Awake in the Night Land (41 page)

“That should cheer this Son of Old Earth, you unregistered chance-birth? Not only can we not get out, but there is no place to go. It is impossible to depart this place, impossible to surpass the speed of light.”

I said, “Impossible? Sir, forgive me, but, for a man who has been revived from the dead, you seem to have a very certain knowledge of what can and cannot be done.”

He-Sings-Death said, “Why is the sky afire?”

Abraxander said, “We are in a pit, us, this ship, all of us. The light is outside the pit and falling inward, onto our heads. The pull of the Omega Point speeds up the light as it falls on us, but light cannot speed up, and so it must grow more energetic, more short-waved, as it falls. Normally, this light is too dark to see, a mere degree or so above absolute zero. But now, the universe is so small in diameter, that light from the Omega Point is departing and re-entering, even as a ship might sail east until the comes back west. That redness is the image of this place where we are now, but the light has traveled in a great circle. That is the light from the outside universe, falling down into the black hole with us. As the wavelength is compressed into visibility from infra-red, to us it seems red.”

The light underfoot grew brighter, and, all at once, the disk of the Central Sun swelled up and filled the view embraced by the table of glass where we stood. At the same time, the fires parted like mists. Even as mountain climbers make their way up through a low hanging cloud, but do not see the cloud, only a mist that receded from them, so too was it with us and the fires of the Central Sun. I bent down and touched the glass, but felt no heat from the surface.

“Look,” I said. “Bubbles. There are streams of fiery bubbles within the fire. Some sort of spray or…"

Ydmos said, “These streams are surely the Earth-Current: there is in them something salubrious to this, our condition of life.”

He-Sings-Death threw himself on his face, and pressed his cheek against the glass, squinting. “I see a tall tree. There! In one of the bubbles. A winter tree, for it has no leaf.”

Ydmos said, “It is a tower.”

Crystals-of-Bliss said, “No, my luckies, it is a ship. The Moon-ships of the Giants are great cylinders like this. An enemy. Or….” He glanced at Ydmos. “Or someone, beyond all hope, a-come now to rescue us?”

Abraxander said, “The
Spirit of Man
.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “That, there, it is a reflection. You are seeing this vessel from the outside. The 'bubble' is a place where space-time forms a standing wave, a node. Light is bent by gravity and returns back whence it came. This is our own image, sent back to us because the space is more badly bent there than around it. Look at the other bubbles. They are nodes as well. If the curvature is positive, a sphere, it will show the surrounding space, and contain all within it: if negative, a saddle, it opens up into something beyond the range of our light-cone, beyond what can be known or seen.”

He-Sings-Death jumped to his feet. “I saw a face! A drowned man! In the bubbles!” He pointed with his spear left and right. “Many faces! Look!”

Abraxander said, “Formation ghosts. Biological formations, in this case. These, we should be able to evoke more complex formations, depending on the initial energy of our imposed rotation. Worlds. Stars. Everything. However, the only available source of power is from the discontinuity engines of this vessel, which are entangled to the creatures who resurrected us.”

I said, “What are those bubbles? Windows into heaven?” For I saw faces, too. Faces of men and women, eyes closed in blissful sleep.

I was overcome with terror, for I was sure that, at any moment, the face of Lisa would float past the window. I cannot say why it was fear, not joy, that gripped my heart at the thought, but I was shaking.

Abraxander said "No. This is an Aleph. It contains the memory of the universe.”

Enoch said, “The elect are mixed here with the damned. Do not look into the dark bubbles. The faces are torn with pain, their mouths wide with screams they cannot utter, their eyes staring and blind. Do not look! It is not right that mortal men, who know but finite times of suffering, should look into the eyes of those who suffer without end.”

He-Sings-Death looked down. He gave a cry of awe and pointed with his spear down below his feet at something I could not see, “All the faces, white and dark alike, sleeping and suffering, are being pulled there, toward that greater light. There is a face within it greater than all others.”

Mneseus took my elbow. “Captain Powell. Yours is the mightiest weapon here. Slay us all, and kill yourself.”

I shook him from me. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, but why should–”

His eyes were flashing. “There was much in the tale of Abraxander-the-Threshold I did not know, and his words passed my ear, and no seed of understanding was planted in my heart. But this one seed was planted, took root, sprouted: in his tale, how did his people learn his art? The practice by which he conjured your iron thunder-spear, my bow, the bone club of the Gaea-born Kitimil?”

I said, “From a radio broadcast from another galaxy…" but I stopped, for I knew he could not imagine a second Milky Way (which, to him, was a road of stars stretched over the dome of the night sky) any more than he could believe in a second sun.

But he said, “To which this great ship—this hall you call it a ship—was sent. But it was a trap. He said this, in his tale. From whence did that art first come? The dark geometry he speaks of, that allows man to open doors between the heaven, earth, and hell, doors the gods abhor that men should open.”

“From them. From the enemy.”

“Do you think they taught him this art, and brought him back from the dead, to be in this place with us now, him and his dark arts, for some purpose that will bring men joy?”

The Blue Man was standing a little ways away from us, and now he raised his hand and spoke loudly, “Radio signals! I am intercepting a message, my bravos. Or—not intercepting—the mind, the mind inside the black hole. It is talking to me. She. It is Emerald-Laughter-of-Refulgent-Leaf.”

“Who?” I asked him.

Absent-mindedly (for he was listening to some voice inaudible to me, and his face was numb with wonder), he whispered. “She…. Was…. My daughter-wife. Made of my own tissues. We are genetically interlocked, chemically addicted to each other. Sterile with any other partners… we….”

Ydmos said, “Do not heed the voice, lest you draw her in, and feed your true love to the enemy.”

Mneseus said, “It is a siren. We will not be able to resist.”

The Blue Man said, “She is coming aboard.”

Kitimil was crouching on the glass floor, staring hungrily at the streams of light flowing past, at the thousands of shining bubbles caught in the light. He threw back his head and uttered a wolflike howl of triumph.

As if by instinct, I raised my rifle and took aim at him.

His face was now dark with wrath and triumph, as if uncounted years of carefully hidden anger now could no longer be suppressed. His hair and beard were bristling, and his lips were drawn back to show his fangs. His eyes were but slits in his dark face.

“Humans, how you forget! Between lives, we do not forget, the First People. When the Darkness fell down from the stars, it pleased the Silent Ones that you should be hunted from life to life, and wake without knowledge after every death. The First People did not please the Silent Ones: we were slain, cub and mother, young and old, and our sacred trees were torn up by the roots, our shades could not climb the branches to the sky. I, and I alone, escaped them, for it amused them to permit me to escape: for the world is a trap, all the world, and I had nowhere to run but here, and nothing to do but this. Now it all begins again.”

Because of the hypnosis or the magic Ydmos and Nergal had performed, I knew that by 'First People' he meant the race I knew as Neanderthals.

Abraxander said, “That one, Kitimil is performing a rotation. That one, he knows the same art as this one, me, but his reach is greater. The fourth-dimensional radius of his major axis embraces this entire area of space-time.”

I said to Kitimil, “Tell me what is going on! Tell me, sir, I warn you, or I shoot!”

He sneered at me. “You knew once, but you forgot.”

I blinked. Even though he was but a scant five yards from me, my vision was swimming, and I had trouble keeping him in my sights. The air between us was rippling.

I said, “We … we have met before …"

Kitimil said, “In other lives, all of you, over and over again. You forget, and I remember.”

Mneseus said to me, “Slay him. Surely he is the traitor we fear.”

I said to Ydmos, “What should I do?”

Ydmos said, “Do not wrong your fellow man, or it calls the Thoughts from the House of Silence, whose doors have never closed in all eternity.”

Mneseus said, “He is not a man; he is an earth-born.”

Kitimil grimaced and gave a chuckle. “Ask him, the archer, why he does not slay me himself? Why does he urge you to do the act?”

Enoch raised his wand and pointed it at Kitimil, “Silence! We agreed not to tell him.”

That made me lower my rifle. I blinked and looked around at the others. They were all wavering now, as light from underfoot was surging into the chamber. There was a pressure behind my eyes, like drunkenness, and my vision was blurred. “Tell me what?”

He-Sings-Death said, “Captain Powell is my friend. I will speak: Powell! We are all ghosts. Not you. That is why you were spared.”

I said, “What does that mean?” And I was surprised to hear the words come from my mouth in a voice that was thick and shaking with fear.

Abraxander tucked his hands into his sleeves like a mandarin. “The self versus non-self distinction is breaking down. We are entering a period of the universe where there is no more
this one
and
that one
. Look at my lips. I am not speaking. You are recalling my thoughts as if they are yours because we are all becoming one.”

Enoch pointed overhead, “Look. There is light below our feet, but we do not cast shadows. You cast a shadow. This is not flesh, our substance. You dreamt us into flesh, even as you dreamt the weapon you carry.”

I said, “Abraxander did that!”

Abraxander said, “Abraxander is but one of your reincarnations. During his life, Illsa Flosshild von Maarchen was reincarnated as Nimgwendoline-the-White-Link, and had been, tragically, wed to another, for you had not the patience to await the coming of your true love, promised from previous aeons, to reappear, and did not recognize her, but delivered her to your liege lord, Arthrobel-the-Circle-of-Stars, who was the potentate for the Third City of the Nine.”

I said, “Her name was Illsa Powell. Von Maarchen is her maiden name. Everyone calls her Lisa.”

He-Sings-Death, “When you were He-Sings-Death, she was She-Speaks-Fair, but she was bitten by a viper on your wedding night, but during the moment when she screamed and jumped in your arms, you thought, you thought she screamed because of the pleasure of you. In the sweat lodge, you walked in a vision to the Dry Place, where the shadows of the dead are kept, and He-Is-Rich, who rules the tribes of the dead, granted you leave to bring her up to the world again; but he did this to mock you, for a shadow cannot step into the sunlight.”

Ydmos said, “The dead did not mock you. She did come again, and you met her again, and fell in love, and were wed. Her name was Ulliona of East Bastion, daughter of Psymmachus the Librarian. I returned from a venture into the Night Land, but I carried a mind-sickness into the Last Redoubt from the unclean things that dwell in the Place of the Thing That Nods, and my thoughts were tainted with extradimensional infusions. In a fit of madness I slew her and my children; when I was brought to my senses again, the Lectors asked me to bite the Capsule, and slay myself, for despite my return to the Last Redoubt again, I carried the Night Land within me and the harsh rules of that outer world applied to me.”

Mneseus said, “She was Parthenope, Sorcerer-Queen of Ys, the seaport of the Land of Atlas. Of her you know, and she perished. When the waves in anger drowned our shining cities, her tomb was sunk also: but she was turned into a sea-mew by the gods, and rose again from the salt waves, and in my ship, I and my few men, we followed her white wings over trackless deeps to Aegyptian Lands, and I told the secrets of my lost peoples to the Pharoahs.”

Enoch raised his wand in both hands, and brought it down across his knee, to break it in two halves. He sent the broken fragments of stick clattering across the glass floor. “I am the traitor. I am the one who cannot say the Master-Word that Ydmos knows.”

I said “I thought you were Enoch the prophet, a holy man?”

“I am Enoch, son of Caine. I stole my mother, Lillith, from my murderous father, and made her my wife. I gathered my people inside the first wall of the first city, and Caine and his other sons gathered about. Caine called up the Grigorim, the Watchers sent from heaven to see the work of creation, but who lusted for the world and forgot their home. These fallen beings, these Watchers, encamped without my walls. Thus began the first of sieges of the first redoubt of man. As with the final siege from Ydmos’ time, treason from within betrayed the redoubt. They offered me a human woman, and life eternal, that she and I should meet and know love, true love, not merely once, but in life after life. The serpent you all feared, the darkness, is carried within me: but my memories are within you. We are entangled. We are one.”

Kitimil's teeth were clenched as he crouched on the glass floor, staring up at me, but he grinned like a skull. “Where is Magigi? Your woman has come again to you, not once, but many times. Why not mine?”

I looked up. There were two shadows on the ceiling. Mine, and the shadow of the Neanderthal. Kitimil was real.

When I brought my eyes down from the ceiling, Ydmos, Abraxander, Mneseus, Sings-Death and Enoch were gone. They had faded away.

I said, “You opened the coffins in the archive, to create the distraction, and you sent Nergal to fight the overseer.”