Beyond the Farthest Suns (13 page)

I looked at Roderick, frozen in terror, and then at Maja, her eyes like pits sucking in nothing, as isolated as any corpse—but still
alive
.

The walls shuddered around me. The fibers withdrew from the stones, and where they no longer held, cracks appeared, running in crazed patterns over the white and yellow surfaces. The tiles of the floor heaved up, their tessellations disrupted, all order scattered.

Cant took my hand and led me through the disintegrating corridors, down the shivering and swaying stairs. Behind me, the stairs buckled and crumbled, and the beams of the ceiling split and jabbed down to the floor like broken elbows. Ahead, a tide of fibers withdrew from the house like sea sucked from a cave, and above the ripping snap of tearing timbers, the rumble and slam of stone blocks falling and shattering, I heard Roderick's high, chicken-cluck shriek, the cry of an avatar driven past desperation into madness:

“No death!
No Death!
King Nerve forever!”

And his bray of laughter at the final jest revealed, all his plans cocked asunder.

The antitheticals blew me through the front door like a wind, and down the walk into the ruined garden, among the twisted and fiber-covered trees, until I was away from the house of Roderick Escher. All of his spreading distractions and entertainments, all of his chambers filled with the world's diversions, the pandering to the commonest denominators of a frozen or disembodied horde … the impossible and convoluted towers leaned, shuddered, and collapsed, blowing dust and splinters through the door and the windows of the first floor.

The fibers pushed from the ground, binding my feet, rising up my legs toward my trunk, feeling through my suit, probing for secrets, for solutions. I felt voices and demands in my head, petulant, childish:

Show us.

Do for us.

Give us.

The fibers burrowed into my flesh with thousands of pricks like tiny cold needles.

Cant took my arm. “You are favored,” she said.

The voices picked at my thoughts, rudely invaded my memories, making crude and cruel jokes. They seemed to know nothing but expletives, arranged in no sensible order, and they applied them accompanied by demands that went beyond the obscene, demands that echoed again and again; and I saw that this new world was composed not of gods, but of rude, ill-bred children who had never faced responsibility or consequence, and whose lives were all secrecy, all privilege, conducted behind thick and impersonal walls.

Tingles shot up my hands and feet and along my spine, and I felt sparks at the very basement of my reason.

Do for us, do everything, live for us, let us feel, all new and all unique, all superlatives and all gladness and joy, and no death no end.

My hands jerked out, holding a pack of cards, and I felt a will other than mine—a collective will—move my fingers, attempt to spread the cards into a fan. The fingers jerked and spilled the cards into the dirt, across the creeping fibers. “Get them away from me!” I cried in furious panic.

The blocks and timbers and reduced towers of the House of Escher settled with a final groaning sigh, but I pictured Roderick and Maja buried beneath its timbers, still alive.

The fibers lanced into my tongue. The voices filling my head hissed and slid and insinuated like snakes, like
worms in my living brain,
demanding
tapeworms
, asking numbing questions, prodding, prickling, insatiable.

Cant said, “You must assert yourself. They demand much, but you have so much to give—”

The fibers shoved down my throat, piercing and threading through my tissues as if to connect with every cell of my being. I clawed at my mouth, my throat, my body, trying to tug free, but the fibers were strong as steel wires, though thinner than the strands of a spider's web.

“Newness is a treasure,” Musnt said, standing beside Cant. Wont and Shant and Dont joined her.

My legs buckled, but the fibers stiffened and held me like a puppet. I could not speak, could only gag, could hardly hear above the dissonant voices.

Amuse.

Give all.

Share all.

“Hail to the new and most masterful,” Cant said worshipfully, smiling simply, innocently. Even in my terror and pain that smile seemed angelic.

“A hundred billion people cannot be wrong,” Shant said, and touched the crown of my head with his outspread hand.

“We anoint the new Master of King Nerve,” the five said as one, and I could breathe for myself, and speak for myself, no more.

The Way of All Ghosts

T
he Thistledown sequence—
Eon
,
Eternity
, and
Legacy
—began with “The Wind from a Burning Woman.” This most recent story was commissioned by Robert Silverberg for his anthology,
Far Horizons
.

I've long been fascinated by the visionary novels of William Hope Hodgson, and in particular, his magnum opus,
The Night Land
, published in 1912. Hodgson died in 1918 at Ypres, ending a very short and very influential career. Today,
The Night Land
is a difficult­ book to read, for stylistic reasons mostly—Hodgson affected a pseudo-Georgian­ style that doesn't really work for contemporary readers, though it does create a dreamlike sense of an ornately sentimental alternate reality.

But more important is the incredible atmosphere of his most fabulous creation, the Night Land itself.

It seemed to me that a science fictional treatment of this vision, set in the Thistledown sequence, would serve more as a collaborative tribute than a rip-off, and Robert Silverberg agreed. Hence the dedication.

Later, I wrote a book on themes echoing some of those found in
The Night Land
and Arthur C. Clarke's
The City and the Stars
, my novel
City at the End of Time
.

Check out
The Night Land
and William Hope Hodgson's many shorter works. We lost something very special at Ypres.

A Myth from Thistledown
For William Hope Hodgson

Preface:

Once upon a very long extension, not precisely time nor any space we know, there existed an endless hollow thread of adventure and commerce called the Way, introduced in
Eon
(Bluejay/Tor, 1985). The Way, an artificial universe fifty kilometers in diameter and infinitely long, was created by the human inhabitants of an asteroid starship called
Thistledown
. They had become bored with their seemingly endless journey between the stars; the Way, with its potential of openings to other times and other universes, made reaching their destination unnecessary.

That the Way was destroyed (in
Eternity,
Warner, 1988) is known; that it never ends in any human space or time is less obvious.

Even before its creators completed their project, the Way was discovered and invaded by the nonhuman Jarts, who sought to announce themselves to Deity, what they called Descendant Mind, by absorbing and understanding everything, everywhere. The Jarts nearly destroyed the Way's creators, but were held at bay for a time, and for a price.

Yet there were stranger encounters. The plexus of universes is beyond the mind of any individual, human or Jart.

One traveler experienced more of this adventure than any other. His name was Olmy Ap Sennen. In his centuries of life, he lived to see himself become a living myth, be forgotten, rediscovered, and made myth again. So many stories have been told of Olmy that history and myth intertwine.

This is an early story. Olmy has experienced only one re-incarnation­ (
Legacy
, Tor, 1995). In fee for his memories, he has been rewarded with a longing to return to death everlasting.

1

“Probabilities fluctuated wildly, but always passed through zero. Gate openers, their equipment, and all associated personnel within a few hundred meters of the gate were swallowed by a null that can only be described in terms of mathematics. It became difficult to remember that these individuals had ever existed; records of their histories were corrupted or altered, even though they were stored millions of kilometers from the incident. We had tapped into the geometric blood of the gods. But we knew we had to continue. We were compelled.”

—
Testimony of Master Gate Opener Ry Ornis,
Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite
Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability of
Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”

The ghost of his last lover found Olmy Ap Sennen in the oldest columbarium of Alexandria, within the second chamber of the
Thistledown
.

Olmy stood in the middle of the hall, surrounded by stacked tiers of hundreds of small golden spheres. The spheres were urns. They rose to the glassed-in ceiling, held within columns of gentle yellow suspension fields. Most contained only a sample of ashes.

He reached out to a blank silver plate on the base of the nearest column. One after another, the names of the dead appeared as if suddenly engraved.

Olmy pulled back his hand when the names reached
Ilmo, Paul Yan.
This is where the soldiers from his childhood neighborhood were honored; five names in this column, all familiar to him from days in school, and all killed in a single skirmish with the Jarts near 3 ex 9, three billion kilometers down the Way.

These urns were empty. His friends had been obliterated without trace. He did not know the details. He did not need to. They had served Thistledown as faithfully as Olmy, but they would never return.

Olmy had spent seventy-three years stranded on the planet Lamarckia, in the service of the Hexamon, but cut off from the Thistledown and the Way that stretched beyond the asteroid's seventh chamber. On Lamarckia, he had raised children, loved and buried wives … lived a long and memorable life in primitive conditions on an extraordinary world. His rescue and return to the Way, followed by conversion from an old and dying man to a fresh-bodied youth, had been a shock worse than the return of any real ghost.

Axis City, slung on the singularity that occupied the geodesic center of the Way, had been completed during those tumultuous years before Olmy's rescue and resurrection. It had moved four hundred thousand kilometers “north,” down the Way, far from the seventh chamber cap.

Within the Geshel precincts of Axis City, the mental patterns of many who died were now transferred to City Memory, a technological afterlife not very different from the ancient dream of heaven. Using similar technology, temporary partial personalities could be created to help an individual multi-task. These were sometimes called ghosts, or partials. Olmy had heard of partials being sent to do the bidding of their originals, with most of their mental faculties, but limited power to make decisions. He had never actually met one, however.

The ghost appeared just to his right and announced its nature by flickering, becoming translucent, and briefly turning negative. This display lasted a few seconds. After, the simulacrum seemed perfectly solid and real.

Olmy surveyed the ghost's features, then shook his head and smiled. “Hello, Neya.”

“It will give my original joy to find you well,” the partial said. “You seem lost, Ser Olmy.”

Olmy did not know what form of speech to use with a ghost. Should he address it with respect due to the original, a corprep and a woman of influence … The last woman he had tried to be in love with … Or as he might address a servant?

“I come here often,” he said. “These are old acquaintances.”

The image looked concerned. “Poor Olmy. Still don't belong anywhere.”

Olmy ignored this. He looked for the ghost's source. It was being projected from a small, fist-sized flier hovering several meters away.

“I'm here on behalf of my original, corporeal representative Neya Taur Rinn,” the ghost said. “You do realize … I am not her?”

“I'm not ignorant,” Olmy said, finding himself once more at a disadvantage with this woman.

The ghost seemed to fix her gaze on him. The image, of course, was not actually doing the seeing. “The presiding minister of the Way, Yanosh Ap Kesler, instructed me to find you. My original was reluctant. I hope you understand.”

Olmy folded his hands behind his back as the partial picted a series of ID symbols: Office of the Presiding Minister, Hexamon Nexus Office of Way Defense, Office of Way Maintenance. Quite a stack of bureaucracies, Olmy thought, Way Maintenance currently being perhaps the most powerful and arrogant of them all.

“What does Yanosh want with me?” he asked.

The ghost lifted her hands and pointed her index finger into her palm, tapping with each point. “You supported him in his bid to become presiding minister of the Seventh Chamber and the Way. You've become a symbol for the advance of Geshel interests.”

“Against my will,” Olmy said. Yanosh, a fervent progressive and Geshel, had sent Olmy to Lamarckia—and had also brought him back and arranged for his new body. Olmy for his part had never known quite which camp he belonged to: conservative Naderites, grimly opposed to the extraordinary advances of the last century, or the enthusiastically progressive Geshels. Neya Taur Rinn's people were Geshels of an ancient radical faction, among the first to move into Axis City.

The partial continued. “Ser Kesler has won re-election as presiding minister of the Way and now also serves as mayor of three precincts in Axis City.”

“I'm aware.”

“Of course. The presiding minister extends his greetings and hopes you are agreeable.”

“I am very agreeable,” Olmy said mildly. “I stay out of politics and disagree with nobody. I can't pay back Yanosh for all he has done—but then, I have rendered him due service as well. Yanosh knows I've put myself on permanent leave.” He did not like being baited—and could not understand why Yanosh would send Neya to fetch him. The presiding minister knew enough about Olmy's private life—probably too much. Olmy could not restrain himself. “Pardon me for boldness, but I'm curious. How do you feel? Do you actually
think
you are Neya Taur Rinn?”

The partial smiled. “I am a high-level partial given subordinate authority by my original,” it said.
She
said … Olmy decided he would not cut such fine distinctions.

“Yes, but what does it
feel
like?” he asked.

“At least you're still alive enough to be curious,” the partial said.

“Your original regarded my curiosity as a kind of perversity,” Olmy said.

“A morbid curiosity,” the partial returned, clearly uncomfortable. “I couldn't stand maintaining a relationship with a man who wanted to be
dead.
”

“You rode my fame until I bored you,” Olmy rejoined, then regretted the words.

The partial seemed to consider how to respond. “To answer your question, I
feel
everything my original would feel. And my original would hate to see you here. What do
you
feel like, Ser Olmy?” The ghost's arm swung out to indicate the urns, the columbarium. “Walking among the truly dead—that's pretty melodramatic.”

That a ghost could remember their time together, could carry tales of this meeting to her original—to a woman he had admired with all that he had left of his heart—both irritated and intrigued him. “You were attracted to me because of my history.”

“I was attracted to you because of your strength,” the ghost said. “It hurt me that you were so intent on living in your memories.”

“I clung to you.”

“And to nobody else …”

“I don't come here often,” Olmy said. He shook his hands out by his side and stepped back. “All my finest memories are on a world I can never go back to. Real loves … real life. Not like Thistledown now.” He squinted at the image. The ghost's focus was precise; still, there was something false about it, a glossy, prim neatness unlike Neya. “You didn't help.”

The ghost's expression softened. “I don't take the blame entirely, but your distress doesn't please my original.”

“I didn't say I was in distress. I feel a strange peace, in fact. Why did Yanosh send you? Why did you agree to come?”

The ghost reached out to him. Her hand passed through his arm. She apologized for this breach of etiquette. “For your sake, to get you involved, and for the sake of my original, please, at least speak to our staff. The presiding minister needs you to join an expedition.” She seemed to consider for a moment, then screw up her courage. “There's trouble at the Redoubt.”

Olmy felt a sting of shock at the mention of that name. The conversation had suddenly become more than a little risky. He shook his head vigorously. “I do not acknowledge even knowing of such a place,” he said.

“You know more than I do,” the partial said. “I've been assured that it's real. Way Defense tells the Office of Way Maintenance that it now threatens us all.”

“I'm not comfortable holding this conversation in a public place,” Olmy protested.

This seemed to embolden the partial, and it projected Neya's image closer. “This area is quiet and clean. No one listens.”

Olmy stared up at the high glass ceiling.

“We are not being observed,” the partial insisted. “The Nexus and Way Defense are concerned that the Jarts are closing in on that sector of the Way. I am told that if they occupy it and gain control of the Redoubt, Thistledown might as well be ground to dust and the Way set on fire like a piece of string. That scares my original. It scares
me
as I am now. Does it bother you in the least, Olmy?”

Olmy looked along the rows of urns … Centuries of Thistledown history, lost memory, now turned to pinches of ash—or less.

“Yanosh says he's positive you can help,” the partial said with a strong lilt of emotion. “It's a way to rejoin the living and make a new place for yourself.”

“Why should that matter to you? To your original?” Olmy asked.

“Because my original still regards you as a hero. I still hope to emulate your service to the Hexamon.”

Olmy smiled wryly. “Better to find a living model,” he said. “I don't belong out there. I'm rusted over.”

“That is not true,” the partial said. “You have been given a new body. You are youthful and strong, and very experienced …” She seemed about to say more, but hesitated, rippled again, and faded abruptly. Her voice faded as well, and he heard only “Yanosh says he's never lost faith in you—”