Awake in the Night Land (37 page)

“My people, us, we thought Seyfert galaxies were a natural phenomenon. So foolish. Us, we thought the Hubble expansion that is draining the universe of useful energy was a natural phenomenon, too. And the neutron stars called black holes, which eat everything.

“In the sweep, they overlooked us. No one knows why. Mars, and the world that once was between Mars and Jupiter…”

Mneseus said, “We called that world Tartaros. It was haunted, even when broken. The ghosts of the void are dangerous to dream-travelers. No fully human has even returned sane from an astral journey beyond the region of the moon, except, perhaps, the dreamer Snireth-Ko.”

Kitimil muttered, “Kuranes. He goes further. He sees the Abyss.”

Abraxander continued: “The two worlds in Sol were destroyed. But not Earth, except a glancing blow that extinguished the dinosaurs. Uranus was knocked sideways on his axis, and Pluto—but that world was discovered after your time Captain Powell, wasn’t it? A ninth planet. Originally it was a moon ripped from the planet Neptune.

“They overlooked the Earth and departed. Perhaps they overlooked another world in the universe as well: my ancestors, they heard radio signals, a mathematical code, issuing from a spot in the Lesser Cloud of Magellan. Instruments indicated a civilization advanced enough to use—these here, you do not know what a radio-pulsar is, do you? A star crushed and spun to produce a regular vibration. It can be held between two other dead stars, to make neutron waves–little parts of matter. Neutrons are little parts of matter of exceeding fineness, that fly, and can be blocked by nothing. Neutronic waves are an effect that has no counterpart in nature. We heard the signal, our ancestors.

“A ship was dispatched. What a ship! The greatest ever built. She was built at the height of the second aeon of star-farers, one aeon before my time.

“This one, me, I deem that the ship of which our records spoke, the fair, high ship, forgotten, in our day, save in the songs that children sang, is this one, her.

“Provisioned to run a billion years, fueled to last till the last proton decayed, five hundred miles from stem to stern, the brightest engine, the brightest star, greatest ship that flew far beyond far. Do you know the song? And done for a dream. Done, even though those who launched her knew their great-grandchildren would be dead before the destination was reached. This is the
Spirit of Man
.”

I said, “What happened?”

He shook his head. ”By the time the human race translated the mathematical code the creatures of Doradus S were sending, it was far, far too late to recall the ship.

“Their math told us a terrible secret. Our discovery was that if we turned our souls sideways in the dimensions between the time-flow and the mind-flow, we could bridge the gap between IS and MUST NOT BE. You see? It changed the nature and the dimensions of thought. The radio signals taught us the universal symbol set. It gave us the tools we needed to open the Utter Door.

“No one of my time, no criminal, no wicked tyrant, no mass-convocation, was dire enough to tempt the Utter Door. But the math was there. Once it was known, it could not be forgotten. The non-Euclidean arrangement of time, energy, eternity, mind, space, madness, dream, reality: the shapes had been discovered. The rotations of the nine-dimensional polyomnihedral chiliagons had been mapped out… we… something came backwards through the gap. Something from the far future, after the heat-death period, when time itself reverts to its primordial symmetry: the Eschaton, the point at which time is null. And the creatures that had swept this galaxy clean of life billions of years ago. The creatures of the far future and far past, the creatures of the outer darkness between the stars. They were the same, somehow.”

The Blue Man said, “And so, my bravos, you have no notion of who they are, these cold faces hanging in the murk? Oho.”

Abraxander said, “They are the enemy, not merely of human life, but of all complex biological systems, everything that depends on sunlight for process, or exists embedded on one-directional time, three-extensional space. They are not of the ordered part of the universe.”

He-Sings-Death said, “They are monsters.”

Now the Blue Man laughed. “No, my dear comrades, we are the monsters. Us. They adapted to the conditions of outer space, outer darkness, and, when time ends, they adapt to conditions of non-time. So why not step backwards through time, make themselves, plant their own seeds, rewrite history to write themselves into the plot from the very beginning?”

Ydmos said, “An old heresy, and one that never dies. It is an illusion. Not all evil is of human making.”

I said to the Blue Man, “You are saying what? Those things out there? The statues with the staring eyes, the silent shadows wearing gauze, the black mist, the thing that laughed? The slugs, the trolls, Dry Tree, the Pallid Mask. They're us? Humans?”

The Blue Man said, “Changed by science to something no human would recognize, yes, my dolls, my dears, my poppets. Think! What else would our descendents be, but something we cannot recognize? What else would they do, once they broke open the wall of time?”

I said, “And would humans wipe out all life in the universe?”

The Blue Man smiled. “Why not wipe out all life in the great dark beyond? All
other
life, that is. All the competition. They did not overlook or forget about the Earth! They cleared the fields for her. Then they traveled backward in time to restart the universe with Man on top, right at the initial condition set. Why not?”

Mneseus said, “And so this horror, all this death, is not a horror at all, but a victory…? A triumph of the human spirit?”

Ydmos said sharply, “No human spirit has triumphed here, no matter how powerful the creature.” He turned to the Blue Man. “It is an old falsehood, one of the oldest. The Ulterior Ones are nothing like us. There is no remainder when a human soul is
sorbed
, consumed by the soul-eaters. It is not a communion; it does not draw the souls together. They are not our ancestors, nor our descendents, nor servants who rebelled, nor a punishment for some ancestral crime, nor something we unwisely stirred up by our overweening pride. Nor are they humans who adapted to the cold, though they do keep some maladapted humans like that with them, as pets, to lend credence to the lie, and some of them have the art of mocking our looks and our voices. Do you understand? They are nothing of ours.”

The Blue Man shook his head. “It makes this son of Mother Earth happy to see that humanity will decay so far after me. Didn't you hear when Abraxander told us where and when we are? This is the end of time-space: all boundaries decay. At the Eschaton point all values fall to zero, as they were before the beginning. Time swallows its own tail. It all begins again. So why are we here, now, where the structure of the next universe is set to be decided, eh? When the barriers of time go down, we will be part of the timelessness, won't we?”

Ydmos said, “Beware your thoughts. You venture into the regions of the House of Silence. When mortal men think thoughts like unto theirs, the Silent Ones are not unaware.”

The Blue Man puffed his pipe again. “The event-conditions of the Timelessness, they cannot be so much harder to hack and reprogram than the doors on this ship. I can set the next universe up according to parameters. I got all the coffins open, didn't I? Once the ape-man there gave me the command key.” He nodded toward Kitimil.

I said, “Key?” Odd. How would an ape-man know how to unlock a complex machine of the future.

The Blue Man said, “Not so much different from the command keys I embedded in the bio-structural phages I used to clean up and fix up the Old Man's head. They have made nerve connections by now, and are open for signal-channel. You understand me?”

With a sinking feeling, I did. I said, “You poisoned Ydmos when he asked you to heal him.”

“Oh, more complicated, much and much, than that, birth-born.”

I said, “Sir, I do not mean to seem harsh, but I have yet to understand why I should not shoot you.”

Abraxander pointed at the Blue Man, saying, “Caution. That one, him, he claims injunction. That one claims the other one, Ydmos of Utter Tower, him, is enthralled. Ensorcelled.”

The Blue Man smiled a mocking smile. “The blue goo I put in the head of Ydmos; an open wound! How could I resist? I can send commands; my little mites will find the nerve ends and set his muscles jumping. Your little chemical-explosive propelled bullet will not penetrate his armor, and I can pull his limbs like a puppet to have you cut in two. The action-commands are on the trip: as soon as I am in pain or in shock or my brain-action is interrupted, the blocks open, and off he goes.”

Ydmos, for his part, smiled a bitter smile. “Perhaps, long ago, the Watching Things rejoiced to see men do their evil work for them. But such weakness is no longer in us. Men of my time cannot butcher each other.”

He did not say 'butcher', but used a word that meant to slay a monster. Evidently, there was no word in his language for killing men. I noticed that he said 'cannot' rather than 'do not' or 'should not'. He used the word-ending with an indicative rather than imperative voice, as if it were a statement of fact, not a question of moral judgment.

Abraxander-the-Threshold said to Crystals-of-Bliss, “Such a use of the polydimensional art will call upon that one, you, a counter-injunction. Certain rotations are possible to one who has done such a deed, which cannot be performed on an innocent man. The mathematical configuration is prepared. I repent that this one, me, must once again abuse the Art, and commit the gravest crime one of my order can commit. Human cellular action does not take place when the variables are rotated into the fourth dimension. The matter-energy balance of the original situation is established instead, without the negative energy spaces that allow for life. I will thrust you into a non-event condition: the trigger is your attempt to usurp the nerve-actions of that one, Ydmos of Utter Tower.”

Ydmos said to Abraxander sharply, “Do not! If you open the Door of the Country of Doors, what will Enter into this place and Condition Of Life is not meant for here. Our records do not reach back so far, but if the Opening of the Dark Way was prompted by the act of man doing deadly wrong to man, then, alas! I fear the suffering of our world is explicable.”

Abraxander said to Ydmos, “Yet that one, he, will slay you if I do not undo his work. I see the colors of time unraveling. These here, us, we are growing ever more near the place of placelessness, the time of Untime.”

Ydmos said curtly to Abraxander, “Death is nothing. He who fears it is enslaved by all who threaten him.”

Ydmos stepped in the middle of us, and spread his arms, trying to block my rifle and the arrow of Mneseus, the spear of He-Sings-Death. “It is not right that men should do wrong to each other! This is against the most ancient laws! Have we not foes enough, who watch forever for our downfall, and who are famished with a most terrible hunger?”

Enoch brought the heel of his wand down on the deck with a ringing noise. The noise was shockingly loud, especially when we had spent so many days creeping in silence away from the ears and eyes of motionless watchers. “Our hearts have been hardened, brother against brother. Who has done this thing? It is not an earthly power: who has sent the whispers and lies into our spirits?”

Ydmos said to him: "You suspect an influence is clouding our judgment? It must be so. Impossible that men should threaten to wrong each other, and make another human to be Destroyed.” Again, his word for 'Destroyed' meant something only monsters could do to people, a physical and spiritual annihilation. There was no concept for murder among his people, no way to express it.

Enoch scowled, and his black beard made a deep parenthesis around his thick red lips, but I could tell he was suppressing a smile at Ydmos. “Perhaps it is not so impossible, perhaps not so rare, Last of the Sons of Man. But it is done by him, who escaped the Deluge.” He pointed his wand at Mneseus.

He-Sings-Death drew back his spear again. “Ah! As I said! He heeds the songs of the Dry Man, the bloodless and tearless man!”

Mneseus raised his bow again, and drew the string back to his jaw, but, again, I was the target, not He-Sings-Death, who threatened him. “Blind of eye! The beasts and dark hounds ran away when Pwyll made his iron stick to roar with that thunder that deafens the ears of men. He is spared when others are not: he was awake in the coffin-chamber before the rest of us!”

I said, “Master Kitimil was awake ere I was. Or, should I say 'Mister', since you are wed. Does everyone here have a mate, a wife, a queen or concubine? Is everyone here missing someone?”

After I spoke it, I realized what an odd question it was. Despite that, He-Sings-Death answered me: “Only him. He stole his father’s woman to be his wife.” He pointed with his jaw toward Enoch.

Enoch said, “Mneseus has spun a web: fury will turn spear against spear; blood will flow. But I, Enoch, Third from Man, with this word I end this web. The threads are broken.” And he raised his wand.

“No!” said Mneseus, “No, do not! The souls gathered here are too weak to take the noble path! Their hunger for the life will unman them: already false promises are being spoken. Do you not hear the voices? Do you not hear the lies?”

Enoch waved his wand in the air. Nothing of any particular import seemed to happen, but he swayed, and a look of weariness came over him, as if he had finished some hard and heavy work. Enoch leaned with both hands on his bronze-tipped quarterstaff.

“Your song is ended, warlock. You thought to snare us, each to slay and be slain by another. But the Word which is given unto me is stronger than your song.”

Enoch was armed with a long and heavy stick shod with a lump of bronze at both ends. The sword in his sash was more a long knife than a real sword, and not a design I had ever seen before. The blade was roughly leaf-shaped, thick towards the tip, and curved, but backward from a scimitar. The inner curve was the business side of his blade: it was like a meat-cleaver. He had blunted it on the skull of an Abomination from Deck One Hundred Two, and never bothered to draw it again.