Awake in the Night Land (38 page)

Five sleeps ago, when we had camped in the Museum, (our last peaceful night before the Black Mist swallowed two of the men on watch, Mr. Clockwork from AD 6000 and the ever-cheerful Huc-Huc Pounce from AD 4500, who I missed dearly), Enoch had spent an hour carving flowing letters into the wood with his blunted knife, and crooning to it in a harsh, glottal language. He said it was the language of the Angels, and he would not take any of the better weapons we looted from the turncoats and half-humans during the Pantry-Raid.

When I think of “angels”, I think of long-haired men in togas with wings and harps. He called them Kherubim, and terror shook his voice when he spoke of seeing them. Once, in his youth, he had seen one shining with fire in among the trees, rolling slowly on the business only God knew, and lighting played from its concentric rings of eyes. Somehow, I did not think he meant what I meant when I said the word ‘angel’.

According to his tale, merely seeing the angelic living creature had somehow granted him knowledge of their speech. Now he raised the staff and showed us the letters written there. It was a cursive script of unearthly beauty.

Mneseus threw his bow and arrow onto the deck with a curse. “May all memory of glory won in war be forgotten! Break, string, and shatter, staff! For you are proven too weak to do your master's will!” Then, to Enoch, the sorcerer-king intoned, “You have condemned us. Dead, we could serve no longer the purposes of those that woke us from the grave. Alive, how can we not? Alas! How did you overcome my spell?”

As he spoke, it occurred to me that it might not be the wisest thing in the world to shoot the Blue Man, much as I disliked him, considering that I, not he, might be the traitor, or alien influences might be tampering with my judgment, making me want to shoot.

I lowered my rifle and worked the bolt, so that there was no cartridge in the chamber.

He-Sings-Death saw me, and he slowly lowered his javelin.

The Blue Man, seeing this, made a little twitch of some expression I could not read, and reached and touched one of the many electronic circuits webbing his filmy coat. I presume that was something to tell the little machines he had smuggled into Ydmos to stand down.

Mneseus saw our weapons being set aside, and he grimaced with frustration, and he said to Enoch, “What are you, that can undo my daemon’s inspiration? How did you overcome me?”

“Everything that is named of Adam’s naming,” Enoch said, “Dominion is given to me, eldest son of his eldest son; for I had the words from my father, and he from his father before him, who is king of all men, eldest, and first: but the words of those things Adam did not name, the older things, sun, moon, stars, trees, waters, light, and the darkness that was before the Lord of the Elu on Oreb spoke His Word: over these things, the sons of Adam have no dominion. In life, I wrote the letters of this speech upon a column of brass and bronze, foreboding what was to come, and I built a city with a tower and a wall near the garden of my grandfather’s exile, by the shore of the river Pison. In times to come an earthquake will bury these pillars, and an age will pass, and then other children of Adam will unearth and read them.”

He-Sings-Death was looking at Enoch in wonder. “I name you He-Speaks-Words! Use your words, you, to drive back the Dry Things and Cold Ones who follow us. Find for us the way out of this cave of iron to the warm places beneath the sun again!”

Enoch shook his head. “Even these words of the Elu will grant me no power over the Grigorim, the Watchers: for the Watchers came down from heaven, to watch the work of creation, but, (woe to mankind!) came to love the gardens of creation, and will not depart back to heaven when called. The sons of Elu take the daughters of women to them, yes, as many as they wish, and giants are born from them, mighty men of renown.

“The giants, the Nephilim, in time to come, one day rule the world, for their strength sweeps all before them. The One of Oreb shall be displeased. He shall open the windows of heaven. The world shall end in a great flood and the elder race of man shall perish. All this shall happen five generations from me, in the time of my grandson’s great-grandson, who is called Jubalcain the Harper. The Grigorim shall perish then but not before.

“It is as it is. No one, not the Elu and the Lord of all the Elu, no one can destroy the Grigorim without destroying the world.”

Kitimil barked at him: "Teach me your words!”

Enoch said disdainfully: "Those who were kings of the earth before Adam have no claim on the Words. You are no child of Adam: they are not for you.”

The Blue Man puffed on his pipe, and said thoughtfully, “So, Mneseus, were you monkeying with Captain Boom-boom's nervous system? Adjusting glandular levels, triggering parasympathetic responses, and working some such as that, and all to get him to blow his tubes of chemical explosives at me? Was there some point to it?”

I said, “With respect, Mr. Bliss, were you not paying attention? His Majesty was attempting to have us all join his suicide pact. If any of us live, it aids the enemy, or so he thinks. Knowing that some of us would be too weak, or too Christian, to slay ourselves, he used some sort of hypnosis or mentalism to urge us to kill each other. I suppose he was hoping the survivors would be those who held their lives lightly.”

Ydmos said, “Child of a happy age, it is not that lives are held too lightly, that we are willing to shed them, but that we dare not allow our lives to be Destroyed. What of man remains after his thoughts are eaten, and twisted, and taken into the dark of the silence-thought, that wounded remnant of him will make his voice will cry out, or what sounds like his voice, and his dreams wing across the Night Lands, making such promises as few ignore, tempting his loved ones to their deaths.”

“Sir,” I said, “I mean not to disparage your people, and I know not the dangers, spiritual and physical, they face: but surely self-destruction is the very definition of despair. That door opens to Hell, if you will forgive my saying so.”

Ydmos said, “Our science shows that souls are born again, for the aetheric currents outlast the fleshy vessels, and maintain themselves in standing waves in the magnetosphere of the planet: if they are Destroyed, there is no returning, not in all the thousands and tens of thousands of generations our records reach.”

Abraxander said, “The people of the Nine Pressurized Cities, us, we were taught that children must not be born aboard the space traveling vessels of which eldest legends spoke, and for such as reason as the men from the time of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss, them, those ones knew well, back in prehistory on the Man-home planet.”

Crystals-of-Bliss looked at him. “You recall our times, duckling? Good. That means we lived.”

Abraxander said, “Legends only. The Moon became the haunt of giants, for the children were born without humanity, and none of their coding was right. As for mental essences, our measurements show a partial formation ever present in the timelessness, which is why anticipation and memory, two non-time-specific functions, are addressed by the phenomena of the mental axis, and not by the physical. To restore whole person backwards from the essence, our savants held it to be possible, but no necromancer ever reduced the theory into practice.”

The Blue Man said, “’Tis but a gravity effect, my ducks. The moon-men were like us once, but meddled with their gene plasm so they could dwell in microgravity without bone decay. Of course they got big. So they lost marriage, and human emotion, and humor, and love, and so they do not blink their big eyes? Brain-chemicals gone wrong, that is all. Deep down, still from human stock, so the old records say. Nothing supernatural about it.” To me he said, “Self-shutdown, what you call suicide, puts you beyond all worry: there is no more you to worry. There is no punishment, no you to punish. And nothing gets saved from some sort of worse-than-death Destruct. There is nothing to save and no one to notice anything might have been. He says its courage to shutdown, you say not: but it neither can be or cannot be. A once-had-been cannot be a coward, not matter what he once was: he cannot be brave. If he be not at all, he cannot be this or that.”

He spread his blue hands and looked so very smug. He no doubt thought his skeptical belief in no one and nothing was the very pinnacle of wisdom, instead of its absence.

I said to the Blue Man, “When your loved ones die, do you tell yourself that they are merely meat? Do you say a dead daughter is made up of just as many atoms as a living one, and so therefore any distinction between them is an arbitrary preference?”

He was taken aback. His cynical mask for a moment had dropped and I saw human grief, plain and clear, on his face. He said softly to himself, “Emerald Laughter.”

I blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”

He did not answer me, for Ydmos then spoke up, saying, “Even among your people, Captain Powell of Nantucket, would you not condemn yourself to Hell, if it meant saving your loved one from being taken in your place to Hell?”

I had no answer for that question. My mother knew the Good Book backward and forward, and knew how riddles like that were answered: I had little use for Bible-learning, back when my world was alive. At that time, I was sure it was some trick made up by priests and hysterical women, to prevent strong men from running things to suit themselves. Now, I was not so sure. I had been a great admirer of pagan virtues, then, who honored strength and boldness, and who were not about to let the meek inherit the earth. Now I was a rat in the hold of a ship crewed by monstrous beings from beyond the cosmos, something out of all human reckoning. You see the virtues of strength and greatness differently, when you are the weak and the hunted, I guess.

“Forgive me, gentlemen,” I said, “But I am no theologian to puzzle out the implications of your lore and doctrines. The world is full of mysteries.”

I stopped, for I head a woman’s voice. I could not make out the words, but it sounded familiar.

Mneseus grit his teeth, and said in a voice of passion, “Children of my children, posterity, we cannot! We cannot live!” He looked back and forth among us. “Do no other of you hear the voice, tempting, pleading, saying they know all the secrets of the past and things-to-come? I know them: did I not once call them up to wreck the ships of enemies who dared the coasts of fair Atlantis? The sirens sing, and tempt, and call out in voices of the ones we lost.”

Ydmos said, “I hear them. Can you not pay them no heed?” But his face was troubled. I suppose, based on what he had said before, that those among his people who could hear the telepathic lures of the enemy, but could not resist them, had long ago been culled from the gene pool. Ydmos said, “The Watching Things can make shapes in thought that sound like our thoughts, but the Master-Word will silence them.”

Enoch looked at him. “What word is this? Is it Adam’s word?”

Ydmos said, “It is the ur-word upon which all human speech is based: it is the fundamental root of human essence. It is prior to language, and no human can misunderstand its import. The things of the Night Land can neither speak nor think it. This is one of many reasons why we know they are not of us.”

Mneseus held up his hand, “Listen to me, my children! Think! What other cause could these beings have, lamp-eyed children of Echidna, titans and Earth-born and all fashion of monstrous prodigies and ugly wonders, to hale us up from our graves? What can we do that they cannot? What purpose do we serve? For, in the state, each craft has its craftsman; and in the parts of animals, so each part has its work. What is our part? What can we do, we humans, that these dark gods of the infernal realm cannot?”

The Blue Man said, “It hides not for naught. It hears us, aye: it watches us with a pale cool eye. What then? What for? For what? What do its codes tell it to do? Wants it us dead? Nothing to fear, in that. Dead, it cannot want us, for, if so, then why then this restart, this re-incarnal knowledge, life to-be-continued in Part Two? Why this?” He tapped his blue chest lightly with his pipe stem. “This sark, these bio-housing coats, fine and fair, firm flesh and pretty hair? Why bring us up from tape backup if it wants no more than but to off us again? Nor, deem I, this hidden one, would it crave aught he could by fear, or pain, or deconstitution of our brain, cell by cell, get for itself. What else? What else it to be?”

He-Sings-Death slapped himself on the thigh, and laughed and said, “Song! When the He-Calls-Day blows through the mouth of man, it is as a man who blows through a reed. (Make my song worthy, O He-Makes-Grass!) The good reed sings well, a cracked reed, badly. I have seen it, a cracked reed can be wrapped in wet doeskin leather, and the crack swell shut, and the flute made whole again. (Make me whole, oh He-Brings-Sun!) This, it could be, that the Smotherer is after, eh? The reed knows nothing of what he sings, till the song is breathed in him.”

Ydmos said, “We were not brought to sing. The enemy knows nothing of song.”

I said, “Then why?”

Ydmos said, “Bait. The strength of the House of Silence knows no limit. The Silent Ones would not need human men for something human men can do. Our living souls are but morsels of food to them, orts for their glut. But: something another can do, another who will come for us. But whom? No one will depart from the Last Redoubt to seek one who has fallen in the Night Lands. The Law forbids it.”

I said. “Bait for whom? For what? No one is coming. Everyone is dead. Even the sun and moon are gone so long ago, that the age of the dinosaurs was yesterday, compared to that. No one is coming.”

Ydmos said, “You are quick to doubt. Before the Lesser Redoubt fell, Naani thought no one was coming. She did not even know her lover had survived the death of the world of sunlight until she heard him calling her in a dream. Till then, the folk of the Lesser Redoubt thought they were the last of man: how could they have known a Greater Redoubt, destined to stand another ten million years longer, was in the Night Land south away?”

I said: “But our whole world, all the worlds, the galaxy, all the galaxies, all the stars, everything. I thought you said—“ I nodded toward Abraxander “—that the structure of space and time was breaking down. Reality and unreality are getting mixed. Time is ending.”