonous grasses and sea microbes, had returned. Of the hundreds of cities and domed villages of his world, only nine cities, in his time, remained.

Back when we had first emerged, wet and shaking from the rebirth coffins in the Archive, Abraxander seemed no stranger than any other man there. He had been naked, like us.

Of the million who fled the burning Archive chamber, I knew that only we survived, unless the other groups had had one like Abraxander among them. Our band had fled to what I took to be the Engineering Deck. While we waited, Abraxander said that the giant sarcophagi shapes looming along the back wall were “non-continuity” engines. He “sensed” that the oblongs still had a memory—he called it a “formation-ghost”—of the engine’s original ability to break through the walls of time and space. With that power, he made materials for us: arms, clothing, food.

He reminds me of my old headmaster at Bramingham: the same condescending, dry, infinitely patient tones. Not long ago, he tried very gamely to explain his art to me, which he insists is not magic (“The materialization is accomplished by polydimensional geometry: an axis rotates eidetic forms out of mind and into matter: the formality collects substance along the time-axis, so that to these ones, us, the process appears to take time…”) until I begged him to stop.

His own clothing reminded me of something between a Turk and a storybook wizard: his hat was a fez or a dunce-cap, he wore a puff-shouldered black jacket set with silver clasps, and a pair of pantaloons so balloon-legged that it looked like a lady’s riding habit, or the skirt of a Japanese fencer. His sleeves were so blousy and long that he had to tuck them into his sash. On his nose he wore a silver clasp set with pearls, as if a pair of pince-nez glasses had been shorn of their glass, leaving only the nosepiece.

His civilization had been the last period of three aeons of star-faring. His original home-era was so far in the future as to be unimaginable to me. And yet, even at that, it was less than one eight-hundredth of the time dividing my time from the home-era of Ydmos of the Last Redoubt.

He spoke in a slow and sad tone, as if his words came out against his will: “My people, us, we knew all life in the island-of-stars, the Milky Way, had been wiped out. Our paleo-xenologists sifted through the rubble, first of one world where evidence of life was found, then, centuries later (for the star-voyaging is slow) a second. My people, us, we found strange buildings, beautiful as seashells, on a lightweight world, but the skulls, fifty millions of them, a billion years old, had been placed in orbit around it. On the next world, a layer of radioactive crust, mixed with bone and blood, lay crushed beneath half a million years of sedimentation.

“Radioactivity we found, a burned world. We thought, us, evidence of internal self-destructive wars. Not so. Weapons that split the atom and use the primordial energy of the universe itself did not prevail against the Slayers, but were able to deny them. You grasp?”

I did not, but Ydmos did. He said gravely: “They were Prepared, and they bit down on the Capsule. They burned themselves with Earth-Current, but they were not Destroyed. It has often been debated among us to do the same.”

I said, “I thought Earth-Current was geomagnetic force? Is it radioactivity?”

Ydmos shrugged. “It is the Earth-Current.”

Abraxander said. “It does not occur on all worlds, and human life cannot endure on worlds that do not have it: their children are less of human each generation, and delight in cruelty. It is a strong force on the Mother World: perhaps this is why the Slayers did not tarry during their first pass. But they had been here. Long ago, they burned the galaxy clean of life. And, looking backward into the past, deeper into the sky, we saw, us, that other galaxies were also dead.

“Do you know what a Seyfert galaxy is? The galactic core implodes in such a way as to produce a stream of deadly radiation, hundreds of light years long: a vent, or a jet. As the core collapses, the jet rotates. Any world in the main galactic plane of a spiral galaxy would be sterilized; in dense areas, novas would trigger novas, to burn any planets missed in the first sweep.