Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (29 page)

“We survived the first night after the lesion. We formed an expedition to make an escape attempt. There were sixty of us that first time. We managed to return to the Redoubt before the Night Land could change us too much, play with us too drastically. We aged. Some of us were taken and… You see them out there. There was no second expedition."

“My husband,” Plass said. “Where is he?”

“Yes… I know you. You are so much the same it hurts. You escaped at the very beginning.”

“I was the only one,” Plass said.

“You called it the Night Land,” Rasp said, holding up her hands, the case with her clavicle. “How appropriate.”

“No sun, no hope, only
order
,” Enoch said, as if the word were a curse. “Did you send yourselves, or were you sent by other fools?”

“Fools, I'm afraid,” Plass said.

“And you… You came back, knowing what you'd find?”

“It wasn't like this when I left. My husband sent ghosts to visit me. They told me a little of what's happened here… or might have happened.”

“Ghosts try to come into the Redoubt and talk,” Enoch said, her many legs shifting restlessly. “We refuse them. Your husband was caught outside that first night. He hasn't been changed much. He stands near the Watcher, frozen in the eyebeam.”

Plass sobbed and hid her face.

Enoch continued, heedless. “The only thing left in his control—to shed ghosts like dead skin. And never the same.. are they? He's allowed to take temporary twists of space-time and shape them in his own image. The allthing finds this sufficiently amusing. Needless to say, we don't let the ghosts bother us. We have too much else to do, just to keep our place secure, and in repair.”

“Repair,” Karn said with a beatific smile, and Olmy turned to her, startled by a reaction similar to his own. Karn did a small dance. “Disorder has its place here, then. You have to
work
to
fix things?”

“Precisely,” Enoch said. “I worship rust and age. But we're only allowed so much of it and no more. Now that you're here, perhaps you'll join us for some tea?” She smiled. “Blessedly, our tea cools quickly in the Redoubt. Our bones grow frail, our skin wrinkles. Tea cools. Hurry!”

“Don't be deceived by our bodies,” Deirdre Enoch said as she poured steaming tea into cups for all her guests. “They are distorted, but they are sufficient. The
allthing
can only perfect and elaborate; it knows nothing of real destruction.”

Olmy watched something ripple through the old woman, a shudder of slight change. She seemed not as old and wrinkled now, as if some force had turned back a clock.

“I'm not clear about perfection,” Olmy said, lifting the cup without enthusiasm. “I'm not even clear on how you come to look old.”

“We're not unhappy,” Enoch said. “That isn't within our power. We know we can never return to Thistledown. We know we can never escape.”

“You haven't answered Ser Olmy's question,” Plass said gently. “Are you independent here?”

“That wasn't his question, Ser Gena Plass,” Enoch said, an edge in her voice. “What you ask is not a
polite
question. I said, we were caught trying to escape. Some of us are out there in the Night Land now. Those of us who returned to the pyramid… did not escape the enthusiasm of the allthing
.
But it's influence here is limited. To answer one question at least: We have some independence.” Enoch nodded as if falling asleep, her head dropping briefly to an angle with her shoulders… an uncomfortable angle, Olmy would have thought. She raised it again with a jerk. “The universe I discovered… there is nothing else. It is all.”

“The Final Mind of the domain,” Plass said.

“I gather it regards the Way and the humans it finds here as objects of curiosity,” Olmy said. Rasp and Karn fidgeted.

“Objects to be recombined and distorted,” Enoch said. “We are materials for the ultimate in decadent art. The allthing is beyond our knowing.” She leaned forward on her cushion, where she had gracefully folded her legs into an agile lotus, and rubbed her nose reflectively with the back of one hand. “We are allowed to resist, I suspect, because we are antithesis.”

“The
allthing
has only known thesis,” Rasp said with a small giggle.

“Exa-a-a-ctly,” Enoch said, drawing out the word with pleasure. Struck by another sensation of unreality, Olmy looked around the group sitting with Enoch and himself: Plass, the twins, a small woman with a questing, feline expression behind Enoch who had said nothing. She carried the teapot around again and refilled their cups.

The tea was cold.

Olmy turned on his sitting pillow to observe the other elderly followers, arrayed around the circular room, still, subservient. Their faces had changed since his arrival, yet no one had left, no one had entered.

It had been observed for a dozen generations that Thistledown's environment and culture bred followers with proportionately fewer leaders, often assigned much greater power. Efforts were being made to remedy that—to reduce the extreme schisms of rogues such as Deirdre Enoch.
Too late for these,
he thought.
Does this allthing want followers?

He could not get his bearings long enough to plan his course of action. He felt drugged, but knew he wasn't.

“Can it tolerate otherness?” Karn asked, her voice high and sweet once more, like a child's.

“No,” Enoch said. “Its nature is to absorb and disguise all otherness in mutation, change without goal.”

“Like the Jarts?” Rasp asked, chewing on her thumb with a coyness and insecurity that was at once studied and completely convincing.

“Not like the Jarts. The Jarts met the allthing and it gave them their own Night Land. I fear it won't be long until ours is merged with theirs, and we are both mingled and subjected to further useless change.”

“How long?” Olmy asked.

“Another few years, perhaps.”

“Not so soon, then,” he said.

“Soon enough,” Enoch said with a sniff. She rubbed her nose again. “We've been here already for well over thousand centuries.”

Olmy tried to understand this. “Truly?” he asked, expecting her to break into laughter.

“Truly. I've had millions of different followers here. Look around you.” She leaned over the table to whisper to Olmy, “Waves in a sea. I've lived a thousand centuries in a thousand infinitesimally different universes. It plays with all world-lines, not just the tracks of individuals. Only I am relatively the same with each tide. I appear to be the real nexus in this part of the Way.”

“Tea cools… skin wrinkles… But you experience such a length of time?”

“Ten thousand lengths cut up and bundled and rotated.” She took a scarf from around her thin neck and stretched it between her firsts. “Twisted. Knotted. You were sent here to correct the reckless madness of a renegade… weren't you?”

“A Geshel visionary,” Olmy said.

Enoch was not mollified. She drew herself up and returned her scarf to her neck, tying it with a conscious flourish. “I was appointed by the Office of Way Maintenance by Ry Ornis himself. They gave me two of the best gate openers in the guild, and they instructed me, specifically, to find a gate into total order. I wasn't told why. I can guess now, however.”

“I remember two openers,” Plass said. “They don't.”

“They hoped you would find me transformed or dead,” Enoch said. “Well, I'm different, but I've survived, and after a few thousands of centuries, one's personality becomes rather rigid. I've become more like that Watcher and its huge gaping eye outside. I don't know how to lie any more. I've seen too much. I've fought against what I found, and I've endured atrocities beyond what any human has ever had to face. Believe me, I would rather have died before my mission began than see what I've seen.”

“Where is the other opener?” Olmy asked.

“In the Night Land,” Enoch said. “Issa Danna was the first to encounter the
allthing.
He and his partner, master Tolby Kin, took the brunt of its first efforts at elaboration.”

Rasp walked over to Olmy and whispered in his ear. “There never was a master opener named Tolby Kin.”

“Can anybody else confirm your story?” Olmy asked.

“Would you believe anyone here? No,” Enoch said.

“Not that it matters,” Plass said fatalistically. “The end result is the same.”

“Not at all,” Enoch said. “We couldn't close down the lesion now even if we had it in our power. Ry Ornis was correct. The rift had to be opened. The infection is not finished. If we don't wait for completion, our universe will never quicken. It'll be born dead.” Enoch shook her head and laughed softly. “And no human in our history will ever see a ghost. A haunted world is a living world, Ser Olmy.”

Olmy touched his tea cup with his finger. The tea was hot again.

The living quarters made available were spare and cold. Most of the Redoubt's energy went to keeping the occupants of the Night Land at bay; that energy was derived from the wall of the Way, an ingenious arrangement set up by Issa Danna before he was caught up in the lesion; sufficient, but not a surfeit by any means.

For the first time in days, Olmy had a few moments alone. He cleared a window looking south, toward the lesion and across about fifty kilometers of the Night Land. Enoch had provided him with a pair of ray-tracing binoculars.

Beyond a tracting grid stretched to its limits, and a glowing demarcation of complete nuclear destruction, through which nothing made of matter could hope to cross, less than a thousand meters from the pyramid, lay the peculiar vivid darkness and the fitful nightmare glows of the allthing's victims.

Olmy swung the lightweight binoculars in a slow steady arc. What looked like hills or low mountains were constructions attended by hundreds of pale figures, human-sized but only vaguely human in shape. They seemed to spend much of their time fighting, waving their limbs about like insect antennae. Others carried loads of glowing dust in baskets, dumping them at the top of a hill, then stumbling and sliding down to begin again.

The giant head modeled after the opener stood a little to the west of the Green Glass Castle. Olmy could not tell whether the head was actually organic material—human flesh—or not. It looked more like stone, though the eye was very expressive.

From this angle, he could not see the huge figure standing in the door of the castle; that side was turned away from the Redoubt. Nothing that he saw contradicted what Plass and Enoch had told him. He could not share the cheerful nihilism of the twins. Nevertheless, nothing that he saw could be fit into any philosophy or web of physical laws he had ever encountered. If there was a mind here, it was incomprehensibly different—perhaps no mind at all.

Still, he tried to find some pattern, some plan to the Night Land. A rationale. He could not.

Just before the tallest hills stood growths like the tangled roots of upended trees, leafless, barren, dozens of meters high and stretching in ugly, twisted forests several kilometers across. A kind of pathway reached from the northern wall of the Redoubt, through the demarcation, into a tortured terrain of what looked like huge strands of melted and drawn glass, and to the east of the castle. It dropped over a closer hill and he could not see where it terminated.

The atmosphere around the Redoubt was remarkably clear, though columns of twisted mist rose around the Night Land. Before a wall of blue haze at some fifty kilometers distance, everything stood out with complete clarity.

Olmy turned away at a knock on his door. Plass entered, wearing a look of contentment that seemed ready to burst into enthusiasm. “Now do you doubt me?”

“I doubt everything,” Olmy said. “I'd just as soon believe we've been captured and are being fed delusions.”

“Do you think that's what's happened?” Plass asked, eyes narrowing as if she had been insulted.

“No,” Olmy said. “I've experienced some pretty good delusions in training. This is real, whatever that means.”

“I must admit the little twins are busy,” Plass said, sitting on a small chair near the table. These and a small mattress on the floor were the only items of furniture in the room. “They're talking to anybody who knows anything about Enoch's gate openers. I don't think you can talk to the same person twice here in an hour—unless it's Enoch.”

Olmy nodded. He was still digesting Enoch's claim that the Office of Way Maintenance had sent an expedition with secret orders… In collusion with the opener's guild.

Perhaps the twins knew more than he did, or Plass. “Did you know anything about an official mission?” he asked.

Plass did not answer for a moment. “Not in so many words. Not ‘official.' But perhaps not without… support from Way Maintenance. We did not think we were outlaws.”

“You've both talked about completion. Was that mentioned when you joined the group?”

“Only in passing. A theory.”

Olmy turned back to the window. “There's a camera obscura near the top of the pyramid. I'd like to look over everything around us, try to make sense of our position.”

“Useless,” Plass said. “I'd wait for a visitation first.”

“More ghosts?”

Plass shrugged her shoulders and stretched out her legs, rubbing her knees.

“I haven't been visited,” Olmy said.

“It will happen,” Plass said flatly. She appeared to be hiding something, something that worried her. “I wouldn't look forward to it. But then, there's nothing you can do to prepare.”

Olmy laughed, but the laugh sounded hollow. He felt as if he were slowly coming unraveled, like Enoch's bundle of relived world-lines. “How would I know if I've seen a ghost?” he asked. “Maybe I have—on Thistledown. Maybe they're around us all the time, but don't reveal themselves.”