Awake in the Night Land (33 page)

All the stars known to the astronomers of history are gone: the galaxies have tumbled together into a vast and central fire, the Last Of All Suns. At the core of this sun is one infinitely heavy point of nothingness where nine-tenths of the mass and energy of the universe are compressed.

Of the remaining tenth part of the substance of the universe, some lingers yet in the form of matter, including a remnant of red dwarf galaxies, their cores absorbed into black holes, their arms choked with exhausted nebulae that will never collapse again to form fresh stars. The dying galaxies are streaming toward the central fire, and, from our position in time and space, seem, to us, not yet to have been consumed. Perhaps that event has happened: the light from it has not reached us. Some of the remaining universal mass is in the form of energy: the residue of the universe has dropped to a uniform background radiation just above absolute zero.

And one infinitely small residuum of the dying cosmos is matter and energy lingering yet in the form of living creatures and their works: there is one ship left, with us aboard.

There is something else aboard as well, something horribly alien to our continuum, to life, to time and space and order. The ship is theirs: we are as rats in the hold.

It was dark. A few fitful lanterns, perhaps a quarter mile up off the deck, perhaps fifteen billion years old, emitted sickly glints of greenish-yellow light. The pounding of numberless claws on the metal deckplates was like drumming rain.

The looming creature Ydmos called a Night-Hound came running ahead of a galloping pack of malformed hobgoblins. This breed of Night-Hound is a hard-skinned albino monster larger than a dray-horse, with a face like a hairless wolf and teeth like an alligator.

Ydmos raised his odd-looking weapon: it was a poleaxe tipped with a sharpened disk. The disk spun like a buzz saw, and a flare like lightning came from it, and a low roar like a lion’s roar. He swung, but the creature saved itself from a mortal blow to its thick neck by raising its forepaw into the blazing path of the weapon. The stroke chopped through scale and hide and muscle to part the monster's flesh from wrist to elbow. A fan of black and stinking blood flew up from the wound, and the creature screamed even more loudly than the lightning-roaring weapon.

The Night-Hound reared up on his hindquarters, one huge fore-limb hanging limply, and slashed down with its other. Its palm was wide as a dinner plate, its nails longer than dirks. Ydmos fell.

I lifted my trusty Holland & Holland elephant gun to my shoulder —or the dream thing, whatever it was, that pretended to be my fine old beauty of the gunsmith’s craft—and squeezed the trigger. The trigger had pull; the heft of the weapon was right. It felt heavy in my hands, trusted and familiar.

The rifle was solid. I could feel the grain of the wood against my cheek as I brought it to my shoulder, I could see the tiny scratches and irregularities in the polished barrel. The sights cast a very tiny shadow on the curved surface of the barrel. It was real. I had faith in it.

I fire a 900-grain slug at nearly four tons of muzzle-energy. The slug is thicker than my thumb, and you can knock over a tree with it, at short ranges. The familiar smell of cordite, cotton soaked in nitro, rose to my nostrils. (For a moment, a terrible moment, I was convinced this was all a dream, and that I would wake up again in the Veldt, the hot sun throwing a zebra-striped pattern of shadows from the long grass against my tent walls, and Lisa outside, looking pretty in her jodhpurs and pith helmet, calling me a slowpoke and telling me the game was getting away. For a moment.)

Fortunately, the matter-wizard Abraxander-the-Threshold (from Tau Ceti, circa AD 30,000) had also been able to materialize a heavy jacket with a padded shoulder. Even with this padding, the kick jarred my shoulder painfully. Either my imagination had over-charged the shells with powder, or I was weaker now than I had been when I was alive.

The Night-Hound went down as if felled by a hammer, its massive head half-severed at its horny collarbones, its chest blown open. I could see ribs, sliding chest-muscles, pumping lung tissue. Black blood streamed from its shattered neck and chest, and flooded across the deck. The stench was terrible. Even dead, its jaws continued to snap, and its legs continued to kick, and the barbs in his tail went in and out like the stinger in a dead wasp does.

You would think the creatures from hell, or from outer space, would be used to loud noises. It seemed not. All the monsters quailed at the report, shocked. A terrible silence hung in the corridor for a long, strange moment. The echoes of the shot reverberated through the ship, farther and farther, echo answering echo.

The monsters ran away.

Kitimil, the shaggy man, gripped the bone he used as a truncheon in his teeth, dropped to all fours, and scampered doglike across the deck toward Ydmos, and his wolfskin pelt flapped on his hairy back as he ran. If I am right, Kitimil is a Neanderthal, or some other pre-human homonid, the earliest of us, even as Ydmos was the latest. The method the Blue Man uses to discover our dates returns no reading from the Neanderthal, or so he says. (The Blue Man claims he is measuring of the regular decay of certain particles in our bodies—but how can these be our original bodies?) Kitimil may be from the future, after an age of degeneration, rather than from the past.

“It is too late!” I called, “Leave him!”

But I was wrong. The Neanderthal saw or sensed something I did not. The fingers of the gauntlet of Ydmos flexed slightly. His pole-arm was laying a foot or so to his right, its heavy disk-shaped ax-blade dark, not spinning. But when his hand trembled, the weapon slid across the deck, as if pulled by an invisible thread, into his grasp, and the blade lit up with terrible energy again.

Even as the main body of the monsters fled from us, there came a sound like a laugh both very near at hand, and from very many miles away, perhaps on another deck. It was one sound, coming from two different points in space. It was a large laugh, larger than an elephant’s lungs could have made. It was as if a hillside laughed, or a world, and we felt it in our bones.

That laugh made us flee in panic, despite our temporary victory. We ran from the monsters who were running from us, both sides fleeing the other. This is more common in irregular skirmishes than you might imagine: officers rarely report it when it happens, for no one can explain, later, why you run from someone you’ve routed. Panic happens in war.

Ahead of us was a place where a lantern had fallen, making a 100-yard wide crater in the deckplates. Even panicked, we were wise enough to turn aside, giving the thing wide berth as we circled the crater; the radiations leaking from the damaged glass were deadly. But the light was brighter here because of it, giving us a glimpse of what lay ahead: before us, we saw the whole tremendous width of the corridor was filled with an encroaching black mist, and the lanterns overhead were winking out, one by one. In the depth of the mist could be glimpsed pale and quivering mounds of flesh, the bodies of enormous slugs, large as freight trains, crawling blindly toward us, quite without noise.

To my left, I saw a wide hatch swing quietly open. This section of bulkhead was between two buttresses, half-hidden in the dim light. I saw, through the open hatch, a set of metal stairs, going down and down.

The Neanderthal pointed toward the valve with his bone truncheon, beckoning us, and he gave a soft hoot. He did not wait to see if we followed, but, with Ydmos still across his back, the shaggy man was away, scooting on all fours down the stairs.

I hissed softly, afraid to raise my voice, but Kitimil did not answer. Gloom swallowed him.

Mneseus, the sorcerer-king from Atlantis, and Enoch the antediluvian, both sprinted toward the stairs. The Blue Man, who was calling himself Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss today, never does anything in a hurry, and so he strolled in a leisurely saunter after them. The Cave-Man or Redskin or whatever—he was named He-Sings-Death—came and stood near me, his spear in its spear-thrower held lightly at his shoulder, his eyes turned intently toward the approaching wall of mist, the silent masses of blind slug-flesh. He bounced on his toes in an agony of impatience: he obviously wanted to flee down the stair, and escape this wide expanse of open corridor, but did not want to abandon gray-haired Abraxander, or me.

I mistrusted the stairs: I felt we were being herded. But in a small company of eight men, leaderless, whoever is the most rash will lead, and the rest must follow or allow the company to be scattered.

I trudged down the stairs into the gloom, rifle ready, Abraxander-the-Threshold on slippered feet, coming in a silken rustle of robes behind me. He-Sings-Death, silent as a cat, came after, watching backwards for signs of pursuit, his spear-hand at his shoulder, elbow high, tense and ready to cast.

We all flinched when the valve came quietly shut behind us, cutting off the lamplight from the corridor.

I must explain how I held a weapon from a world, and a solar system, and a galaxy, long ago dissolved.

Four sleeps ago (and our sleeps were of no even length: the hours were unknown; no sun shined, no churchbell rang, in this coffin of black steel larger than worlds), another member of our dwindling company, a matter-wizard named Abraxander-the-Threshold, had somehow materialized this weapon from my past. “Fleshed it from Dreaming” so he said: that I had known and loved it in life allowed him (somehow) to find it or recreate it from out of the abyss of years.

At first, the firearm had been a thing of gossamer, a ripple that I could only see from the corner of my eye. When I was nodding into restless sleep in a hidden closet of steel where we cowered, only then could I feel the weight in my hand.

Three sleeps ago, I woke from a dream about my rifle to find its shadow in my hand. At that time, the stock was a mere line of cigarette smoke, with a translucent smudge for a lock, a blurred cloud for a barrel. We fled from trolls who came from the darkness toward us, and I did not attempt to shoot.

When I slept and woke again, the weapon was made of colored glass that faded in and out of view. The Sound we think heralds the coming of the Thing-That-Spins passed near us, and half the company did not answer when we counted off in the pitch dark. There was no target then, nor later when hissing, chuckling shapes made of luminous vapor overtook the slower runners.

I think the raid on the pantry was that evening. Or had that been earlier? We needed water, and we found creatures enough like humans to have a supply. The near-humans seemed to be made of flesh, and time passed for them as it did for us. They bowed before a Shape like a pale mask that hung in the midst of a gray cloud above the deck, and when tendrils of cloud plucked up two of the near-humans, they screamed in voices like ours, and the blood they shed was red. We waited in silence, hidden, till the manifestation of the Pallid Mask had withdrawn, leaving only mortal and three-dimensional enemies in the chamber.

We rushed against them: Crooked-armed near-humans who wielded glassy knives, giants armed with maces and flails, and dripping monsters who looked like disease-crusted boars were our foes. Here also was one iron-faced Hag the size of an open-air butcher’s shop I saw once in Ivory Coast, and a smell not less putrid.

The Giants panted and hooted and grinned at us, and we lost ten men for every one of them we toppled with grapnel and line. The Hag crouched behind the Giants and snatched any of our fallen she could reach with her ever-lengthening worm-arms, and tossed them lightly into her stew-pot: it was Ydmos who cleaved her in two, though her left half, which lived on, swatted him with her claw-foot, and sent him tumbling with a blow that would have killed a smaller man. Others of our band held her hopping foot at bay with spears and lengths of pipe until Ydmos found his feet again, and ran back with this weapon held high in both hands, its blade blazing like a St. Catherine’s wheel. My rifle still was too soft and dreamlike to be of any use: I fought with a machete.

Today, as I woke, my rifle had been like a colored painting, very authentic to the eye, but oddly slick and buoyant in my grip. It cast no shadow on the ground. It had no odor to it, and when I flicked a fingernail against the barrel, or worked the bolt, there was no noise. But when the time came to fire it, it fired.

I had been resurrected in the Archive earlier than most of the others. It was never clear what the faceless creatures wanted with us: we could not communicate with them. They were not alive.

As the Archive burned, the tall silent shapes on the far side of the chamber raised their thin hands and motioned for a horde of lantern-eyed things to gather us in. The humans ran, scattered.

There may have been as many as a million of us at first. How many hours we were hunted through the lightless halls and corridors, each army of us rushing in a different direction, down corridors taller than the nave of a cathedral, through darkened chambers vaster than caverns, I cannot number.

After an hour of panicked flight, some eight hundred of us, cut off from the others, found ourselves in a storage bay. Here, thankfully, there was no huge watching beast, larger than a mountain, waiting without noise or motion or any sign of life for human souls to enter in.

There was a strange assembly, during which we debated our fate. We came from periods so far scattered in time, that only a few of us knew the names of the lands or the ages of the others. Something like dread crept over me, when I realized that, of all the men of my future, none of them knew of the outcome of the Great War, or recalled the names of the nations involved. Only two of the men there knew what the Roman Catholic Church had been, or the Roman Empire: one man knew of England, but no one knew of New England. Even those ages, far past my own, that had some record of flying machines, could not name the brothers who had invented it, or the country from which they had come, any more than I could name the name and country of the inventor of the wheel, or the lever, or the bow.