Each and each, his Chord were brought back to the Museum. Katherine, stumping on her walking cast, spent long hours in the exhibit hall. She hovered and guarded and warded, and stroked and petted and adjusted Orm the Beautiful’s hoard like a nesting falcon turning her eggs. His song sustained her, his warm bones worn against her skin, his voice half-heard in her ear.
He was broken and scattered. He was not a part of his Chord. He was lost to them, as other dragons had been lost before, and as those others his song would eventually fail, and flicker, and go unremembered.
After a few months, she stopped weeping.
She also stopped eating, sleeping, dreaming.
Going home.
They came as stragglers, footsore and rain-draggled, noses peeled by the sun. They came alone, in party dresses, in business suits, in outrageously costly T-shirts and jeans. They came draped in opals and platinum, opals and gold. They came with the song of Orm the Beautiful warm against their skin.
They came to see the dragons, to hear their threaded music. When the museum closed at night, they waited patiently by the steps until morning. They did not freeze. They did not starve.
Eventually, through the sheer wearing force of attrition, the passage of decades, the museum accepted them. And there they worked, and lived, for all time.
And Orm the Beautiful?
He had been shattered. He died alone.
The Chord could not reclaim him. He was lost in the mortal warders, the warders who had been men.
But as he sang in their ears, so they recalled him, like a seashell remembers the sea.
She cuts him from the belly of a shark.
If this were another kind of story, I should now tell you, fashionably, that the shark is not a shark. That she is not a she and he is not a he. That your language and symbology do not suffice for my purposes, and so I am driven to speak in metaphor, to construct three-dimensional approximations of ten-dimensional realities. That you are inadequate to the task of comprehension.
Poppycock.
You are a God.
The shark is a shark. A Great White, Carcharodon carcharias, the sublime killer. It is a blind evolutionary shot-in-the-dark, a primitive entity unchanged except in detail for—by the time of our narrative—billions of years.
It is a monster wonderful in its adequacy: the ultimate consumer. So simple in construction: over eighteen feet long, pallid on the belly and shades of gray above, in general form comprised of two blunt-ended, streamlined, flexible, muscular and cartilaginous cones. One is squat and one is tapered. They are joined together base to base.
It is a sort of meat ramjet. Water runs through, carrying oxygen, which is transferred to the blood by a primitive gill arrangement. At the tapered end are genitalia and propulsion. At the thick end are lousy eyesight, phenomenal olfactory and electrical senses, and teeth.
In the middle is six meters of muscle and an appetite.
Beginner’s luck; a perfect ten.
They are the last creatures in the universe, he and she and the shark. The real world, outside, is running down, and the world they inhabit is a false, constructed world.
But it is a real shark. Fishy blood slimes her hands as she slits its belly with the back-curve of knives that are a part of her, extruded from her hands at need. She grows extra arms as convenient, to hold the wound open while she drags him free.
The shark’s skin is silky-slick and sandpaper-rough simultaneously, scraping layers of material from the palms of her hands. The serrations on her blades are like those of the shark’s teeth, ragged jags meshing like the rollers of a thresher.
There had been three living things left in their world.
Now there are two.
She cuts him from the belly of a shark. Allowing himself to be swallowed was the easiest way to beach and kill the monster, which for humane reasons must be dead before the next stage of their plan.
He stands up reefed in gnawed car tires and bits of bungee cord, and picks rubber seaweed from his teeth. They are alone on a boat in a sea like a sunset mirror. The sky overhead is gray metal, and a red sun blazes in it. It is a false sun, but it is all they have.
They have carefully hoarded this space, this fragment of creation, until the very end. They have one more task to fulfill.
As for him, how can he survive being swallowed by a shark? If entropy itself comes along and eats you, breaks you down, spreads you out thin in a uniform dispersal permeating its meat and cartilage—if it consumes, if it digests you—surely that’s the end? Entropy always wins.
Final peace in the restless belly of a shark, nature’s perpetual motion machine. Normally, it would be the end.
But he is immortal, and he cannot die.
There, under the false and dying sun, becalmed on a make-believe sea, they do not make love. She is a lesbian. He is sworn to a celibate priesthood. They are both sterile, in any case. They are immortal, but their seed has been more fortunate.
Instead, he picks the acid-etched rubber and bits of diode from his hair and then dives into the tepid sea. The first splash washes the shark’s blood and fluids away.
The water he strokes through is stagnant, insipid. The only heartbeat it has known in lifetimes is the shark’s. And now that the shark’s is stilled, it won’t know the man’s. His heart does not beat. Where blood and bone once grew is a perfect replica, a microscopic latticework of infinitesimal machines.
He dives for the bottom. He does not need to breathe.
This desolate sea is little enough, but it is all there is. Outside the habitat, outside the sea and the sun and the boat and the gape-bellied corpse of the shark, outside of the woman and the man, nothing remains.
Or not nothing, precisely. But rather, an infinite, entropic sea of thermodynamic oatmeal. A few degrees above absolute zero, a few scattered atoms more populated than absolute vacuum. Even a transfinite amount of stuff makes a pretty thin layer when you spread it over an infinite amount of space.
Suffice it to say there is no place anyplace out there; every bit of it is indistinguishable. Uniform.
The universe has been digested.
While the man swims, the woman repairs the shark.
She doesn’t use needles and thread, lasers or scalpels. She has tools that are her hands, her body. They will enter the shark as they entered her, millennia ago, and remake the shark as they remade her, until it is no longer a consuming machine made of muscle and sinew, but a consuming machine made of machines.
They are infinitesimal, but they devour the shark in instants. As they consume it, they take on its properties—the perfect jaws, the perfect strength, the slick-sharp hide. The shark, mercifully dead, feels no pain.
The woman is more or less humane.
When the machines reach the animal’s brain, they assume its perfect appetite as well. Every fishy thought. Every animal impulse, every benthic memory, are merely electrical patterns flickering dark in already-decaying flesh. They are consumed before they can vanish.
The shark reanimates hungry.
She heaves it over the side with her six or eight arms, into the false, dead sea, where the man awaits it. It swims for him, driven by a hunger hard to comprehend—a ceaseless, devouring compulsion. And now it can eat anything. The water that once streamed its gills in life-giving oxygen is sustenance, now, and the shark builds more shark-stuff to incorporate it.
The man turns to meet it and holds up his hands.
When its jaws close, they are one.
The being that results when the shark and the man unify, their machinememories interlinking, has the shark’s power, its will, its insistent need. Its purpose.
The man gives it language, and knowledge, and will. It begins with the false world, then—the sea and the ship, and the gray metal sky, and the make-believe sun. These are tangible.
The woman, like the man, like the shark-that-has-become, is immortal, and she cannot die.
The shark will consume her last of all.
Consider the shark. An engine for converting meat into motion. Motion generates heat. Heat is entropy. Entropy is the grand running-down of the clock that is the universe.
The shark-that-has-become does nothing but eat. Time is irrelevant. What now the puny unwindings of planet and primary, of star and galaxy? There is no night. There is no day.
There are only the teeth of the shark, vacuuming the cosmos. Enormous electromagnetic webs spin out from its ever-growing maw, sweeping sparse dust and heat into its vasty gullet. The shark grows towards infinity.
The dead universe is swept.
The woman follows.
You are a God. For forty hundred thousand million days and forty hundred thousand million nights, the shark carries you under its unbeating heart. And when all space lie clean and empty, polished and waiting, you turn to her. You will consume her, last of all.
There will be nothing when she is gone. The entire universe will have passed down your throat, and even your appetite must be assuaged. And if it is not, you will devour yourself.
A machine can manage that.
You wonder what it will be like not to hunger, for a while.
But as you turn to swallow her, she holds up her hand. Her small, delicate hand that compasses galaxies—or could, if there were any left to compass.
Now, it cups the inverse glow of a naked singularity, as carefully hoarded as the shark, as the false-world that was the first thing to fall to the shark-that-has-become. She casts it before you, round and rolling, no bigger than a mustard seed.
You lunge. It’s hard and heavy going down, and you gulp it sharply. A moment later, she follows, a more delicate mouthful, consumed at leisure.
She joins the man and the shark in your consciousness. And it is her knowledge that calms you as you fall into the singularity you’ve swallowed, as you—the whole universe of you—is compacted down, swept clean, packed tight.
When you have all fallen in on yourself, she says, there will be a grand and a messy explosion. Shrapnel, chunks and blobs and incandescent energy. The heat and the fires of creation.
The promise of rebirth.
But for now, collapsing, the shark has consumed all there is to consume. The shark is a perfect machine.
And at the end of the world the shark is happy, after all.
You cannot really keep a princess in a tower. Not if she has no brothers and must learn statecraft and dancing and riding and poisons and potions and the passage of arms, so that she may eventually rule.
But you can do the next best thing.
In the land of the shining empire, in a small province north of the city of Messaline and beyond the great salt desert, a princess with a tip-tilted nose lived with her mother, Hoelun Khatun, the Dowager Queen. The princess—whose name, it happens, was Nilufer—stood tall and straight as an ivory pole, and if her shoulders were broad out of fashion from the pull of her long oak-white bow, her dowry would no doubt compensate for any perceived lack of beauty. Her hair was straight and black, as smooth and cool as water, and even when she did not ride with her men-at-arms, she wore split, padded skirts and quilted, paneled robes of silk satin, all emerald and jade and black and crimson embroidered with gold and white chrysanthemums.
She needed no tower, for she was like unto a tower in her person, a fastness as sure as the mountains she bloomed beside, her cool reserve and mocking half-lidded glances the battlements of a glacial virginity.
Her province compassed foothills, and also those mountains (which were called the Steles of the Sky). And while its farmlands were not naturally verdant, its mineral wealth was abundant. At the moderate elevations, ancient terraced slopes had been engineered into low-walled, boggy paddies dotted with unhappy oxen. Women toiled there, bent under straw hats, the fermenting vegetation and glossy leeches which adhered to their sinewy calves unheeded. Farther up, the fields gave way to slopes of scree. And at the bottoms of the sheer, rising faces of the mountains, opened the nurturing mouths of the mines.
The mines were not worked by men; the miners were talus, living boulders with great stone-wearing mouths. The talus consumed ore and plutonic and metamorphic rocks alike (the sandstones, slates, schists, and shales, they found to be generally bereft of flavor and nutrition, but they would gnaw through them to obtain better) and excreted sand and irregular ingots of refined metal.
The living rocks were gentle, stolid, unconcerned with human life, although casualties occurred sometimes among the human talus-herders when their vast insensate charges wholly or partially scoured over them. They were peaceful, though, as they grazed through stone, and their wardens would often lean against their rough sides, enjoying the soothing vibrations caused by the grinding of their gizzards, which were packed with the hardest of stones. Which is to say carborundum—rubies and sapphires—and sometimes diamonds, polished by ceaseless wear until they attained the sheen of tumbled jewels or river rock.
Of course, the talus had to be sacrificed to retrieve those, so it was done only in husbandry. Or times of economic hardship or unforeseen expense. Or to pay the tithe to the Khagan, the Khan of Khans might-helive-forever, who had conquered Nilufer’s province and slain her father and brother when Nilufer was but a child in the womb.
There had been no peace before the Khagan. Now the warring provinces could war no longer, and the bandits were not free to root among the spoils like battle ravens. Under the peace of the Khanate and protection of the Khagan’s armies, the bandit lords were often almost controlled.
So they were desperate, and they had never been fastidious. When they caught one of the talus, they slaughtered it and butchered the remains for jewels, and gold, and steel.
As has been mentioned, the princess of the land had no brothers, and the Khatun, finding it inexpedient to confine her only daughter until marriage (as is the custom of overzealous guardians in any age), preferred to train her to a terrifying certainty of purpose and to surround her with the finest men-at-arms in the land. To the princess and to her troop of archers and swordsmen, not incidentally, fell the task of containing the bandit hordes.